The Mind of Shakspere (cont.)

Part 2 of "The Mind of Shakspere" from *The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, and Other Essays* by John Erskine.

What, for instance, is the effect of his plays on us? For one thing, we understand them, as we could hardly do if they were the work of superhuman intelligence. What audience was ever puzzled by a Shakspere play? It is only the theories of his critics that perplex. Further, the plays seem to the audience to be miracles not of intellect but of observation. No doubt the poet was thoughtful; no doubt his mind brooded on life; but in his plays he gives the results of clear vision, not the results of clear thinking.

Might we not find a clue to the secret in the behavior and expression of children before they are instructed as to what they ought to think and say? Who of us cannot recall at least one of their disconcertingly apposite remarks? Their naive pronouncements share with great poetry the double effect of echo and surprise; we who hear have felt our way towards some such idea, yet when it confronts us we are startled. For highly conventionalized people, like Tennyson's spinster, children in their talkative moods are almost demoniacal,

"a-haxin ma hawkward questions, an saayin ondecent things."

But their youthful penetration is not solely a cause of embarrassment. Sometimes it shocks us to repentance for the unnatural state of mind into which we have grown. When Mr. Brocklehurst asked little Jane Eyre what she must do in order to avoid hell fire after death, she replied, "I must keep in good health, and not die." Why not, after all? We have been educated to a less natural answer. Sometimes this penetration is the very gift of prophecy. When young William Blake was to be apprenticed to a certain painter, the boy objected, saying that the man looked as if he were to be hanged. And the man later did come to be hanged.

This faculty in childhood, which we can all illustrate for ourselves, appears to be nothing more than accurate, natural observation—an almost animal power of sight such as a fine dog or horse would have—and spontaneous, unretarded expression. As we grow older, learning to consider our thoughts we become conventional—that is, we train ourselves to see only what we expect to see. And learning to consider our speech, we limit our vocabulary; for the effect of taking thought is to curtail, not extend, our supply of words. Because we are unsure of many a fine word, or because we are unsteady in its pronunciation, we ordinary grown folk will not use it; and we hesitate to write it, forsooth, because of the spelling. Yet what energetic child, before he has been to school, ever stops for a word? Will he not make one up as he needs it, and pronounce it as he can, and by the same guidance spell it—very much in the way of that reckless word-user, William Shakspere? As to that unspoiled power to see true, some vestiges of it we grown folk perceive when upon meeting a stranger or seeing a landscape we feel an instant reaction, an impulsive judgment which craves expression, but which we stifle because we did not expect it. And a few seconds later perhaps some unconsidering person says the very thing, and wins a prompt acclaim.

Is there not a hint of Shakspere in this? To be sure, he was no child, but a mature man, educated to some extent in the knowledge of his time, if not in the profundities of modern scholarship. His associates were probably better educated than he, and his daily conference with them must have subjected his thought to a thousand influences of wisdom which we shall never be able to trace specifically among his "sources." Yet with all this maturity, can we not imagine a grown person with whom for the most part expression has remained an instantaneous reflex of experience, who sees true habitually, as we less child-like folk do occasionally, and who speaks so spontaneously that he takes no account of his utterance? He never blotted a line, if we believe Ben Jonson; and even if we do not believe him, it is harder to prove that Shakspere's second thought is in any of the texts, than it is to conceive of his mind at its best as unspoiled by intention or reconsideration, like the mind of a child whose penetrating, unconscious criticism of life has not yet been ruined by blame or praise. With such a conception, the known facts of Shakspere's life cease to be puzzling. Hawthorne wondered that poetic genius could grow up in the small Stratford house, where there was no privacy. Probably Hawthorne's meditative genius could not have grown up there, but for Shakspere's mind there could be no happier school. At all times and places his mental process was normal; he needed no privacy for penurious inspiration, but in the very heart of noisy, roistering Southwark could reflect the life that crowded in upon him; and doubtless the lack of seclusion in his father's house fostered the gift. Indeed, privacy and leisure would probably have meant starvation for his art. The fortunate conditions for the development of his energy and his naturalness, were a crowded and stirring environment and the necessity of ceaseless labor. It is no miracle that in a few years filled with distractions he produced in such rapid succession so many plays; had he enjoyed an unstimulating quiet, perhaps only by a miracle would he have produced any plays at all.

Shakspere's energy, which we assume as the prime fact in his character, is too generally conceded to call for proof. In the details of his career from the imprudent marriage and the deer-stealing to the purchase of New Place and the return to Stratford, he was a man of action fully occupied with affairs. Professor Wallace's recent contributions to our knowledge of his life in London, set him still more clearly in this light. But his writing might teach us as much without the help of the biographers. Great energy, strong interest, whether a man be very happy or very angry, results in vividness of imagination and felicity of speech. Shakspere's writing further reminds us that it is too much to expect even him to live invariably in a tense, reacting frame of mind, wherein life is observed and created with infallible energy. Many a dull and self-conscious passage—if we may be forgiven for observing them!—is witness to his relaxed moments. Yet it would not be difficult to argue that his best work was done in his busiest years. That he mingled with other men in a companionable way, without much hint that he or they thought him more than a genial, frank comrade, is no paradox, but the inevitable consequence of his interest in life and his energy ; nor should we wonder that his family remembered him in the death record as a gentleman, not as the world's greatest poet. His business was to live, not to write. That we have his plays now, means only that poetry is the most enduring reaction to life. He illustrates the usually forgotten truth that the greatest poets, normal and not too conscious of themselves, are men of action. Like Dante or Milton or Scott, he responded to life in other ways than through poetry—only he set so great value on the other ways and so little on the poetry that we are forced to think him the least conscious and most naive of artists.

If his unconscious energy illuminates his vast accomplishment, it throws light as well upon his narrowest limitation. Since his genius at its typical moments reflected life in spontaneous, uncalculating speech, no wonder that his horizon was narrowly bounded by human birth and death. His thought attempted no other world, no other life, than this. His mind could not react happily on what could not be physically seen. Dante's imaginings or Milton's were therefore impossible to his temperament; indeed, the casual questions of any serious-minded contemporary of his as to a future existence were to him it seems strange and forbidding. In Hamlet and Measure for Measure, those dark adventures in the borderland of death, the practical wisdom of life is profound, but the brooding upon the hereafter is child-like, with a child's respect for angels and devils, and a more certain dread of ghosts and of being alone in the dark.

The other fact of Shakspere's equipment which needs no proof is his gift of language. Distinction must be made of course between his natural endowment and the felicitous word-play which he shared with his contemporaries. It was a languaged age. What Shakspere owed to Euphuism is known to all students of his style. The fashion of fine cadences helped him to many a much-commentaried line, sounding and shallow, like

"And peace proclaims olives of endless age,"

or taught him such a flawless stretch of song as satisfies us though we forget the allusion—

"And the imperial votaress passed on
In maiden meditation fancy-free,"

or shorter phrases, now proverbial, like

"Sweets to the Sweet,"

"More sinned against than sinning."

In these felicities, however, Shakspere surpassed but little the other poets of his time, who improved their vocabulary and style, as we nowadays would do, by taking thought. Any one with an ordinary ear for word-music could effect some such happy combinations of sound. If he should occasionally miss the mark, so also did Shakspere; immediately before and after these quoted lines occur others far less happy. That he excelled at all in the practice of Euphuism, that he had a higher average of happy lines to his credit than others in that fashion, is proof only of his delight in language for its own sake—a delight that is common in some degree to all poets. Even in the highly Euphuistic passages, however, with alliteration and balance and the other artifices of style, some magic word often lives with the Shaksperian vitality. Among the "w's" and the "l's" and the "k" sounds of the following most familiar lines, the verb which gives the picture has an eerie detonation, a charm that it never wore in any other employment—

"On such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea bank, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage."

The distinction of Shakspere's language at its best is its extraordinary vitality. Words to most men are listless things, to be combined into stationary forms of thought or color. But in the Shaksperian word there is always a certain astonishment, a new approach, whether or not the word has been familiar before—

"In the dead vast and middle of the night."

"Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change."

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety."

Does not the secret of this imaginative speech lie in the poet's clearness of vision and in his immediateness and accuracy of expression? Such words cannot be found by careful search in one's vocabulary; they are found, if at all, in the thing contemplated, when the energy of the poet's nature provides—to take a liberty with his own phrase—that the firstlings of his sight shall be the firstlings of his speech. To a degree children have this spontaneous felicity, at least as long as they keep a naive approach to language. Until they are spoiled by self-consciousness they do not think the words—they see them, as something new and wonderful. Certain child-like ages, notably the Elizabethan, have rediscovered language, have toyed with it and manipulated it,—even distorted it; and Shakspere, the supreme child of a child-like age, when his interest was diverted from word-play to the spectacle of life, energized that life with unreflecting abandon into language curiously haphazard and uneven, but at its best a matchless symbol or incarnation of life itself.

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