Nothing saves a man from this but personality. The first great tonic is humor. Dr. Furness, man and work together, brim with it. Who else would have made a merry mark of the one word in Shakspere—in “The Tempest,” “young scamels from the rock”—for which no one has even suggested a convincing or even plausible meaning? The humor needed to salt these barrels and barrels of Shaksperian pemmican is much more than the capacity to see a joke. This is to humor what a pocket-dictionary is to an encyclopedia. What is needed for adequate comment on Shakspere, the most English of all figures in the world of letters, is that numberless capacity to see the broad laugh in all things which lies so near to tears that when the coin of fate is flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. This gives sanity. It enables the editor of a variorum to know from time to time what a fool a German scholar can make of himself and his author. I suppose no man could see Horace Howard Furness, that solid figure, that sturdy step, that firm face of roomy planes and liberal modeling, those twinkling eyes, that air of benignant wisdom and general good-nature, without seeing that the worst joke of all, life itself, could not daunt this resolution or dull this humor.
There is a look we all know on the face of the judge—a detached habit of thought. It comes on the bench, and it comes, too, let me assure you, if a man has had before his bar for forty years all the culprits who for two centuries have been writing about Shakspere. His beam will stand sure and he will “poise the cause in justice’s equal scales.” There are scholars whose lives are given to the great in letters who become surfeited with honey and “in the taste confound the appetite.” Nothing saves from this but the incommunicable capacity for the perception of the best. This capacity grows by what it feeds upon. Through these volumes there has grown certainty of touch and serenity of judgment, but from the first issue there was apparent, as in the man, the norm which is not to be corrupted even by the Elizabethan extravagance of the greatest of Elizabethans.
Dr. Furness came to his life task through the Kemble tradition. The Kembles, who succeeded Garrick, first gave dignity to Shakspere. Three critics of the contemporary stage, dramatic critics all, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, two of them working journalists, began the present attitude. It has since been impossible for any scholar to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that a passage in a third-rate play, Congreve’s “Mourning Bride,” was better than anything in Shakspere.
The stage was dear to him, and he believed that no play could be adequately understood unless it was heard. The foremost players of his day he knew, and each had counseled with him, and he had gladly learned from them. With Fanny Kemble and her light touch and perspicuous, penetrating interpretation as a model, he read the familiar plays himself to many audiences, interspersing comment. To all who read or act he was a living proof that lines are “read” by the mind and that he or she who fully understands will fully express, and he or she alone. Deaf as he was, stress, cadence, emphasis, intonation, and expression were as manifold, accurate, and illuminating as his comment. All was suffused with the cheer and glow of strength, and had behind that incomparable organ of interpretation, a mind that knew, loved, and voiced the inner meaning of the uttered word.
It is now sixty-five years since Dr. Furness, a boy of fourteen, received from Fanny Kemble a season ticket for her readings. In her readings she sat at a green baize-covered table still cherished in his library. She made him a Shaksperian for life. He was living in a city which, until Boston took its place a little over twenty years ago, as Chicago is doing to-day, gave the stage a more serious, steady, intelligent, and consistent support than any other.
To a local stage possessing this tradition the Philadelphia of threescore years ago added through his father, William Henry Furness, for fifty years head of the Unitarian Church founded by Joseph Priestley, a more intimate contact with the romantic movement in England than fell to other young Americans of the period. It was in Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first appreciated at his full value by an American. It was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, in a commonwealth for two centuries nearer Germany than any other American State, German translation began. William Henry Furness early addressed himself to this field. His daughter, Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued the task through thirty years, her last work appearing in a volume of her brother’s variorum series. Where other commentators in our tongue, in either home of our race, have looked to English comment, Dr. Furness from the first significant dedication of his “Hamlet” (1877), written in personal exultation over German triumph as proving Germany no longer the “Hamlet of Nations,” has seen Shakspere as a world poet, has come close to German authority and research, and equaled its thorough and exact character without falling into its pedantry or its far-fetched gloss.
From many causes he knew all it is to be a gentleman, and when every year he rose as dean of the Shakspere Society on St. George’s day to give the solitary toast, “William Shakspere, gentleman,” it was on the last word that his sturdy accent fell. Beyond all the other great voices of our tongue, Shakspere was “gentle.” The author of “Coriolanus” loathed the general mass. He scarce mentions it without touching on its evil smell. Its sweaty nightcap ever stank in his nostrils. Certain sympathies are needed for full critical appreciation of the poet who was the last word of the feudalism of the past to the democracy of the future, and these sympathies Dr. Furness had.
The Shakspere Society first began his study. For sixty-one years its fortnightly meetings have gathered a group of men foremost in Philadelphia. One has read Shakspere there with a cabinet-minister, a chancellor of the bar association, a judge of the first rank, a great physician as well known in the art of letters as in the letters of his art, and a novelist whose best seller has not had its total exceeded. It was in a like practical atmosphere that, a young man not yet thirty, Dr. Furness was stirred half a century ago to try to compare texts by the aid of a scrap-book. Out of this grew the Variorum, first with the first folio for a basis and later the Cambridge text. He had leisure, a perilous gift. He early collected, until 7000 volumes were at hand in a building for their use; but most collectors are swamped by their apparatus. “A Concordance of Shaksperian Poems,” 1874, by Mrs. Furness, bespoke a common bond in a perfect union. In 1883 she was taken. After a generation, those who then saw his grief from without will not adventure to speak of it. A sense of loss was never absent from him. It drove him to arduous labors, which the years made a habit of life. Save a single volume of his father’s intimate friendship with Emerson, he wrote nothing but the Variorum. His prefaces, his addresses, and his letters should, now that he is gone, make a volume. He preserved the epistolary gift, lost in our day. His simplest note had style, charm, and weight.
In his research he was to the end a firm believer in the study of the plays and the plays alone. The order in which the plays were written did not interest him. For “weak endings,” “incomplete lines,” and all the newer apparatus of Shakspere study, he had an unconcealed disregard. It was not for him. He would have questioned his personal identity as soon as question the personal authorship of Shakspere’s plays.
The happy fortune befell me once at his side and over his ear-trumpet to say of him that which greatly pleased. It was at the luncheon when the New Theatre gave him a gold medal and he monopolized the affectionate attention of every woman in the room. His appreciation gave whatever value there was to my words, in which I said that it was not as a scholar unrivaled and a critical authority unequaled that he would be most loved and remembered, but because his work had made accurate study possible to the wandering player, given the solitary teacher on the frontier the best of past criticism, and armed the smallest village club with a library of learning, making the best of Shakspere the general possession of all. It was for this he labored. It was this American ideal that inspired him. It was in the service of this ideal that he renounced all royalties.