Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  In this case, however, all the world ought to know, there is a positive and ascertained clue. Shakespeare has left to us not merely a collection of dramas, the exercises of his creative phantasy in a world of ideal matter, but also certain poems which are assuredly and expressly autobiographic. Criticism seems now pretty conclusively to have determined, what it ought to have determined long ago, that the Sonnets of Shakespeare are, and can possibly be, nothing else than a poetical record of his own feelings and experience — a connected series of entries, as it were, in his own diary — during a certain period of his London life. This, we say, is conclusively determined and agreed upon; and whoever does not, to some extent, hold this view knows nothing about the subject. Ulrici, who is a genuine investigator, as well as a profound critic, is, of course, right on this point. So, also, in the main, is M. Guizot, although he mars the worth of the conclusion by adducing the foolish theory of Euphuism — that is, of the adoption of an affected style of expression in vogue in Shakespeare’s age — in order to explain away that which is precisely the most important thing about the Sonnets, and the very thing not to be explained away: namely, the depth and strangeness of their pervading sentiment, and the curious hyperbolism of their style. In truth, it is the very closeness of the contact into which the right view of the Sonnets brings us with Shakespeare, the very value of the information respecting him to which it opens the way, that operates against it. Where we have so eager a desire to know, there we fear to believe, lest what we have once cherished on so great a subject we should be obliged again to give up, or lest, if our imaginations should dare to figure aught too exact and familiar regarding the traits and motions of so royal a spirit, the question should be put to us, what we can know of the halls of a palace, or the mantled tread of a king? Still the fact is as it is. These Sonnets of Shakespeare are autobiographic — distinctly, intensely, painfully autobiographic, although in a style and after a fashion of autobiography so peculiar that we can cite only Dante in his Vita Nuova, and Tennyson in his In Memoriam, as having furnished similar examples of it.

  We are not going to examine the Sonnets in detail here, nor to tell the story which they involve as a whole. We will indicate generally, however, the impression which, we think, a close investigation of them will infallibly leave on any thoughtful reader, as to the characteristic personal qualities of that mind the larger and more factitious emanations from which still cover and astonish the world.

  The general and aggregate effect, then, of these Sonnets, as contributing to our knowledge of Shakespeare as a man, is to antiquate, or at least to reduce very much in value, the common idea of him implied in such phrases as William the Calm, William the Cheerful, and the like. These phrases are true, when understood in a certain very obvious sense; but, if we were to select that designation which would, as we think, express Shakespeare in his most intimate and private relations to man and nature, we should rather say William the Meditative, William the Metaphysical, or William the Melancholy. Let not the reader, full of the just idea of Shakespeare’s wonderful concreteness as a poet, be staggered by the second of these phrases. The phrase is a good phrase; etymologically, it is perhaps the best phrase we could here use; and whatever of inappropriateness there may seem to be in it proceeds from false associations, and will vanish, we hope, before we have done with it. Nor let it be supposed that, in using, as nearly synonymous, the word Melancholy, we mean anything so absurd as that the author of Falstaff was a Werther. What we mean is that there is evidence in the Sonnets, corroborated by other proof on all hands, that the mind of Shakespeare, when left to itself, was apt to sink into that state in which thoughts of what is sad and mysterious in the universe most easily come and go.

  At no time, except during sleep, is the mind of any human being completely idle. All men have some natural and congenial mood into which they fall when they are left to talk with themselves. One man recounts the follies of the past day, renewing the relish of them by the recollection; another uses his leisure to hate his enemy and to scheme his discomfiture; a third rehearses in imagination, in order to be prepared, the part which he is to perform on the morrow. Now, at such moments, as we believe, it was the habit of Shakespeare’s mind, obliged thereto by the necessity of its structure, to ponder ceaselessly those quest ions relating to man, his origin, and his destiny, in familiarity with which consists what is called the spiritual element in human nature. It was Shakespeare’s use, as it seems to us, to revert, when he was alone, to that ultimate mood of the soul in which one hovers wistfully on the borders of the finite, vainly pressing against the barriers that separate it from the unknown; that mood in which even what is common and under foot seems part of a vast current mystery, and in which, like Arabian Job of old, one looks by turns at the heaven above, the earth beneath, and one’s own moving body between, interrogating whence it all is, why it all is, and whither it all tends. And this, we say, is Melancholy. It is more. It is that mood of man, which, most of all moods, is thoroughly, grandly, specifically human. That which is the essence of all worth, all beauty, all humour, all genius, is open or secret reference to the supernatural; and this is sorrow. The attitude of a finite creature, contemplating the infinite, can only be that of an exile, grief and wonder blending in a wistful longing for an unknown home.

  As we consider this frame of mind to have been characteristic of Shakespeare, so we find that as a poet he has not forgotten to represent it. We have always fancied Hamlet to be a closer translation of Shakespeare’s own character than any other of his personations. The same meditativeness, the same morbid reference at all times to the supernatural, the same inordinate development of the speculative faculty, the same intellectual melancholy, that are seen in the Prince of Denmark, seem to have distinguished Shakespeare. Nor is it possible here to forget that minor and lower form of the same fancy — the ornament of As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques.

  “Jaques. More, more, I prithee, more.

  Amiens. It will make you melancholy, Monsieur Jaques.

  Jaques. I thank it. More, I prithee, more! I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More. I prithee, more!

  Amiens. My voice is ragged; I know I cannot please you.

  Jaques. I do not desire you to please me; I desire you to sing.

  ******

  Rosalind. They say you are a melancholy fellow.

  Jaques. I am so; I do love it better than laughing.

  Rosalind. Those that are in extremity of either are abominable fellows, and betray themselves to every modern censure worse than drunkards.

  Jaques. Why, ’tis good to be sad and say nothing.

  Rosalind. Why, then, ’tis good to be a post.

  Jaques. I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”

  Jaques is not Shakespeare; but in writing this description of Jaques Shakespeare drew from his knowledge of himself. His also was a “melancholy of his own,” a “humorous sadness in which his often rumination wrapt him.” In that declared power of Jaques of “sucking melancholy out of a song” the reference of Shakespeare to himself seems almost direct. Nay more, as Rosalind, in rating poor Jaques, tells him on one occasion that he is so abject a fellow that she verily believes he is “out of love with his nativity, and almost chides God for making him of that countenance that he is,” so Shakespeare’s melancholy, in one of his Sonnets (No. 29), takes exactly the same form of self-dissatisfaction.

  “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,


  And look upon myself and curse my fate,

  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

  Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

  Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

  With what I most enjoy contented least;

  Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising,

  Haply I think on thee,” &c.

  Think of that, reader! That mask of Shakespeare’s face, which we have been discussing, Shakespeare himself did not like; and there were moments in which he was so abject as actually to wish that he had received from Nature another man’s physical features!

  If Shakespeare’s melancholy was, like that of Jaques, a complex melancholy, a melancholy “compounded of many simples” — extracted perhaps at first from some root of bitter experience in his own life, and then fed, as his Sonnets clearly state, by a habitual sense of his own “outcast” condition in society, and by the sight of a hundred social wrongs around him, into a kind of abject dissatisfaction with himself and his fate — yet, in the end, and in its highest form, it was rather, as we have already hinted, the melancholy of Hamlet, a meditative, contemplative melancholy, embracing human life as a whole, the melancholy of a mind incessantly tending from the real (τα φυσικα) to the metaphysical (τα μετα τα φυσικα), and only brought back by external occasion from the metaphysical to the real.

  Do not let us quarrel about the words, if we can agree about the thing. Let any competent person whatever read the Sonnets, and then, with their impression on him, pass to the plays, and he will inevitably become aware of Shakespeare’s personal fondness for certain themes or trains of thought, particularly that of the speed and destructiveness of time. Death, vicissitude, the march and tramp of generations across life’s stage, the rotting of human bodies in the earth — these and all the other forms of the same thought were familiar to Shakespeare to a degree beyond what is to be seen in the case of any other poet. It seems to have been a habit of his mind, when left to its own tendency, ever to indulge by preference in that oldest of human meditations, which is not yet trite: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; he cometh forth as a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth as a shadow, and continueth not.” Let us cite a few examples from the Sonnets: —

  “When I consider everything that grows

  Holds in perfection but a little moment,

  That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows

  Whereon the stars in secret influence comment.” —

  Sonnet 15.

  “If thou survive my well-contented clay,

  When that churl Death my bones with dust shall

  cover.” —

  Sonnet 32.

  “No longer mourn for me when I am dead

  Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

  Give warning to the world that I am fled

  From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.” —

  Sonnet 71.

  “The wrinkles, which thy glass will truly show,

  Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;

  Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth may’st know

  Time’s thievish progress to eternity.” —

  Sonnet 77.

  “Or I shall live your epitaph to make,

  Or you survive when I in earth am rotten.” —

  Sonnet 81.

  These are but one or two out of many such passages occurring in the Sonnets. Indeed, it may be said that, whenever Shakespeare pronounces the words time, age, death, and the like, it is with a deep and cutting personal emphasis, quite different from the usual manner of poets in their stereotyped allusions to mortality. Time, in particular, seems to have tenanted his imagination as a kind of grim and hideous personal existence, cruel out of mere malevolence of nature. Death, too, had become to him a kind of actual being or fury, morally unamiable, and deserving of reproach: “that churl Death.”

  If we turn to the plays of Shakespeare, we shall find that in them too the same morbid sensitiveness to all associations with mortality is continually breaking out. The vividness, for example, with which Juliet describes the interior of a charnel-house partakes of a spirit of revenge, as if Shakespeare were retaliating, through her, upon an object horrible to himself: —

  “Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house,

  O’ercovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,

  With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.”

  More distinctly revengeful is Romeo’s ejaculation at the tomb: —

  “Thou détestable maw, thou womb of Death,

  Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,

  Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open!”

  And who does not remember the famous passage in Measure for Measure? —

  “Claudio.Death is a fearful thing.

  Isabella. And shamed life is hateful.

  Claudio. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

  To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

  This sensible warm motion to become

  A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

  To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

  In thrilling regions of thick-ribbèd ice;

  To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

  And blown with restless violence round about

  The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

  Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts

  Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!

  The weariest and most loathed worldly life

  That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment,

  Can lay on nature is a paradise

  To what we fear of Death.”

  Again in the grave-digging scene in Hamlet we see the same fascinated familiarity of the imagination with all that pertains to churchyards, coffins, and the corruption within them.

  “Hamlet. Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.

  Horatio. What’s that, my lord?

  Hamlet. Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?

  Horatio. E’en so.

  Hamlet. And smelt so? pah! (Puts down the skull.)

  Horatio. E’en so, my lord!

  Hamlet. To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

  Horatio. ‘Twere to reason too curiously to consider so.

  Hamlet. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: — Alexander died; Alexander was buried; Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?

  Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,

  Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:

  O that that earth which kept the world in awe

  Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!”

  Observe how Shakespeare here defends, through Hamlet, his own tendency “too curiously” to consider death. To sum up all, however, let us turn to that unparalleled burst of language in the Tempest, in which the poet has defeated Time itself by chivalrously proclaiming to all time what Time can do: —

  “And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

  And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made of; and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.”

  This, we contend, is no mere poetic phrenzy, inserted because it was dramatically suitable that Prospero should so express himself at that place; it is the explosion into words of a feeling during which Prospero was forgotten, and Shakespeare swooned into himself. And what is the continuation of the passage but a kind of postscript, describing, under the gui
se of Prospero, Shakespeare’s own agitation with what he had just written? —

  “Sir, I am vexed;

  Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled:

  Be not disturbed with my infirmity:

  If you be pleased, retire into my cell,

  And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk,

  To still my beating mind.”

  To our imagination the surmise is that Shakespeare here laid down his pen, and began to pace his chamber, too agitated to write more that night.

  In this extreme familiarity with the conception of mortality in general, and perhaps also in this extreme sensitiveness to the thought of death as a matter of personal import, all great poets, and possibly all great men whatever, have to some extent resembled Shakespeare. For these are the feelings of our common nature on which religion and all solemn activity have founded and maintained themselves. Space and Time are the largest and the outermost of all human conceptions; to stand, therefore, incessantly upon these extreme conceptions, as upon the perimeter of a figure, and to view all inwards from them, is the highest exercise of thought to which a human being can attain. Accordingly, in all great poets there may be discerned this familiarity of the imagination with the world figured as a poor little ball pendent in space and moving forward out of a dark past to a future of light or gloom. But in this respect Shakespeare exceeds them all; and in this respect, therefore, no poet is more religious, more spiritual, more profoundly metaphysical, than he. Into an inordinate amount of that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of sensible things, infuse the peculiar moral germ of Christianity, and you have the religion of Shakespeare. Thus: —