CHAPTER IV

SHAKESPEARE, HIS DUAL NATURE

WHAT enabled Shakespeare to do what he did, and write as he did? How did he produce his wonderful plays? What was there in the nature of the man, in the quality of his brain, and in his own character that made such productions possible?

The longer one surveys as a whole the wonderful structure of his work, its beauty, its massive grandeur, its variety, and above all its fidelity to human life, the more amazing and bewildering does it appear. The bricks of this literary fabric are so deftly put together, the words so exactly fit the thought, that one can hardly detect the mortar that retains them. Can this be the work of one man, or of any man however gifted? One sometimes is inclined to imagine that Nature, or some invisible power, stood beside Shakespeare as he wrote, used him merely as a medium or automaton, directed his pen, and compelled him to put down what he did. The man Shakespeare himself is invisible throughout: you can see him only in his works. But the works, if one only studies them with reflection, and at sufficient length, enable one to construct with considerable accuracy, indeed almost with certainty, the powers and entire character of their author.

Shakespeare himself is invisible. This is doubtless

due largely to the fact that he was utterly devoid of any sort of self-consciousness. If he had a craving for admiration and approbation, he was not apprehensive about it; he could disregard it altogether, and was not at all the man to allow the lack of it to mar and impede the operations of his mind.

No where can one discern a touch of egoism. He wrote on and on, as if Nature were the only spectator, and that man as a critic did not exist. There is no intentional building for immortality here; and conscious as he must have been of his own great powers, he seemed to set little store by them, and almost to regard with indifference his own immortal productions. He was not the least anxious about their publication; nor did he ever court or solicit for them publicity. The greater part of his plays were not published at his death, and the few which appeared in his life were apparently thrust into the world, without the care of the author, and probably without his knowledge. And the absence of this egoism adds an additional charm to all he wrote.

How many latter day publications are marred and spoilt by an egoism that prevails throughout, in some, blatant and thinly veiled, in others, hardly to be detected, well hidden no doubt, but there.

There is always fibre in the thought of Shakespeare, and a knitting up and tightening of expression. And this knitting up and tightening of expression is in itself an artistic operation. All true art, in whatever field of exercise, is really the outcome of the play of the individual mind, within the limits of a wheel of a well thought out and long recognised method of construction. This wheel is capacious and elastic, and capable of considerable pressure and expansion in every portion of its circumference, to enable it to let

in, and allow for, the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the individual mind. But there is a point beyond which no artist may lawfully stretch it. If he wilfully breaks through, defies, and violates it, he is no longer the servant of cosmos or law, but soon discovers that he is in the broken and desolate region of chaos and confusion, and his work takes on the form of either the grotesque, the horrible, the weird, or the obscene. His work becomes, not creative, but the very reverse, dissolute and destructive.

Individualists may fret as they may, but there is, and always must be, a standard not severely conventional but inherent in the nature of things, which carries with it the sanction and experience of ages, and which no labourer in any field of art can afford to ignore, be his genius what it may.

Shakespeare, great artist though he was, instinctively recognised this law, and bowed down before it. This does not imply that he conformed deliberately or even consciously in his utterances to any set artistic limitation to the expansion of his thought. That is not the English way; but he instinctively recognised the unwritten laws of propriety. In his language and utterances he keeps the via media, and is neither seduced by the virtuoso and eccentric on the one hand, or by the vulgar on the other. Everything he touches he adorns, and enriches and ennobles the language as he proceeds.

Dr Johnson makes this very clear in a passage worthy of quotation and remembrance :

"If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a style which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered: this style is probably

to be sought, in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better: those who wish for distinction escape the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness, and below refinement, where propriety resides, and where this poet seems to have gathered his comic dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the ears of the present age than any other author equally remote, and among other excellencies deserves to be studied as one of the original masters of our language."

Shakespeare is constantly referred to as a great creative genius, indeed some go so far as to assert that with the exception of Homer-the darling child of the classical nursery - he was the only creative literary genius that ever existed, and that he alone was possessed of true creative power.

Let us regard for a moment these two qualities, creative power and genius.

What is creative power? The human brain at its best has only two gifts-the one, that of putting two and two together, and the other, that of recording what it sees, feels, and hears, through the medium of the

senses.

Shakespeare, of course, in the primary meaning of the word, created nothing; in that sense no man is a creator. But he was an artistic creator, possibly the greatest that ever lived. That is to say, he had the gift of moulding words into sentences so pregnant with thought, fancy, and observation that he far excelled in this gift all that were before him, and ages may yet elapse before he is equalled or surpassed.

His rival may some day appear,

as the voyaging spirit of man cannot remain within the enclosure of any one age, or of any single mind."

Shakespeare's brain, then, was the most perfect recording instrument hitherto discovered in any single being. He did not create the impressions he produced: they are the common property of all. All men feel them if they felt them not, they would fail to recognise them in Shakespeare.

The least artistic amongst us can comfort ourselves with the reflection that we are all of us, be it a little, more or less-probably less-potential Homers, Dantes, and Shakespeares. The difference between the latter and ordinary men is that they have the will, the patience, and persistency to bring to the birth, mould what they see and feel with their own emotions, and present them as indelible pictures to mankind. They are the Daniels among men; they interpret for us the handwriting of Nature, which we but dimly apprehend.

Shakespeare was, moreover, a great artistic photographer. The lenses of his instrument were perfect; he knew how to take advantage of the lights and shades in human character, and the propitious moment in which to depict them. He was also a perfect developer. His pictures are never blurred, but always clear-cut and well defined.

Students of Shakespeare cannot fail to observe that frequently a very delicate and beautiful embroidery of dialogue and what not, surrounds as it were in a frame or encasement, the chief figures of the picture under creation. There was an old-fashioned idea that the poet was born, and not made :

"The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,"

and so forth. It was imagined that the poet had some quality innate in his brain, which, when it had reached