Amenities of Literature Part 49

There is one more remarkable object in the Shakespeare of Warburton. He not only preserved that strange device of Pope to distinguish the most beautiful pa.s.sages by _inverted commas_, but carried on that ridiculous process on his own separate account, by marking his favourites by _double commas_. It is evident that these great editors judged Shakespeare by these fragmentary and unconnected pa.s.sages, which could not indicate the harmonious and gradual rise of the thoughts, nor the fine transitions of emotions, and less the comprehensive genius of the inventor. They were scattering the living members which must be viewed whole with all their movements, and at last must be sought for by the reader in his own mind. The truest mode of discovering the beauties of an author is first to be conversant with the beautiful, otherwise it is possible that the beauties may escape the readers, even should they be marked by a Pope or a Warburton.

The acknowledged failure of the preceding editions invited to a fresh enterprise, and it was the edition of Johnson, in 1765, which conferred on Shakespeare the stability of a cla.s.sic, by the vigour and discrimination of his criticism, and the solemnity of his judicial decisions.

When Johnson had issued his proposals twenty years before for an edition of Shakespeare, he pointed to a great novelty for the elucidation of the poet. His intuitive sagacity had discerned that a poet so racy and native required a familiarity both with the idiom and the manners of his age. He was sensible that a complete explanation of an author, not systematic and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and slight hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. He enumerates, however, the desiderata for this purpose; among which we find that of reading the books which Shakespeare read, and to compare his works with those of writers who lived at the same time, or immediately preceded, or immediately followed him. This project, happily conceived, inferred comprehensive knowledge in the proposer; but it was only a reverie; a dim Pisgah view which the sagacity of the great critic had taken of that future Canaan, which he himself never entered. With this sort of knowledge, and these forgotten writers, which the future commentators of Shakespeare revelled in, Johnson remained wholly unacquainted.

But what proved more fatal to the editorial ability of JOHNSON than this imperfect knowledge of the literature and the manners of the age of Shakespeare, was that the commentator rarely sympathised with the poet, for his hard-witted and unpliant faculties, busied with the more palpable forms of human nature, when thrown amid the supernatural and the ideal, seemed suddenly deserted of their powers; the magic knot was tied, which cast our Hercules into helpless impotence; and in the circle of imaginative creation, we discover the baffled sage resisting the spell, by apologising for Shakespeare's introduction of his mighty preternatural beings! a certain evidence that the critic had never existed for a moment under their influence. "Witches, fairies, and ghosts, would not now be tolerated by an audience;" such was the grave and fallacious a.s.sumption of the unimaginative critic, which seems something worse than Voltaire's raillery; for though that wit ridiculed the ghost in Hamlet, he afterwards had the poetic agility to transfer its solemnity to his own Semiramis,--though, like all rapid inlayers, the applique did not fit to his work.[30]

We may even suspect the degree of our great critic's susceptibility of the infinitely-varied emotions flowing in the inexhaustible vein of the poet of nature. In those judicial summaries at the close of each drama, his cold approbation, his perplexing balancings, his hazarded doubts, or his positive censures, all alike betray the uncertainty and the difficulties of a critical mind, which misapplied its energies to themes adverse to its habits.

Johnson's preface to his Shakespeare was long held as a masterpiece; and several splendid pa.s.sages, after more than half a century, remain to remind us of his nervous intellect. If we now read that preface with a different understanding than that of most of his contemporaries, it is because Johnson himself has revealed his poetical confessions in certain "Lives of the Poets." We now look on that famed preface much more as a labour of pomp than a labour of love. Far from me be any irreverence to our master-genius of the pa.s.sed century, whose volumes were read by all readers, and imitated by all writers; my first devotion to literature was caught from his pages; and the fire still burns on that altar. But the literary character of JOHNSON, with his enduring works, is no longer a subject of inquiry, but of history; of truths established, and not of opinions which are mutable.

Can we imagine that Johnson himself experienced a degree of conviction, some perplexing consciousness, that his spirit was not endowed with the sensibility of Longinus? A profound thinker, acutely argumentative and a.n.a.lytical, though clothed in the purple of his c.u.mbrous diction, and the cadences of his concatenated periods, when he touched on themes of pure imagination, and pa.s.sions not merely declamatory, had nothing left to him but the solitary test of his judgment, to decide on what lies out of the scope of daily life. He interpreted the pathetic and the sublime, till they ceased to be either by the force of his reasoning and the weakness of his conceptions; he cross-examined shadowy fancies, till they vanished under the eye of the judge. He had no wing to ascend into "the heaven of invention."

In JOHNSON'S SHAKESPEARE, therefore, we may trace that deficient sympathy which subsequently betrayed itself in his revolting decisions on Collins, on Gray, on Milton, and on others. It was his hard fate to be called on to deliver his solemn decisions on two of our greatest poets; from Spenser he had fortunately escaped, having wholly forgotten the Muse of Mulla, while his piety and his taste had remembered Blackmore, in the collection of English poets. It is curious to detect the mode by which our great critic extricated himself from the difficulties of his judicial function on Shakespeare and on Milton, by his prudential sagacity, and his pa.s.sive obedience to established authorities. Johnson's preface to Shakespeare was grafted on Pope's, as afterwards, when he came to Milton, he followed the track of Addison.

But Johnson was too honest to disguise the reality of his own conviction: it was legitimate to adopt theirs, but it was independent to preserve his own; in this dissonance he has left a lesson and a warning for some who are eminent, and who travel in the high-road of criticism.

It is thus that we find in this famous preface to Shakespeare that he is hailed as the poet of nature, and is placed by the side of Homer; and of this Pope had instructed the critic; but in the sudden change the n.o.ble qualities of the bard are minutely reversed; the ant.i.thesis was too often in the critic's own taste; and the characteristic excellence ascribed to Shakespeare seems hardly compatible with the number and the grossness of his faults. Every work of note bears the impression of its times; and we learn from the faithful chronicler of Johnson the real occasion which gave rise to this remarkable preface. "A blind and indiscriminate admiration of Shakespeare had exposed the British nation to the ridicule of foreigners; and this preface was considered as a grave, well-considered, and impartial opinion of the judge." Such was the defence of the logical critic, who so diligently enumerated the defects of his author, that Voltaire, who could never understand the language nor comprehend the genius of Shakespeare, might sometimes have referred to Johnson to confirm his own depreciating notions.

The extensive plan for the ill.u.s.tration of the poet, imperfectly projected by Johnson, was finally executed through a series of editions, which gave rise to a new cla.s.s of literary antiquaries.

Shortly after the first edition of Johnson, Dr. FARMER led the way to the disclosure of a new lore in our old books. Farmer had silently pursued an untired chase in this "black" forest, for he had a keen _gusto_ for the native venison, and, alluding to his Shakespearian pursuits, exclaimed in the inspiring language of his poet--

Age cannot wither them, nor custom stale Their infinite variety.

His vivacity relieved the drowsiness of mere antiquarianism. This novel pursuit once opened, an eager and motley pack was hallooed up, and Shakespeare, like Actaeon, was torn to pieces by a whole kennel of his own hounds, as they were typified, with equal humour and severity. But to be severe and never to be just is the penury of the most sordid criticism; and among these

Spirits black, white, and grey,

are some of the most ill.u.s.trious in English literature.

The original edition of Johnson consisted only of eight volumes; had not the contriving wisdom of the printers impressed the last into twenty and one huge tomes, they might easily have been expanded into forty.

When we survey the ma.s.sive _variorum_ edition of Shakespeare, we are struck by the circ.u.mstance that nothing similar has happened to any other national author. It was not to be expected that, after the invention of the art of printing, an author could arise, whose works should be disfigured by treacherous transcribers, corrupted by interpolations, and still more by a race of men whose art was unknown to the ancients, subjecting his text to the mercy of contending commentators and conjectural critics. But a singular combination of untoward circ.u.mstances attached to this poet and his works, produced this remarkable result. The scholiasts among the ancient cla.s.sics had rejoiced in some rare emendation of the text, or the rhetorical commentator had flourished in the luxuriance of the latent beauties of some favourite author. But a far wider and deeper source of inquiry was now to be attempted, historical or explanatory--comments to clear up obscure allusions; to indicate unknown prototypes; to trace the vicissitudes of words as well as things; to picture forth the customs and the manners which had faded into desuetude; and to re-open for us the records of our social and domestic life, thus at once to throw us back into that age, and to familiarize us with that language, of Shakespeare which had vanished. Shakespeare, it may be said, suddenly became the favourite object of literary inquiry. Every literary man in the nation conned over and illumined "the infinite variety" of the bard.

And a.s.suredly they enriched our vernacular literature with a collection of historical, philological, and miscellaneous information, unparalleled among any other literary people. In 1785, ISAAC REED, in one of his prefaces, informs us, that "the works of Shakespeare, during the last twenty years, have been the object of public attention."

All this novel knowledge was, however, not purchased at a slight cost.

It was not only to be s.n.a.t.c.hed up by accidental discovery, but it was more severely tasked by what Steevens called "a course of black-letter!"--dusty volumes, and fugitive tracts, and the wide range of antiquarian research. The sources whence they drew their waters were muddy; and STEEVENS, who affected more gaiety in his chains than his brothers in the Shakespearian galley, with bitter derision reproached his great coadjutor MALONE, whom he looked on with the evil eye of rivalry for drawing his knowledge from "books too mean to be formally quoted."

The commentators have enc.u.mbered the poet, who often has been but a secondary object of their lucubrations, for they not only write notes on Shakespeare, but notes, and bitter ones too, on one another. This commentary has been turned into a gymnasium for the public sports of friendly and of unfriendly wrestlers; where some have been so earnest, that it is evident that, in measuring a cast, they congratulated themselves in the language of Orlando, "If ever he goes alone again, I'll never wrestle for prize more."

THOMAS WARTON once covered with his s.h.i.+eld some of the minor brotherhood: "If Shakespeare is worth reading, he is worth explaining; and the researches used for so valuable and elegant a purpose merit the thanks of genius and candour, not the satire of prejudice and ignorance." But this serves not as an apology for abusing the privilege of a commentator; elucidating the poet into obscurity by information equally contradictory and curious; racking us by fantastic readings which no one imagined before or since; and laying us open to the mercy of some who never ventured to sharpen their pens but on our irresistible Shakespeare. What has been the result of the petty conflicts between the arch maliciousness of Steevens and the fervent plodding of Malone, which raised up two parties among the Shakespearian commentators, till they became so personal, that a Steevenite and a Malonist looked on each other suspiciously, and sometimes would drop the ordinary civilities of life? At length, strange to tell, after Steevens had laboured with zeal equal to the whole confraternity, it became a question with him, In what manner the poet COULD be read? Are we to con over each note appended to each word or pa.s.sage?--but this would be perpetually to turn aside the flow of our imagination; or are we to read a large portion of the text uninterruptedly, and then return to the notes?--but this would be breaking the unity of the poet into fragments; or, for a final decision, and the avowal must have mortified the ingenuous ill.u.s.trator, according to a third cla.s.s of readers, were these ill.u.s.trations to be altogether rejected? must the poet or the commentator be at continual variance? or shall we endure to see "Alcides beaten by his page?"

Might I be allowed to offer an award on a matter so involved and delicate as this union between the genius of Shakespeare and the genius of his commentators, I would concede the divorce, from the incompatibility of temper between the parties; but I would insist on a separate maintenance, to preserve the great respectability attached to the party most complained of. The true reader of Shakespeare may then accommodate himself with two editions; the one for his hand, having nothing but what the poet has written; the other for the shelf, having all the commentators have conjectured, confuted, and confounded.[31]

The celebrity of Shakespeare is no longer hounded by his nationality.

Even France responds, though the voice of Parisian critics is m.u.f.fled, confused, and ambiguous; they have not yet solved the great problem, why Shakespeare is an omnipotent dramatist.[32] The school of Corneille and Racine are perplexed, like Quin, who could not be brought to acknowledge the creative acting of Garrick, observing that, "If that young man were right, all which they had hitherto done was wrong."

Voltaire, in early life, to compose the _Henriade_, to escape from the Bastile, or to conceal his espionage--for he appears to have been a secret _employe_ of the French ministry--resided a considerable time in England. He acquired an unusual knowledge of our language, and published an essay on the epic poets in English.[33] He discovered a new world among our writers, and was the first who introduced the Literature of England into France. Voltaire expounded to his nation the philosophy of Newton; but unhappily he criticized and translated Shakespeare, whose idiomatic phrases and metaphorical style did not admit of the demonstrations of the Newtonian system. To the author of the _Henriade_, who had ever before his eyes the two great masters whom he was one day to rival, the anti-cla.s.sical and "Gothic" genius of a poet of the Elizabethan period, scorning the unities, following events without the contrivance of an intrigue artfully developed, mingling farce with tragedy, buffoons with monarchs, and preternatural beings stalking amid the palpable realities of life--such irregular dramas seemed to the Aristotelian but "des farces monstrueuses," as we see they appeared to Rymer and Shaftesbury; but Voltaire was too sagacious to be wholly insensible that "these monstrous farces, which they call tragedies, had scenes grand and terrific." Voltaire, then meditating on his future dramas, in pa.s.sing over the surface of the soil, discovered that a mine lay beneath--

Some ore Among a mineral of metals base,

and the embedded treasure was worked with more diligence than with grat.i.tude to the owner. If Voltaire ridiculed what he had found, it was partly with the desire of its concealment, but not wholly; for it was impossible for any foreigner to interpret sweet words, and idiomatic phrases, not to be found in dictionaries; or to make way through the bewilderment of the perpetual metaphorical diction of the daring fancy of the great poet; but the deformities of the bard would be too intelligible; all those parts which Pope would have struck out as "superfoetations." A bald version, or a malicious turn, would amuse the world by those amazing absurdities, which the wit, too famous for his ridicule, rejoiced to commit, and Europe yet knew nothing of Shakespeare, and lay under the sway of this autocrat of Literature.[34]

Mrs. MONTAGUE was the Minerva, for so she was complimented on this occasion, whose celestial spear was to transfix the audacious Gaul. Her "Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, compared with the Greek and French dramatic poets," served for a popular answer to Voltaire. This accomplished lady, who had raised a literary coterie about her, which attracted such fas.h.i.+onable notice that its t.i.tle has survived its inst.i.tution, found in "the Blue-stocking Club" choral hymns and clouds of incense gathering about the altar in Portman Square! The volume is deemed "a wonderful performance," by those echoes of contemporary prepossessions, the compilers of dictionary-biography; even the poet Cowper placed Mrs. Montague "at the head of all that is called learned."

This lady's knowledge of the English drama, and the genius of our ancient Literature, is as vague and indistinct as that of the Greek tragedians, to whom she frequently refers, without, we are told, any intimacy with the originals. She discovers many bombast speeches even in _Macbeth_, but she triumphantly exclaims, "Shakespeare redeems the nonsense, the indecorum, the irregularities of his plays;"

irregularities which seem to her incomprehensible. Her criticisms are the random reflections of her feelings; but trusting to our feelings alone, unaccompanied by that knowledge on which they should be based, is confiding in a capricious, and often an erring dictator, governed by our own humours, or by fas.h.i.+onable tastes.

Thus have we viewed our bard through distinct eras, from the time in which he was not yet pre-eminently distinguished among his numerous peers; the Shakespeare of his own day could not be the Shakespeare of posterity; his rivals could only view that genius in its progress, and though there was not one who was a Shakespeare, yet, in that bursting compet.i.tion of genius, there were many who were themselves Shakspearian.

In a succeeding era, novel and unnational tastes prevailed; to the Drydenists who, dismissing the language of nature, subst.i.tuted a false nature in their exaggerated pa.s.sion, Shakespeare might have said of himself--

I dare do all that may become a man, Who dares do more is none;--

and when tried by the conventional code of criticism, and condemned; the poet of creation, might have exclaimed to Rymer and to Shaftesbury--

The poet's eye, Bodying forth the forms of THINGS UNKNOWN, gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

Emerging into light through his modern editors, the volume in the hands of all men; the English public, with whom the cla.s.sical model was held as nothing, received him as their national bard; for every one read in "the chance" that could only "hit suddenly," as Butler has described the genius of Shakespeare, revelations about himself. It seemed as if the poet had served in all professions, taking every colour of public and domestic life. Lawyers have detected their law-cunning in the legal contrivances of the poet; physicians have commented on the madness of Lear, and the mystery of Hamlet; statesmen have meditated on profound speculations in civil polity; the merchant and the mechanic, the soldier and the maiden--all, from the crowned head to the sailor-boy, found that in the cursory pages of the great dramatist, he had disclosed to all the tribes of mankind the secrets of their condition. The plenitude and the pliancy of the Shakespearian mind may be manifested by a trivial circ.u.mstance. We are a people of pamphleteers; a free country has a free communication; and many, for interest or vainglory, rush to catch the public ear. To point out the drift of their effusions, and aid a dubious t.i.tle by an unquestioned authority, the greater number of these incessant fugitives, coming in all shapes, will be usually found to have recourse for this apposite thought, and crowning motto, to the prodigal pages of Shakespeare, who, thus pressed into their service, has often made the drift of the pamphleteer intelligible, vainly sought in his confused pamphlet.

When the strange condition of his works made the poet the n.o.ble prey of a brood of commentators, antiquarian and philological, from that generation he derived nothing of that abstract greatness with which we are now accustomed to contemplate a genius which seems universal. It was not by new readings, contested restorations, conjectural emendations, and notes explanatory of customs and phrases, however useful, that we could penetrate into the depths of a genius profound as nature herself, and it was only when philosophical critics tested this genius by their own principles, that the singularity was discovered to Europe.

Hitherto the critical art had been verbal, or didactic, or dogmatic; but when the mind engaged itself in watching its own operations, by a.n.a.lysis and combination, and when the laws of its const.i.tution formed a science, educing principles, and exploring the sources of our emotions, all arbitrary conventions were only rated at their worth, while the final appeal was made to our own experience: these n.o.bler critics founded the demonstrations of their metaphysical reasonings on our consciousness.

This novel philosophy was more surely and more deeply laid in the nature of man, and whatever concerns man, than the arbitrary code of the Stagyrite, who had founded many of his laws on what had only been customs. We were pa.s.sing from the history of the human understanding to the history of the imagination; and the whole beautiful process of the intellectual faculties was a new revelation. Theories of taste and systems of philosophy multiplied our sympathies, and amplified our a.s.sociations; the intellectual powers had their history, and the pa.s.sions were laid bare in their eloquent anatomy. But in these severe investigations, this new school had to seek for ill.u.s.trations and for examples which might familiarize their abstract principles; and these philosophical critics appealed to nature, and drew them from her poetic interpreter.

It was the philosophical critics who, by trying Shakespeare by these highest tests, fixed him on his solitary eminence. From Lord Kaimes, through a brilliant succession of many a Longinus, the public has been instructed. The strokes of nature and the bursts of pa.s.sion, the exuberance of his humour and the pathos of his higher mood, untutored minds had felt more or less, and Shakespeare was lauded for what they considered to be his "natural parts;" and it was parts only on which they could decide, for the true magnitude they could not yet comprehend.

The loneliness of his genius, in its profundity or its elevation, and the delicacy of its delineations, the mighty s.p.a.ce his universal faculty extends before us, these they could never reach! The phenomenon had not been explained--the instruments had not yet been invented which could fathom its depths, or take the admeasurement at the meridian.

But if philosophical criticism has been so far favourable to develope the truth of nature in the great poet, it is not a consequence that Shakespeare himself produced his poetry on those revolving systems of metaphysics by which some late aesthetic and rhetorical German critics have somewhat offuscated the solitary luminary. They have developed such a system of intricate thinking in the genius of the poet, such a refined connexion between his conceptions and the execution of his dramatic personages--they have so grafted their own imagination upon his, that at times it becomes doubtful whether we are influenced by the imagination of the critic, or that of the poet. In this seraphic mode of criticism, the poem becomes mythic, and the poet a myth; in the power of abstraction, these critics have pa.s.sed beyond the regions of humanity.

We soar with them into the immensity of s.p.a.ce, and we tremble as if we stood alone in the universe; we have lost sight of nature, as we seem to have pa.s.sed her human boundaries. The ancient divinity of poetry itself, even Homer, is absorbed in the Shakespearian myth; for Shakespeare, to s.n.a.t.c.h a feather from the fiery wing of Coleridge, is "the Spinosistic deity, an omnipresent creativeness."

Thou whose rapt spirit beheld the vision of human existence, "the wheel in the middle of the wheel, and the spirit of the living creature within," and wrotest thy inspirations, how shall we describe thy faculty? To paint lightning, and to give it no motion, is the doom of the baffled artist. Something, however, we may conceive of the Shakespearian faculty when we say that it consisted in a facility of feeling, an apt.i.tude in following those trains of thought which const.i.tute that undeviating propriety, in the consonance of the character with its action, and the pa.s.sion with its language. Whether the poet followed the romancer or the chronicler in his conception of a dramatic character, he at the first step struck into that undeviating track of our humanity amid the accidents of its position. The progress of each dramatic personage was therefore a unity of diction and character, of sentiment and action; all was direct, for there was no effort where all was impulse; and the dramatic genius of Shakespeare, as if wholly unstudied, seems to have formed the habit of his intellectual character. Was this unerring Shakespearian faculty an intuitive evidence, like certain axioms; or may we venture to fancy that our poet, as it were, had discovered the very mathematics of metaphysics?

Besides this facility of feeling appropriating to itself the whole sphere of human existence, there is another characteristic of our national bard. He struck out a diction which I conceive will be found in no other poet. What is usually termed diction would, applied to Shakespeare, be more definite, and its quality more happily explained, if we call it _expression_, and observed in what magic the Shakespearian expression lies. This diction has been subject to the censure of obscurity. Modern critics have ascribed the invention of our dramatic blank verse to Shakespeare; but Shakespeare was no inventor in the usual acceptation of the term, and a.s.suredly was not of unrhymed metre: what, indeed, are imperfectly or rarely found among his tuneful predecessors and contemporaries, are the sweetness of his versification, combined with ceaseless imagery; we view the image through the transparency of the thought never disturbing it; it is neither a formal simile nor an expanded metaphor--it is a single expression, a sensible image combined with an emotion.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Posterity is even in some danger of losing the real name of our great dramatic poet. In the days of Shakespeare, and long after, proper names were written down as the ear caught the sound, or they were capriciously varied by the owner. It is not therefore strange that we have instances of eminent persons writing the names of intimate friends and of public characters in a manner not always to be recognised. Of this we are now furnished with the most abundant evidence, which was not sufficiently adverted to in the early times of our commentators.

The autographs we possess of our national bard are unquestionably written SHAKSPERE, according to the p.r.o.nunciation of his native town; there the name was variously written,--even in the same public doc.u.ment,--but always regulated by the dialectical orthoepy. The marriage license of the poet, recovered in the "Gentleman's Magazine"

for September, 1836, offers a striking evidence of the viciousness of the p.r.o.nunciation and the utter carelessness with which names were written, for there we find it s.h.a.gSPERE.

That the poet himself considered that the genuine name was SHAKESPEARE, accordant with his own (a spear, the point upward), seems certain, notwithstanding his compliance with the custom of his country; for his "Rape of Lucrece," printed by himself in 1594, in the first edition bears the name of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, as also does the "Venus and Adonis," that first heir of his invention; these first editions of his juvenile poems were doubtlessly anxiously scrutinised by the youthful bard. In the literary metropolis the name was so p.r.o.nounced. Bancroft has this allusion in his Epigrams--"To Shakespeare:"--

"Thou hast so used thy pen, or shook thy speare, That poets startle."

The well-known allusion of Robert Greene, to a shake-scene, confirms the p.r.o.nunciation. I now supply one more evidence--that of Thomas Heywood, the intimate of Shakespeare and his brother dramatists; he, like some others, has printed the name with a hyphen, which I transcribe from the volume open before me,--