On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

SHAKESPEARE.

The drama is the last form of poetry to which we would turn in hope of finding rural objects and scenery described. Yet it is astonishing how much of this kind can be culled from a careful search through Shakespeare’s plays. Indeed it has been remarked how much of out-of-doors life there is in Shakespeare’s dramas, how much of the action is carried on under the open sky. No doubt the pressure of human action and emotion is too absorbing to admit of detailed description—in most cases of more than passing allusions. Yet engrossed though he is with stirring events and thrilling emotions and powerful human characters, it is wonderful how many are the side-glances that he and his characters cast at the Nature that surrounds them. And these glances are like everything else in him, rapid, vivid, and intense. As has been said, natural scenes “he so paints by occurrences, by allusions, by the emotions of his characters, that we seem to see them before our eyes, and to live in them.” There is hardly one of his plays in which the season and the scene is not flashed upon the mind by a single stroke more vividly than it could be by the most lengthened description:—

“Lady! by yonder silver moon I swear,

That tips with silver all the fruit-tree tops.”

How these few words shed round us all the loveliness of the Italian night! Or that other where the moonshine of the warm summer night brightens the last scenes of the “Merchant of Venice,” and calls up, as only moonlight can, all wild and fascinating memories of legend and romance:—

“Lorenzo. The moon shines bright: In such a night as this,

When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,

And they did make no noise; in such a night

Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,

And sigh’d his soul toward the Grecian tents,

Where Cressid lay that night.

“Jessica. In such a night

Did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew;

And saw the lion’s shadow ere himself,

And ran dismay’d away.

“Lorenzo. In such a night

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand

Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love

To come again to Carthage.”

A recent critic has spoken of the Poet-Laureate’s “wonderful skill in creating a perfectly real and living scene—such as always might, and perhaps somewhere does, exist in external nature—for the theatre of the feeling he is about to embody, and yet a scene every feature of which helps to make the emotion more real and vivid.” Careful students of Shakespeare know how truly these words apply to almost every one of his plays. He leaves not only the impression of each character deeply graven on your memory; but the season and the scenery which encompassed them, though perhaps not above a line or two are given to them, rise before us almost as indelibly. To take one sample out of many. In “Macbeth,” for instance, how does the scenery at every turn answer to the action and the emotion! For the first appearance of the witches there is the blasted heath, the thunder and lightning; then, as the key-note to Lady Macbeth’s fell purpose, there is—

“The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements.”

But when King Duncan himself, with his retinue, appears, the whole aspect of things is changed, and the gracious disposition of the old king comes out very naturally in the view he takes of the castle in which he was so soon to meet his doom:—

“This castle has a pleasant seat; the air

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself

Unto our gentle senses.”

Banquo replies:—

“This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve

By his loved mansionry that the heaven’s breath

Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,

Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird

Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;

Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,

The air is delicate.”

The castle, with its buttresses and battlements, its high gables and overhanging towers, lends itself as readily to the pleasant humor of the kindly king that calm afternoon, as it will do to the horror and the gloom of the morrow. Then the night in which the murder was done is quite such a night as often comes in dead winter, yet fits in so well with the deed and the feeling it awakened in men’s hearts.

“Lennox. The night has been unruly: where we lay

Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,

Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death

And other prodigies.

Macb. ’Twas a rough night.

Len. My young remembrance cannot parallel

A fellow to it.”

This is the talk that passes just before the murder is known. And after it is known, this is the kind of day that follows:

“By the clock, ’tis day,

And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp.”

Again, as twilight brings on, the night which is to see Banquo taken out of the way, Macbeth exclaims—

“Come, seeling night,

Skarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;

And, with thy bloody and invisible hand,

Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond

Which keeps me pale!—Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood;

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

While night’s black agents to their prey do rouse.”

But why go on quoting passages, which all remember, to show how exactly all through this or the other dramas the face of Nature answers to the deeds and the emotions of the human agents, and how a line—sometimes a word in the midst of a rapid dialogue—lets in the open air, and all the surrounding nature, more tellingly than pages of description could have done. But between Shakespeare and a modern poet there is this great difference, that, while in the latter this correspondence is attained by careful study and elaborate forethought, in Shakespeare we may well believe that the white heat of imagination which created and moulded the characters in all their throng of emotion struck off, at the same moment, almost unconsciously, the aspects of external nature which were proper to them.

The forest was evidently with Shakespeare a favorite resort, bringing back to him, as it would, recollections of his youthful deer-huntings. In his day the forest was not far off or strange, but still a familiar place, as we are told, coming up very close to the gates of the country town. From Stratford-on-Avon he had not far to go before he found himself in the midst of the forest of fine oaks, the survivors of which are still seen all about in the parks and lanes of Warwickshire. So when he would spend the summer night in the most extravagant mirth and drollery, it is out to the wild wood that he leads his company; when he would surround the grave thoughts of the exiled Duke and the melancholy of Jaques with a congenial background, he places them in the Forest of Arden, where free Nature fits into the mood, and brings soothing to their mental maladies.

“Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?”

In how many ways throughout these plays are the aspects of human life set forth by their resemblances in Nature!

“Jul. The current that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know’st, being stopp’d, impatiently doth rage;

But, when his fair course is not hindered,

He makes sweet music with the enameled stones,

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;

And so by many winding nooks he strays

With willing sport, to the wild ocean.

Then let me go, and hinder not my course,

I’ll be as patient as a gentle stream,

And make my pastime of each weary step,

Till the last step have brought me to my love;

And then I’ll rest, as, after much turmoil,

A blessed soul doth in Elysium.”

Shakespeare, whether from watching the sea from the shore, or from sailing on it, was evidently at home in describing it.

The sea storm in “Pericles” (Act iii. Scene 1) is full of life and movement, made all the more terrible by the death of the queen on shipboard when the tempest is at its height. They are off the coast of Tharsus, and the ship is driving in upon it unmanageably, and will not answer to the helm:—

“1st Sailor.—Slack the bolins there; thou wilt not, wilt thou? Blow and split thyself.

2d Sailor.—But sea room, an the brine and cloudy billow kiss the moon, I care not.

1st Sailor.—Sir, your queen must overboard; the sea works high, the wind is loud, and will not lie till the ship be cleared of the dead.”

The human situation and the conflict of the elements combine each to heighten to the utmost the terror and despair of the other. The conjunction is no doubt finely imagined. But when a modern poet writes: “No poetry of shipwreck and the sea has ever equaled the great scene of ‘Pericles,’ no such note of music was ever struck out of the clash and contention of tempestuous elements,” one cannot but feel that he indulges in exaggeration.

For coast scenery the description of Dover cliffs stands almost alone.

But while with the forest and the sea-coast Shakespeare’s early life had made him familiar, he had not, as far as we know, had much, if any, experience of mountains. Of Nature, as of man, he painted for the most part what he had seen and known—idealizing it of course, but having caught the first hint from reality. And mountains formed no part of the Warwickshire or indeed of the England which he knew. Therefore while we find many notices of the fields, the forest, and the sea, and of the way they affect human imaginations, there is no allusion to the effect of mountain scenery. It could not have been said of him:—

“The power of hills is on thee.”

On this fact Mr Ruskin has this characteristic reflection, that Shakespeare having been ordained to take a full view of total human nature, to be perfectly equal and universal in his portraiture of man, could be allowed no mountains, nor even supreme natural beauty. For had he been reared among mountains they would have overbalanced him, have laid too powerful a grasp on his imagination, have made him lean too much their way, and so would have marred his universality. Whether we take this view of it or not, it is certain that the power of the mountains is not expressed in that poetry which expresses almost every other conceivable thing, and that the mountain rapture had to lie dumb for two more centuries before it found utterance in English song.

In “Cymbeline” the two noble youths are brought up in caves among the mountains, but from this their characters receive no touch of freedom or grandeur, but are enhanced only by having taken no taint of degradation from so base a dwelling-place. “The only thing belonging to the hills,” says Mr. Ruskin, “that Shakespeare seems to feel as noble, was the pine-tree, and that was because he had seen in Warwickshire clumps of pine occasionally rising on little sandstone mounds above the lowland woods.” He touches on this tree fondly again and again.

“As rough

Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind,

That by his top doth take the mountain pine,

And make him stoop to the vale.”

Again:—

“You may as well forbid the mountain pines

To wave their high tops, and to make no noise

When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven.”

And again:—

“But when from under this terrestrial bank

He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines.”

He knew little then of the mountains by experience; but had he known them more, though they might have added some sternness to his genius, some awe to his thoughts about life, they might perhaps have narrowed his range and made his view of men less universal and serene. So Mr. Ruskin thinks. And yet perhaps it is hardly safe so to speculate about Shakespeare. For could not the mind which took in and harmonized so many things, have made room for this other influence, without deranging its proportions and marring its universality?

Though Shakespeare sometimes describes, in a general way, countries he had never seen, as in that exquisite description of Sicily in the “Winter’s Tale,”—

“The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet,

Fertile the isle, the temple much surpassing

The common praise it bears”—

yet whenever he descends to details of country life and scenery, as he so often does, every word bears the stamp of having been brought, not from books, but from what his own eyes had seen in the neighborhood of Stratford-upon-Avon. How familiar he was with the garden and all its processes is seen by many a metaphor and allusion, perhaps nowhere more notably than in the 4th Scene of the 3d Act of “Richard II.,” where in the Duke of York’s garden at Langley the discourse of the gardener and his men on the management of fruit-trees is turned to political meaning. A disordered state is a neglected and unweeded garden, the pruning and bleeding of fruit-trees are the restraining great and growing men in the state, and all the operations are so described and applied as only an adept in gardening could do; or again, there is the well-known metaphor in Wolsey’s speech where he likens his blushing honors to blossoms nipt by frost. The process of grafting furnishes many a metaphor for human doings. All the ordinary forest trees, the oak, the elm, the pine, the willow, come in with the easy handling of one who knew them from boyhood. Every bird, the rook, the chough, the throstle, the ousel-cock or blackbird, the nightingale,

“The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,

The plain-song cuckoo gray”—

all find familiar notice; and perhaps of these we might select the lark as his favorite, to judge by the frequency of allusion to it.

Though garden flowers—such garden flowers as were cultivated in his time—are not passed over, yet much more noteworthy is the loving way in which Shakespeare dwells, or rather makes his characters dwell, on the field-flowers. Almost every wild-flower that is to be found at this day in the meadows and woods by Avon side looks out from some part of other of his poetry. But this love for flowers, it has been noted, he puts in the mouth, not of his strong heroic characters, his Henry V. or Othello, but in the lips of his more feminine ones. It is the sentimental Duke in “Twelfth Night” who exclaims—

“That strain again; it had a dying fall.

Oh! it came o’er my ear like the sweet south,

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing, and giving odor”—

just such a bank as may be seen any April day under the Warwickshire hedge-rows. Every one remembers poor Ophelia and her flowers, the flowers with which Arviragus promises to sweeten the sad grave of Fidele; and, above all, the wonderful scene in the “Winter’s Tale” where Perdita presiding at the sheep-shearing feast sorts the flowers according to the age of the guests, “flowers of winter, rosemary and rue,” to the elders, to men of middle age flowers of middle summer—

“Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram,

The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun,

And with him rises weeping.”

And for her fairest friend—

“I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might

Become your time of day;

Daffodils, violets, and pale primroses.”

Lastly, the song which winds up “Love’s Labor Lost,”—with what lyric sweetness it condenses how much of flowery spring and of nipping winter into a few easy lines! In this as in all other mentions of wild-flowers in Shakespeare, it has been remarked how true he is to time and season, giving to each flower its proper season and haunt, and sorting them all with the careless ease of one to whom they were among the most familiar things. In this he contrasts with the artistic but not accurate assortment of flowers in the well-known passage of “Lycidas,” where Milton groups in one posy flowers belonging to different seasons.

On the whole, though Shakespeare never set himself formally to study or describe external Nature, yet his dramas are full of her presence and her works—not taken from books or daintily tricked out by art, but idealized from his memory well stored with country scenes. Again, these are given, not in elaborate descriptions, but in rapid strokes, and side-glances, vivid, penetrating, intense, thrown off from the heat of an imagination brooding mainly over human interests and emotions. And perhaps after all that view of Nature is the truest, healthiest, manliest, which does not pore or moralize over her appearances, but keeps them in the background, putting man into the foreground and making him the central object. As Man and Nature stand over against each other, and are evidently made each for each, it may be that not apart from Man, with his emotions and his destiny, can Nature be rightly conceived and portrayed.