evaporates with the lapse of time. But for the most part Shakespeare's wit is still pregnant in the highest sense, and reminds the reader of Porson's saying, "Wit is in general the finest sense in the world." "Wit and Truth (true reasoning) I discovered to be one and the same." 66 A So completely free is Shakespeare from the meshes of anything approaching a philosophical system, that one would hesitate to pronounce him definitely either an optimist or a pessimist. For "utter freedom of thought," as Goethe observed, not infrequently in the direction of irony and cynicism, it is difficult to surpass some passages in Troilus and Cressida; while speeches in Hamlet and Macbeth are indicative in the strongest way of a deepseated weariness and nausea of the self-complacent optimism of everyday respectability and worldly success. rather gloomy philosophy of life, by no means wholly free from fatalism, emerges from such plays as Measure for Measure, Othello, and even Romeo and Juliet, in which the most vital issues are shown to be woven inextricably into the merest chapter of accidents. Shakespeare had seen too much of life at first hand to ignore or underrate the value of luck. But in his most typical moods, especially, perhaps, in his later plays, what amazes us is the centrality and the serenity of his point of view. Shakespeare this one point is clear-had always been a clean and strenuous worker. The incentive to be active and to do things had kept him out of the dark corners which are as likely eventually to warp the artist as to dissolve the man. Charles Lamb was fortunate in his epithet when he wrote of Shakespeare's plays as "this manly book." Of the sickly, decadent "cast of thought" which has come to pervade so much of our literature, there is absolutely no trace in Shakespeare. Such modern subjects as ugly disease and painful mediocrity, the bête humaine or the hideous lusts and morbidities which humanity in all ages has shrouded-such subjects were wholly foreign to Shakespeare's psychological palette. Enormously liberal as he was in almost every way, he yet had a thoroughly healthy dislike of the abnormal. The lusus naturæ had not superlative attraction for him; his choice of theme was reserved for strong, potent, and energetic types of the human species. Nor has he much tolerance in practical things for the blurring of the line of demarcation between good and evil: they appeared to him in a well enough defined contrast, and the absolute triumph of evil or wickedness must clearly have appeared to him something in the nature of the abnormal. He faces such problems squarely, for there is in him none of that pre-occupation with and insistence upon the beauty of nature upon which modern poets harp. What he loves as an artist is power-intensity-in human character. It may be power of intellect or moral power, or power of passion or of grace, or the intensity of the exquisite as in Ariel, or power of love as in Imogen, or power of wit as in Benedick, or intensity of stupidity as in Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whose silliness approaches the sublime; but it is always the intense, the perfect in some kind, that he dwells upon and makes central. Splendid and puissant personalities are the primary material of his tragedies, giants of wit or silliness of his comedy. If we put aside the morbid, there is only one form of the extreme in human character which he practically never makes use of, and that is the extremely brutal. The merely bestial he disregards entirely. Yet his characters, splendid or extreme as they are, are never extravagant or abnormal in their nature; they are rather perfected types of the normal. We may fairly say that Shakespeare sought for the highest expressions of the normal in humanity. But of mere mediocrities Shakespeare makes but little use. He relegates them to the background, and uses them as foils and explanatory notes. Mediocrity may be complex; but Shakespeare has not the modern love of the complex as such, though he masters it when he pleases. He prefers a complexity that is not commonplace, like that of Hamlet. Mediocrity may be tragic or pathetic; but Shakespeare prefers the pathos of Imogen and the tragedy of Lear. The man who is dull, but not dull enough to be altogether laughable, the man whose summed virtues make up respectability, whose actions are reducible to fear, who can neither dare nor enjoy freely, is not a subject of Shakespeare's art. He is included and passed over." The test of his writing is that it braces us for effort, enlarges our thoughts towards charity, and ennobles our feelings. Enrichers of the fancy, Charles Lamb calls these plays, "strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples teaching these virtues his pages are full." No one is debased or depressed by Shakespeare, for there is nothing base or cowardly in him. His are the darkness and terror of crag and precipice, and his, too, the exhilaration of the summits. 1 Coriolanus was one of three plays in which Shakespeare used Plutarch as a prop as he had previously used Holinshed, probably with the intention of saving himself trouble, and merely dramatising historical narratives. But in every case (especially that of Antony and Cleopatra,2 1 Age of Shakespeare, vol. ii. pp. 127-8. 2 Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps only not the greatest of all Shakespeare's tragedies because the theme is smaller and has less reach than the themes of Hamlet or Lear, and because it is perhaps exceptionally lacking in concentration and unity. In Pericles and Timon of near this same date (1607-9) we are surprised a little to find Shakespeare recurring to his earlier manner of somewhat breathless and haphazard collaboration. |