V
Finally, as Shakespeare recognized for purposes of comedy certain types of love-making alien to the ideal norm, so too, more rarely, for the purposes of tragedy. Ideal love, as has been seen, occurs constantly in the tragedies even where it does not directly affect or participate in the tragic issues; as with France and Cordelia, Brutus and Portia, Richard II and his queen, Coriolanus and Virgilia. But the more penetrating sense of evil which becomes apparent in his tragic period contributed to draw more prominently into the sphere of his art the disastrous aspects of the relations between men and women. That he refrained from exploiting in drama the more sinister forms of passion, we have seen. But in some of his ripest and greatest work he drew love with implications and under conditions, which sharply mark it off from the ‘marriage of true minds.’ It is unstable, or lawless, or grounded on illusion; and thus not merely succumbs easily to assault from without, but directly breeds and fosters tragic ruin within. Even the union of Othello and Desdemona, in every other respect a ‘marriage of true minds’ which reaches for a moment (ii. 1) incomparable intensity and beauty, is rendered fatally precarious by their ignorance of each other.
Love, like everything else which grows in Hamlet’s Denmark, is touched with insidious disease. Ophelia is wonderfully imagined in keeping with the tragic atmosphere, an exquisite but fragile flower of the unweeded garden where evil things run to seed and good things wither. And her love, wholly un-Shakesperean as it is, and therefore irritating to many readers, bears within it the seed of tragedy both for Hamlet and herself. It is ‘a power girt round with weakness.’ She never falters in faithful devotion to him; but the ‘sweet bells,’ her father has told her, are ‘jangled,’ and she consents both to be the instrument of the king and Polonius’s ‘lawful espial’ (which may, please heaven, restore him), and to deny his access and return his gifts. She stands alone among Shakesperean heroines in renouncing her love at a father’s bidding. We seem to approach for once the heroic renunciations of love in the name of principle or country which impress us in Corneille and Racine—in Polyeucte or Bérénice. But no halo of sublime self-sacrifice surrounds Ophelia’s renunciation, for her or for us. It is merely a piteous surrender, which breaks her heart, overthrows her delicately poised reason, and removes one of the last supports of Hamlet’s trust in goodness.
On the other hand, Shakespeare occasionally found his tragic love in violent and lawless passion. We need not dwell on episodic incidents like the rivalry in the love of Edmund which crowns and closes the criminal careers of Goneril and Regan. In this case there was little scope for the undoing of soul which is the habitual theme of Shakesperean tragedy. But in Measure for Measure an inrush of sensual passion instantly shatters the imposing but loosely built edifice of Angelo’s morality, and though the play was meant for comedy, and the tragic point is thus (rather clumsily) blunted or broken off, the spiritual undoing of him is discernible enough. Without a thought of resistance he proceeds to act out the whole merciless catalogue of vices which the poet of sonnet cxxix saw attending upon lust.[3] At the same time it is clear that Isabel, with her cold austerity, is an even greater anomaly among Shakespeare’s women. Their purity is not that of a negative abstinence, but of whole-hearted devotion to the man they love.
In Cressida he drew a kind of tragic love as lawless as Angelo’s and as sensual, but insidious and seductive instead of violent. Compared with the profligate women of Restoration Comedy she has a certain girlish air of grace and innocence. If she betrays Troilus for Diomede it is with a sigh and a half wistful glance back at the deserted lover: ‘Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee’ (V, ii. 107). Though classed by the Folio editors—hesitatingly it would seem—with the Tragedies, this play seems to set at nought the whole scheme of Shakesperean tragedy. Neither Troilus nor Cressida has the grandeur without which ruin is not sublime; and their love has not the heroic intensity of those (like Heine’s Asra) welche sterben wenn sie lieben. The only imposing figures are those of the great captains of the Greek and Trojan camps, who are but slightly concerned with their love. Nevertheless, the whole effect of the play is tragic, or falls short of tragedy only because the gloom is more unrelieved. There are no colossal disasters, plots, crimes, or suffering, nor yet the stormy splendour which agony beats out of the souls of Othello, Hamlet, Antony, or Lear, and which leaves us at the close rather exultant than depressed. This tragedy is purely depressing because it strikes less deep; the harms do not rend and shatter, but secretly undermine and insidiously frustrate. Cressida is a symbol of the love which may kindle valour for a moment, but in the end saps heroism and romance at once, and which strikes the magnificent champions of Homeric story themselves with a futility more tragic than death, the futility hinted savagely in the Horatian Troiani cunnus teterrima belli Causa, and superbly in Faustus’s great apologue to ‘the face that launched the thousand ships.’
In Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, a type of love not in its origin loftier or purer than that of Troilus and Cressida is seen dominating two souls of magnificent compass and daemonic force. Antony is held by his serpent of old Nile in the grip of a passion which insolently tramples on moral and institutional bonds, private and public alike; which brings the lovers to ruin and to death; and which yet invests their fall with a splendour beside which the triumph of their conqueror appears cold and mean. There is no conflict, no weighing of love and empire, as great alternatives, against each other, in the manner of Corneille; nor does Shakespeare take sides with either; he neither reprobates Antony, like Plutarch, for sacrificing duty to love, nor glorifies him, like the author of the Restoration drama, All for Love, or the World Well Lost; still less does he seek to strike a balance between these views. He is no ethical theorist trying exactly to measure right or wrong, but a great poet whose comprehensive soul had room, together, for many kinds of excellence incompatible in the experience of ordinary men. That Antony’s passion for Cleopatra not only ruins his colossal power in the state but saps his mental and moral strength is made as mercilessly clear in Shakespeare as in Plutarch. He is ‘the noble ruin of her magic.’ But it is equally clear that this passion enlarges and enriches his emotional life; in a sense other than that intended by the sober Enobarbus,
A diminution in our captain’s brain
Restores his heart; (III, xiii, 198)
and enlarged feeling opens up new regions of imagination and lifts him to unapproached heights of poetry, as in the unarming-scene with Eros (IV, xiv.) and the farewell speeches to Cleopatra (‘I am dying, Egypt, dying,’ IV, xv.). And Cleopatra too, in the ‘infinite variety’ of her moods, has momentary flickerings of genuine devotion of which she was before incapable. Momentary only, it is true; the egoist, the actress, the coquette, are only fitfully overcome; in her dying speech itself the accent of them all is heard. The ‘baser elements’ are not expelled, but the nobler ‘fire and air’ to which she dreams that she is resolved, gleam for a fitful instant in her cry ‘Husband, I come,’ to yield a moment later to jealous alarm lest Lear should have Antony’s kiss, and vindictive satisfaction at having outwitted Cæsar.
Shakespeare’s poetry takes account of so vast a number of other things, of so many other ways of living and aspects of life, that we hardly think even of the author of Romeo and Juliet as in any special sense the poet of Love. Nor is he, if we mean by this that he thinks or speaks of Love in the transcendent way of Dante, or Lucretius, or Spenser, or Shelley. Love with them is part of the vital frame of the universe. Lucretius (in spite of his atomist creed) saw it pervading ‘all that moves below the gliding stars, the sea and its ships, the earth and its flocks and flowers.’ Dante saw it as the force which not only draws men and women together, but ‘moves the Sun and the other stars.’ Spenser saw it as ‘the Lord of all the world by right, that rules all creatures by his powerful saw.’ Shelley saw it as the sustaining force blindly woven through the web of Being. For such heights of poetic metaphysic we do not look in Shakespeare. He is one of the greatest of poets, and his poetry has less almost than any other the semblance of myth and dream; its staple is the humanity we know, its basis the ground we tread; what we call the prose world, far from being excluded, is genially taken in. And precisely where he is greatest, in the sublime ruin of the tragedies, love between the sexes has on the whole a subordinate place, and is there most often fraught, as we have seen, with disaster and frustration. So it seemed to Keats when he turned from ‘golden-tongued Romance’ to ‘burn through’ the strife of ‘damnation with impassioned clay’ in King Lear. Shakespeare certainly did not, so far as we can judge, regard sexual love (like some moderns) as either the clue to human life or as in any way related to the structure of the universe. But if, instead of these abstract questions, we ask whether any poet has united in a like degree veracious appreciation of love in its existing conditions with apprehension of all its ideal possibilities, we shall not dispute Shakespeare’s place among the foremost of the poets of love.
II
THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS
II
THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS
‘Lucretius stands alone in the controversial force and energy with which the genius of negation inspires him, and transforms into sublime reasons for firm act, so long as living breath is ours, the thought that the life of a man is no more than the dream of a shadow.’—Lord Morley’s Recollections.