To say that he "followed Nature" is to mean that he permits his thoughts to flow out in the order in which thoughts naturally come,—that he makes his characters think as we all fancy we should think under the circumstances in which he places them,—that it is the truth of his thoughts which first impresses us. It is in this respect that he is so universal; and it is by his universality that his naturalness is confirmed. Not all his finer strokes of genius, but the general scope and progress of his mind, are within the path all other minds travel; his mind answers to all other men's minds, and hence is like the voice of Nature, which, apart from particular association, addresses all alike. The cataracts, the mountains, the sea, the landscapes, the changes of season and weather have each the same general meaning to all mankind. So it is with Shakspeare, both in the conception and development of his characters, and in the play of his reflections and fancies. All the world recognizes his sanity, and the health and beauty of his genius.
Not all the world, either. Nature's poet fares no better than Nature herself. Half the world is out of the pale of knowledge; a good part of the rest are stunted by cant in its Protean shapes, or by inherited narrowness and prejudice, and innumerable soul-cankers. They neither know nor think of Nature or Poetry. Just as there are hundreds in all great cities who never leave their accustomed streets winter or summer, until finally they lose all curiosity, and cease to feel the yearnings of that love which all are born with for the sight of the land and sea,—the dear face of our common mother. Or the creatures who compose the numerical majority of the world are rather like the children of some noble lady stolen away by gypsies, and taught to steal and cheat and beg, and practised in low arts, till they utterly forget the lawns whereon they once played; and if their mother ever discovers them, their natures are so subdued that they neither recognize her nor wish to go with her.
Without fearing that Shakspeare can ever lose his empire while the language lasts, it is humiliating to be obliged to acknowledge one great cause that is operating to keep him from thousands of our young countrymen and women, namely, the wide-spread mediocrity that is created and sustained by the universal diffusion of our so-called cheap literature;—dear enough it will prove by and by!—But this is needlessly digressing.
The very act of writing implies an art not born with the poet. This process of forming letters and words with a pen is not natural, nor will the poetic frenzy inspire us with the art to go through it. In conceiving the language of passion, the natural impulse is to imitate the passion in gesture; there is something artificial in sitting quietly at a table and hollaing, "Mortimer!" through a quill. If Hotspur's language is in the highest degree natural, it is because the poet felt the character, and words suggested themselves to him which he chose and wrote down. The act of choice might have been almost spontaneous with the feeling of the character and the situation, yet it was there,—the conscious judgment was present; and if the poet wrote the first words that came, (as no doubt he usually did,) it was because he was satisfied with them at the time; there was no paroxysm of poetic inspiration,—the workings of his mind were sane. His fertility was such that he was not obliged to pause and compare every expression with all others he could think of as appropriate;—judgment may decide swiftly and without comparison, especially when it is supervising the suggestions of a vivid fancy, and still be judgment, or taste, if we choose to call it by that name. We know by the result whether it was present. The poet rapt into unconsciousness would soon betray himself. Under the power of the imagination, all his faculties waken to a higher life; his fancies are more vivid and clear; all the suggestions that come to him are more apt and congruous; and his faculties of selection, his perceptions of fitness, beauty, and appropriateness of relation are more keen and watchful. No lapse in what he writes at such times indicates aught like dreaming or madness, or any condition of mind incompatible with soundness and health,—with that perfect sanity in which all the mental powers move in order and harmony under the control of the rightful sovereign, Reason.
These observations are not intended to bear, except remotely, upon the question, Which is the true Dramatic Art, the romantic or the ancient? We shall not venture into that land of drought, where dry minds forever wander. We can admit both schools. In fact, even the countrymen of Racine have long since admitted both,—speculatively, at least,—though practically their temperament will always confine them to artificial models. We may consider the question as set at rest in these words of M. Guizot:—"Everything which men acknowledge as beautiful in Art owes its effect to certain combinations, of which our reason can always detect the secret when our emotions have attested its power. The science—or the employment of these combinations—constitutes what we call Art. Shakspeare had his own. We must detect it in his works, and examine the means he employs and the results he aims at." Although we should be far from admitting so general a definition of Art as this, yet it is sufficient as an answer to the admirers of the purely classic school.
But it has become necessary in this "spasmodic" day to vindicate our great poet from the supposition of having written in a state of somnambulism,—to show that he was even an artist, without reference to schools. The scope of our observations is to exhibit him in that light; we wish to insist that he was a man of forethought,—that, though possessing creative genius, he did not dive recklessly into the sea of his fancy without knowing its depth, and ready to grasp every pebble for a pearl-shell; we wish to show that he was not what has been called, in the cant of a class who mistake lawlessness for liberty, an "earnest creature,"—that he was not "fancy's child" in any other sense than as having in his power a beautifully suggestive fancy, and that he "warbled his native wood-notes wild" in no other meaning than as Milton warbled his organ-notes,—namely, through the exercise of conscious Art, of Art that displayed itself not only in the broad outlines of his works, but in their every character and shade of color. With this purpose we have urged that he was "natural" from taste and choice,—artistically natural. To illustrate the point, let us consider his Art alone in a few passages.
We will suppose, preliminarily, however, that we are largely interested in the Globe Theatre, and that, in order to keep it up and continue to draw good houses, we must write a new piece,—that, last salary-day, we fell short, and were obliged to borrow twenty pounds of my Lord Southampton to pay our actors. Something must be done. We look into our old books and endeavor to find a plot out of ancient story, in the same manner that Sir Hugh Evans would hunt for a text for a sermon. At length one occurs that pleases our fancy; we revolve it over and over in our mind,—and at last, after some days' thought, elaborate from it the plot of a play,—"TIMON OF ATHENS,"—which plot we make a memorandum of, lest we should forget it. Meantime, we are busy at the theatre with rehearsals, changes of performance, bill-printing, and a hundred thousand similar matters that must be each day disposed of. But we keep our newly-thought-of play in mind at odd intervals, good things occur to us as we are walking in the street, and we begin to long to be at it. The opening scenes we have quite clearly in our eye, and we almost know the whole; or it may be, vice versa, that we work out the last scenes first; at all events, we have them hewn out in the rough, so that we work the first with an intention of making them conform to a something which is to succeed; and we are so sure of our course that we have no dread of the something after,—nothing to puzzle the will, or make us think too precisely on the event. Such is the condition of mind in which we finally begin our labor. Some Wednesday afternoon in a holiday-week, when the theatres are closed, we find ourselves sitting at a desk before a sea-coal fire in a quaintly panelled rush-strewn chamber, the pen in our hand, nibbed with a "Rogers's" pen-knife, [A] and the blank page beneath it.
[Footnote A: "A Shefeld thwitel bare he in his hose."—CHAUCER. The
Reve's Tale.]
We desire the reader to close his eyes for a moment and endeavor to fancy himself in the position of William Shakspeare about to write a piece,—the play abovenamed. This may be attempted without presumption. We wish to recall and make real the fact that our idol was a man, subject to the usual circumstances of men living in his time, and to those which affect all men at all times,—that he had the same round of day and night to pass through, the same common household accidents which render "no man a hero to his valet." The world was as real to him as it is to us. The dreamy past, of two hundred and fifty years since, was to him the present of one of the most stirring periods in history, when wonders were born quite as frequently as they are now.
And having persuaded the reader to place himself in Shakspeare's position, we will make one more very slight request, which is, that he will occupy another chair in the same chamber and fancy that he sees the immortal dramatist begin a work,—still keeping himself so far in his position that he can observe the workings of his mind as he writes.