Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/880

824 inative writers in order to show why the German critics, in seeking for evidence of self-conscious movements in Shakespeare's mind and in finding allegorical meaning's in Shakespeare's work, have gone so lamentably astray. And on many other points it seems to me that English Shakespearians have succumbed overmuch to the dogmatism of Germany, from the publication of Wilhelm Meister downwards. They have, for instance, endeavored to construct a chronology of the plays from certain tests, such as the metrical test, on the one hand, and such as the test of what is called the spiritual development of the poet, supposed to be discoverable in his way at various periods of confronting human life and generalizing upon it. In the metrical test there may be something if the investigations are not pursued too far, for it is true, no doubt, that metre is a fine art—true, no doubt, that there are thousands of new things to be learned by the poet in the exercise of that art as he passes through life, and, consequently, that what to him may have seemed good metre as a boy may seem bad metre at maturity, after he has made a thorough study of the great masters of the art. Keats's case is a notable instance of this; so is Tennyson's. But the test is a very unsafe one. As regards, however, evolving a spiritual order for Shakespeare's plays, this seems to me a more daring venture than that connected with the metrical test.

Does any one really think that Shakespeare, born in a country town, dragged by his father's misfortunes or follies from that pedestal of middle-class respectability which he so loved, down to that struggling impecuniosity which he so hated; driven by disaster to seek in London the means to retrieve the commercial honor of a family whose head had been kept from church by fear of arrest for debt—does any one really think that such a man wrote plays to bring out his thoughts and emotions as they arose? To think so is to ignore the difference between the dramatist and the lyrist who sings because he must win sympathy for his joys and pains, must sing or die. The dramatic instinct being to give sympathy and not to ask it, the dramatist has no great need of expression unless that need comes from the outside. The external need was, with Shakespeare, the need of "getting a living," as the Warwickshire phrase still is. As Dickens at fourteen had to exercise his faculties by pasting labels upon blacking-pots, so Shakespeare at the same age, according to traditions in which even Dyce seems half inclined to believe, had to become a butcher-boy and then a lawyer's clerk. Such a career makes it impossible to say, either from the metrical movement of his utterances or from, their tone, "This belongs to one period, this to another." The more we study any one of his plays with the others, the more clearly shall we see that Shakespeare, as soon as the chance came to him, harnessed his genius to business—harnessed it far too thoroughly to dream of producing plays for the purpose of expressing that great inner life of his which circumstance and temperament had been building up. To the really great writer Life is far greater than Literature. The rich results of Shakespeare's life, active and emotive, had been well garnered, it is true; but, as "the Poet" in Timon of Athens says most profoundly,

When the Globe Theatre demanded it, Shakespeare could throw into the market more of this most precious "gum" than all his contemporary dramatists—more than has been produced by the combined efforts of all the poets that have lived since.

As to the wisdom of the generalizations upon life and the ripeness of the meditation upon the mystery of the universe, sometimes found scattered in plays which we know from external evidence to have been early, it seems to be forgotten that boys, even in these days, when leading a country life, are often very meditative—more meditative, perhaps, than men. But meditation was the intellectual note of the time when Shakespeare was a boy. It is difficult for us in a vulgar, sordid, wealth-worshipping society, like that of the England and America of the present hour, to understand the temper of the great time when Shakespeare lived—when the court society of England contained