From Shakespeare to O. Henry; studies in literature

Front matter

T'/T

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

Contents

I. SHAKESPEARE II. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

III. SOME MODERN POETS

IV. SOME MORE MODERN POETS V. THE MODERN NOVEL

II

OF late we have regarded Shakespeare, so far as we have regarded him at all, solely as a Patriot and a War-Poet, and by so doing have run the risk of forgetting altogether his claim to be the greatest dramatist of our own if not of all nations ; it is perhaps just as well that the Tercentenary of his death should fall in war time, for it will tend to bring us back to our attitude of reverence and never-ceasing gratitude for all that he has done for us. It is also time to readjust our point of view regarding his life and work in the light of what recent criticism has done in the way of showing us the true Shakespeare. There has never been an age so rich or so diverse in Shakespearean criticism as our own : we have been able, in a more unbiassed manner than our fathers, to glean what there was of lasting value in the pages of Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt ; added to this there has been the never sufficiently to be praised life study of Sir Sidney Lee, and the fact that we are somehow more honest or more inspired than our ancestors. Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt that the studies of Brandes, Ten Brink, Taine, Raleigh, Bradley, Frank Harris, Masefield and Dowden have opened up new roads of thought, each of them different from the other, but each converging on the one end we would all attain, the heart of Shakespeare.

We recognise now, for instance, that Wordsworth was far more of a seer than Browning, and more

14 STtJDIES IN LITERATURE

probably right when he suggested that in the Sonnets we have the real living Shakespeare : " with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart." The theory that we know little or nothing of the dramatist's own life ^ or point of view is exploded, we may hope, for ever : the truth is that we know more, not less, about the actual details of his life than we do about any other dramatist of his time, owing to the indefatigable energy of Sir Sidney Lee, Professor Wallace and others; and, as Bagehot says, Shakespeare is, after all, his own biographer. Surely no man could desire a better Boswell. As it was one of Shakespeare's most notable gifts to be able to make a fictitious character live more reaUy than many people with whom we have been intimately connected all our lives, so when he comes to portray his own idiosyncrasies we find that we know Shakespeare better almost than anybody else in the whole world. It has been said, of course, that it is the business of the dramatist to treat his art objectively, to stand right outside it and so far to obHterate his own point of view as to be able to step into the very body and soul of his dramatis personce and, for the time being, to become them : to see life from their particular niche and to utter sentiments (which may be totally opposed to his own) which fit their character. This is aU quite true and sound criticism, but when Homer nods, when the character for some inexplicable reason gratuitously emphasises points in his character wliich rather tend to retard than to develop the action, we may justifiably begin to think that at these times the personality of the author is unconsciously obtruding itself and is, in a word, his own temperament giving voice to its likes and dislikes.

^ Sir George Greenwood's theory that Shakespeare the actor and "Shakespeare" the playwright were two different men does not come within the scope of this paper, but cannot be neglected.

Again, when a dramatist returns time after time to the same peculiarities in his major creations, it is obvious that he is at any rate interested in those peculiarities, either because they are his own obsessions or are possessed by his most intimate friends. No man can depict what he fails to understand, nor does he usually attempt to draw what never interests him; Shakespeare, for instance, nowhere gives us a living portrait of the zealous Puritan fanatic reformer, or the shopkeeping, middle-class citizen : neither type interested him.

Two types alone stand out among his delineations of men : as Doctor Johnson shrewdly remarks, Shakespeare has no heroes ; his best pictures of men are those which depict them as creatures of obvious himian failings like unto ourselves, and they stand out, very clear-cut, in two main groups.

First there is the group which we identify as like in nearly all points to Shakespeare himself — ^the Hamlet, Biron, Vincentio, Orsino, Prospero, Jaques, Macbeth, Posthumus, Richard the Second tj^e. These men are amazingly alike even when, by all the laws of drama, they ought not to be. They all love solitude, are far too much given to introspection and thinking too precisely on the event, it is their great failing that their native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought, they all find solace in music, they are gentle, almost too gentle, " too full of the milk of human kindness," in all of them their imaginative faculty is developed at the expense of all their other faculties. They may, in some cases, describe themselves as " plain, blunt men," but as a matter of fact they delude themselves when they say so ; the truth is that they are all poets ; they never speak anything but the purest poetry ; they are . simply Shakespeare, Shakespeare himself speaking through the lips of these kings and princes and dulces, Shakespeare the gentle, the passionate, the irresolute. After all, if we take Leonardo da Vinci's opinion to be worth anything, we should expect this. " For the form," he says, " we go to Nature and use our observations, for the soul we look into our own hearts and paint ourselves."

This it is that seems to me to account for Shakespeare's failure when we begin to analyse his depiction of the second broad group — ^the men of action. For who are Shakespeare's men of action ?

Othello ? He begins as man of action and ends as a man of action, but in the middle of the play he is the poet, imaginative, given to much thinking (it is almost a sine qua non that our men of action should not be overburdened with intellect ; it is just because they don't waste time in overmuch thinking that we admire them so), an abominably bad judge of character (where your man of action is almost infallible), suspicious to an extraordinary degree. He talks too much. ^Macbeth? He is superstitious, lily-livered in his fear of blood, more a poet, and far more sensitive of soul than Othello.

Henry the Fifth ? As a king he may compel admiration, but as a man he is almost beneath contempt ; he is a low, common cad who deserts his friends, butchers his enemies and makes love like a savage.

Hotspur ? His masterpiece of the man of action is a medley of contrarieties, who hates " mincing poetry " and yet employs it ad nauseam, losing himself in mistimed phDosophic reflection when he ought to be the, brave, blunt hero.

Richard the Second ? Heavens, no ! Falconbridge ? He is slavishly copied from The Troublesome Baigne.

Search the plays through and through and you will find that Shakespeare mars in some particular all his men of action. The truth is that he is not sufficiently interested in them to understand them. How otherwise can we explain the fact that he never took the trouble to depict a Raleigh, a Hawkins, a Frobisher, a Drake or a Sir Philip Sidney ? He had models enough near at hand ; he must have come into intimate contact with men of this famous breed; he nowhere portrays them ariy more than he portrays the zealous Puritan or the middle-class shopkeeper. He had nothing in common with them. He had, truly, the finest experiencing nature ever given to man ; his mind was like a highly sensitive photographic plate. Consequently, he has immortalised types which will live for ever in tragedy and comedy. His Falstaff, about whom it has been said that if anyone were to gamer up all the humour and gaiety of his entire life it woiild amount to about the worth of one sentence of the immortal knight ; his Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, who remains ever fresh when all our real nurses are forgotten ; his Dogberry, who contains the essence of all the policemen we have had the misfortune to know ; his Shallow, whose humour Masefield compares to an apple-loft in some old bam where the apples of last year lie sweet in the straw — all these are in the world's great portrait gallery. Yet it must not be forgotten that, in spite of these, Shakespeare had his limitations, and this failure to depict the man of action was one of the most noticeable. He seems himself to have been a man obsessed with a horror of bloodshed. He can never quite rise to an adequate description of courage — as Frank Harris says, when we want to see this side of life faithfully rendered we have to turn to Bunyan : Valiant-for-Truth, with his " I fought till my sword did cleave to my hand and when they were joined together as if a sword grew out of my arm, and when the blood ran through my fingers, then I fought with most courage," is quite beyond the scope of Shakespeare. . But, as Professor Saintsbury says in his Peace of the Augustans, " it is not a sin for a potato not to be a peach or not to be sorry because it is one " : it is not Shakespeare's fault if he left us no picture of the modem Public School boy or drew the happy warrior less happily than Wordsworth; what is sinful is for us to pretend that he did what he did not do. " For the soul we look into our own hearts and paint ourselves."

So when Shakespeare came to portray womanhood I believe he painted those whom he knew, and sometimes idealised them to such a degree that they became lifeless abstractions.

Hazlitt's dictum that " Shakespeare's heroines (though they have been found fault with as insipid) are the finest in the world," likemost of Hazlitt's judgments, hits the nail on the head.

When suddenly we are asked to pick out our favourite heroines in fiction we are hard put to it to think of any with whom we would willingly spend our days. Scott once, in Jeanie Deans, painted a real live girl, Meredith again and again ; but few other writers have succeeded in pleasing the fastidious male. Shakespeare certainly has left the best we know, but with many even of his we are prone to iind fault.

Who, for instance, would willingly marry an Ophelia ? She is scarcely more than a puppet. There are times when we are so tortured in Othello that we long for any girl of our acquaintance to change places for half-anhour with Desdemona. There simply would have been no tragedy had a flesh-and-blood girl been in her situation ; it is Desdemona's dumbness, Desdemona's etherial qualities that allow a tragedy which strains the probabilities almost to breaking-poiat.

In Cordelia, however, Shakespeare rises to his highest ; though she speaks barely a hundred lines she lives for us for ever ; her foolish obstinacy, her show of temper as she leaves her sisters, her "amazing filial devotion, all endear her to us, so that she stands out far above all the other women whom Shakespeare depicted. The truth is that Shakespeare was always paintiag ideal portraits of girls : in Rosalind, in Portia, in Beatrice, in Juliet. Again and again we have the same sprightly, witty, loose-talking, boyish girl who is like no one we ever met, but in some points like the girl of our dreams.

Occasionally we get a picture of a shrew, as in Adriana, Katherine, or Constance (in the earlier scenes), and from hints that Shakespeare drops from time to time we may well believe that he was here depicting that unfortunate Anne Hathaway, the wife who was eight years older than her husband, to whom the second-best bed was his last bequest. In Volumnia, that splendid Roman matron, he has paid a grand tribute to mothers, and it is quite on the cards that in the bloodless abstractions with which he occupied himself in his closing years, in Perdita, Marina and Miranda, he may well have had in mind his daughter Judith. But it none the less remains true that he never succeeds in painting any type of womanhood so successfully again as he did in Cleopatra. No other woman in Shakespeare is worthy to compare with her; she is astoundingly alive and real. She has the power of making us feel that had we been Antony we should have done what Antony did, and in rereading the play it seems impossible to imagine that Shakespeare drew entirely from his imagination when he conceived such a character. Frank Harris's theory that Cleopatra and Cressida are both portraits of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, that Shakespeare's great tragedy was his unbridled passion for this lady, call her Mary Fitton or whom you will, is at least plausible, and becomes more and more likely as we follow up the threads of his argument.

That Shakespeare personally experienced deep suffering of some sort seems to be obvious ; it is inconceivable that he should have written Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and Othello had he not himself been in the depths ; what that experience was we cannot now know for certain, but, judging from what we do know of him, it appears more likely to have been an agony of love, of treachery and baseness in love than anything else. The story of the friend being deputed to make love to the girl for the hero does not occur, be it remembered, only in the Sonnets ; we have the same story retold in Much Ado About Nothing and in Twelfth Night. It is an absurd story for a dramatist so versatile as Shakespeare to harp on, but he somehow cannot get away from it, as he would not, were he recalling an episode in his own life. When we recollect how often Shakespeare inveighs against the sin of ingratitude, to him obviously the worst offence imaginable, it lends colour all the more strongly to the theory that Shakespeare sent the young Herbert to plead his cause with Mary Fitton, only to discover that she succumbed to the attractiveness of the friend and betrayed Shakespeare by giving herself to his friend.

Whatever the truth of this may be, there is at least no doubt that Shakespeare was more successful in his portraiture of women when he was painting the coquette, the wanton Cleopatra (whom he seemed to know right down to the utmost depths) than he was in any other type of womanhood at all. Even Ruskin noticed that nearly all Shakespeare's women were faultless, but he does not conclude, therefore, as we do, that they were, for this very reason, unhuman and untrue to life.

II

It has been said that Shakespeare spent his life in two places : in the Court, mingling with the young gallants who had taken him up and foxmd his witty, sunny disposition to their liking ; and ia the taverns, with Ben Jonson and Marlowe, where he met the Bardolphs, Falstaffs and Quicklys of life. The middle of humanity he never knew, but only the extremes. This may be due to all sorts of reasons ; one certainly was that he was inherently an aristocrat ; by a strange paradoxical irony, apparently he was also a snob. Somehow in the light of this it is easier to understand the way in which Mary Fitton treated him, " now she would and now she wouldn't " — always keeping him on the tenterhooks alternately of hope and despair, until she finally married for the second time and left London for ever. Genius was ever unhappy in its relations with the opposite sex, and it appears unlikely that Shakespeare was an exception to a rule which has scarcely ever been broken, except in the case of the Brownings.

It has been the fashion for many years now to extol Shakespeare's sense of humour as almost the most perfectly developed which we possess; but Doctor Johnson noticed what many of us nowadays feel : that many of his so-called comic scenes are intolerably dull, owing to the eternal playing upon words in which the characters indulge. Just as Euphuism was a passing phase, a fashion of the moment, so this habit of pimning, so dear to the heart of Shakespeare, once it reaches its zenith in Sidney Smith, ceases to have any claim upon our attention : it has become the very , lowest form of wit — cheap, vulgar, relegated to the less desirable type of music-hall. No fashion changes more quickly than the fashion of fun, the criterion of what is or what is not humorous ; it is this that so surprises us in Johnson's other statement when he says that in his comic scenes Shakespeare seems to produce without labour what no labour can improve ; Hazlitt strikes a truer note when he says that we prefer Shakespearean tragedy to Shakespearean comedy for the simple reason that tragedy is better than comedy. Nothing, for instance, could be more tedious or more wooden to modem ears than the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet, with its silly talk about " choler," " collier " and " collar." It is now almost painful to have to attribute such drivel to the pen that created Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch and Bottom.

Shakespeare's failures in the world of humour are more noticeable than any other man's, for the simple reason that he was more richly endowed with the precious gift than any other man ; as Meredith truly points out, from Mother Earth

Came the honeyed corner of his lips.

The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails

Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips, Yet full of speech and intershifting tales,

Close mirrors of us : thence had he the laugh We feel is hers.

There was in his life a summer time when his innate capacity for sunny gaiety came to full expression in the golden comedies of Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It.

How different is his success in the ever-famous Nurse and^in Bully Bottom and their likes, all of whom he saw Avith loving observation, from his pictures of men of action : very rarely does his humour become sardonic or contemptuous : rather is it closely allied with Meredith's Comic Spirit — sympathetic, harmless and beautiful as summer lightning. As Meredith says of him:

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the Comic Spirit ; with more of what we call blood-life than is to be found anywhere else : and they pre of this world, but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination and by great poetic imagination.

So much for the particular. But it is when Meredith generalises on the Comic Spirit that he gives us so true a picture of Shakespearean humour.

It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half-tension. It shows sunlight of the mindj mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract it ; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does : and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate ; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to, run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly ; whenever they are at variance with their professions and violate the unwritten laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice : are false in humility, or mixed with conceit, individually or in the bulk — the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter.

This so exactly and so perfectly describes Shakespeare's humour that to add or subtract a word is only to spoil a consummately exact picture. It leaves nothing to be said. Every iota of this criticism applies with wonderful exactness to all his finest comic scenes.

Ill

We should have thought, from the fact that Shakespeare must have met many hundreds of boys on the stage, that he would have left us one deathless portrait at least of the human boy, but by a strange paradox he has left no picture of the living boy we know. All Shakespeare's boy characters are precocious and almost girlish in their ways. Arthur is far the best of them, and may well stand as a type for all the others. There is no question of his being alive : he holds a very dear place in our hearts among the gallery of Shakespeare's most successftil characters, but he is scarcely the boy as we know him ; he is all angelic love, a woman-child in his unselfish sympathy, exceedingly tender and sweet of heart, almost perfect and yet quite natural, never mawkish or sentimental ; it is a wonderful creation, tear-compelling in his pathetic helplfessness, just as are the prattling Princes or Macduff's son.

So then we see, whether we are discussing Shakespeare's heroes, heroines, humour or boy characters, broadly defined some of his own peculiar idiosyncrasies : his gentle, forgiving, almost feminine mind stands out at every phase of his life's journey and betrays him to us. It remains for us to fill in the, portrait by noting in a careful rereading what other qualities he seems to place in the category of good or bad.

First and by far the most noticeable is his love of. music; all his favourite characters, from Orsino to Cleopatra, call for music on the slightest pretext ; he even goes out of his way to condemn the man who has no music in his soul, though we know well enough how false a judgment that is. It is on a par with the " love me, love my dog " theory, and incidentally in this connection it is worthy of remark that Shakespeare always derides dogs : for him they seem always to be synonymous with some vice ; he is, if there ever was one, a doghater, which is all the more strange when we think of his love for the open air and the cotintry, and his knowledge of hounds. No man ever described the chase from the point of view of the hare so well as Shakespeare ; no man ever described a hoimd so well — ^and yet he hated dogs ! It is a strange anomaly.

That he was generous and liberal-minded is clear to anyone who has read The Merchant of Venice ; evei*yone in the play (except Shylock) seems to look on money as dirt, and miserliness is, to Shakespeare's mind, certainly only a lesser crime than ingratitude. I have touched on his snobbishness before ; it is, of course, a national trait, but Shakespeare seems to have suffered from the malady badly ; it is strange indeed to think that so great a man should have worried to appeal to the Heralds' Court to be assigned a coat of arms as befitted a gentleman ; that he was a gentleman and an aristocrat is obvious, but none the less, he seems delighted always to portray himself as a duke or prince whenever possible.

With regard to his politics we may be sure that he sided with law, order and the Constitution. It is not always remembered that he wrote in Tudor times — ^it would have been strange indeed had he done otherwise, constituted as he was — he was certainly not the man to understand Jack Cade ; Piers Plowman would have left him cold. It has been pointed out frequently that in The Tempest he damned the Socialistic point of view for ever, but it may well be doubted whether, had he been hving now, he would have taken even the trouble to do that.

" Shakespeare has nowhere drawn the religious type of man in his plays " : so runs the famous indictments of the great critic, and for many years the general reader has agreed complacently without taking the trouble to forage for himself and prove the truth or falsity of this sweeping generalisation.

It all depends upon what you mean by the word religious : in an age which no one in his senses could call tolerant, Shakespeare stands out without a trace of bigotry. It was scarcely likely that he would extol the Roman Catholics : on the other hand, he has nowhere left a living picture of the fanatic Ptiritan, ready to bum for his principles if need be, obsessed by the zeal of his faith which could remove moimtains : it would have been so easy for a genius who had only (apparently) to observe a man to become him to have drawn an imperishable portrait of the finest type of Puritan : but no ; the truth must be confessed : Shakespeare, like Homer, had his blind side : to put it shortly, the type did not interest him ; the naiddle-class ■, shopkeeper, together with the zealot, failed to attract him. Shakespeare was for ever depicting the highest and the lowest ; he seemed not to see the vast millions who lay in between : that was part and parcel of his aristocratic temperament.

That he was contemptuous, in a quite minor degree, both of ordinary citizens and of the Puritans, was natural when we think how both these types combined to oppose the acting of plays, and even petitioned Elizabeth to banish theatres to the suburbs, but it is absurd to take Sir Andrew Aguecheek's opinion as Shakespeare's : —

Maria. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan. Sir Andrew. O, if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog. Sir Toby. What, for being a Puritan? Thy exquisite reason, dear knight ?

Sir Andrrtr. I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have reason good enough.

Inddentally it k to be noticed k propos of MalvoKo, that Maria replies to this : " The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly but a time-pleaser."

It yrs& certainly not for his Puritanic leanings that Shakespeare thought fit to make Malvolio " a most notorious geek and gull."

The above dialogue reflects altogether on the utter foolishness of Sir Andrew, and not at all on the Puritans as a body. It might with more justice be urged that Shakespeare is here paying the Puritans a very high compliment.

No : the truth is that we may search Shakespeare through and through in vain to discover any sectarian point of view held up to admiration or ridicule. But religion, to all except the few, is not sectarian. The point at issue rather is, does or does not Shak^peare propound a theorj- to explain the riddle of life ? Does he praise virtue and condemn vice ? Is he, in the broadest and only true sense, religious? I answer, without the shadow of a doubt, yes !

It must, however, first of all be remembered that the dramatist's first duty is, like the novelist's, to attract and amuse his audience. He must not obtrude his own personality or moralise upon his dramcMs personce. His business is to show you the imfolding of character, not to tell you what to think of the character as if he were the editor of a school edition of his own plays. He is also bound to depict life as he sees it, not as it ought or ought not to be.

Hence to the dullard it is quite possible that Shakespeare seems to have no ulterior moral purpose. We have traged}^ after tragedy in which the stage is fiteraUy heaped with the corpses of righteous and vicious alike.

in that indiscriminating way which, as the Psalmist saw, is so true to life. The righteous man may beg his bread, and appear to all intents and purposes forsaken, while the wicked man obviously flourishes like a green bay-tree. But that is not all : we are most distinctly left with a sense (never mentioned in so many words, but plainly hinted at again and again) that this world is not all, and that even in this world the purpose of its progress is towards virtue, for it is evil that violently disturbs our ordered path ; hence it follows that nature is not indifferent between evil and good, but is quite definitely on the side of the angels. The whole theory of Shakespearean tragedy is a proof of Shakespeare's sane, broad-minded, religious point of view.

What could be more definite, more succinct, more noble, than the whole attitude of Edgar towards life, summed up in this one immortal phrase : —