Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

pidity, past finding out! "The myriadminded one," the light of far-off faturities was in him, and he knew it not! While the word was on his lips, and he reasoned of it, he heeded it not! He, at whose feet all men else are proud to sit, came to him, and found no reverence. The treasure for us all was put into his hands, and-he did not waste it he did not keep it laid up in a napkin, he did not dig in the earth, and hide his lord's money; no, he used it! he used it for his own despicable and sordid ends, "to complete purchases that he had a mind to," and he left us to gather up "the arts and fragments as best we may. And they dare to tell us this of him, and men believe it, and to this hour his bones are canonized, to this hour his tomb is a shrine, where the genius of the cool, sagacious, clearthoughted Northern Isle is worshiped, under the form of a mad, unconscious, intellectual possession-a dotard inspiration, incapable of its own designs, wanting in the essential attribute of all mental power-self-cognition.

And yet, who would be willing to spare, now, one point in that timehonored, incongruous whole? Who

would be willing to dispense with the least of those contradictions, which have become, in the progressive development of our appreciation of these works, so inextricably knit together, and thereby inwrought, as it were, into our inmost life? Who can, in fact, fairly convince himself, now, that deerstealing and link-holding, and the name of an obscure family in Stratfordcommon enough there, though it means what it does to us-and bad, or indifferent performances, at a Surrey theatre, are not really, after all, essential preliminaries and concomitants to the composition of a Romeo and Juliet, or a Midsummer Night's Dream, or Twelfth Night? And what Shakespeare critic, at least, could persuade himself, now, that any other motive than the purchase of the Globe theatre, and that capital messuage or tenement in Stratford, called the New Place, with the appurtenances thereof, and the lands adjoining, and the house in Henley street, could by any possibility have originated such works as these?

[ocr errors]

And what fool would undertake to prove, now, that the fact of the deerstealing, or any other point in the traditionary statement, may admit of question? Certainly, it we are to have an historical or traditionary Shakespeare of any kind, out of our present materials, it becomes us to protest, with the utmost severity, against the least meddling therewith. If they are not sufficiently meagre already-if the two or three historical points we have, or seem to have, and the miserable scraps and fragments of gossip, which the painful explorations of two centuries have, at length, succeeded in rescuing from the oblivion to which this man's time consigned him*-if these points are to be encroached upon, and impaired by criticism, we may as well throw up the question altogether. In the name of all that is tangible, leave us what there is of affirmation here. Surely we have negations enough already. If he did not steal the deer, will you tell us what one mortal thing he did do? He wrote the plays. But, did the man who wrote the plays do nothing else? Are there not some foregone conclusions in them?—some intimations, and round ones, too, that he who wrote them, be he who he may, has had experiences of some sort? Do such things as these, that the plays are full of, begin in the fingers' ends? Can you find them in an ink-horn? Can you sharpen them out of a goose-quill? Has your Shakespeare wit and invention enough for that?

But the man was a player, and the manager of a play-house, and these are plays that he writes. And what kind of play is it that you find in them -and what is the theatre-and who are the actors? Has this man's life been all play? Has there been no earnest in it?-no acting in his own name? Had he no part of his own in time, then? Has he dealt evermore with second-hand reports, unreal shadows, and mockeries of things? Has there been no personal grapple with realities, here? Ah, let him have that one living opposite. Leave him that single shot "heard round the world." Did not Eschylus fight at Salamis? Did not Scipio teach Terence how to

*Constituting, when well put together, precisely that historic trail which an old, defunct, indifferent, fourth-rate play-actor naturally leaves behind him, for the benefit of any antiquary who may find occasion to conduct an exploration for it.

marshal his men and wing his words? (A cotemporary and confidant of Shakespeare's thinks, from internal evidence, that the patron wrote the plays, in this case, altogether.) And was not Socrates as brave at Potidea and Delium as he was in the market-place; and did not Cæsar, the author, kill his millions? But, this giant wrestler and warrior of ours, with the essence of all the battles of all ages in his nerves-with the blood of a new Adam bubbling in his veins he cannot be permitted to leap out of those everlasting buskins of his, long enough to have a brush with this one live deer, but the critics must have out their spectacles, and be down upon him with their objections.

Is

And what honest man would want a Shakespeare at this hour of the day, that was not written by that same irregular, lawless, wild, reckless, facetious, law-despising, art-despising genius of a "Will" that did steal the deer? not this the Shakespeare we have had on our shelves with our bibles and prayer-books, since our great grandsires' times? The next step will be to call in question Moses in the bulrushes, and Pharaoh's daughter.

66

And what is to become, too, under this supposition, of that exquisite specimen of the player's merciless wit, and 'facetious grace in writing," which attracted the attention of his cotemporaries, and left such keen impressions on the minds of his fellow-townsmen? What is to become, in this case, of the famous lampoon on Sir Thomas Lucy, nailed up on the park gate, rivaling in Shakespearean grace and sharpness another Attic morceau from the same source the impromptu on "John-aCombe?" These remains of the poet, which we find accredited to him in his native village, "with likelihood of truth enough," among those who best knew him, have certainly cost the commentators too much trouble to be lightly relinquished; and, unquestionably, they do bear on the face of them most unmistakable symptoms of the player's wit and the Stratford origin.

No! no! We cannot spare the deerstealing. As the case now stands, this one, rich, sparkling point in the tradition, can by no means be dispensed with. Take this away, and what becomes of our traditional Shakespeare? He goes! The whole fabric tumbles to pieces, or settles at once into a

hopeless stolidity. But for the mercurial lightning, which this youthful reminiscence imparts to him-this single indication of a suppressed tendency to an heroic life-how could that heavy, retired country gentleman, late manager of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres, be made to float at any convenient distance above the earth, in the laboring conceptions of the artists whose business it is to present his apotheosis to us? Enlarge the vacant platitudes of that forehead as you will -pile up the artificial brains in the frontispiece to any height which the credulity of an awe-struck public will hesitate to pronounce idiotic-huddle the allegorical shapes about him as thickly as you will, and yet, but for the twinkle which this single reminiscence leaves, this one solitary "proof of liberty," "the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind of general assault," how could the old player and showman be made to sit the bird of Jove so comfortably as he does, on his way to the waiting Olympus?

But, after all, it is not this old actor of Elizabeth's time, who exhibited these plays at his theatre in the way of his trade, and cared for them precisely as a tradesman would-cared for them as he would have cared for tin kettles, or earthen pans and pots, if they had been in his line, instead; it is not this old tradesman; it is not this old showman and hawker of plays; it is not this old lackey, whose hand is on all our heartstrings, whose name is, of mortal names, the most awe-inspiring.

The Shakespeare of Elizabeth and James, who exhibited at his theatre as plays, among many others surpassing them in immediate theatrical success, the wonderful works which bore his name-works which were only half printed, and that surreptitiously, and in detached portions during his life-time, which, seven years after his death, were first collected and published by authority in his name, accompanied, according to the custom of the day, with eulogistic verses from surviving brother poets -this yet living theatrical Shakespeare, is a very different one from the Shakespeare of our modern criticism;-the Shakespeare, brought out, at length, by more than two centuries of readings and the best scholarly investigation of modern times, from between the two lids of that wondrous folio.

The faintly limned outlines of the nucleus which that name once included, are all gone long ago, dissolved in the splendors, dilated into the infinities which this modern Shakespeare dwells in. It is Shakespeare the author, that we now know only, the author of these worlds of profoundest art-these thought-crowded worlds, which modern reading discovers in these printed plays of his. It is the posthumous Shakespeare of the posthumous volume, that we now know only. No, not even that; it is only the work itself that we now know by that name-the phenomenon and not its beginning. For, with each new study of the printed page, further and further behind it, deeper and deeper into regions where no man so much as undertakes to follow it, retreats the power, which is for us all already, as truly as if we had confessed it to ourselves, the unknown, the unnamed.

What does this old player's name, in fact, stand for with us now? Inwrought not into all our literature merely, but into all the life of our modern time, his unlearned utterancès our deepest lore, which "we are toiling all our lives to find," his mystic page, the page where each one sees his own life inscribed, point by point, deepening and deepening with each new experience from the cradle to the grave; what is he to us now? Is he the teacher of our players only? What theatres hold now his school? What actors' names stand now enrolled in its illustrious lists? Do not all our modern works incorporate his lore into their essence, are they not glittering on their surface everywhere, with ever new, unmissed jewels from his mines? Which of our statesmen, our heroes, our divines, our poets, our philosophers, has not learned of him; and in which of all their divergent and multiplying pursuits and experiences do they fail to find him still with them, still before them?

The name which has stood to us from the beginning, for all this-which has been inwrought into it, which concentrates it in its unity-cannot now be touched. It has lost its original significance. It means this, and this only to us. It has drunk in the essence of all this power, and light, and beauty, and identified itself with it. Never, perhaps, can it well mean anything else

to us.

You cannot christen a world anew, though the name that was given to it at the font prove an usurper's. With all that we now know of that heroic scholar. from whose scientific dream the New World was made to emerge at last, in the face of the mockeries of his time, with all that appreciation of his work which the Old World and the New alike bestow upon it, we cannot yet separate the name of his rival from his hard-earned triumph. What name is it that has drunk into its melody, forever, all the music of that hope and promise, which the young continent of Columbus still whispers-in spite of old European evils planted there -still whispers in the troubled earth? Whose name is it that stretches its golden letters, now, from ocean to ocean, from Arctic to Antarctic, whose name now enrings the millions that are born, and live, and die, knowing no world but the world of that patient scholar's dream-no reality, but the reality of his chimera?

What matters it? "What's in a name?"

Who cares? Is there any

voice from that hero's own tomb, to rebuke this wrong? No. He did not toil, and struggle, and suffer, and keep his manly heart from breaking, to the end, that those millions might be called by his name. Ah, little know they, who thus judge of works like his, what roots such growths must spread, what broad, sweet currents they must reach and drink from. If the millions are blessed there, if, through the heat and burden of his weary day, man shall at length attain, though only after many an erring experience and fierce rebuke, in that new world, to some height of learning, to some scientific place of peace and rest, where worlds are in harmony, and men

are as one, he will say, in God's name, Amen! For, on the heights of endurance and self renunciation, where the divine is possible with men, we have one name.

What have we to do with this poor peasant's name, then, so hallowed in all our hearts, now, with household memories, that we should seek to tear it from the countless fastenings which time has given it? This name, chosen at least of fortune, if not of nature, for the place it occupies, dignified with all that she can lend it-illustrious with her most lavish favoritism-has she not chosen to encircle it with honors which make

poor those that she saves for her kings and heroes? Let it stand, then, and not by grace of fortune only, but by consent of one who could afford to leave it such a legacy. For he was one whom giving did not impoverish-he had wealth enough of his own and to spare, and honors that he could not part with.

"Once," but in no poet's garb, once, through the thickest of this "workingday world," "he trod" for himself, with bleeding feet," the ways of glory here," "and sounded all the depths and shoals of honor," and, from the wrecks of lost "ambition," found to the last "the way to rise in."

"By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then,

The image of his Maker, hope to win by't? Love thyself last: cherish the hearts that hate thee;

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace, To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not:

Let all the ends thou aim'st at, be thy country's,

Thy God's, and truth's; then, if thou fall'st, thou fall'st

A noble martyr!"

Let the name stand, then, where the poet has himself left it. If he—if he himself did not scruple to forego his fairest honors, and leave his immortality in a peasant's weed; if he himself could consent to bind his own princely brows in it, though it might be for ages, why e'en let him wear it, then, as his own proudest honor. To all time let the philosophy be preached in it, which found in a name" the heroic height whence its one great tenct could be uttered with such an emphasis, philosophy-"not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute," roaming here at last in worlds of her own shaping; more rich and varied, and more intense than nature's own; where all things "echo the name of Prospero;" where, "beside the groves, the fountains, every region near seems all one mutual cry;" where even young love's own youngest melodies, from moon-lit balconies, warble its argument. Let it stand, then. Leave to it its strange honors-its unbought immortality. Let it stand, at least, till all those who have eaten in their youth of the magic tables spread in it, shall have died in the wilderness. Let it stand while it will, only let its true significance be recognized.

For, the falsity involved in it, as it now stands, has become too gross to be en

dured any further. The common sense cannot any longer receive it, without self-abnegation; and the relations of this question, on all sides, are now too grave and momentous to admit of any further postponement of it.

In judging of this question, we must take into account the fact that, at the time when these works were issued, all those characteristic organizations of the modern ages, for the diffusion of intellectual and moral influences, which now everywhere cross and recross, with electric fibre, the hitherto impassable social barriers, were as yet unimagined. The inventions and institutions, in which these had their origin, were then but beginning their work. To-day, there is no scholastic seclusion so profound that the allied voice and action of this mighty living age may not perpetually penetrate it. To-day, the work-shop has become clairvoyant. The plow and the loom are in magnetic communication with the loftiest social centres. The last results of the most exquisite culture of the world, in all its departments, are within reach of the lowest haunt, where latent genius and refinement await their summons; and there is no " smallest scruple of nature's excellence" that may not be searched out and kindled. The Englishman who but reads The Times, today, puts himself into a connection with his age, and attains thereby a means of enlargement of character and elevation of thought and aims, which, in the age of Elizabeth, was only possible to men occupying the highest official and social position.

It is necessary, too, to remember that the question here is not a question of lyric inspiration, merely; neither is it a question of dramatic genius, merely. Why, even the poor player, that Hamlet quotes so admiringly, "but in a dream of passion," his soul rapt and subdued with images of tenderness and beauty, "tears in his eyes, the color in his cheeks," even he, with his fine sensibilities, his rhythmical ear, with his living conceits, if nature has but done her part towards it, may compose you a lyric that you would bind up with Highland Mary," or "Sir Patrick Spens," for immortality. And even this poor tinker, profane and wicked as he is, and coarse and unfurnished for the poet's mission as he seems, when once the infinities of religion, with their

[ocr errors]

divine ideals, shall penetrate to the deep, sweet sources of his yet undreamed of genius, and arouse the latent soul in him, with their terrific struggles and divine triumphs, even he, from the coarse, meagre materials which his external experience furnishes to him, shall be able to compose a drama, full of immortal vigor and freshness, where all men shall hear the rushing of wings-the tread from other spheres-in their life's battle; where all men shall be able to catch voices and harpings not of this shore. But the question is not here of a Bunyan or a Burns. And it is not a Bloomfield that we have in hand here. The question is not whether nature shall be able to compose these, without putting into requisition the selectest instrumentalities of the ages. It is a question different in kind; how different, in the present stage of our appreciation of the works involved in it, cannot be made manifest.

It is impossible, indeed, to present any parallel to the case in question. For if we suppose a poor actor, or the manager of a theatre, or a printer, unlearned, except by the accident of his trade, to begin now to issue out of his brain, in the way of his trade, wholly bent on that, and wholly indifferent to any other result, and unconscious of any other, a body of literature, so high above anything that we now possess, in any or in all departments; so far exhausting the excellency of all, as to constitute, by universal consent, the literature of this time; comprehending its entire scope; based on its subtlest analysis; pronouncing everywhere its final word, even such a supposition would not begin to meet the absurdity of the case in question.

If the prince of showmen in our day, in that stately oriental retreat of his, in Connecticut, rivaling even the New Place at Stratford in literary conveniences, should begin now to conceive of something of this sort, as his crowning speculation, and should determine to undertake its execution in person, who would dare to question his ability?* Certainly no one would have any right to criticise, now, the motive conceded, or to put in suspicion its efficiency for the proposed result. Why, this man could not conduct his business a day, he could not even hunt through the journals for

his own puffs and advertisements, without coming by accident in contact with means of moral and intellectual enlargement and stimulus, which could never have found their way, in any form, to Elizabeth's player. The railway, the magnetic telegraph, the steam-ship, the steam-press, with its journals, its magazines, its reviews, and its cheap literature of all kinds, the public library, the book-club, the popular lecture, the lyceum, the voluntary association of every kind-these are all but a part of that magnificent apparatus and means of culture which society is now putting in requisition in that great school of hers, wherein the universal man, rescued from infinite self-degradations, is now at last beginning his culture. And yet all these social instrumentalities combined cannot, even now, so supply the deficiencies in the case supposed as to make the supposition any other than a violent one, to say the least of it.

The material which nature must have contributed to the Shakespearean result, could, indeed, hardly have remained inert, under any superincumbent weight of social disadvantages. But the very first indication of its presence, under such conditions, would have been a struggle with those disadvantages. First of all, it would force its way upward, through them, to its natural element; first of all, it would make its way into the light, and possess itself of all its weapons-not spend itself in mad movements in the dark, without them. Look over the history of all the known English poets and authors of every kind, back even to the days of the Anglo-Saxon Adhelm, and Cedmon, and, no matter how humble the position in which they are born, how many will you find among them that have failed to possess themselves ultimately of the highest literary culture of the age they lived in? how many, until you come to this same Shakespeare?

Well, then, if the Genius of the British Isle turns us out such men as those from her universities; but, when she would make her Shakespeare retreat into a green-room, and send him forth from that, furnished as we find him, pull down, we say, pull down those gray old towers, for the wisdom of the Great Alfred has been laughed

It should be stated, perhaps, that the above was written two or three years since, and that no reference to Mr. Barnum's recent addition to the literature of the age was intended.

« AnteriorContinuar »