Page images
PDF
EPUB

Act of 1867 was anything more to Mr. Disraeli than it avowedly was to the late Lord Derby-to wit, a divinely inspired contrivance for "dishing the Whigs?" Few men, either Liberals or Conservatives, regarded it as anything else, at the time, or for several years afterwards. The mass of Mr. Disraeli's own party were as impressed by the calamity which overtook him in 1868 as were the simple islanders of Melita at the supposed judgment executed by the viper upon St. Paul. It was not till the Conservative leader seemed to have shaken off" the venomous beast" Revolution, in 1874, and "to feel no harm," that they "changed their minds and said that he was a god."

He

But to do him justice, he never countenanced the apotheosis. did not actually disclaim the character of a successful prophet, but he laid little stress upon his success. Nor did he proceed to use it as a successful prophet would. He said little about policy, and much about "no-policy." He professed little knowledge of what the people desired in the way of legislation: he was clear only upon one point-that they wanted repose. They were wearied, he declared, of Mr. Gladstone's intolerable restlessness, and had overthrown him and restored his rival because they wished, for the time at any rate, to be let alone. That was Mr. Disraeli's explanation of the event of 1874; and I think it quite possible that it was the true one. At any rate, I hope it was; for the hypothesis is at all events preferable to what appears to me its sole alternativenamely, that the constituencies swayed over in a mass from the Liberals to the Conservatives for no better reason than mere caprice and love of change. But if the former explanation is the true one, its moral for Lord Randolph Churchill and other impatient spirits is obvious. If the country only displaced the Liberals and recalled the Conservatives in 1874 because it wanted repose, there is nothing for the Conservatives but to wait till it wants repose again. For aught I know, that time is now; but if not, it is impossible to hasten it by any ingenuities of Parliamentary tactics. Moreover, the party which offers rest to the harassed British elector, should seek to emphasize the restlessness of their adversaries by their personal composure, and not to weaken the force of the contrast by factious fidgettings of their own.

H. D. TRAILL.

TWO ASPECTS OF SHAKSPEARE'S ART.

[ocr errors]

TH

HAT which Coleridge termed the aesthetic criticism of Shakspeare was so sorely done to death in his own day-not certainly by himself, or by Lamb, but by critics, who, while they abused them, wrote in roundabout imitation of them-that there eventually occurred a natural and complete critical reaction. The Shakspeare scholarship which succeeded the transcendentalism of the first thirty years of the century took form about 1840 in the unquestionably concrete investigations of the first Shakspeare Society. About thirty years were thenceforth devoted to sundry matter-of-fact inquiries, which have since proved valuable, not only in themselves, but in the elucidation of certain higher problems which centuries of speculation might not have solved. Later still, a younger generation of Shakspeareans have devoted themselves with an assiduity deserving of more than the somewhat meagre results that have accrued to the study of the text of the poet, partly with a view to cleansing it of the corruptions that still cling to it, but mainly in the hope of arriving at certain metrical tests which, being mathematically demonstrable, are expected to afford us that knowledge of Shakspearean chronology which neither history nor tradition can give. And among these three schools of criticism the study of the national dramatist has throughout the years of the present century been systematically divided, not only in England, but also in Germany and America. After so much subdivision of critical labour, it is humiliating to reflect how little has been achieved. At the inauguration of the Shakspeare Society much was said, with the emphasis of confident expectation, of the superiority of actual research over speculative inquiry; but what in the end has proved to be the outcome of these forty years' laborious traversing of record offices and corporate archives? Some substantial and

unlooked-for gains have indubitably resulted, but by much the more considerable portions of the investigations of students, like Mr. Halliwell Phillipps, have merely gone to the verification of the salient features of the hitherto unauthenticated story of Shakspeare's life and work which tradition hands down. Mr. Phillipps gives us now the net results of his life's labour in an interesting volume of some 700 pages, but the reader, who has been decoyed by the fascination of the subject and the lucidity of the treatment into a careful perusal of the bulky work in question, will probably lay it aside with the reflection that the facts of the poet's life that have there been substantiated are only just too numerous to be inscribed upon his tomb. It has been pertinently, if not generously, remarked, that from fear of the reproach of belonging to the serviceable army of the dry-asdusts of 1840, the younger Shakspeareans of 1870 established an ornamental corps of dryer-than-dusts; and certainly the metrical computations to which they have devoted themselves have been attended by results which are, it is to be feared, at once more laboriously unedifying (at least to the average reader of Shakspeare) and more conjectural. Indeed, while making frank recognition of the obligations under which we rest to Mr. Furnivall and his followers for the helps afforded towards a systematic study of the poet's works in something like the order in which he wrote them, one cannot but think that these accomplished students, in their mysterious pursuit of time and metrical analyses, are often sadly amenable to Dr. Johnson's well-known strictures on the prosy stolidness of the elder Sheridan, which implied that it must have taken the rival lexicographer a great deal of learned trouble to become so dull. And now it seems within the limits of probability that, in view of the unsatisfying outcome first of the rational criticism of 1840, and next of the scientific criticism of 1870, the Shakspeare criticism of the remaining years of the century may be, in general character, a revival of the æsthetic criticism which Coleridge began in England. In that case we may reasonably look for flights of speculative thought, before which the recent amazing discovery, that the sonnets of Shakspeare were after all addressed to the poet's own son, must fail of interest and amusement. The prospect is at least an exhilarating one, after nearly fifty years of the too patient and secure groping in the ground of short-breathed philosophers who have been unable to trust their wings, and have honestly if humbly contented themselves with solemn discussion of the burning questions of whether Shakspeare stole deer on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy, and died of a fever contracted by hard drinking in the company of Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, and whether he wrote more lines with double-endings at fifty than at forty, and more lines with female-endings at forty than at twenty

"Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare." (Longmans.)

five.

Certain it is that if the next few years should see the advent of such a sub-Victorian school of critics, led by Mr. Swinburne, or any other, the opportunities for raillery and revenge afforded in the sequel to the unrequited and abandoned Shakspeareans will be numerous enough and sufficiently appetizing.

Perhaps after this preamble it may seem to require courage to enter upon an abstract and twofold inquiry touching Shakspeare's artistic methods, but my bulwark of defence in the present case shall be, that I have not trusted to æsthetic or philosophical postulations of my own, but have in the first of the two sections of my paper traversed a theory expounded by Coleridge, and in the other section advanced an hypothesis formulated out of curious strictures by Goldsmith. In the fragment of Coleridge's lectures preserved to us by the industry of Mr. Collier,* there is an argument, which, though hastily dealt with, is intended to show that Shakspeare's method of projecting character was to pass every conception through the medium of his meditative intelligence, and by so doing render it typical. With a sense of surprise that in the perpetual resuscitation of wornout theories this vast point has been much overlooked, I have endeavoured to fill in the outlines of Coleridge's idea with more completeness of illustration than he stays to afford. Such is the first of the two aspects of Shakspeare's art to which I desire to ask attention; and the second is the less familiar, but not less important, aspect, in which Goldsmith sees the poet in the novel character of a melodramatist.

I.

There can be little doubt that Shakspeare found the nucleus of fact on which he based his characters in real intercourse with men. But he did more than transfer the figures he saw in life to the canvas of his invention. If he had merely set down, however faithfully, the men and women he actually beheld in the flesh he must soon have been forgotten. Some of his contemporaries did that, and with what results we know. He doubtless saw many a Sir John Falstaff strutting bodily before him at the Mermaid Tavern, but he did not depict under that name any individual charlatan he chanced to meet there. If he had done so, we who live in days when soldiers do not think it necessary for the better support of their valour to forswear thin potations, and addict themselves to sack, would probably care very little for the character, notwith

* I cannot here engage in the discussion (so fully sustained by the late Mr. A. E. Brae) on the genuineness of Mr. Collier's reports, farther than to say that from a lifelong familiarity with Coleridge's authenticated writings I feel satisfied that whether the lectures, as given by Mr. Collier, be "apocryphal," as Herbert Coleridge thought, or "deliberate concoctions from Coleridge's published works," as the author of "Literary Cookery" maintained, the theory which I have attributed to Coleridge is essentially Coleridgean, and could have come (in one form or another) from Coleridge only.

standing the attractions pertaining to it of that Rabelaisean humour which never disturbs us with any question as to the side of our face on which the laugh should be. But the whole family of swaggering topers from Sir John's day down to our own have had certain features of family resemblance, and these features Shakspeare waited for and portrayed. So Sir John Falstaff becomes a type, and hence is applicable to every age, because representative of his phase of humanity in every age. The same truth that explains to us the basis of the immortality of Falstaff applies to every noticeable character Shakspeare depicts. The poet never goes to work (as, according to an acute critic, the young pre-Raphaelites did in 1850) as a photographic camera, but always as a creative intelligence, and this is what Coleridge means in the argument just referred to, in which he shows that Shakspeare passed every conception through the medium of his meditative genius. Nor is this true merely of Shakspeare's method of projecting character in the realm of what the actors call eccentric comedy, for in dealing with heroic character his art is the same. Glance at Romeo. It is hardly to be supposed that an individual answering to the young Montague engaged in that shadowy historical occurrence which is referred to the first years of the fourteenth century; but none the less on that account is he typical of certain romantic young lovers in all ages. He begins by sighing over some fugitive passion for a mythical Rosaline, and presently forgets the paragon in his newfound passion for the more responsive Juliet. There may not exist either historical or traditional ground for believing that the original of the Romeo of Luigi da Porto and Bandello had in fact any such preliminary passion; but Shakspeare knew from observation, and perhaps from personal experience, that a vague, indeterminate condition of mind and heart usually precedes the ordeal known as falling in love, and therefore (following Arthur Brooke in part) he gave Romeo an unrequited attachment, or shadow of attachment, in which he is much more in love with his own thoughts than with anything more substantial. So Romeo, without ceasing to be a son of the house of Montague, becomes a type of all the sons of the house of Love. It was the typical feature of Romeo's character that Mr. Irving brought most into prominence in his recent impersonation of the part, and in giving relief to so salient a characteristic Mr. Irving did well; but perhaps the chief imperfection of his performance was a too prolonged dwelling upon this subjective side of Romeo's passion, apparently to the total disregard of the clear fact that Shakspeare meant no more by it than to generalize on the beginnings of all human passion, and then pass on to the story of an individual and very concrete affection.

Look now at Hamlet. When Shakspeare took up that character it was a bald traditional conception, simply, of a commonplace young prince, having coarse appetites and gross passions, who had been

« PreviousContinue »