Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille

by Benedetto Croce

What poets appear at first sight more different than Shakespeare and Ariosto? Yet they have this in common, that both look upon something that is beyond particular emotions, and for this reason it has been said of both of them, more than once, that "they speak but little to the heart." They are certainly sentimental and agitated by the passions to a very slight degree; the "humour" of both has been referred to, a word that we avoid here, because it is so uncertain of meaning and of such little use in determining profound emotions of the spirit. Ariosto veils and shades all the particular feelings that he represents, by means of his divine irony; and Shakespeare, in a different way, by endowing all with equal vigour and relief, succeeds in creating a sort of equilibrium, by means of reciprocal tension, which, owing to its mode of genesis, differs in every other respect from the harmony in which the singer of the Furioso delights. Ariosto surpasses good and evil, retaining interest in them only on account of the rhythm of life, so constant and yet so various, which arises, expands, becomes extinguished and is reborn, to grow and again to become extinguished. Shakespeare surpasses all individual emotions, but he does not surpass, on the contrary, he strengthens our interest in good and evil, in sorrow and joy, in destiny and necessity, in appearance and reality, and the vision of this strife is his poetry. Thus the one has been metaphorically called "imaginative"; the other "realistic," and the one has been opposed to the other. They are opposed to one another, yet they meet at one point, not at the general one of both being poets, but at the specific point of being cosmic poets, not only in the sense in which every poet is cosmical, but in the particular sense above explained. Let us hope that it is not necessary to recommend that this should be understood with the necessary reservations, that is to say, as the trait that dominates the two poets in a different way and does not exclude the other individual traits of feature, above all not that which belongs to all poetry whatsoever. The limits set to every critical study, which should henceforth be known to all, are laid down by the impossibility of ever rendering in logical terms the full effect of any poetry or of other artistic work, since it is clear that if such a translation were possible, art would be impossible, that is to say, superfluous, because admitting of a substitute. Criticism, nevertheless, within those limits, performs its own office, which is to discern and to point out exactly where lies the poetical motive and to formulate the divisions which aid in distinguishing what is proper to every work.

For the rest, if Ariosto has often been compared to contemporary painters, with the object of drawing attention to his harmonic inspiration, Ludwig has been unable to abstain from making similar comparisons for Shakespeare. He found the most adequate image for his dramas in the portraits and landscapes of Titian, of Giorgione, of Paul Veronese, as contrasting with the amiability of Correggio, the insipidity of the Caracci, the affected manner of Guido and of Carlo Dolce, the crudity of the naturalists Caravaggio and Ribera. In Shakespeare, as in those great Venetians, there is everywhere "existence," life upon earth, transfigured perhaps, but devoid of restlessness, of aureoles and of sentimentalisms, serene even where tragic.

This sense of strife in vital unity, this profound sense of life, prevents the vision from becoming simplified and superficialised in the antitheses of good and evil, of elect and reprobate beings, and causes the introduction of conflict, in varying measure and degree, in every being. Thus the battle is fought at the very heart of things. Hence the aspect of mystery that surrounds the actions and events portrayed by Shakespeare, which is not to be understood in the general sense that every vision of art is a mystery, but rather in the special sense of a course of events of which the poet not only does not possess (and could not possess) the philosophical explanation, but never discovers the reposeful term, peace after war, the acceptance of war as a means to a more lofty peace. For this reason is everywhere diffused the terror of the Unknown, which surrounds on every side and conceals a countenance that may be more terrible than terrible life itself, in the development of which human beings are involved—a countenance terrible for what it will reveal, and perhaps sublime and ecstatic, giving in its very terribleness, terror and rapture together. The mystery lies not only in the occasional appearance of spectres, demons, witches, in the poetry, but in the whole atmosphere of which they form only a part, assisting by their presence in a more direct determination. This mystery was well expressed by the first great critics who penetrated into the world of Shakespearean poetry, Herder and Goethe, to the second of whom belongs the simile of the Shakespearean drama as "open books of Destiny, in which blows the wind of emotional life here and there stripping their leaves in its violence." In Shakespeare's musicality we are everywhere sensible of a voluptuous palpitation before the mystery which at times reflects upon itself and supplies the link between music and love, music and sadness, music and unknown Godhead.

We must insist upon the word "sentiment," which we have adopted for the description of this spiritual condition, in order that it may not be mistaken for a concept or mode of thought Or philosopheme, which occurs when the word "conception" or "mode of conceiving life" is taken in a literal and material manner as applied to Shakespeare and in general to the poets—when, for instance, it is asked by what special quality does Shakespeare's "conception of tragedy" differ from Greek and French tragedy, and the like, as though in such a case, it were a question of concepts and systems. Shakespeare is not a philosopher: his spiritual tendency is altogether opposed to the philosophic, which dominates both sentiment and the spectacle of life with thought that understands and explains it, reconciling conflicts under a single principle of dialectic. Shakespeare, on the contrary, takes both and renders them in their vital mobility—they know nothing of criticism or theory—and he does not offer any solution other than the evidence of visible representation. For this reason, when he is characterised and receives praises for his "objectivity," his "impersonality," his "universality," and those who do this are not satisfied even with their incorrect description of the real psychological differences noted above, but proceed to claim a philosophical character for his spiritual attitude, it is advisable to reject them all, confronting his objectivity with his poetic subjectivity, his impersonality with his personality, his universality with his individual mode of feeling. The cosmic oppositions, in imagining which he symbolises reality and life, not only are not philosophical solutions for him in his plays, but they are not even problems of thought; only rarely do they tend to take the form of bitter interrogations, which remain without answer. Equally fantastic and arbitrary are the attempts to compose a philosophical theory from the work of Shakespeare who is alternately, theistic, pantheistic, dualistic, deterministic, pessimistic and optimistic, by extracting it from his plays in the same manner as that employed in the case of the philosophy implied in a historical or political treatise; because there is certainly a philosophy implied in these latter cases, embodied in the historical and political judgments which they contain. In the case of Shakespeare, however, which is that of poets in general, to extract it means to place it there, that is, to think and to draw conclusions ourselves under the imaginative stimulus of the poet, and to place in his mouth, through a psychological illusion, our own questions and answers. It would only be possible to discuss a philosophy of Shakespeare if, like Dante, he had developed one in certain philosophical sections of his poems; but this is not so, because the thoughts that he utters fulfil no other function than that of poetical expressions, and when they are taken from their contexts, where they sound so powerful and so profound, they lose their virtue and appear to be indeterminate, contradictory or fallacious.

It is quite another question as to whether his sentiment was based upon what are called mental or philosophical presumptions and as to what these, properly speaking, were; because, as regards the first point, it must be at once admitted that a sentiment does not appear without a basis of certain mental presumptions or concepts, that is to say, of certain convictions, affirmations, negations and doubts. As regards the second point, the legitimacy of the enquiry will be admitted, and it will also be noted that this forms one of several historical enquiries, relating to Shakespeare in his poetry, to which belongs the place unduly usurped by ineptitudes and superficialities on the theme of his private affairs; his domestic relations, his business transactions, and his pretended love intrigues with Mary Fitton and the hostess Madam Davenant.

It is also true that the researches into the mental presumptions of Shakespeare have often strayed into the external and the anecdotic, as is the case with such problems as the religion that he followed and his political opinions. Stated in this way, they likewise sink to the level of biographical problems, indifferent to art. That Shakespeare belonged to the Anglican and not to the Catholic confession (as some still maintain, and in 1864 Rio wrote a whole book on the subject), and opposed Puritanism in one quality or the other; that he supported Essex in his conspiracy, or on the contrary was on the side of Queen Elizabeth, has nothing to do with the mental presuppositions immanent in his poetry. He may have been impious and profane in active practical life as a Greene or a Marlowe, or a devout papist, worshipping with secret superstition, like an adept of Mary Stuart, and nevertheless he may have composed poetry with different presuppositions, upon thoughts that had entered his mind and had there become formed and dominated in his spirit, without for that reason having changed the faith previously selected and observed. The research of which we speak does not concern the superficial, but the profound character of the man; it is not concerned with the congealed and solidified stratum, but with the tide that flows beneath it, which others would call the unconscious in relation to the conscious, whereas, it would be more exact to invert the two qualifications. Presuppositions are the philosophemes that everyone carries with him, gathering them from the times and from tradition, or forming them anew by means of his own observations and rapid reflections. In poetical works, they form the condition remote from the psychological attitude, which generates poetical visions.

In this depth of consciousness, Shakespeare shows himself clearly to be outside, not only Catholicism, but also Protestantism, not only Christianity, but every religious, or rather every transcendental and theological conception. Here he also resembles the Italian poet of the Renaissance, Ariosto, though reaching the position by different ways and with different results. His sentiment would have appeared in an altogether different guise, if a theological conception, such as the belief in an eternal life, in a judging God, in rewards and punishments beyond this world, in the view that earthly life is a trial and a pilgrimage, had been lively and active in him. He knows no other than the vigorous passionate life upon earth, divided between joy and sorrow, with around and above it, the shadow of a mystery.

It is with natural wonder, then, that we read of Shakespeare, especially among German authors, as a spirit altogether dominated by the Christian ideas proper to the Reformation, whereas, with regard to Christianity, he was altogether lacking, both in the theology of Judaic-Hellenic origin and in the tendency to asceticism and mysticism. On the other hand we cannot admit the opposite statement that he was a pagan, in the somewhat popular sense of self-satisfied hedonism, because it is not less evident that his moral discernment, his sense of what is sinful, his delicacy of conscience, his humanity, bear a strong imprint of Christian ethics. Indeed, it is precisely owing to this lofty and exquisite ethical judgment, united to the vision of a world, which moves by its own power or anyhow by some mysterious power, frequently opposing or overthrowing or perverting the forces directed to the good, that this tragic conflict arises in him. To this double presupposition must be added, as inference, a third, the negation, the scepticism, or the ignorance of the conception of a rational course of events and of a Providence that governs it. Not even does he accept inexorable Fate as sole master of men and Gods; nor the determinism of individual character as another kind of Fate, a naturalistic Fate, as some of his interpreters have believed; he remains unaffected by the hard Asiatic or African dualistic idea of predestination; on the contrary, he recognizes human spontaneity and liberty, as forces that prove their own reality in the fact itself, though he nevertheless permits liberty and necessity to clash and the one sometimes to overpower the other, without establishing a relation between the two, without suspecting their identity in opposition, without discovering that the two elements at strife form the single river of the real, and therefore failing to rise to the level of the modern theodicy, which is History. Our wonderment bursts forth anew, in observing the emphatic and insistent statements of such writers as for instance Ulrici as to the historicity of the thought and of the tragedies of Shakespeare, where just what is altogether absent is the historical conception of life, which was possessed by Dante, though in the form of the mediaeval philosophy of history. And since historicity is both political and social ideality, Shakespeare must have been and is wanting, as has been said, in true political faith and passion. He has however been credited with this by publicists and political polemists like Gervinus, who have desired to count so great a name among their number, have imagined him possessed with the passion for it and even believed that it was crowned in him with doctrinal wisdom.

It is difficult to decide by what ways and means these presuppositions were formed in his inmost soul, for with this question we reenter the biographical problem as to his education, the company he kept, his reading, his experiences; and upon all these subjects little or no exact information is available. Did he observe the fervour of life which prevailed in the England of his day with sympathetic soul and vigilant eye? Did he lend an ear to discussions upon theological and metaphysical questions and carry away from them a sense of their emptiness? Did he frequent the youth of the universities, which just at that time gave several university wits to literature and to the drama? Did he read the Laus Stultitiae of Erasmus, moral and religious dialogues and treatises, the English humanists, the Platonicians, the ancient and modern historians, as he certainly read Montaigne at a later date? Did he read Machiavelli and the other political writers of Italy, and those who had begun to sketch the doctrine of the temperament and the passions, such as Huarte and Charron, did he know Bruno, or had he heard of him and of his doctrines? Or did the influence of these men and books reach him by various indirect paths, at second or third hand, through conversation, or as by a figure of speech we say, from his environment? And what part of those doubts, negations and beliefs of his, was due to his vivacity and certainty of intuition, or to his own continuous and steady rumination in himself, rather than to the course of his studies? But even if we possessed abundant notes on this subject, we should still remain without much information, because the processes of the formation of the individual escape for the most part the observation of others and frequently even the memory of him in whom they have actually occurred, and the facility with which they are forgotten proves that what is really important to preserve, is not these, but their result.

And what is here of importance is the relation of these mental presuppositions with the life of the time, with the general culture of the period, with the historical phase through which the human spirit was then passing. In these respects, Shakespeare was truly, as he has appeared to those who have best understood him, a man of the Renaissance, of that age, which, with its navigation, its commerce, its philosophies, its religious strifes, its natural science, its poems, its pictures, its statues, its graceful architecture, had set earthly life in full relief, and no longer permitted it to lose its colours, become pallid and dissolve in the rays of another world external to it, as had happened through the long period of the Middle Ages. But Shakespeare did not belong to the pleasure-seeking, joyous and pagan Renaissance, which is but a small aspect of the great movement, but rather to that side of it which was animated with new wants, with new religious tendencies, with the spirit of new philosophical research, full of doubts, permeated with flashes from the future. These flashes, which appeared only in the great thinkers, who were not yet able to arrest them and make of them distributors of a calm and equable light, were also irreducible to a radiant centre in its greatest poet, in whom philosophy served as a presupposition and did not form the essence of his mental life. It is therefore vain to seek in Shakespeare for what neither Bruno nor Campanella attained, nor even Descartes and Spinoza at a later date, namely the historical concept, of which we have already spoken, and it is also vain to talk of his Spinozistic or Shellingian pantheism.