The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV by Editor in Chief: Kuno Francke

E >> Editor in Chief: Kuno Francke >> The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36

LECTURE XXIII

Ignorance or Learning of Shakespeare--Costume as observed by Shakespeare,
and how far necessary, or may be dispensed with in the Drama--Shakespeare
the greatest drawer of Character--Vindication of the genuineness of his
pathos--Play on words--Moral delicacy--Irony--Mixture of the Tragic and
Comic--The part of the Fool or Clown--Shakespeare's Language and
Versification.

Our poet's want of scholarship has been the subject of endless
controversy, and yet it is surely a very easy matter to decide.
Shakespeare was poor in dead school-cram, but he possessed a rich
treasury of living and intuitive knowledge. He knew a little Latin,
and even something of Greek, though it may be not enough to read with
ease the writers in the original. With modern languages also, the
French and Italian, he had, perhaps, but a superficial acquaintance.
The general direction of his mind was not to the collection of words
but of facts. With English books, whether original or translated, he
was extensively acquainted: we may safely affirm that he had read all
that his native language and literature then contained that could be
of any use to him in his poetical avocations. He was sufficiently
intimate with mythology to employ it, in the only manner he could
wish, in the way of symbolical ornament. He had formed a correct
notion of the spirit of Ancient History, and more particularly of that
of the Romans; and the history of his own country was familiar to him
even in detail. Fortunately for him it had not as yet been treated in
a diplomatic and pragmatic spirit, but merely in the chronicle-style;
in other words, it had not yet assumed the appearance of dry
investigations respecting the development of political relations,
diplomatic negotiations, finances, etc., but exhibited a visible image
of the life and movement of an age prolific of great deeds.
Shakespeare, moreover, was a nice observer of nature; he knew the
technical language of mechanics and artisans; he seems to have been
well traveled in the interior of his own country, while of others he
inquired diligently of traveled navigators respecting their
peculiarity of climate and customs. He thus became accurately
acquainted with all the popular usages, opinions, and traditions which
could be of use in poetry.

The proofs of his ignorance, on which the greatest stress is laid, are
a few geographical blunders and anachronisms. Because in a comedy
founded on an earlier tale, he makes ships visit Bohemia, he has been
the subject of much laughter. But I conceive that we should be very
unjust toward him, were we to conclude that he did not, as well as
ourselves, possess the useful but by no means difficult knowledge that
Bohemia is nowhere bounded by the sea. He could never, in that case,
have looked into a map of Germany, but yet describes elsewhere, with
great accuracy, the maps of both Indies, together with the discoveries
of the latest navigators.[21] In such matters Shakespeare is faithful
only to the details of the domestic stories. In the novels on which he
worked, he avoided disturbing the associations of his audience, to
whom they were known, by novelties--the correction of errors in
secondary and unimportant particulars. The more wonderful the story,
the more it ranged in a purely poetical region, which he transfers at
will to an indefinite distance. These plays, whatever names they bear,
take place in the true land of romance and in the very century of
wonderful love stories. He knew well that in the forest of Ardennes
there were neither the lions and serpents of the torrid zone, nor the
shepherdesses of Arcadia; but he transferred both to it,[22] because
the design and import of his picture required them. Here he considered
himself entitled to take the greatest liberties. He had not to do with
a hair-splitting, hypercritical age like ours, which is always seeking
in poetry for something else than poetry; his audience entered the
theatre, not to learn true chronology, geography, and natural history,
but to witness a vivid exhibition. I will undertake to prove that
Shakespeare's anachronisms are, for the most part, committed of set
purpose and deliberately. It was frequently of importance to him to
move the exhibited subjects out of the background of time and bring it
quite near us. Hence in _Hamlet_, though avowedly an old Northern
story, there runs a tone of modish society, and in every respect the
customs of the most recent period. Without those circumstantialities
it would not have been allowable to make a philosophical inquirer of
Hamlet, on which trait, however, the meaning of the whole is made to
rest. On that account he mentions his education at a university,
though, in the age of the true Hamlet of history, universities were
not in existence. He makes him study at Wittenberg, and no selection
of a place could have been more suitable. The name was very popular:
the story of _Dr. Faustus of Wittenberg_ had made it well known; it
was of particular celebrity in Protestant England, as Luther had
taught and written there shortly before, and the very name must have
immediately suggested the idea of freedom in thinking. I cannot even
consider it an anachronism that Richard the Third should speak of
Machiavelli. The word is here used altogether proverbially the
contents, at least, of the book entitled _Of the Prince_ (_Del
Principe_) have been in existence ever since the existence of tyrants;
Machiavelli was merely the first to commit them to writing.

That Shakespeare has accurately hit the essential custom, namely, the
spirit of ages and nations, is at least acknowledged generally by the
English critics; but many sins against external costume may be easily
remarked. Yet here it is necessary to bear in mind that the Roman
pieces were acted upon the stage of that day in the European dress.
This was, it is true, still grand and splendid, not so silly and
tasteless as it became toward the end of the seventeenth century.
(Brutus and Cassius appeared in the Spanish cloak; they wore, quite
contrary to the Roman custom, the sword by their side in time of
peace, and, according to the testimony of an eye witness,[23] it was,
in the dialogue where Brutus stimulates Cassius to the conspiracy,
drawn, as if involuntarily, half out of the sheath). This does in no
way agree with our way of thinking: we are not content without the
toga.

The present, perhaps, is not an inappropriate place for a few general
observations on costume, considered with reference to art. It has
never been more accurately observed than in the present day; art has
become a slop-shop for pedantic antiquities. This is because we live
in a learned and critical, but by no means poetical age. The ancients
before us used, when they had to represent the religions of other
nations which deviated very much from their own, to bring them into
conformity with the Greek mythology. In Sculpture, again, the same
dress, namely, the Phrygian, was adopted, once for all, for every
barbaric tribe. Not that they did not know that there were as many
different dresses as nations; but in art they merely wished to
acknowledge the great contrast between barbarian and civilized: and
this, they thought, was rendered most strikingly apparent in the
Phrygian garb. The earlier Christian painters represent the Savior,
the Virgin Mary, the Patriarchs, and the Apostles in an ideal dress,
but the subordinate actors or spectators of the action in the dresses
of their own nation and age. Here they were guided by a correct
feeling: the mysterious and sacred ought to be kept at an
awe-inspiring distance, but the human cannot be rightly understood if
seen without its usual accompaniments. In the middle ages all heroical
stories of antiquity, from Theseus and Achilles down to Alexander,
were metamorphosed into true tales of chivalry. What was related to
themselves spoke alone an intelligible language to them; of
differences and distinctions they did not care to know. In an old
manuscript of the _Iliad_, I saw a miniature illumination representing
Hector's funeral procession, where the coffin is hung with noble coats
of arms and carried into a Gothic church. It is easy to make merry
with this piece of simplicity, but a reflecting mind will see the
subject in a very different light. A powerful consciousness of the
universal validity and the solid permanency of their own manner of
being, an undoubting conviction that it has always so been and will
ever continue so to be in the world--these feelings of our ancestors
were symptoms of a fresh fulness of life; they were the marrow of
action in reality as well as in fiction. Their plain and affectionate
attachment to everything around them, handed down from their fathers,
is by no means to be confounded with the obstreperous conceit of ages
of mannerism, for they, out of vanity, introduce the fleeting modes
and fashion of the day into art, because to them everything like noble
simplicity seems boorish and rude. The latter impropriety is now
abolished: but, on the other hand, our poets and artists, if they
would hope for our approbation, must, like servants, wear the livery
of distant centuries and foreign nations. We are everywhere at home
except at home. We do ourselves the justice to allow that the present
mode of dressing, forms of politeness, etc., are altogether
unpoetical, and art is therefore obliged to beg, as an alms, a
poetical costume from the antiquaries. To that simple way of thinking,
which is merely attentive to the inward truth of the composition,
without stumbling at anachronisms or other external inconsistencies,
we cannot, alas! now return; but we must envy the poets to whom it
offered itself; it allowed them a great breadth and freedom in the
handling of their subject.

Many things in Shakespeare must be judged of according to the above
principles, respecting the difference between the essential and the
merely learned costume. They will also in their measure admit of an
application to Calderon.

So much with respect to the spirit of the age in which Shakespeare
lived, and his peculiar mental culture and knowledge. To me he appears
a profound artist, and not a blind and wildly luxuriant genius. I
consider, generally speaking, all that has been said on the subject a
mere fable, a blind and extravagant error. In other arts the assertion
refutes itself; for in them acquired knowledge is an indispensable
condition of clever execution. But even in such poets as are usually
given out as careless pupils of nature, devoid of art or school
discipline, I have always found, on a nearer consideration of the
works of real excellence they may have produced, even a high
cultivation of the mental powers, practice in art, and views both
worthy in themselves and maturely considered. This applies to Homer as
well as to Dante. The activity of genius is, it is true, natural to
it, and, in a certain sense, unconscious; and, consequently, the
person who possesses it is not always at the moment able to render an
account of the course which he may have pursued; but it by no means
follows that the thinking power had not a great share in it. It is
from the very rapidity and certainty of the mental process, from the
utmost clearness of understanding, that thinking in a poet is not
perceived as something abstracted, does not wear the appearance of
reflex meditation. That notion of poetical inspiration, which many
lyrical poets have brought into circulation, as if they were not in
their senses, and, like Pythia when possessed by the divinity,
delivered oracles unintelligible to themselves--this notion (a mere
lyrical invention) is least of all applicable to dramatic composition,
one of the most thoughtful productions of the human mind. It is
admitted that Shakespeare has reflected, and deeply reflected, on
character and passion, on the progress of events and human destinies,
on the human constitution, on all the things and relations of the
world; this is an admission which must be made, for one alone of
thousands of his maxims would be a sufficient refutation of any who
should attempt to deny it. So that it was only for the structure of
his own pieces that he had no thought to spare? This he left to the
dominion of chance, which blew together the atoms of Epicurus. But
supposing that, devoid of any higher ambition to approve himself to
judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which
longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had
merely labored to please the unlettered crowd; still this very object
alone and the pursuit of theatrical effect would have led him to
bestow attention to the structure and adherence of his pieces. For
does not the impression of a drama depend in an especial manner on the
relation of the parts to one another? And, however beautiful a scene
may be in itself, if yet it be at variance with what the spectators
have been led to expect in its particular place, so as to destroy the
interest which they had hitherto felt, will it not be at once
reprobated by all who possess plain common sense and give themselves
up to nature? The comic intermixtures may be considered merely as a
sort of interlude, designed to relieve the straining of the mind after
the stretch of the more serious parts, so long as no better purpose
can be found in them; but in the progress of the main action, in the
concatenation of the events, the poet must, if possible, display even
more expenditure of thought than in the composition of individual
character and situations, otherwise he would be like the conductor of
a puppet-show who has so entangled his wires that the puppets receive
from their mechanism quite different movements from those which he
actually intended.

The English critics are unanimous in their praise of the truth and
uniform consistency of his characters, of his heartrending pathos, and
his comic wit. Moreover, they extol the beauty and sublimity of his
separate descriptions, images, and expressions. This last is the most
superficial and cheap mode of criticising works of art. Johnson
compares him who should endeavor to recommend this poet by passages
unconnectedly torn from his works, to the pedant in Hierocles, who
exhibited a brick as a sample of his house. And yet how little, and
how very unsatisfactorily does he himself speak of the pieces
considered as a whole! Let any man, for instance, bring together the
short characters which he gives at the close of each play, and see if
the aggregate will amount to that sum of admiration which he himself,
at his outset, has stated as the correct standard for the appreciation
of the poet. It was, generally speaking, the prevailing tendency of
the time which preceded our own, and which has showed itself
particularly in physical science, to consider everything having life
as a mere accumulation of dead parts, to separate what exists only in
connection and cannot otherwise be conceived, instead of penetrating
to the central point and viewing all the parts as so many irradiations
from it. Hence nothing is so rare as a critic who can elevate himself
to the comprehensive contemplation of a work of art. Shakespeare's
compositions, from the very depth of purpose displayed in them, have
been especially liable to the misfortune of being misunderstood.
Besides, this prosaic species of criticism requires always that the
poetic form should be applied to the details of execution; but when
the plan of the piece is concerned, it never looks for more than the
logical connection of causes and effects, or some partial and trite
moral by way of application; and all that cannot be reconciled
therewith is declared superfluous, or even a pernicious appendage. On
these principles we must even strike out from the Greek tragedies most
of the choral songs, which also contribute nothing to the development
of the action, but are merely an harmonious echo of the impressions
the poet aims at conveying. In this they altogether mistake the rights
of poetry and the nature of the romantic drama, which, for the very
reason that it is and ought to be picturesque, requires richer
accompaniments and contrasts for its main groups. In all Art and
Poetry, but more especially in the romantic, the Fancy lays claims to
be considered as an independent mental power governed according to its
own laws.

In an essay on _Romeo and Juliet_,[24] written a number of years ago,
I went through the whole of the scenes in their order and demonstrated
the inward necessity of each with reference to the whole; I showed why
such a particular circle of characters and relations was placed around
the two lovers; I explained the signification of the mirth here and
there scattered, and justified the use of the occasional heightening
given to the poetical colors. From all this it seemed to follow
unquestionably that, with the exception of a few criticisms, now
become unintelligible or foreign to the present taste (imitations of
the tone of society of that day), nothing could be taken away, nothing
added, nothing otherwise arranged, without mutilating and disfiguring
the perfect work. I would readily undertake to do the same for all the
pieces of Shakespeare's maturer years, but to do this would require a
separate book. Here I am reduced to confine my observations to tracing
his great designs with a rapid pencil; but still I must previously be
allowed to deliver my sentiments in a general manner on the subject of
his most eminent peculiarities.

Shakespeare's knowledge of mankind has become proverbial: in this his
superiority is so great that he has justly been called the master of
the human heart. A readiness to remark the mind's fainter and
involuntary utterances, and the power to express with certainty the
meaning of these signs, as determined by experience and reflection,
constitute "the observer of men;" but tacitly to draw from these still
further conclusions and to arrange the separate observations according
to grounds of probability into a just and valid combination--this, it
may be said, is to know men. The distinguishing property of the
dramatic poet who is great in characterization, is something
altogether different here, and which, take it which way we will,
either includes in it this readiness and this acuteness, or dispenses
with both. It is the capability of transporting himself so completely
into every situation, even the most unusual, that he is enabled, as
plenipotentiary of the whole human race, without particular
instructions for each separate case, to act and speak in the name of
every individual. It is the power of endowing the creatures of his
imagination with such self-existent energy that they afterward act in
each conjuncture according to general laws of nature: the poet, in his
dreams, institutes, as it were, experiments which are received with as
much authority as if they had been made on waking objects. The
inconceivable element herein, and what moreover can never be learned,
is, that the characters appear neither to do nor to say anything on
the spectator's account merely; and yet that the poet, simply by means
of the exhibition, and without any subsidiary explanation,
communicates to his audience the gift of looking into the inmost
recesses of their minds. Hence Goethe has ingeniously compared
Shakespeare's characters to watches with crystalline plates and cases,
which, while they point out the hours as correctly as other watches,
enable us at the same time to perceive the inward springs whereby all
this is accomplished.

Nothing, however, is more foreign to Shakespeare than a certain
anatomical style of exhibition, which laboriously enumerates all the
motives by which a man is determined to act in this or that particular
manner. This rage of supplying motives, the mania of so many modern
historians, might be carried at length to an extent which would
abolish everything like individuality, and resolve all character into
nothing but the effect of foreign or external influences, whereas we
know that it often announces itself most decidedly in earliest
infancy. After all, a man acts so because he is so. And what each man
is, that Shakespeare reveals to us most immediately: he demands and
obtains our belief even for what is singular, and deviates from the
ordinary course of nature. Never perhaps was there so comprehensive a
talent for characterization as Shakespeare. It not only grasps every
diversity of rank, age, and sex, down to the lispings of infancy; not
only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage
and the idiot, speak and act with equal truthfulness; not only does he
transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and portray
with the greatest accuracy (a few apparent violations of costume
excepted) the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in the wars
with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of
their history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many
comedies), the cultivated society of the day, and the rude barbarism
of a Norman fore-time; his human characters have not only such depth
and individuality that they do not admit of being classed under common
names, and are inexhaustible even in conception: no, this Prometheus
not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of
spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us the witches
with their unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and
sylphs; and these beings, though existing only in the imagination,
nevertheless possess such truth and consistency that even with such
misshapen abortions as Caliban, he extorts the assenting conviction
that, were there such beings, they would so conduct themselves. In a
word, as he carries a bold and pregnant fancy into the kingdom of
nature, on the other hand he carries nature into the region of fancy
which lie beyond the confines of reality. We are lost in astonishment
at the close intimacy he brings us into with the extraordinary, the
wonderful, and the unheard-of.

Pope and Johnson appear strangely to contradict each other, when the
first says, "all the characters of Shakespeare are individuals," and
the second, "they are species." And yet perhaps these opinions may
admit of reconciliation. Pope's expression is unquestionably the more
correct. A character which should be merely a personification of a
naked general idea could neither exhibit any great depth nor any great
variety. The names of genera and species are well known to be merely
auxiliaries for the understanding, that we may embrace the infinite
variety of nature in a certain order. The characters which Shakespeare
has so thoroughly delineated have undoubtedly a number of individual
peculiarities, but at the same time they possess a significance which
is not applicable to them alone: they generally supply materials for a
profound theory of their most prominent and distinguishing property.
But even with the above correction, this opinion must still have its
limitations. Characterization is merely one ingredient of the dramatic
art, and not dramatic poetry itself. It would be improper in the
extreme, if the poet were to draw our attention to superfluous traits
of character at a time when it ought to be his endeavor to produce
other impressions. Whenever the musical or the fanciful preponderates,
the characteristical necessarily falls into the background. Hence many
of the figures of Shakespeare exhibit merely external designations,
determined by the place which they occupy in the whole: they are like
secondary persons in a public procession, to whose physiognomy we
seldom pay much attention; their only importance is derived from the
solemnity of their dress and the duty in which they are engaged.
Shakespeare's messengers, for instance, are for the most part mere
messengers, and yet not common, but poetical messengers: the message
which they have to bring is the soul which suggests to them their
language. Other voices, too, are merely raised to pour forth these as
melodious lamentations or rejoicings, or to dwell in reflection on
what has taken place; and in a serious drama without chorus this must
always be more or less the case, if we would not have it prosaic.

If Shakespeare deserves our admiration for his characters, he is
equally deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this
word in its widest signification, as including every mental condition,
every tone, from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage
and despair. He gives us the history of minds; he lays open to us, in
a single word, a whole series of their anterior states. His passions
do not stand at the same height, from first to last, as is the case
with so many tragic poets, who, in the language of Lessing, are
thorough masters of the legal style of love. He paints, with
inimitable veracity, the gradual advance from the first origin; "he
gives," as Lessing says, "a living picture of all the slight and
secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the
imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems
by which it makes every other passion subservient to itself, till it
becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions." Of all the
poets, perhaps, he alone has portrayed the mental diseases,
melancholy, delirium, lunacy, with such inexpressible and, in every
respect, definite truth, that the physician may enrich his
observations from them in the same manner as from real cases.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36