Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 by Various

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_Poet_. Nay, Sir, but hear me on.

The artifice is to secure the attention of the spectator. The
interruptions give naturalness and force to the narrative; and the
questions and entreaties, though addressed to each other by the
personages on the stage, have their effect in the front. The same
artifice is employed in the most obvious manner where Prospero (Tempest,
Act i. Sc. 2) narrates his and her previous history to Miranda. The Poet
continues:--

All those which were his fellows but of late
(Some better than his value) on the moment
Follow his strides, his lobbies fill with tendance,
Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear,
Make sacred even his stirrup, and through him
Drink the free air.

_Painter_. Ay, marry, what of these?

The Poet has half deserted his figure, and is losing himself in a new
description, from which the Painter impatiently recalls him. The text
is so artificially natural that it will bear the nicest natural
construction.

_Poet_. When Fortune, in her shift and
change of mood,
Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants,
Which labored after him to the mountain's
top,
Even on their knees and hands, let him slip
down,
Not one accompanying his declining foot.

_Painter_. 'Tis common:
A thousand moral paintings I can show
That shall demonstrate these quick blows of
Fortune
More pregnantly than words. Yet you do
well
To show Lord Timon that mean eyes have
seen
The foot above the head.

[_Trumpets sound. Enter Timon, attended; the
servant of Ventidius talking with him_.

Thus far (and it is of no consequence if we have once or twice forgotten
it while pursuing our analysis) we have fancied ourselves present,
seeing Shakspeare write this, and looking into his mind. But although
divining his intentions, we have not made him intend any more than his
words show that he did intend. Let us presently fancy, that, before
introducing his principal character, he here turns back to see if he has
brought in everything that is necessary. It would have been easier to
plan this scene after the rest of the play had been done,--and, as
already remarked, it may have been so written; but when the whole
coheres, the artistic purpose is more or less evident in every part; and
the order in which each was put upon paper is of as little consequence
as the place or time or date or the state of the weather. Wordsworth has
been particular enough to let it be known, where he composed the last
verse of a poem first. With some artists the writing is a mere copying
from memory of what is completely elaborated in the whole or in long
passages: Milton wrote thus, through a habit made necessary by his
blindness; and so Mozart, whose incessant labors trained his genius in
the paths of musical learning, or brought learning to be its slave, till
his first conceptions were often beyond the reach of elaboration, and
remained so clear in his own mind that he could venture to perform
in public concertos to which he had written only the orchestral or
accessory parts. Other artists work _seriatim_; some can work only when
the pen is in their hands; and the blotted page speaks eloquently
enough of the artistic processes of mind to which their most passionate
passages are subjected before they come to the reader's eye. Think of
the fac-simile of Byron's handwriting in "Childe Harold"! It shows a
soul rapt almost beyond the power of writing. But the blots and erasures
were not made by a "fine frenzy"; _they_ speak no less eloquently for an
artistic taste and skill excited and alert, and able to guide the frenzy
and give it a contagious power through the forms of verse,--this
taste and this skill and control being the very elements by which his
expressions become an echo of the poet's soul,--pleasing, or, in the
uncultivated, helping to form, a like taste in the hearer, and exciting
a like imagined condition of feeling and poetic vision.

Yet if it were made a question, to be decided from internal evidence,
whether the scene here analyzed was written before or after the rest of
the piece, a strong argument for its being written before might be found
in the peculiar impression it leaves upon the fancy. Let us suppose we
follow the author while he runs it over, which he does quite rapidly,
since there are no blotted lines, but only here and there a comma to
be inserted. He designed to open his tragedy. He finds he has set a
scene,--in his mind's eye the entrance-hall to an Athenian house, which
he thinks he has presently intimated plainly enough to be Timon's house.
Here he has brought forward four actors and made them speak as just
meeting; they come by twos from different ways, and the first two
immediately make it known that the other two are a merchant and
jeweller, and almost immediately that they themselves are, one a
painter, the other a poet. They have all brought gifts or goods for
the lord Timon. The Athenian Senators pass over, and, as becomes
their dignity, are at once received in an inner hall,--the first four
remaining on the stage. All is so far clear. He has also, by the
dialogue of the Painter and Poet, made in itself taking to the attention
through the picture and the flighty recitation, suggested and interested
us incidentally in the character of Timon, and conveyed a vague
misgiving of misfortune to come to him. And there is withal a swelling
pomp, three parts rhetorical and one part genuinely poetical, in the
Poet's style, which gives a tone, and prepares the fancy to enter
readily into the spirit of the tragedy. This effect the author wished to
produce; he felt that the piece required it; he was so preoccupied with
the Timon he conceived that he sets to work with a Timon-rich hue of
fancy and feeling; to this note he pitches himself, and begins his
measured march "bold and forth on." What he has assumed to feel he
wishes spectators to feel; and he leaves his style to be colored by his
feeling, because he knows that such is the way to make them feel it. And
we do feel it, and know also that we are made thus to feel through an
art which we can perceive and admire. On the whole, this introduction
opens upon the tragedy with just such a display of high-sounding
phrases, such a fine appropriateness, such a vague presentiment, and
such a rapid, yet artful, rising from indifference to interest, that it
seems easiest to suppose the author to be writing while his conceptions
of what is to follow are freshest and as yet unwrought out. We cannot
ask him; even while we have overlooked him in his labor, his form has
faded, and we are again in this dull every-day Present.

We have seen him take up his pen and begin a tragedy; or, to drop the
fancy, we have made it real to ourselves in what manner Shakspeare's
writing evidences that he wrought as an _artist_,--one who has an idea
in his mind of an effect he desires to produce, and elaborates it with
careful skill, not in a trance or ecstasy, but "in clear dream and
solemn vision." The subtile tone of feeling to be struck is as much a
matter of art as the action or argument to be opened. And it is no less
proper to judge (as we have done) of the presence of art by its result
in this respect than in respect to what relates to the form or story.
An introduction is before us, a dramatic scene, in which characters are
brought forward and a dialogue is given, apparently concerning a picture
and poem that have been made, but having a more important reference to a
character yet to be unfolded. Along with this there is also expressed,
in the person of a professed panegyrist, a certain lofty and free
opinion of his own work, in a confident declamatory style of
description,--

"Sir, I have upon a high and pleasant hill
Feigned Fortune to be throned," etc.,--

that is levelled with exquisite tact just on the verge of bombast. This
is not done to make the hearer care for the thing described, which is
never heard of after, but to give a hint of Timon and what is to befall
him, and to create a _melodic effect_ upon the hearer's sense which
shall put him in a state to yield readily to the illusion of the piece.

It is not possible to conceive Shakspeare reviewing his lines and
thinking to himself, "That is well done; my genius has not deserted me;
I could not have written anything more to my liking, if I had set about
it deliberately!" But it is easy to see him running it over with a
sensation of "This will serve; my poet will open their eyes and ears;
and now for the hall and banquet scene."

The sense of fitness and relation operates among thoughts and feelings
as well as among fancies, and its results cannot be mistaken for
accident. Ariel and his harpies could not interrupt a scene with a more
discordant action than the phase of feeling or the poetic atmosphere
pervading it would be interrupted by, if a cloud of distraction came
across the poet and the faculties of his mind rioted out of his control.
For he not only feels, but sees his feeling; he takes it up as an object
and holds it before him,--a feeling to be conveyed. Just as a sculptor
holds in his mind a form and models it out of clay, undiverted by other
forms thronging into his vision, or by the accidental forms that the
plastic substance takes upon itself in the course of his work, till it
stands forth the image of his ideal,--so the poet works out his states
of poetic feeling. He grasps and holds and sustains them amidst the
multiplicity of upflying thoughts and thick-coming fancies;--no matter
how subtile or how aspiring they may be, he fastens them in the chamber
of his imagination until his distant purpose is accomplished, and he has
found a language for them which the world will understand. And this is
where Shakspeare's art is so noble,--in that he conquers the entire
universe of thought, sentiment, feeling, and passion,--goes into the
whole and takes up and portrays characters the most extreme and diverse,
passions the most wild, sentiment the most refined, feelings the most
delicate,--and does this by an art in which he must make his characters
appear real and we looking on, though he cannot use, to develop his
dramas, a hundred-thousandth part of the words that would be used in
real life,--that is, in Nature. He also always approaches us upon the
level of our common sense and experience, and never requires us to yield
it,--never breaks in or jars upon our judgment, or shocks or alarms any
natural sensibility. After enlarging our souls with the stir of whatever
can move us through poetry, he leaves us where he found us, refreshed by
new thoughts, new scenes, and new knowledge of ourselves and our kind,
more capable, and, if we choose to be so, more wise. His art is so great
that we almost forget its presence,--almost forget that the Macbeth and
Othello we have seen and heard were Shakspeare's, and that he MADE them;
we can scarce conceive how he could feign as if felt, and retain and
reproduce such a play of emotions and passions from the position of
spectator, his own soul remaining, with its sovereign reason, and all
its powers natural and acquired, far, far above all its creations,--a
spirit alone before its Maker.

The opening of "Timon" was selected on account of its artful preparation
for and relation to what it precedes. It shows the forethought and skill
of its author in the construction or opening out of his play, both
in respect to the story and the feeling; yet even here, in this
half-declamatory prologue, the poet's dramatic art is also evident. His
poet and painter are living men, and not mere utterers of so many words.
Was this from intuition?--or because he found it easy to make them
what he conceived them, and felt that it would add to the life of his
introduction, though he should scarcely bring them forward afterwards?
No doubt the mind's eye helps the mind in character-drawing, and that
appropriate language springs almost uncalled to the pen, especially of
a practised writer for the stage. But is his scene a dream which he can
direct, and which, though he knows it all proceeds from himself, yet
seems to keep just in advance of him,--his fancy shooting ahead and
astonishing him with novelties in dialogue and situation? There are
those who have experienced this condition in sickness, and who have
amused themselves with listening to a fancied conversation having
reference to subjects of their own choosing, yet in which they did not
seem to themselves to control the cause of the dialogue or originate the
particular things said, until they could actually hear the voices rising
from an indistinct whisper to plain speech. I knew an instance, (which
at least is not related in the very curious work of M. Boismont on the
"Natural History of Hallucinations,") where an invalid, recovering
from illness, could hear for half a night the debates and doings of an
imaginary association in the next chamber, the absurdity of which often
made him laugh so that he could with difficulty keep quiet enough to
listen; while occasionally extracts would be read from books written in
a style whose precision and eloquence excited his admiration, or whose
affecting solemnity moved him deeply, though he knew perfectly well that
the whole came from his own brain. This he could either cause or permit,
and could in an instant change the subject of the conversation or
command it into silence. He would sometimes throw his pillow against the
wall and say, "Be still! I'll hear no more till daybreak!" And this has
taken place when he was in calm health in mind, and, except weakness, in
body, and broad awake. What was singular, the voices would cease at his
bidding, and in one instance (which might have startled him, had he not
known how common it is for persons to wake at an hour they fix) they
awoke him at the time appointed. Their language would bear the ordinary
tests of sanity, and was like that we see in daily newspapers; but the
various knowledge brought in, the complicated scenes gone through, made
the whole resemble intricate concerted music, from the imperfect study
of which possibly came the power to fabricate them. That they were owing
to some physical cause was shown by their keeping a sort of cadence with
the pulse, and in the fact, that, though not disagreeable, they were
wearisome; especially as they always appeared to be got up with some
remote reference to the private faults and virtues of that tedious
individual who is always forcing his acquaintance upon us, avoid him
however we may,--one's self.

Shall we suppose that Shakspeare wrote in such an _opium dream_ as this?
Did his "wood-notes wild" come from him as tunes do from a barrel-organ,
where it is necessary only to set the machine and disturb the bowels of
it by turning? Was it sufficient for him to fore-plan the plots of his
plays, the story, acts, scenes, persons,--the general rough idea, or
argument,--and then to sit at his table, and, by some process analogous
to mesmeric manipulations, put himself into a condition in which his
_genius_ should elaborate and shape what he, by the aid of his poetic
taste and all other faculties, had been able to rough-hew? How far did
his consciousness desert him?--only partially, as in the instance just
given, so that he marvelled, while he wrote, at his own fertility,
power, and truth?--or wholly, as in a Pythonic inspiration, so that the
frenzy filled him to his fingers' ends, and he wrote, he knew not what,
until he re-read it in his ordinary state? In fine, was he the mere
conduit of a divinity within him?--or was he in his very self, in the
nobility and true greatness of his being and the infinitude of his
faculties, a living fountain,--he, he alone, in as plain and common a
sense as we mean when we say "a man," the divinity?

These are "questions not to be asked," or, at least, argued, any
more than the question, Whether the blessed sun of heaven shall eat
blackberries. The quality of Shakspeare's writing renders it impossible
to suppose that it was produced in any other state than one where all
the perceptions that make good sense, and not only good, but most
excellent sense, were present and alert. Howsoever "apprehensive, quick,
forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes" his brain
may be, it never gambols from the superintendence of his reason and
understanding. In truth, it is the perfectness of the control, the
conscious assurance of soundness in himself, which leaves him so free
that the control is to so many eyes invisible; they perceive nothing but
luxuriant ease in the midst of intricate complexities of passion and
character, and they think he could have followed the path he took only
by a sort of necessity which they call Nature,--that he wrote himself
quite into his works, bodily, just as he was, every thought that came
and went, and every expression that flew to his pen,--leaving out only a
few for shortness. They are so thoroughly beguiled by the very quality
they do not see, that they are like spectators who mistake the scene on
the stage for reality; they cannot fancy that a man put it all there,
and that it is by the artistic and poetic power of him, this man, who is
now standing behind or at the wing, and counting the money in the house,
that they are beguiled of their tears or thrown into such ecstasies of
mirth.

It exalts, and not degrades, the memory of Shakspeare to think of him in
this manner, as a man: for he _was_ a man; he had eyes, hands, organs,
dimensions, and so forth, the same that a Jew hath; a good many people
saw him alive. Had we lived in London between 1580 and 1610, we might
have seen him,--a man who came from his Maker's hand endowed with the
noblest powers and the most godlike reason,--who had the greatest
natural ability to become a great dramatic poet,--the native genius and
the aptness to acquire the art, and who did acquire the highest art
of his age, and went on far beyond it, exhibiting new ingenuities and
resources, and a breadth that has never been equalled, and which admits
at once and harmonizes the deepest tragedy and the broadest farce, and,
in language, the loftiest flights of measured rhetoric along with
the closest imitation of common talk;--and all this he _so used_, so
elaborated through it the poetic creations of his mind, in such glorious
union and perfection of high purpose and art and reach of soul, that he
was the greatest and most universal poet the world has known.

Rowe observes, in regard to Shakspeare,--"Art had so little and
Nature so large a share in what he did, that, for aught I know, the
performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, and had the
most fire and strength of imagination in them, were the best. I
would not be thought by this to mean that his fancy was so loose and
extravagant as to be independent on the rule and government of judgment;
but that what he thought was commonly so great, so justly and rightly
conceived in itself, that it wanted little or no correction, and was
immediately approved by an impartial judgment at the first sight."

The last sentence is true; but Mr. Rowe really means to say that he was
as great an artist as natural poet,--that his _creative_ and _executive_
powers wrought in almost perfect spontaneity and harmony,--the work
of the _making_ part of him being generally at once approved by the
_shaping_ part, and each and both being admirable. When a man creates
an Othello, feigns his story and his passion, assumes to be him and to
observe him at the same time, figures him so exactly that all the
world may realize him also, brings in Desdemona and Iago and the rest,
everything kept in propriety and with the minutest perfection of detail,
which does most, Art or Nature? How shall we distinguish? Where does one
leave off and the other begin? The truth of the passion, that is Nature;
but can we not perceive that the Art goes along with it? Do we not at
once acknowledge the Art when we say, "How natural!"? In such as Iago,
for example, it would seem as if the least reflective spectator must
derive a little critical satisfaction,--if he can only bring himself to
fancy that Iago is not alive, but that the great master painted him and
wrote every word he utters. As we read his words, can we not see how
boldly he is drawn, and how highly colored? There he is, right in the
foreground, prominent, strong, a most miraculous villain. Did Nature put
the words into his mouth, or Art? The question involves a consideration
of how far natural it is for men to make Iagos, and to make them
speaking naturally. Though it be natural, it is not common; and if its
naturalness is what must be most insisted on, it may be conceded, and we
may say, with Polixenes, "The Art itself is Nature."

There is a strong rapture that always attends the full exercise of our
highest faculties. The whole spirit is raised and quickened into a
secondary life. This was felt by Shakspeare,--felt, and at the same
time controlled and guided with the same strictness over all thoughts,
feelings, passions, fancies, that thronged his mind at such moments, as
he had over those in his dull every-day hours. When we are writing, how
difficult it is to avoid pleasing our own vanity! how hard not to step
aside a little, now and then, for a brilliant thought or a poetic fancy,
or any of the thousand illusions that throng upon us! Even for the sake
of a well-sounding phrase we are often tempted to turn. The language of
passion,--how hard it is to feign, to write it! how harder than all, to
keep the tone, serious, or whatever it may be, with which we begin, so
that no expressions occur to break it,--lapses of thought or speech,
that are like sudden stumbles or uneasy jolts! And if this is so in
ordinarily elevated prose, how much more must it be so in high dramatic
poetry, where the poet rides on the whirlwind and tempest of passion and
"directs the storm." There must go to the conception and execution of
this sort of work a resolved mind, strong fancies, thoughts high and
deep, in fine, a multitude of powers, all under the grand creative,
sustaining imagination. When completed, the work stands forth to all
time, a great work of Art, and bulwark of all that is high against all
that is low. It is a great poetic work, the work of a maker who gives
form and direction to the minds of men.

In a certain sense, it is not an extravagance to say that all who are
now living and speak English have views of life and Nature modified by
the influence of Shakspeare. We see the world through his eyes; he has
taught us how to think; the freedom of soul, the strong sense, the
grasp of thought,--above all, the honor, the faith, the love,--who has
imparted such noble ideas of these things as he? Not any one, though
there were giants in those days as well as he. Hence he has grown to
seem even more "natural" than he did in his own day, his judges being
mediately or immediately educated by him. The works are admired, but the
nobleness of soul in him that made them is not perceived, and his genius
and power are degraded into a blind faculty by unthinking minds, and by
vain ones that flatter themselves they have discovered the royal road to
poetry. What they seem to require for poetry is the flash of thought
or fancy that starts the sympathetic thrill,--the little jots,--the
striking, often-quoted lines or "gems." The rest is merely introduced to
build up a piece; these are the "pure Nature," and all that.

And it is not to be denied that they are pure Nature; for they are true
to Nature, and are spontaneous, beautiful, exquisite, deserving to be
called gems, and even diamonds.

"The sweet South,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor":--

thousands of such lines we keep in our memories' choicest cells; yet
they are but the exterior adornments of a great work of Art. They are
the delightful finishes and lesser beauties which the great work admits,
and, indeed, is never without, but which are not to be classed among its
essentials. Their beauty and fitness are not those of the grand columns
of the temple; they are the sculptures upon the frieze, the caryatides,
or the graceful interlacings of vines. They catch the fancy of those
whose field of vision is not large enough to take in the whole, and
upon whom all excellences that are not little are lost. Beautiful in
themselves, their own beauty is frequently all that is seen; the beauty
of their propriety, the grace and charm with which they come in, are
overlooked. Many people will have it that nothing is poetry or poetic
but these gems of poetry; and because the apparent spontaneousness of
them is what makes them so striking, these admirers are unwilling to see
that it is through an art that they are brought in so beautifully in
their spontaneousness and give such finish to larger effects. And
we have no end of writers who are forever trying to imitate them,
forgetting that the essence of their beauty is in their coming unsought
and in their proper places as unexpected felicities and fine touches
growing out of and contributing to some higher purpose. They are natural
in this way:--when the poet is engaged upon his work, these delicate
fancies and choice expressions throng into his mind; he instantly, by
his Art-sense, accepts some, and rejects more; and those he accepts are
such as he wants for his ulterior purpose, which will not admit the
appearance of art; hence he will have none that do not grow out of his
feeling and harmonize with it. All this passes in an instant, and the
apt simile or the happy epithet is created,--an immortal beauty, both in
itself and as it occurs in its place. It was put there by an art;
the poet knew that the way to make expressions come is to assume the
feeling; he knew that he

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