“But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity — “
a passage, however, in which, from the nature of the mood in which it was written, we are to suppose exaggeration for the worse. In short, the face of Shakespeare, so far as we can infer what it was from the homely Stratford bust, was a genuine and even comely, but still unusual, English face, distinguished by a kind of ripe intellectual fulness in the general outline, comparative smallness in the individual features, and a look of gentle and humane repose.
Goethe’s face is different. The whole size of the head is perhaps less, but the proportion of the face to the head is greater, and there is more of that determinate form which arises from prominence and strength in the bony structure. The features are individually larger, and present in their combination more of that deliberate beauty of outline which can be conveyed with effect in sculpture. The expression, however, is also that of calm intellectual repose; and, in the absence of harshness or undue concentration of the parts, one is at liberty to discover the proof that this also was the face of a man whose life was spent rather in a career of thought and literary effort than in a career of active and laborious strife. Yet the face, with all its power of fine susceptibility, is not so passive as that of Shakespeare. Its passiveness is more the passiveness of self-control, and less that of natural constitution; the susceptibilities pass and repass over a firmer basis of permanent character; the tremors among the nervous tissues do not reach to such depths of sheer nervous dissolution, but sooner make impact against the solid bone. The calm in the one face is more that of habitual softness and ease of humour; the calm in the other is more that of dignified, though tolerant, self-composure. It would have been more easy, one thinks, to take liberties with Shakespeare in his presence than to attempt a similar thing in the presence of Goethe. The one carried himself with the air of a man often diffident of himself, and whom, therefore, a foolish or impudent stranger might very well mistake till he saw him roused; the other wore, with all his kindness and blandness, a fixed stateliness of mien and look that would have checked undue familiarity from the first. Add to all this that the face of Goethe, at least in later life, was browner and more wrinkled; his hair more dark; his eye also nearer the black and lustrous in species, if less mysteriously vague and deep; and his person perhaps the taller and more symmetrically made.
But a truce to these guesses! What do we actually know respecting those two men, whose masks, the preserved similitudes of the living features with which they once fronted the world, are now before us? Let us turn first to the one and then to the other, till, as we gaze at these poor eyeless images, which are all we now have, some vision of the lives and minds they typify shall swim into our ken.
Shakespeare, this Englishman who died two hundred and sixty years ago, what is he now to us his countrymen, who ought to know him best? A great name, in the first place, of which we are proud! That this little foggy island of England should have given birth to such a man is of itself a moiety of our acquittance among the nations. By Frenchmen Shakespeare is accepted as at least equal to their own first; Italians waver between him and Dante; Germans, by race more our brethren, worship him as their own highest product too, though born by chance amongst us. All confess him to have been one of those great spirits, occasionally created, in whom the human faculties seem to have reached that extreme of expansion on the slightest increase beyond which man would burst away into some other mode of being and leave this behind. And why all this? What are the special claims of Shakespeare to this high worship? Through what mode of activity, practised while alive, has he won this immortality after he is dead? The answer is simple. He was an artist, a poet, a dramatist. Having, during some five-and-twenty years of a life not very long, written about forty dramatic pieces, which, after being acted in several London theatres, were printed either by himself or by his executors, he has, by this means, bequeathed to the memory of the human race an immense number of verses, and to its imagination a great variety of ideal characters and creations — Lears, Othellos, Hamlets, Falstaffs, Shallows, Imogens, Mirandas, Ariels, Calibans. This, understood in its fullest extent, is what Shakespeare has done. Whatever blank in human affairs, as they now are, would be produced by the immediate withdrawal of all this intellectual capital, together with all the interest that has been accumulated on it: that is the measure of what the world owes to Shakespeare.
This conception, however, while it serves vaguely to indicate to us the greatness of the man, assists us very little in the task of defining his character. In our attempts to do this — to ascend, as it were, to the living spring from which have flowed those rich poetic streams — we unavoidably rely upon two kinds of authority: the records which inform us of the leading events of his life; and the casual allusions to his person and habits left us by his contemporaries.
To enumerate the ascertained events of Shakespeare’s life is unnecessary here. How he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in Warwickshire, in April, 1564, the son of a respectable burgess who afterwards became poor; how, having been educated with some care in his native town, he married there, at the age of eighteen, a farmer’s daughter eight years older than himself; how, after employing himself as scrivener or schoolmaster, or something of that kind, in his native county for a few years more, he at length quitted it in his twenty-fourth year, and came up to London, leaving his wife and three children at Stratford; how, connecting himself with the Blackfriars theatre, he commenced the career of a poet and play-writer; how he succeeded so well in this that, after having been a flourishing actor and theatre-proprietor, and a most popular man of genius about town for some seventeen years, he was able to leave the stage while still under forty, and return to Stratford with property sufficient to make him the most considerable man of the place; how he lived here for some twelve years more in the midst of his family, sending up occasionally a new play to town, and otherwise leading the even and tranquil existence of a country gentleman; and how, after having buried his old mother, married his daughters, and seen himself a grandfather at the age of forty-three, he was cut off rather suddenly near his fifty-third birthday, in the year 1616: — all this is, or ought to be, as familiar to educated Englishmen of the present day as the letters of the English alphabet. M. Guizot, with a little inaccuracy, has made these leading facts in the life of the English poet tolerably familiar even to our French neighbours.
But, while such facts, if conceived with sufficient distinctness, serve to mark out the life of the poet in general outline, it is rather from the few notices of him that have come down to us from his contemporaries that we derive the more special impressions regarding his character and ways with which we are accustomed to fill up this outline. These notices are various; those of interest may, perhaps, be about a dozen in all; but the only ones that take a very decided hold on the imagination are the three following: —
Fuller’s Fancy-picture of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern. — “Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.” — Written, about 1650, by Thomas Fuller, born in 1608.
Aubrey’s Sketch of Shakespeare at second hand. — “This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess, about 18; and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson was never a good actor, but an excellent instructor.) He began early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at that time was very low; and his plays took well. He was a handsome, well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit. The humour of the constable in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ he happened to take at Grendon, in Buc
ks, which is the road from London to Stratford; and there was living that constable about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that parish; and knew him. Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men daily wherever they came.... He was wont to go to his native country once a year. I think I have been told that he left 200l. or 300l. per annum, there and thereabout, to a sister. I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell, who is accounted the best comedian we have now, say that he had a most prodigious wit, and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramatical writers. He was wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life. Said Ben Jonson, ‘I wish he had blotted out a thousand.’” — Written, about 1680, by John Aubrey, born 1625.
Ben Jonson’s own Sketch of Shakespeare. — “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been ‘Would he had blotted a thousand!’; which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour: for I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped: ‘Sufflaminandus erat,’ as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too! Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter; as when he said, in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him, ‘Cæsar, thou dost me wrong,’ he replied, ‘Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause,’ and such like; which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.” — Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries.”
It is sheer nonsense, with these and other such passages accessible to anybody, to go on repeating, as people seem determined to do, the hackneyed saying of the commentator Steevens, that “all that we know of Shakespeare is, that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon; married and had children there; went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote plays and poems; returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.” It is our own fault, and not the fault of the materials, if we do not know a great deal more about Shakespeare than that; if we do not realize, for example, these distinct and indubitable facts about him — his special reputation among the critics of his time, as a man not so much of erudition as of prodigious natural genius; his gentleness and openness of disposition; his popular and sociable habits; his extreme ease, and, as some thought, negligence in composition; and, above all, and most characteristic of all, his excessive fluency in speech. “He sometimes required stopping,” is Ben Jonson’s expression; and whoever does not see a whole volume of revelation respecting Shakespeare in that single trait has no eye for seeing anything. Let no one ever lose sight of that phrase in trying to imagine Shakespeare.
Still, after all, we cannot be content thus. With regard to such a man we cannot rest satisfied with a mere picture of his exterior in its aspect of repose, or in a few of its common attitudes. We seek, as the phrase is, to penetrate into his heart — to detect and to fix in everlasting portraiture that mood of his soul which was ultimate and characteristic; in which, so to speak, he came ready-fashioned from the Creator’s hands; towards which he always sank when alone; and on the ground-melody of which all his thoughts and actions were but voluntary variations. As far short of such a result as would be any notion we could form of the poet Burns from a mere chronological outline of his life, together with a few stories such as are current about his moral irregularities, so far short of a true appreciation of Shakespeare would be that idea of him which we could derive from the scanty fund of the external evidence.
And here it is that, in proceeding to make up the deficiency of the external evidence by going to the only other available source of light on the subject, namely the bequeathed writings of the man himself, we find ourselves obstructed at the outset by an obvious difficulty, which does not exist to the same extent in most other cases. We can, with comparative ease, recognise Burns himself in his works; for Burns is a lyrist, pouring out his own feelings in song, often alluding to himself, and generally under personal agitation when he writes. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is a dramatist, whose function it was not to communicate, but to create. Had he been a dramatist of the same school as Ben Jonson, indeed — using the drama as a means of spreading, or, at all events, as a medium through which to insinuate, his opinions, and often indicating his purposes by the very names of his dramatis personæ (as Downright, Merecraft, Eitherside, and the like) — then the task would have been easier. But it is not so with Shakespeare. Less than almost any man that ever wrote does he inculcate or dogmatise. He is the very type of the poet. He paints, represents, creates, holds the mirror up to nature; but from opinion, doctrine, controversy, theory, he holds instinctively aloof. In each of his plays there is a “central idea,” to use the favourite term of the German critics — that is, a single thought round which all may be exhibited as consciously or unconsciously crystallized; but there is no pervading maxim, no point set forth to be argued or proved. Of none of all the plays can it be said that it is more than any other a vehicle for fixed articles in the creed of Shakespeare.
One quality or attribute of Shakespeare’s genius we do, indeed, contrive to seize out this very difficulty of seizing anything — that quality or attribute of many-sidedness of which we have heard so much for the last century and a half. The immense variety of his characters and conceptions, embracing as it does Hamlets and Falstaffs, Kings and Clowns, Prosperos and Dogberrys, and his apparently equal ease in handling them all, are matters that have been noted by one and all of the critics. And thus, while his own character is lost in his incessant shiftings through such a succession of masks, we yet manage, as it were in revenge, to extract from the very impossibility of describing him an adjective which does possess a kind of quasi-descriptive value. It is as if of some one that had baffled all our attempts to investigate him we were to console ourselves by saying that he was a perfect Proteus. We call Shakespeare “many-sided;” not a magazine, nor a young lady at a party, but tells you that; and in adding this to our list of adjectives concerning him we find a certain satisfaction, and even an increase of light.
But it would be cowardice to stop here. The old sea-god Proteus himself, despite his subtlety and versatility, had a real form and character of his own, into which he could be compelled, if one only knew the way. Hear how they served this old gentleman in the Odyssey:
“We at once,
Loud shouting, flew on him, and in our arms
Constrained him fast; nor the sea-prophet old
Called not incontinent his shifts to mind.
First he became a long-maned lion grim;
A dragon then, a panther, a huge boar,
A limpid stream, and an o’ershadowing tree.
We, persevering, held him; till, at length,
The subtle sage, his ineffectual arts
Resigning weary, questioned me and spoke.”
And so with our Proteus. The many-sidedness of the dramatist, let it be well believed and pondered, is but the versatility in form of a certain personal and substantial being, which constitutes the specific mind of the dramatist himself. Precisely as we have insisted that Shakespeare’s face, as the best portraits represent it to us, is no mere general face or face to let, but a good, decided, and even rather singular face, so, we would insist, he had as specific a character, as thoroughly a way of his own in thinking about things and going through his morning and evening hours, as any of ourselves. “Man is only many-sided,” says Goethe, “when he strives after the highest because he must, and descends to the lesser because he will;” that is, as we interpret, when he is borne on in a certain noble direction in all that he does by the very structure of his mind, while,
at his option, he may keep planting this fixed path or not with a sportive and flowery border. By the necessity of his nature, Shakespeare was compelled in a certain earnest direction in all that he did; and it is our part to search through the thickets of imagery and gratuitous fiction amid which he spent his life, that this path may be discovered. As the lion, or the limpid stream, or the overshadowing tree, into which Proteus turned himself, was not a real lion, or a real stream, or a real tree, but only Proteus as the one or as the other; so, involved in each of Shakespeare’s characters, — in Hamlet, in Falstaff, or in Romeo, — involved in some deep manner in each of these diverse characters, is Shakespeare’s own nature. If Shakespeare had not been precisely and wholly Shakespeare, and not any other man actual or conceivable, could Hamlet or Falstaff, or any other of his creations, have been what they are?
But how to evolve Shakespeare from his works, how to compel this Proteus into his proper and native form, is still the question. It is a problem of the highest difficulty. Something, indeed, of the poet’s personal character and views we cannot help gathering as we read his dramas. Passages again and again occur of which, from their peculiar effect upon ourselves, from their conceivable reference to what we know of the poet’s circumstances, or from their evident superfluousness and warmth, we do not hesitate to aver “There speaks the poet’s own heart.” But to show generally how much of the man has passed into the poet, and how it is that his personal bent and peculiarities are to be surely detected inhering in writings whose essential character it is to be arbitrary and universal, is a task from which a critic might well shrink, were he left merely to the ordinary resources of critical ingenuity without any positive and ascertained clue.
Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Page 345