The Other Difference Between Comedy and Tragedy
A few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare’s tragedy. But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare’s comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the laughter of Elizabethan England. The low dark arches, the low strong pillars upon which Shakespeare’s temple rests we can all explore and handle. We can all get into his mere tragedy; we can all explore his dungeon and penetrate into his coal-cellar; but we stretch our hands and crane our necks in vain towards that height where the tall turrets of his levity are tossed towards the sky. Perhaps it is right that this should be so; properly understood, comedy is an even grander thing than tragedy.
(Illustrated London News, April 27, 1907)
Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which is common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die bachelors and old maids. Love’s Labour’s Lost is filled with the same energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our subject, since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time.
(“Rostand,” Twelve Types)
Shakespeare and the Legal Lady
I wonder how long liberated woman will endure the invidious ban which excludes her from being a hangman. Or rather, to speak with more exactitude, a hangwoman. The very fact that there seems something vaguely unfamiliar and awkward about the word, is but a proof of the ages of sex oppression that have accustomed us to this sex privilege. The ambition would not perhaps have been understood by the prudish and sentimental heroines of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. But it is now agreed that the farther we go beyond these faded proprieties the better; and I really do not see how we could go farther. There are always torturers of course, who will probably return under some scientific name. Obscurantists may use the old argument, that woman has never risen to the first rank in this or other arts; that Jack Ketch was not Jemima Ketch, and that the headsman was called Samson and not Delilah. And they will be overwhelmed with the old retort: that until we have hundreds of healthy women happily engaged in this healthful occupation, it will be impossible to judge whether they can rise above the average or no. Tearful sentimentalists may feel something unpleasing, something faintly repugnant, about the new feminine trade. But, as the indignant policewoman said the other day, when a magistrate excluded some of her sex and service from revolting revelations, “crime is a disease,” and must be studied scientifically, however hideous it may be. Death also is a disease; and frequently a fatal one. Experiments must be made in it; and it must be inflicted in any form, however hideous, in a cool and scientific manner.
It is not true, of course, that crime is a disease. It is criminology that is a disease. But the suggestion about the painful duties of a policewoman leads naturally to my deduction about the painful duties of a hangwoman. And I make it in the faint hope of waking up some of the feminists, that they may at least be moved to wonder what they are doing, and to attempt to find out. What they are not doing is obvious enough. They are not asking themselves two perfectly plain questions; first, whether they want anybody to be a hangman; and second, whether they want everybody to be a hangman. They simply assume, with panting impetuosity, that we want everybody to be everything, criminologists, constables, barristers, executioners, torturers. It never seems to occur to them that some of us doubt the beauty and blessedness of those things, and are rather glad to limit them like other necessary evils. And this applies especially to the doubtful though defensible case of the advocate.
There is one phrase perpetually repeated and now practically stereotyped, which to my mind concentrates and sums up all the very worst qualities in the very worst journalism, all its paralysis of thought, all its monotony of chatter, all its sham culture and shoddy picturesqueness, all its perpetual readiness to cover any vulgarity of the present with any sentimentalism about the past. There is one phrase that does measure to how low an ebb the mind of my unfortunate profession can sink. It is the habit of perpetually calling any of the new lady barristers “Portia.”
First of all, of course, it is quite clear that the journalist does not know who Portia was. If he has ever heard of the story of the Merchant of Venice, he has managed to miss the only point of the story. Suppose a man had been so instructed in the story of As You Like It that he remained under the impression that Rosalind really was a boy, and was the brother of Celia. We should say that the plot of the comedy had reached his mind in a rather confused form. Suppose a man had seen a whole performance of the play of Twelfth Night without discovering the fact that the page called Cesario was really a girl called Viola. We should say that he had succeeded in seeing the play without exactly seeing the point. But there is exactly the same blind stupidity in calling a barrister Portia; or even in calling Portia a barrister. It misses in exactly the same sense the whole meaning of the scene. Portia is no more a barrister than Rosalind is a boy. She is no more the learned jurist whom Shylock congratulates than Viola is the adventurous page whom Olivia loves. The whole point of her position is that she is a heroic and magnanimous fraud. She has not taken up the legal profession, or any profession; she has not sought that public duty, or any public duty. Her action, from first to last, is wholly and entirely private. Her motives are not professional but private. Her ideal is not public but private. She acts as much on personal grounds in the Trial Scene as she does in the Casket Scene. She acts in order to save a friend, and especially a friend of the husband whom she loves. Anything less like the attitude of an advocate, for good or evil, could not be conceived. She seeks individually to save an individual; and in order to do so is ready to break all the existing laws of the profession and the public tribunal; to assume lawlessly powers she has not got, to intrude where she would never be legally admitted, to pretend to be somebody else, to dress up as a man; to do what is actually a crime against the law. This is not what is now called the attitude of a public woman; it is certainly not the attitude of a lady lawyer, any more than of any other kind of lawyer. But it is emphatically the attitude of a private woman; that much more ancient and much more powerful thing.
Suppose that Portia had really become an advocate, merely by advocating the cause of Antonio against Shylock. The first thing that follows is that, as like as not, she would be briefed in the next case to advocate the cause of Shylock against Antonio. She would, in the ordinary way of business, have to help Shylock to punish with ruin the private extravagances of Gratiano. She would have to assist Shylock to distrain on poor Launcelot Gobbo and sell up all his miserable sticks. She might well be employed by him to ruin the happiness of Lorenzo and Jessica, by urging some obsolete parental power or some technical flaw in the marriage service. Shylock evidently had a great admiration for her forensic talents; and indeed that sort of lucid and detached admission of the talents of a successful opponent is a very Jewish characteristic. There seems no reason why he should not have employed her regularly, whenever he wanted someone to recover ruthless interest, to ruin needy households, to drive towards theft or suicide the souls of desperate men. But there seems every reason to doubt whether the Portia whom Shakespeare describes for us is likely to have taken on the job.
Anyhow, that is the job; and I am not here arguing that it is not a necessary job; or that it is always an indefensible job. Many honourable men have made an arguable case for the advocate who has to support Shylock, and men much worse than Shylock. But that is the job; and to cover up its ugly realities with a loose literary quotation that really refers to the exact opposite, is one of those crawling and cowardly evasions and verbal fictions which make all this sort of servile journalism so useless for every worthy or working purpose. If we wish to consider whether a lady should be a barrister, we should consider sanely and clearly what a barrister is and what a lady is; and then come to our conclusion according to what we consider worthy or worthless in the traditions of the two things. But the spirit of advertisement, which tries to associate soap with sunlight or grape-nuts with grapes, calls to its rescue an old romance of Venice and tries to cover up a practical problem in the robes of a romantic heroine of the stage. This is the sort of confusion that really leads to corruption. In one sense it would matter very little that the legal profession was formally open to women, for it is only a very exceptional sort of woman who would see herself as a vision of beauty in the character of Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz. And most girls are more likely to be stage-struck, and want to be the real Portia on the stage, rather than law-struck and want to be the very reverse of Portia in a law court. For that matter, it would make relatively little difference if formal permission were given to a woman to be a hangman or a torturer. Very few women would have a taste for it; and very few men would have a taste for the women who had a taste for it. But advertisement, by its use of the vulgar picturesque, can hide the realities of this professional problem, as it can hide the realities of tinned meats and patent medicines. It can conceal the fact that the hangman exists to hang, and that the torturer exists to torture. Similarly it can conceal the fact that the Buzfuz barrister exists to bully. It can hide from the innocent female aspirants outside even the perils and potential abuses that would be admitted by the honest male advocate inside. And that is part of a very much larger problem, which extends beyond this particular profession to a great many other professions; and not least to the lowest and most lucrative of all modern professions; that of professional politics.
I wonder how many people are still duped by the story of the extension of the franchise. I wonder how many Radicals have been a little mystified, in remarking how many Tories and reactionaries have helped in the extension of the franchise. The truth is that caning in crowds of new voters will very often be to the interest, not only of Tories, but of really tyrannical Tories. It will often be in the interest of the guilty to appeal to the innocent; if they are innocent in the matter of other people’s conduct as well as of their own. The tyrant calls in those he has not wronged, to defend him against those he has wronged. He is not afraid of the new and ignorant masses who know too little; he is afraid of the older and nearer nucleus of those who know too much. And there is nothing that would please the professional politician more than to flood the constituencies with innocent negroes or remote Chinamen, who might possibly admire him more, because they knew him less. I should not wonder if the Party System had been saved three or four times at the point of extinction, by the introduction of new voters who had never had time to discover why it deserved to be extinguished. The last of these rescues by an inrush of dupes was the enfranchisement of women.
What is true of the political is equally true of the professional ambition. Much of the mere imitation of masculine tricks and trades is indeed trivial enough; it is a mere masquerade. The greatest of Roman satirists noted that in his day the more fast of the fashionable ladies liked to fight as gladiators in the amphitheatre. In that one statement he pinned and killed, like moths on a cork, a host of women prophets and women pioneers and large-minded liberators of their sex in modern England and America. But besides these more showy she-gladiators there are also multitudes of worthy and sincere women who take the new (or rather old) professions seriously. The only disadvantage is that in many of those professions they can only continue to be serious by ceasing to be sincere. But the simplicity with which they first set out is an enormous support to old and complex and corrupt institutions. No modest person setting out to learn an elaborate science can be expected to start with the assumption that it is not worth learning. The young lady will naturally begin to learn Law as gravely as she begins to learn Greek. It is not in that mood that she will conceive independent doubts about the ultimate relations of Law and Justice. Just as the Suffragettes are already complaining that the realism of industrial revolution interferes with their new hobby of voting, so the lady lawyers are quite likely to complain that the realism of legal reformers interferes with their new hobby of legalism. We are suffering in every department from the same cross-purposes that can be seen in the case of any vulgar patent medicine. In Law and Medicine, we have the thing advertised in the public press instead of analysed by the public authority. What we want is not the journalistic Portia but the theatrical Portia; who is also the real Portia. We do not want the woman who will enter the law court with the solemn sense of a lasting vocation. We want a Portia; a woman who will enter it as lightly, and leave it as gladly as she did.
The same thing is true of a fact nobler than any fiction; the story, so often quoted, of the woman who won back mediaeval France. Joan of Arc was a soldier; but she was not a normal soldier. If she had been, she would have been vowed, not to the war for France, but to any war with Flanders, Spain or the Italian cities to which her feudal lord might lead her. If she were a modern conscript, she would be bound to obey orders not always coming from St. Michael. But the point is here that merely making all women soldiers, under either system, could do nothing at all except whitewash and ratify feudalism or conscription. And both feudalism and conscription are much more magnanimous things than our modern system of police and prisons.
In fact there are few sillier implications than that in the phrase that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. A cook who really rules a kitchen on that principle would wait patiently for milk from the bull, because he got it from the cow. It is neither a perceptible fact nor a first principle that the sexes must not specialize; and if one sex must specialize in adopting dubious occupations, we ought to be very glad that the other sex specializes in abstaining from them. That is how the balance of criticism in the commonwealth is maintained; as by a sort of government and opposition. In this, as in other things, the new regime is that everybody shall join the government. The government of the moment will be monstrously strengthened; for everybody will be a tyrant and everybody will be a slave. The detached criticism of official fashions win and none was ever so detached as the deadly criticism that came from women. When all women wear uniforms, all women will wear gags; for a gag is part of every uniform in the world.
(From Fancies vs. Fads. Originally from New Witness, December 1, 1922)
It is recognised that some of the greatest men in literature were plagiarists from much smaller men, and that they even more often borrowed from the stock of popular legends which were composed by nobody in particular. But we generally do less than justice to the value of this outline or framework of the tale that they borrowed. We think too exclusively of the work of the great man and far too little of the great story which was the work of many small men. Above all we omit to observe that the idea and philosophy of the story is generally present in the rude outline as well as in the finished product.
An instance will make the matter more clear. In Professor Raleigh’s recent book on Shakespeare that shrewd and effective critic is concerned to explain (very truly on the whole) that it is possible to make too much fuss about the mysteries of Shakespeare, that many of them are accidents, many of them practical limitations of the playwright. But in the course of maintaining this he suggests, I think, that a certain brutality in the mere mechanism of The Merchant of Venice prevented Shakespeare from doing the most delicate spiritual justice to Shylock. He implies that the coarse old tale of the pound of flesh tied Shakespeare down, and prevented him from painting with full sympathy a noble Jew.
If I am right in my memory of Professor Raleigh’s meaning, he thinks that Shylock would be finer without the story of Shylock; in that case he does a great injustice to the old story. It is at any rate an injustice that is often done to it. The truth is that the rude story of the pound of flesh is a very spiritual story. Moreover, it was exactly the spiritual story which Shakespeare wished to tell, out of which he wished to draw the full spirituality. No one but Shakespeare could have made the thought explicit; but the thought was implicit in the most jingling old ballad about the merchant and the Jew.
That idea was the profound philosophy of mercy or of charity, which Mr. Belloc has called somewhere “the appreciation of living things.” In other words, there is a certain kind of sympathy or allowance which is due to organisms, and which cannot be given to the inorganic. There is a sense in which one can be just to a stone; but one could be merciful to a mushroom. When the thing has a life of its own, an interdependence of function, a circulation of power, then it becomes necessary to deal with it sympathetically and not literally, to remember that one thing goes with another, and that one cannot touch parts without injuring the whole.
If you chop a stone in two, you have two halves of a stone; but if you chop a horse in two you only have more horseflesh than you require for any domestic purpose.
Now the old tale of the Jew and the merchant of Venice was a satire on that commercial literalism which endeavours to apply hard contract and cruel exactitude to life and to living things. The Jew, as the great, mediaeval symbol of this unchivalrous calculation was represented as saying that he had a legal right to a pound of a man’s flesh, and that he would take not a grain more or less. It was useless to point out to him that the pound was a part of an organic life, and that in taking that he was in fact taking more. So at last, when he had rejected all appeals to generosity and commonsense, he was at last routed by the reductio ad absurdum of justice. His own mad logic is pushed one step further, and it destroys his case. He may take flesh if he can manage to take flesh without blood.
The whole legend, even in its baldest and most brutal outline, has the clear voice of Christian morals and European sanity. It is a protest against that pedantry which always becomes inhumanity.
What Shakespeare did was to take this wild tale, to see the mother wit in it, and to develop that into an exalted spiritual wisdom. He was quite as sure that the Jew was wrong as any mediaeval could have been. But he emphasised the wrongness not by making him grotesquely wrong, but by making him splendidly and pathetically wrong. Instead of giving us the comic moneylender of mediaeval farce, he showed us a man mighty in error, whose morality had sublimely gone astray. Shylock, in his own eyes, is asking only for his rights; but he cannot be got to see that when dealing with life it is often possible to take rights and to leave wrongs instead. You not only deduct something, you also add something; you add a wound. Shylock’s morality has not enough mysticism to make him see that in touching a living thing he is breaking into a sanctuary where unknown vengeances are hung over his head. And Shylock’s philosophy has not enough of what always goes with mysticism, it has not enough humour to see that it is silly to talk about owning a part of another man.
Shylock’s philosophy, the pedantic and inhuman philosophy, is held by many people in our own time, who are as dignified and sincere as Shylock. It is always marked by this inability to apprehend the interdependence between all the parts of a living thing.
When there has been question, for instance, of the suppression of some small nationality I have heard a quite good-natured young English guardsman or squire say “these people only had to give up their flag which was merely ornamental.” To this I was impelled to reply, “My good sir, the only thing I ask of you is that you should cut off your head, which I am sure is merely ornamental. The rest of your attractive person will remain in full play; you can salute with your hand and waltz with your legs as before, without this sentimental emblem erected between your shoulders, of which, if you will permit me to say so, I have grown a little tired.”
But, alas, that is the weakness of the Shylock philosophy, for, as the Guardsman lucidly and patiently explained to me, his head, however, useless for the higher purposes, was quite essential to his either drilling or dancing; in short, that I could not take his head without taking his life, which was a much more enjoyable thing. And then I told him that a Christian Commonwealth is an animal of a very funny shape, and it is often hard to say which is the head with the life in it; but, generally, the head is the flag. But I do not think that he quite followed my meaning.
But one may commit this anti-organic crime in many directions, and it concerns us more to realise that we can easily commit it in our arrangements for reforming human society. Do not let us be the dupe of lists and classifications in which Antonio”s flesh is put down to Shylock’s banking account. Almost every book I find full of a righteous anger against the social evil slips into this bad habit of reckoning by tons or inches instead of by organisms. Like Shylock, it takes humanity by the pound instead of by the person.
Let me take but one case out of a hundred. All rational citizens have long had the thought that certain things ought to be run from the centre, and for all alike. The strongest case, I think, is transit. If a thousand people for a thousand reasons all want to go from Balham to Highgate it must be an advantage to take them all by one responsible system.
But from this certain modern writers, forgetting that they are dealing with living things, deduce the wildest things. They deduce, for instance, that in a better state of society we shall all dine together at a common restaurant. This is to forget all the vital element involved. Men take a tram for Highgate because they want to get to Highgate. But men do not dine because they want dinner. They dine because they want a certain human atmosphere, of repose, of domesticity, of hospitality, and of chosen friends, and they want dinner along with all this. They do not want their pound of flesh or their pound of beans and bacon. They want the spiritual sentiment of a good dinner. If you try to cut that out of humanity you will find (as Shylock did) that you cannot do it unless blood is shed.
(Daily News, February 15, 1908)
There was a controversy in the columns of an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subject of the character of Shylock in Shakespeare. Actors and authors of distinction, including some of the most brilliant of living Jews, argued the matter from the most varied points of view. Some said that Shakespeare was prevented by the prejudices of his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock. Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powers of his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock. Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queer story as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly have to do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock. In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so much of an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he must have been a Pro-Semite. But all of them in a sense admitted that they were puzzled as to what the play was about. The correspondence filled column after column and went on for weeks. And from one end of that correspondence to the other, no human being even so much as mentioned the word “usury.” It is exactly as if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month about the play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mention the word “murder.”
The play called The Merchant of Venice happens to be about usury, and its story is a medieval satire on usury. It is the fashion to say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact it is an exceedingly good story. It is a perfect and pointed story for its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story. And the moral is that the logic of usury is in its nature at war with life, and might logically end in breaking into the bloody house of life. In other words, if a creditor can always claim a man’s tools or a man’s home, he might quite as justly claim one of his arms or legs. This principle was not only embodied in medieval satires but in very sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying to take away a man’s livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying to take away a man’s life. And if anybody thinks that usury can never go to lengths wicked enough to be worthy of so wild an image, then that person either knows nothing about it or knows too much. He is either one of the innocent rich who have never been the victims of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential rich who are money-lenders themselves.
All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side to the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered. What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attempt to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer. It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert that the usurer was a man. And the Elizabethan dramatist does make him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster. Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectly sincere and self-respecting man. But the point is this: that he is a sincere man who sincerely believes in usury. He is a self-respecting man who does not despise himself for being a usurer. In one word, he regards usury as normal. In that word is the whole problem of the popular impression of the Jews. What Shakespeare suggested about the Jew in a subtle and sympathetic way, millions of plain men everywhere would suggest about him in a rough and ready way.
(“The Problem of Zionism,” The New Jersusalem)
The old common sense of human communities … never allowed, as we have allowed, even the idea of merchandise to entirely outweigh and overwhelm the idea of agriculture. The merchant had his place, but it was not the supreme place, and it was not so near the very heart of the society as the place of the ploughman. The merchant might be congratulated on his courage rather than on his safety, but it was not allowed to usurp the place of the courage of the soldier. So one of the most famous merchants, called the Merchant of Venice, is encouraged to talk hopefully of his happiness when his ships come home; but he knows that ships sometimes do not come home. Since then we have further transferred the wealth of Antonio to things in some ways even less solid than ships; things often under influences more alien, remote and inhuman than the strangest storms on the most uncharted sea. And then, because we have taken the things out of the cupboard and put them in the coffers of foreign financiers, we calmly talk about something being “as safe as the bank.” We are perfectly satisfied now, and have none of the hesitation of Shakespeare; because the wealth in the wandering ships has been transferred from Antonio to Shylock. This is a primary and preliminary fact of the problem, and has nothing to do with doubting any particular bank or denying that banks are useful; still less with merely destroying banks as useless. It merely gets the order and relation of the things stated right, in a world where they are always stated wildly wrong.
(G.K.’s Weekly, April 22, 1931)
It is an odd thing that the words hero and heroine have in their constant use in connection with literary fiction entirely lost their meaning. A hero now means merely a young man sufficiently decent and reliable to go through a few adventures without hanging himself or taking to drink. The modern realistic novelist introduces us to a weak-kneed young suburban gentleman who varies dull respectability with duller vice, and consumes three thick volumes before he has decided which woman he will marry. And by the strange, blasphemous perversion of words, he is called “The Hero.” He might just as well, in reason, be called “The Saint”, or “The Prophet”, or “The Messiah”. A hero means a man of heroic stature, a demigod, a man on whom rests something of the mystery which is beyond man. Now, the great and striking thing about heroines like Portia and Isabella and Rosalind is that they are heroines, that they do represent a certain dignity, a certain breadth, which is distinct from the mere homely vigour of the Shakespearian men. You could not slap Portia on the back as you could Bassanio. There may or may not be a divinity that cloth hedge a king, but there is certainly a divinity that cloth hedge a queen. To understand this heroic quality in the Shakespearian women it is necessary to grasp a little the whole Elizabethan, and especially the whole Shakespearian, view of this matter.
The great conception at the back of the oldest religions in the world is, of course, the conception that man is of divine origin, a sacred and splendid heir, the eldest son of the universe. But humanity could not in practice carry out this conception that everyone was divine. The practical imagination recoils from the idea of two gods swindling each other over a pound of cheese. The mind refuses to accept the idea of sixty bodies, each filled with a blazing divinity, elbowing each other to get into an omnibus. This mere external difficulty causes men in every age to fall back upon the conception that certain men preserved for other men the sanctity of man. Certain figures were more divine because they were more human. In primitive times of folklore, and in some feudal periods, this larger man was the conquering hero, the strong man who slew dragons and oppressors. To the old Hebrews this sacred being was the prophet: to the men of the Christian ages it was the saint. To the Elizabethans this sacred being was the pure woman.
The heroic conception of womanhood comes out most clearly in Shakespeare because of his astonishing psychological imagination, but it exists as an ideal in all Elizabethans. And the precise reason why the heroines of Shakespeare are so splendid is because they stand alone among all his characters as the embodiments of the primal ages of faith. They are the high and snowy peaks which catch the last rays of the belief in the actual divinity of man. We feel, as we read the plays, that the women are more large, more typical, belong more to an ideal and less to a realistic literature. They are the very reverse of abstractions; considered merely as women they are finished down to the finest detail. Yet there is something more in them that is not in the men. Portia is a good woman and Bassanio is a good man. But Portia is more than a woman: Portia is Woman and Bassanio is not Man. He is merely a very pleasant and respectable individual.
There are Elizabethan plays so dark and frightful that they read like the rubbish from the wastepaper basket of a madhouse. No one but a prophet possessed of devils, one might fancy, could produce incidents so abrupt and so sombre, could call up scenes so graphic and so unmeaning. In one play a man is forced to watch the murder of those he loves and cannot speak because his tongue is nailed to the floor with a dagger. In another a man is torn with red-hot pincers; in another a man is dropped through a broken floor into a cauldron. With horrible cries out of the lowest hell it is proclaimed that man cannot be continent, that man cannot be true, that he is only the filthiest and the funniest of monkeys. And yet the one belief that all these dark and brutal men admit, is the belief in the pure woman. In this one virtue, in this one sex, something heroic and holy, something, in the highest sense of that word, fabulous, was felt to reside. Man was natural, but woman was supernatural.
Now it is quite clear that this was the Elizabethan view of woman. Portia is not only the most splendid and magnanimous woman in literature. She is not only the heroine of the play, she is the play. She is the absolute heroic ideal upon which the play is built. Shakespeare had conceived, with extraordinary force, humour and sympathy, a man to express the ideal of technical justice, formal morality, and the claim of a man to his rights: the man was Shylock. Over against him he set a figure representing the larger conception of generosity and persuasion, the justice that is fused of a score of genial passions, the compromise that is born of a hundred worthy enthusiasms. Portia had to represent the ideal of magnanimity in law, morality, religion, art and politics. And Shakespeare made this figure a good woman because, to the mind of his day, to make it a good woman was to ring it with a halo and arm it with a sword.
(The Speaker, October 26, 1901)
Shakespeare always made his heroines heroic as well as his heroes.
(Introduction to Nicholas Nickleby)
If Shakespeare really married a bad wife when he had conceived the character of Beatrice he ought to have been ashamed of himself: he had failed not only in his life, he had failed in his art.
(Daily News, Dec. 9, 1902)
In numberless modern novels and magazines stories, the heroine is apparently complimented by being described as “boyish.” Doubtless there will soon be another fashion in fiction, in which the hero will always be described as girlish. Fettered as we are with an antiquated Victorian prejudice of the equality of the sexes, we cannot quite understand why one should be a compliment any more than the other. But, anyhow, the present fashion offers a much deeper difficulty. For the girl is being complimented on her boyishness by people who obviously know nothing at all about boys. Nothing could possibly be more unlike a boy than the candid, confident, unconventional and somewhat shallow sylph who swaggers up to the unfortunate hero of the novel a la mode. So far from being unconventional and shallow, the boy is commonly conventional because he is secretive. He is much more sullen outside and much more morbid inside. Who then is this new Pantomime Boy, and where did she come from? In truth she comes out of a very old pantomime. About three hundred years ago William Shakespeare, not knowing what to do with his characters, turned them out to play in the woods, let a girl masquerade as a boy, and amused himself with speculating on the effect of feminine curiosity freed for an hour from feminine dignity. He did it very well, but he could do something else. And the popular romancers of to-day cannot do anything else. Shakespeare took care to explain in the play itself that he did not think that life should be one prolonged picnic. Nor would he have thought that feminine life should be one prolonged piece of private theatricals. But Rosalind, who was then unconventional for an hour, is now the convention of an epoch. She was then on a holiday; she is now very hard-worked indeed. She has to act in every play, novel, or short story, and always in the same old pert pose. Perhaps she is even afraid to be herself: certainly Celia is now afraid to be herself. We should think it rather a bore if all tragic youths wore black cloaks and carried skulls in imitation of Hamlet, or all old men waved wands and clasped enormous books in imitation of Prospero. But we are almost as much tied to one type of girl in popular fiction to-day. And it is getting very tiresome. A huge human success is banking up for anybody bold enough to describe a quiet girl, a girl handicapped by good manners and a habit of minding her own business. Even a sulky girl would be a relief. The moral is one we often draw; that the family is the real field for personality. All the best Shakespearian dramas are domestic dramas; even when mainly concerned with domestic murders. So far from freedom following on the decay of the family, what follows is uniformity. The Rosalinds become a sort of regiment; if it is a regiment of vivandières. They wear uniform of shingled hair and short skirts; and they seem to stand in a row like chorus girls. Not till we have got back within the four walls of the home shall we have any great tragedy or great comedy. The attempts to describe life in a Utopia of the future are alone enough to prove that there is nothing dramatic about an everlasting picnic. Men and women must stand in some serious and lasting relation to each other for great passions and great problems to arise; and all this anarchy is as bad for art as it is for morals. Rosalind did not go into the wood to look for her freedom; she went into the wood to look for her father. And all the freedom—and even all the fun—of the adventure really arises from that fact. For even an adventure must have an aim. Anyhow, the modern aimlessless has produced a condition in which we are so bored with Rosalind that we almost long for Lady Macbeth.
(G.K.’s Weekly, September 3, 1927)
The greatest of Shakespeare’s comedies is also, from a certain point of view, the greatest of his plays. No one would maintain that it occupied this position in the matter of psychological study if by psychological study we mean the study of individual characters in a play. No one would maintain that Puck was a character in the sense that Falstaff is a character, or that the critic stood awed before the psychology of Peaseblossom. But there is a sense in which the play is perhaps a greater triumph of psychology than Hamlet itself. It may well be questioned whether in any other literary work in the world is so vividly rendered a social and spiritual atmosphere. There is an atmosphere in Hamlet, for instance, a somewhat murky and even melodramatic one, but it is subordinate to the great character, and morally inferior to him; the darkness is only a background for the isolated star of intellect. But A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a psychological study, not of a solitary man, but of a spirit that unites mankind. The six men may sit talking in an inn; they may not know each other’s names or see each other’s faces before or after, but night or wine or great stories, or some rich and branching discussion may make them all at one, if not absolutely with each other, at least with that invisible seventh man who is the harmony of all of them. That seventh man is the hero of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A study of the play from a literary or philosophical point of view must therefore be founded upon some serious realisation of what this atmosphere is. In a lecture upon As You Like It, Mr. Bernard Shaw made a suggestion which is an admirable example of his amazing ingenuity and of his one most interesting limitation. In maintaining that the light sentiment and optimism of the comedy were regarded by Shakespeare merely as the characteristics of a more or less cynical pot-boiler, he actually suggested that the title “As You Like It” was a taunting address to the public in disparagement of their taste and the dramatist’s own work. If Mr. Bernard Shaw had conceived of Shakespeare as insisting that Ben Jonson should wear Jaeger underclothing or join the Blue Ribbon Army, or distribute little pamphlets for the nonpayment of rates, he could scarcely have conceived anything more violently opposed to the whole spirit of Elizabethan comedy than the spiteful and priggish modernism of such a taunt. Shakespeare might make the fastidious and cultivated Hamlet, moving in his own melancholy and purely mental world, warn players against an over-indulgence towards the rabble. But the very soul and meaning of the great comedies is that of an uproarious communion between the public and the play, a communion so chaotic that whole scenes of silliness and violence lead us almost to think that some of the “rowdies” from the pit have climbed over the footlights. The title “As you Like It”, is, of course, an expression of utter carelessness, but it is not the bitter carelessness which Mr. Bernard Shaw fantastically reads into it; it is the god-like and inexhaustible carelessness of a happy man. And the simple proof of this is that there are scores of these genially taunting titles scattered through the whole of Elizabethan comedy. Is “As You Like It” a title demanding a dark and ironic explanation in a school of comedy which called its plays “What You Will”, “A Mad World, My Masters”, “If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It”, “The Devil is an Ass”, “An Humorous Day’s Mirth”, and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”? Every one of these titles is flung at the head of the public as a drunken lord might fling a purse at his footman. Would Mr. Shaw maintain that “If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It”, was the opposite of “As You Like It”, and was a solemn invocation of the supernatural powers to testify to the care and perfection of the literary workmanship? The one explanation is as Elizabethan as the other.
Now in the reason for this modern and pedantic error lies the whole secret and difficulty of such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be summed up at all, can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of happiness. That is to say, it is the conception that as man lives upon a borderland he may find himself in the spiritual or supernatural atmosphere, not only through being profoundly sad or meditative, but by being extravagantly happy. The soul might be rapt out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a trance of ecstasy; but it might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of laughter. Sorrow we know can go beyond itself; so, according to Shakespeare, can pleasure go beyond itself and become something dangerous and unknown. And the reason that the logical and destructive modern school, of which Mr. Bernard Shaw is an example, does not grasp this purely exuberant nature of the comedies is simply that their logical and destructive attitude have rendered impossible the very experience of this preternatural exuberance. We cannot realise As You Like It if we are always considering it as we understand it. We cannot have A Midsummer’s Night Dream if our one object in life is to keep ourselves awake with the black coffee of criticism. The whole question which is balanced, and balanced nobly and fairly, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is whether the life of waking, or the life of the vision, is the real life, the sine qua non of man. But it is difficult to see what superiority for the purpose of judging is possessed by people whose pride it is not to live the life of vision at all. At least it is questionable whether the Elizabethan did not know more about both worlds than the modern intellectual; it is not altogether improbable that Shakespeare would not only have had a clearer vision of the fairies, but would have shot very much straighter at a deer and netted much more money for his performances than a member of the Stage Society.
In pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a merit of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic, like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck. Then the dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning. Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing out with a reverent and sympathetic scepticism that all these fairies and spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man himself. The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things ripples one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good saying seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of any other triumphant evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole midsummer night’s dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius. But of this comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with a crashing finale, full of humour and wisdom and things set right, and silence falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a moment, as it were, the elves look into the house, asking which is the reality. “Suppose we are the realities and they the shadows.” If that ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane.
It is a trite matter, of course, though in a general criticism a more or less indispensable one to comment upon another point of artistic perfection, the extraordinarily human and accurate manner in which the play catches the atmosphere of a dream. The chase and tangle and frustration of the incidents and personalities are well known to everyone who has dreamt of perpetually falling over precipices or perpetually missing trains. While following out clearly and legally the necessary narrative of the drama, the author contrives to include every one of the main peculiarities of the exasperating dream. Here is the pursuit of the man we cannot catch, the flight from the man we cannot see; here is the perpetual returning to the same place, here is the crazy alteration in the very objects of our desire, the substitution of one face for another face, the putting of the wrong souls in the wrong bodies, the fantastic disloyalties of the night, all this is as obvious as it is important. It is perhaps somewhat more worth remarking that there is about this confusion of comedy yet another essential characteristic of dreams. A dream can commonly be described as possessing an utter discordance of incident combined with a curious unity of mood; everything changes but the dreamer. It may begin with anything and end with anything, but if the dreamer is sad at the end he will be sad as if by prescience at the beginning; if he is cheerful at the beginning he will be cheerful if the stars fall. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has in a most singular degree effected this difficult, this almost desperate subtlety. The events in the wandering wood are in themselves, and regarded as in broad daylight, not merely melancholy but bitterly cruel and ignominious. But yet by the spreading of an atmosphere as magic as the fog of Puck, Shakespeare contrives to make the whole matter mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic, and mysteriously charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives somehow to rob tragedy and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a toothache or a deadly danger from a tiger, or a precipice, is robbed of its sharpness in a pleasant dream. The creation of a brooding sentiment like this, a sentiment not merely independent of but actually opposed to the events, is a much greater triumph of art than the creation of the character of Othello.
It is difficult to approach critically so great a figure as that of Bottom the Weaver. He is greater and more mysterious than Hamlet, because the interest of such men as Bottom consists of a rich subconsciousness, and that of Hamlet in the comparatively superficial matter of a rich consciousness. And it is especially difficult in the present age which has become hag-ridden with the mere intellect. We are the victims of a curious confusion whereby being great is supposed to have something to do with being clever, as if there were the smallest reason to suppose that Achilles was clever, as if there were not on the contrary a great deal of internal evidence to indicate that he was next door to a fool. Greatness is a certain indescribable but perfectly familiar and palpable quality of size in the personality, of steadfastness, of strong flavour, of easy and natural self-expression. Such a man is as firm as a tree and as unique as a rhinoceros, and he might quite easily be as stupid as either of them. Fully as much as the great poet towers above the small poet the great fool towers above the small fool. We have all of us known rustics like Bottom the Weaver, men whose faces would be blank with idiocy if we tried for ten days to explain the meaning of the National Debt, but who are yet great men, akin to Sigurd and Hercules, heroes of the morning of the earth, because their words were their own words, their memories their own memories, and their vanity as large and simple as a great hill. We have all of us known friends in our own circle, men whom the intellectuals might justly describe as brainless, but whose presence in a room was like a fire roaring in the grate changing everything, lights and shadows and the air, whose entrances and exits were in some strange fashion events, whose point of view once expressed haunts and persuades the mind and almost intimidates it, whose manifest absurdity clings to the fancy like the beauty of first-love, and whose follies are recounted like the legends of a paladin. These are great men, there are millions of them in the world, though very few perhaps in the House of Commons. It is not in the cold halls of cleverness where celebrities seem to be important that we should look for the great. An intellectual salon is merely a training-ground for one faculty, and is akin to a fencing class or a rifle corps. It is in our own homes and environments, from Croydon to St. John’s Wood, in old nurses, and gentlemen with hobbies, and talkative spinsters and vast incomparable butlers, that we may feel the presence of that blood of the gods. And this creature so hard to describe, so easy to remember, the august and memorable fool, has never been so sumptuously painted as in the Bottom of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Bottom has the supreme mark of this real greatness in that like the true saint or the true hero he only differs from humanity in being as it were more human than humanity. It is not true, as the idle materialists of today suggest, that compared to the majority of men the hero appears cold and dehumanised; it is the majority who appear cold and dehumanised in the presence of greatness. Bottom, like Don Quixote and Uncle Toby and Mr. Richard Swiveller and the rest of the Titans, has a huge and unfathomable weakness, his silliness is on a great scale, and when he blows his own trumpet it is like the trumpet of the Resurrection. The other rustics in the play accept his leadership not merely naturally but exuberantly; they have to the full that primary and savage unselfishness, that uproarious abnegation which makes simple men take pleasure in falling short of a hero, that unquestionable element of basic human nature which has never been expressed, outside this play, so perfectly as in the incomparable chapter at the beginning of Evan Harrington in which the praises of The Great Mel are sung with a lyric energy by the tradesmen whom he has cheated. Twopenny sceptics write of the egoism of primal human nature; it is reserved for great men like Shakespeare and Meredith to detect and make vivid this rude and subconscious unselfishness which is older than self. They alone with their insatiable tolerance can perceive all the spiritual devotion in the soul of a snob. And it is this natural play between the rich simplicity of Bottom and the simple simplicity of his comrades which constitutes the unapproachable excellence of the farcical scenes in this play. Bottom’s sensibility to literature is perfectly fiery and genuine, a great deal more genuine than that of a great many cultivated critics of literature—“the raging rocks, and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison gates, and Phibbus’ car shall shine from far, and make and mar the foolish fates”, is exceedingly good poetical diction with a real throb and swell in it, and if it is slightly and almost imperceptibly deficient in the matter of sense, it is certainly every bit as sensible as a good many other rhetorical speeches in Shakespeare put into the mouths of kings and lovers and even the spirits of the dead. If Bottom liked cant for its own sake the fact only constitutes another point of sympathy between him and his literary creator. But the style of the thing, though deliberately bombastic and ludicrous, is quite literary, the alliteration falls like wave upon wave, and the whole verse, like a billow mounts higher and higher before it crashes. There is nothing mean about this folly; nor is there in the whole realm of literature a figure so free from vulgarity. The man vitally base and foolish sings “The Honeysuckle and the Bee”, he does not rant about “raging rocks” and “the car of Phibbus”. Dickens, who more perhaps than any modern man had the mental hospitality and the thoughtless wisdom of Shakespeare, perceived and expressed admirably the same truth. He perceived, that is to say, that quite indefensible idiots have very often a real sense of, and enthusiasm for letters. Mr. Micawber loved eloquence and poetry with his whole immortal soul; words and visionary pictures kept him alive in the absence of food and money, as they might have kept a saint fasting in a desert. Dick Swiveller did not make his inimitable quotations from Moore and Byron merely as flippant digressions. He made them because he loved a great school of poetry. The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman. And the triumph of Bottom is that he loves rhetoric and his own taste in the arts, and this is all that can be achieved by Theseus, or for the matter of that by Cosimo di Medici. It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism.
There is another aspect of this great play which ought to be kept familiarly in the mind. Extravagant as is the masquerade of the story, it is a very perfect aesthetic harmony down to such coup-de-maître as the name of Bottom, or the flower called Love in Idleness. In the whole matter it may be said that there is one accidental discord; that is in the name of Theseus, and the whole city of Athens in which the events take place. Shakespeare’s description of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the best description of England that he or anyone else ever wrote. Theseus is quite obviously only an English squire, fond of hunting, kindly to his tenants, hospitable with a certain flamboyant vanity. The mechanics are English mechanics, talking to each other with the queer formality of the poor. Above all, the fairies are English; to compare them with the beautiful patrician spirits of Irish legend, for instance, is suddenly to discover that we have, after all, a folk-lore and a mythology, or had it at least in Shakespeare’s day. Robin Goodfellow, upsetting the old women’s ale, or pulling the stool from under them, has nothing of the poignant Celtic beauty; his is the horse-play of the invisible world. Perhaps it is some debased inheritance of English life which makes American ghosts so fond of quite undignified practical jokes. But this union of mystery with farce is a note of the medieval English. The play is the last glimpse of Merrie England, that distant but shining and quite indubitable country. It would be difficult indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase “merrie England”, though some conception of it is quite necessary to the comprehension of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In some cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism. Amid all the great work of Puritanism the damning indictment of it consists in one fact, that there was one only of the fables of Christendom that it retained and renewed, and that was the belief in witchcraft. It cast away the generous and wholesome superstition, it approved only of the morbid and the dangerous. In their treatment of the great national fairy-tale of good and evil, the Puritans killed St. George but carefully preserved the Dragon. And this seventeenth-century tradition of dealing with the psychic life still lies like a great shadow over England and America, so that if we glance at a novel about occultism we may be perfectly certain that it deals with sad or evil destiny. Whatever else we expect we certainly should never expect to find in it spirits such as those in Aylwin as inspirers of a tale of tomfoolery like the Wrong Box or The Londoners. That impossibility is the disappearance of “merrie England” and Robin Goodfellow. It was a land to us incredible, the land of a jolly occultism where the peasant cracked jokes with his patron saint, and only cursed the fairies good-humouredly, as he might curse a lazy servant. Shakespeare is English in everything, above all in his weaknesses. Just as London, one of the greatest cities in the world, shows more slums and hides more beauties than any other, so Shakespeare alone among the four giants of poetry is a careless writer, and lets us come upon his splendours by accident, as we come upon an old City church in the twist of a city street. He is English in nothing so much as in that noble cosmopolitan unconsciousness which makes him look eastward with the eyes of a child towards Athens or Verona. He loved to talk of the glory of foreign lands, but he talked of them with the tongue and unquenchable spirit of England. It is too much the custom of a later patriotism to reverse this method and talk of England from morning till night, but to talk of her in a manner totally un-English. Casualness, incongruities, and a certain fine absence of mind are in the temper of England; the unconscious man with the ass’s head is no bad type of the people. Materialistic philosophers and mechanical politicians have certainly succeeded in some cases in giving him a greater unity. The only question is, to which animal has he been thus successfully conformed?
(From The Common Man. Originally from Good Words, September—October, 1904)
Bottom, Shakespeare’s true hero, is the type of the art enthusiast of that time, omnivorous, inconsistent, extravagant, the man with the ass’s head. The modern Ibsenite and Student of Drama has got rid of the hybrid character, though we are not quite sure to which of the two animals he has been finally assimilated.
(The Bookman, July, 1900)
The vague modern hedonist … is not satisfied with saying that he must live his life. He seems to mean that he must live everybody else’s life. He is consumed with a sort of envy of everybody else for being everybody else. He is not, like the old decadent of the days of my childhood, rendered more or less dependable by the very limitations of his pose. He is not satisfied with saying that he has a right to be what he is; he seems rather to think he has a right to be whatever he might have been. He does not say he is entitled to drink absinthe because he is an artist; he rather implies that he is entitled to eat hashish because he might have been an assassin, or possibly entitled to eat human flesh because he might have been a cannibal. He is not content with wasting his substance, or even other people’s substance, in riotous living. He does not wish to be a rioter but to be a riot—that is, to be a crowd. He thinks he could fulfil everybody else’s destinies. Like the decadent, he has his toadies; there are many to tell us that the hedonist must have his head, because it is such a highly intellectual head. Unfortunately, as I say, he wants to have a hundred heads, like the hydra. There are many to praise this new universality; but I am haunted with the memory of somebody else who thought that he could play all the parts at once. I cannot help recalling who it was who said “Let me play the lion too,” and what sort of a head it was that they gave him in the end.
(Illustrated London News, May 16, 1925)
To cut the buffoonery out of Shakespeare is as hopeless as to cut it out of Rabelais—or, for the matter of that, to cut the name of God out of the Bible.
(Illustrated London News, Oct. 31, 1914)
Love’s Labour’s Lost is chronologically as well as philosophically the youngest of Shakespeare’s plays. It is chiefly to be understood as a study of the spirit and the nature of youth, and it is so true in this respect that it must offend almost all critics who judge of things by what they logically should be, by what they inevitably must be, rather than by what they are. The world of life, and equally and even more decisively the world of literature, is always outwitting the philosophers; things do not accord themselves to our great critical syntheses, even to the latest and largest and most sympathetic. According to our modern ethics and ethnology, the emergence from barbarism to civilization ought to be the gradual subordination of grotesque and obscene passions to a calmer moral selection; yet when we come to the facts of literature, we find the modern arts full of sensuality and a savage tribal epic like the Iliad—in all essentials a Zulu war song—as pure as Sir Galahad. Savage peoples ought to exhibit a muddy materialism, a mere interest in meat and blood and animals, and civilized people an interest in the abstract and the ideal; yet when we come to the facts of literature we find that all the discoveries about blood and animals, about food and the seasons, have been made by civilized men, and all the discoveries about the abstract, about mystery and hope, about justice and brotherhood, have been made by savages; we find that barbarians sitting in mud huts have been unable to study the mud they lived in, but have been able to write the Book of Job. Thus upon every side of literature we have to be on our guard against a facile literalism; we have to be ready to receive, with infantile credulity, a paradox. And in nothing is this so striking as in the Shakespearean drama; in nothing so striking especially as in that cycle of early comedies, celebrating the mystery of youth, of which As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night are examples, but of which Love’s Labour’s Lost is the earliest and infinitely the most typical example. The account of youth given in these appears like the sculptures of a lunatic asylum; it is fantastic, solemn, full of preposterous observances, of fanciful limits. The only answer is that youth is an experience, like Freemasonry, and no one who does not remember it can recognize its signs.
There are certain matters of human psychology in which Shakespeare is so singularly and strangely right that his rightness will only with great difficulty be appreciated by those few persons who happen intensely to remember the experience. Thus, for instance, it would occur to most people, it does occur to the realistic and hysterical moderns, to represent the hour of deadly peril as an hour which leads to frenzied assertions of authority, to selection, to decimation, to a fierce and merciless inequality. The short-story writer of to-day who has never been in danger of anything (except perhaps of delirium tremens) represents the leader of a small army hemmed in by the enemy as asserting himself with a splendid brutality, as domineering, as sneering, as striking men when they murmur and shooting them when they disobey. But Shakespeare in that splendid scene in Henry V perceived the spiritual truth that danger reveals democracy:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers—
For who this day shall shed his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition.
Ten men cast on a desert island might have ten different social ranks, for the time they would be only men. So in Shakespeare these Englishmen, islanded as it were in a sea of enemies, are only Englishmen. Instances of the same kinds of truth, too true to impress the outsider, abound in Shakespeare. Thus when he glorifies his native land in that incomparable and hackneyed passage in Richard II, he does not dwell, like a windy journalist, upon the largeness of his country; he dwells, like a lover, on its smallness—he calls it a jewel and a little fort; he feels the real love and therefore tends, like the amatory poet, to diminutives, or like the collector, to a careful and almost compassionate manner of hovering over something infinitesimal. These are merely random examples of the general psychological truth that the place where most modern men, careless of actuality or ignorant of passionate experience would go wrong, is precisely the place where Shakespeare goes right. It is so supremely in this matter of the nature of youth as revealed in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Sullen and Byronic poets depict youth as extravagant in enjoyment and demand, as splendidly sensual and mingled of the animal and the God. This is the universal habit of literary Puritans and of those hackneyed epicureans and hedonists who are more gloomy than any Puritans. But any one who can really recall the nature of youth, will perceive that the Elizabethans had hold of precisely the accurate and precisely the opposite view. Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost perceives first of all the one great mark of a generous boyhood—the vow of celibacy. Youth with its sense of a reserve force, of an unexplored strength, with its delight in trifles, with its readiness for a crusade, has always been favourable to the frenzy of virginity. It has the power of extracting from comradeship (as Plato and Walt Whitman did) almost all the romance of first love: it has the power of trusting itself. There is about the celibate and scholarly brotherhood in Love’s Labour’s Lost something of the radiant childishness which marks, to those who can read history rightly, the inception of the greater monastic orders, such as that of St. Francis, inceptions which make us feel, as we read of them, that in their gay austerity was the very April of the soul, and that no revelers will ever be so light-hearted as those ascetics. Shakespeare, at one with the early Middle Ages in their sympathy with an ecstatic bachelorhood, is separated from the Middle Ages in that he thinks that bachelorhood is not a final vocation but a splendid vigil. His three celibate heroes in Love’s Labour’s Lost are quite passionately and sincerely attached to their celibacy, but they succeed afterwards in becoming equally passionately and equally sincerely attached to three young ladies. Although this is almost the very earliest of the great Shakespearean love-stories, the love poetry in it rises here and there to a height which he seldom afterwards touched even in his greatest moments. There are lines that have the one essential of great song, that of seeming, the reader knows not how, to be fragments of some more prehistoric and gigantic poem, glimpses of a far-off beauty:
For valour, is not love a Hercules
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides.
But though the victory is in this play, as in all Shakespeare’s comedies, given to the higher power of sex, the critics make a great mistake who treat their early theories of virginity as a mere folly to be exploded by the story. Many writers have spoken of this play as if it were an attack on mediaeval celibacy, as if it were meant merely to satirise a resistance to nature. This is profoundly to misinterpret the levity and purity of the story, the pure gold and the clear silver of that Elizabethan dawn. The love would be quite as much spoilt without the celibacy as the celibacy without the love. The note of severity struck at the beginning of the story is simply the note struck at the beginning of all honest youth and passion. For Shakespeare wrote, as we say, from the inside of youth: he was a young man beginning a young literature. He uttered true things that seem fantastic, as the true things of war seem to the civilian. And he uttered above all the central truth that the right and primary attitude of happy youth towards sex is an attitude of consuming fear.
(Good Words, January, 1904)
There has been a new literary competition, touching the question of our favorite character in fiction; and this cannot be made an international issue, for it seems to have started in London; indeed, with John o’London, who must surely represent that city. Afterwards it seems to have gone on a lecturing tour in America, like so many Johns of London, and turned up in the New York Times, after which it has returned to London and to me.
Like most of these selections, it suffers from some ambiguity in the terms of reference. Our favorite character might mean the most psychologically credible character, as in so much of Balzac or Trollope or Jane Austen; or the most gloriously and divinely incredible character, as in so much of Dickens; or the character for whom we should have the most affection in real life; which is something entirely different.
Thus, when Mr. H. E. Bates chooses Uncle Toby and Mr. T. G. Powys chooses Parson Adams, they may well love these persons as persons, and not only admire them as personae. But when Mr. Arthur Symons chooses Père Goriot he means the most vivid or pathetic person, not the person he would like to live with; and when Mr. L. A. G. Strong gives the second place to Mrs. Gamp it is rather to a conversationalist to whom he would like to listen than to a nurse whom he would trust with his life.
In this sense there are a throng of Dickens characters competing for my favor, some of the most insignificant being the most important. I am not sure I would not award the laurel to Trabb’s Boy, in Great Expectations. He is Democracy in daemonic power, when he blasts the snobbishness of Pip.
But as Mr. Strong gives Falstaff as his first choice, I am moved to support him and say a word about that great original among the comic characters of our literature. I do so because Falstaff has always been a puzzle to moralists, and it was by a sort of accident that I found the key.
I was deep in controversy with a very learned Cambridge don on the subject of Pride, a point perhaps a little too personal to Cambridge dons. Anyhow, this professor was grumbling that Pride is not so bad after all, since swaggerers are admired and we all like Falstaff. And then I suddenly saw the truth, as I have often seen it, in a blaze of light revealed by the black falsehood and folly of professors. The scholar is often a guide to truth because he states clearly the exact contrary of the truth.
Falstaff is a coward, a thief, an old man encouraging the young in vice; he has not, in our ethical definition, one ordinary virtue to his name. And yet all Christian people love him; and they are right. They love him because, in his welter of vices, there is not one drop of Pride. He knows what he is; he jeers at himself for being what he is.
But because our evolutionary ethics have forgotten Humility we cannot understand even our own affections. We love Falstaff because he is everything else except a Pharisee. And so his admirers have been driven to pretend they are cynics or anarchists when the dreadful secret is that they are still Christians.
(New York American, December 29, 1934)
Smaller characters give us the impression that the author has told the whole truth about them, greater characters give the impression that the author has given of them, not the truth, but merely a few hints and samples. In some mysterious way we seem to feel that even if Shakespeare was wrong about Falstaff, Falstaff existed and was real; that even if Dickens was wrong about Micawber, Micawber existed and was real.
(“Bret Harte,” Varied Types)