Harrington: A Story of True Love

by William Douglas O'Connor

“So it is, Richard,” returned Harrington, smiling good-naturedly at him. “About as odd as that Ulrici should have said that Shakspeare took no heed of the politics of his time, when Lear, Coriolanus, and Julius Cæsar are occupied, under the dramatic cover, and in the very face of the military despotism of the age, with the broadest sort of political discussion. About as odd as that you should think Shakspeare had no patriotism, when the historical dramas so overflow with passionate love for England that London theatres, at this day, rise and roar to it when Phelps or Macready gives it voice from the stage.”

“Well,” said Wentworth, reddening and laughing, “I spoke too fast, no doubt. Besides, there’s Brutus—a splendid type of the pure country-lover. But the philanthropy—where’s that?”

“So the man who drew up the Science of Human Nature, subtle, vast, exact, complete, the inevitable preliminary to the relief of the human estate that Bacon schemed for, had no philanthropy,” bantered Harrington.

“That’s you exactly!” burst out Wentworth, coloring again, and laughing. “Thunder, Harrington! that’s the way you hook in a fellow. Of course, since I’ve accepted your first proposition, the rest follows. Well, at all events, you may show philanthropy as the genius of the plan, but I’m hanged if you can name a character that has it in the plays.”

“Can’t I, then?” retorted Harrington, good-humoredly. “What do you think of Lear? Whose heart folds in poor Tom, the social outcast from the lowest sinks of the Elizabethan wretchedness? Who hurls forth that terrible invocation for the ‘superfluous and lust-dieted man that slaves Heaven’s ordinance—that will not see because he does not feel?’ Who prays for the ‘poor naked wretches that bide the peltings of the pitiless storm,’ and dwells so eloquently on ‘their houseless heads and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness.’ Who is it, the impersonation of cold and callous conservatism, that is made, as Burke says, to ‘attend to the neglected and remember the forgotten,’ and comes face to face with houseless poverty and want to exclaim, ‘Oh, I have ta’en too little care of this?’ Who demands that the rich and fortunate shall expose themselves to ‘feel what wretches feel,’ in order that their superfluities may be shared with them, and justice be more the law of social life? And if this is not philanthropy, what is it?”

“Say no more, Harrington, I cave,” replied Wentworth, gaily.

“It is true,” pursued Harrington, “that the Shakspeare Drama has no figure of a philanthropist like Howard, no more than it has of a religious saint like Xavier or Monica. But I do not think that such portraitures would consist with the author’s design, which, however vast, is still special, having for its end the culture and cure of the human mind, and, as I have said, the reconstruction of society. Ah, but the true philanthropist, the true saint of that Drama is its author! No need to add such a figure to his pages when he himself stands there added to them by our thought, an image of the noblest love that ever strove and suffered for mankind.”

They both sat in silence for a few moments, lost in musing.

“It is strange,” said Wentworth, at length. “All we know about Shakspeare personally, is in conflict with what you have said—though I admit that his works sustain your view. He seems to have lived a very common-place and vulgar sort of a life. Certainly, his biography does not show that he had large sympathies and designs for man, and it is indisputable that he did not participate in the loftier life of his age.”

“I look at it in this way,” replied Harrington. “Set aside the evidence we might collect from his writings, and consider only what must inevitably have followed from the nature of his intellect. The complex catholicity—the massive breadth—in a word, the universality of his mind, inevitably involves a corresponding vastness of interest and participation in the public affairs of his time, and all the varieties of its thought and life. Isolation from public life may coexist, and be perfectly compatible, with intensity of genius—with universality, never. Moreover, to be worldly wise, as the plays show their author to have been, a man must follow the rule Bacon insists upon as indispensable—namely, to ally contemplation with action. Deny such a man experience, and you cannot get from him the lessons of experience, as you get them from this author. Isolate such a man from affairs, and his genius spreads aloft into the vast air of the abstract, and you never get in his writings the voices of the street, the camp, the court, the cabinet—in a word, the voices of concrete practical life, as you do in the Shakspeare Drama. Take for example, the man nearest Shakspeare, the many-sided Goethe: the corollary to his many-sidedness is the fact that he was a man of the world, a scientifician, courtier, statesman. So with the author of the Drama. He must have been immersed in public life. He must have held office. He must have administered the affairs of State. It was the inevitable result of his genius, and it was the condition on which the manifestations of that genius depended. Denied public life, and either his development would have been arrested, or he would have become a vast dreamer or abstractionist.”