SPECIAL PROSE.
Mrs. Caliban begged me to add a few words on “Special Prose,” and to subjoin an example of that manner. She has suggested for the latter purpose Mrs. Railston’s “Appreciation of William Shakespeare,” written as a preface for the Charing Cross Shakespeare in 1897. She has even been at the pains of asking Mrs. Railston’s leave to have it included in this volume, a permission that was at once granted, accompanied with the courteous request that Mrs. Railston’s name, address, and private advertisement should accompany the same.
Were I dependent upon my own judgment alone, the wisdom of adding such a division at the close of these essays might seem doubtful. Special Prose is an advanced kind of literature, too great an attraction to which might at first confuse rather than aid the student; and I should hardly make a place for it in a straightforward little Text-book.
Mrs. Caliban’s wishes in all matters concerning this work must be observed, and I have done what she desired me, even to the degree of printing Mrs. Railston’s advertisement, though I am certain that great Authoress does herself harm by this kind of insistence ... It is no business of mine....
It is only fair to add that prose of this sort is the highest form of our Art, and should be the ultimate goal of every reader of this Guide. If, however, the student is bewildered in his first attempt to decipher it (as he very well may be), my advice to him is this: let him mark the point to which he has persevered, and then put the whole thing aside until he has had some little further practice in English letters. Then let him return, fresh from other work, some weeks later, and see if he cannot penetrate still further into the close-knit texture. Soon he will find it almost like his own tongue, and will begin to love and to understand.
Not many months will pass before it will mean to him something more than life, as he once imagined, could contain.
Having said so much, let me hasten to obey Mrs. Caliban’s command.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
An Appreciation.
By Margaret Railston.
How very manifestly well did not Montaigne (I think it was) say in his essay upon Value that the “inner part of Poesy is whilom hid, whilom bare, and it matters little whether it be bare or hidden.” That was a sentence such as our Wordsworth might have quoted at the high court of Plato when the poets were arraigned as unworthy to be rooted in his Republic. For the most part these dear poets of our tongue will rather have it bare than hidden, leaving the subtleties of “The Misanthrope” to another race, and themselves preferring the straight verbal stab of “The Idiot Boy” or “Danny Deever;” so that many of us see nothing in the Rhymed Heroics of the Grand Siècle. Yet Molière also had genius.
“Molière a du génie et Christian été beau.”
That sentence given nasally by a Coquelin to a theatre-full of People of the Middle-Class should convince also us of the Hither-North that flowers may blow in any season and be as various as multiplicity may.
William Shakespeare, without all question and beyond any repining, is—or rather was—the first of our Poets, and was—or rather is—the first to-day. So that, with him for a well and the Jacobean Bible for a further spring of effort, our English Poets make up (“build” Milton called it) the sounding line. But William Shakespeare also is of us: he will have it on the surface or not at all; as a man hastening to beauty, too eager to delve by the way. And with it all how he succeeds! What grace and what appreciation in epithet, what subtle and sub-conscious effects of verb! What resonant and yet elusive diction! It is true Shakespeare, that line—
“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.”
And that other—
“Or stoops with the Remover to remove.”
And these are true Shakespeare because in each there is we know not what of ivory shod with steel. A mixture of the light and the strong, of the subtle and the intense rescues his simple words from oblivion. But another, not of our blood, would have hidden far more; he shows it all, frankly disdaining artifice.
Also the great Elizabethan needs room for his giant limbs, for his frame of thought and his thews of diction. Cite him just too shortly, choose but a hair’s breadth too mickle an ensample of his work, and it is hardly Poesy, nay, hardly Prose. Thus you shall have Othello—the Moor they call him—betrayed and raging, full of an African Anger. What does he say of it? Why very much; but if you are of those that cut out their cameos too finely; you slip into quoting this merely:—
Oth. Hum! Hum!
And that is not our Shakespeare at all, nor e’en our Othello. Oh! no, it is nothing but a brutish noise, meaning nothing, empty of tragedy, unwished for.
It was Professor Goodle who said that “none needed the spaces of repose more than Shakespeare,” and taught us in these words that the poet must have hills and valleys; must recline if he is to rise. But does not Shakespeare, even in his repose, seem to create? The Professor will indeed quote to us the mere sprawling leisure of Stratford, and shame us with such lines as—
Mac.—The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon,
Where got’st thou that goose look?
Which is Shakespeare at full length. But we also, that are not over sure of Shakespeare’s failing, can answer him with such excerpts as these:—
Hen.—Therefore do thou, stiff-set Northumberland,
Retire to Chester, and my cousin here,
The noble Bedford, his to Glo’ster straight
And give our Royal ordinance and word
That in this fit and strife of empery
No loss shall stand account. To this compulsion
I pledge my sword, my person and my honour
On the Great Seal of England: so farewell.
Swift to your charges: nought was ever done
Unless at some time it were first begun.
This also is Shakespeare in his repose, but a better Shakespeare than he whom the Professor would challenge. For though there is here no work or strain in the thing, yet it reeks of English. It is like the mist over our valleys at evening, so effortless is it and so reposeful, and yet so native. Note the climax “On the Great Seal of England” and the quaint, characteristic folk-lore of the concluding couplet, with its rhyming effect. Note also how sparing is William Shakespeare of the strong qualificative, however just it may be. For when our moderns will speak hardly of “the tolerant kine” or “the under-lit sky,” or of “the creeping river like a worm upturned, with silver belly stiffened in the grass,” though they be by all this infinitely stronger, yet are they but the more condensed and self-belittled. Shakespeare will write you ten lines and have in all but one just and sharp adjective—“stiff-set;” for the rest they are a common highway; he cares not.
And here he is in the by-paths; a meadow of Poesy. I have found it hidden away in one of the latter plays; the flowers of his decline:—
“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Now thine earthly task is done,
Thou’rt gone home and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and lasses must,
Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
There is in that a line I swear no one but Shakespeare would have dared. “Thou’rt gone home and ta’en thy wages.” Commonplace? A text on the wall? A sermon-tag? All you will, but a frame for glory.
This then is William Shakespeare in a last word. A man at work full of doing; the Ϝ ἔργον: glad if you saw the mark of the chisel; still more glad if you did not see it. And if it be queried why are such things written of him? Why do we of the last and woful days turn and return the matter of our past? We say this. Vixere Fortes; that is, no fame were enduring save by continued iterance and echo of similar praise, nor any life well earned in the public sheets that dared not touch on any matter and remodel all. It is for ourselves and for William Shakespeare that these things are done. For ourselves, that is a private thing to hide under the veil of the Home-lofe. For William Shakespeare, that is the public duty, that his fame may not fail in the noise of new voices. And we can borrow from him and return to him what he said of another with such distinction of plane and delicate observance of value:—
“So long as men shall breathe and eyes can see,
This lives, and living, this gives life to thee.”
[Notices in this manner can be furnished at reasonable notice upon any poet, preferably a young or a modern poet, on the usual terms. The style is produced in seven distinct sizes, of which this is No. 3. Please state No. when ordering. All envelopes to be addressed.
Mrs. Margaret Railston,
c/o Charlie Bernberg,
48, Upper Gannimore Gardens,
Shepherd’s Bush, W.
All envelopes to be marked “Appreciation.” Accounts monthly. All cheques to be crossed “Becker, Becker, & Bernberg.”]
APPENDIX