Chapter LV: Section VI: General Idea of Shakespeare

So now at last we are in the presence of one, whom we perceived before us through all the vistas of the Renaissance, like some vast oak to which all the forest ways converge. I will treat of Shapespeare by himself. In order to take him in completely, we must have a wide and open space. And yet how shall we comprehend him? how lay bare his inner constitution? Lofty words, eulogies, are all used in vain; he needs no praise, but comprehension merely; and he can only be comprehended by the aid of science. As the complicated revolutions of the heavenly bodies become intelligible only by use of a superior calculus, as the delicate transformations of vegetation and life need for their explanation the intervention of the most difficult chemical formulas, so the great works of art can be interpreted only by the most advanced psychological systems; and we need the loftiest of all these to attain to Shakespeare's level--to the level of his age and his work, of his genius and of his art.

After all practical experience and accumulated observations of the soul, we find as the result that wisdom and knowledge are in man only effects and fortuities. Man has no permanent and distinct force to secure truth to his intelligence, and common-sense to his conduct. On the contrary, he is naturally unreasonable and deceived. The parts of his inner mechanism are like the wheels of clock-work, which go of themselves, blindly, carried away by impulse and weight, and which yet sometimes, by virtue of a certain unison, end by indicating the hour. This final intelligent motion is not natural, but fortuitous; not spontaneous, but forced; not innate, but acquired. The clock did not always go regularly; on the contrary, it had to be regulated little by little, with much difficulty. Its regularity is not insured; it may go wrong at any time. Its regularity is not complete; it only approximately marks the time. The mechanical force of each piece is always ready to drag all the rest from their proper action, and to disarrange the whole agreement. So ideas, once in the mind, pull each their own way blindly and separately, and their imperfect agreement threatens confusion every moment. Strictly speaking, man is mad, as the body is ill, by nature; reason and health come to us as a momentary success, a lucky accident.[589] If we forget this, it is because we are now regulated, dulled, deadened, and because our internal motion has become gradually, by friction and reparation, half harmonized with the motion of things. But this is only a semblance; and the dangerous primitive forces remain untamed and independent under the order which seems to restrain them. Let a great danger arise, a revolution take place, they will break out and explode, almost as terribly as in earlier times. For an idea is not a mere inner mark, employed to designate one aspect of things, inert, always ready to fall into order with other similar ones, so as to make an exact whole. However it may be reduced and disciplined, it still retains a sensible tinge which shows its likeness to an hallucination; a degree of individual persistence which shows its likeness to a monomania; a network of singular affinities which shows its likeness to the ravings of delirium. Being such, it is beyond question the rudiment of a nightmare, a habit, an absurdity. Let it become once developed in its entirety, as its tendency leads it,[590] and you will find that it is essentially an active and complete image, a vision drawing along with it a train of dreams and sensations, which increases of itself, suddenly, by a sort of rank and absorbing growth, and which ends by possessing, shaking, exhausting the whole man. After this, another, perhaps entirely opposite, and so on successively: there is nothing else in man, no free and distinct power: he is in himself but the process of these headlong impulses and swarming imaginations: civilization has mutilated, attenuated, but not destroyed them; shocks, collisions, transports, sometimes at long intervals a sort of transient partial equilibrium: this is his real life, the life of a lunatic, who now and then simulates reason, but who is in reality "such stuff as dreams are made on";[591] and this is man, as Shakespeare has conceived him. No writer, not even Molière, has penetrated so far beneath the semblance of common-sense and logic in which the human machine is enclosed, in order to disentangle the brute powers which constitute its substance and its mainspring.

How did Shakespeare succeed? and by what extraordinary instinct did he divine the remote conclusions, the deepest insights of physiology and psychology? He had a complete imagination; his whole genius lies in that complete imagination. These words seem commonplace and void of meaning. Let us examine them closer, to understand what they contain. When we think a thing, we, ordinary men, we only think a part of it; we see one side, some isolated mark, sometimes two or three marks together; for what is beyond, our sight fails us; the infinite network of its infinitely complicated and multiplied properties escapes us; we feel vaguely that there is something beyond our shallow ken, and this vague suspicion is the only part of our idea which at all reveals to us the great beyond. We are like tyro naturalists, quiet people of limited understanding, who, wishing to represent an animal, recall its name and ticket in the museum, with some indistinct image of its hide and figure; but their mind stops there. If it so happens that they wish to complete their knowledge, they lead their memory, by regular classifications, over the principal characters of the animal, and slowly, discursively, piecemeal, bring at last the bare anatomy before their eyes. To this their idea is reduced, even when perfected; to this also most frequently is our conception reduced, even when elaborated. What a distance there is between this conception and the object, how imperfectly and meanly the one represents the other, to what extent this mutilates that; how the consecutive idea, disjoined in little, regularly arranged and inert fragments, resembles but slightly the organized, living thing, created simultaneously, ever in action, and ever transformed, words cannot explain. Picture to yourself, instead of this poor dry idea, propped up by a miserable mechanical linkwork of thought, the complete idea, that is, an inner representation, so abundant and full that it exhausts all the properties and relations of the object, all its inward and outward aspects; that it exhausts them instantaneously; that it conceives of the entire animal, its color, the play of the light upon its skin, its form, the quivering of its outstretched limbs, the flash of its eyes, and at the same time its passion of the moment, its excitement, its dash; and beyond this its instincts, their composition, their causes, their history; so that the hundred thousand characteristics which make up its condition and its nature find their analogues in the imagination which concentrates and reflects them: there you have the artist's conception, the poet's--Shakespeare's; so superior to that of the logician, of the mere savant or man of the world, the only one capable of penetrating to the very essence of existences, of extricating the inner from beneath the outer man, of feeling through sympathy, and imitating without effort, the irregular oscillation of human imaginations and impressions, of reproducing life with its infinite fluctuations, its apparent contradictions, its concealed logic; in short, to create as nature creates. This is what is done by the other artists of this age; they have the same kind of mind, and the same idea of life: you will find in Shakespeare only the same faculties, with a still stronger impulse; the same idea, with a still more prominent relief.

[Footnote 513: Fuller's "Worthies," ed. Nuttall, 1840, 3 vols. III. 284.]

[Footnote 514: There is a similar hallucination to be met with in the life of Lord Castlereagh, who afterwards committed suicide.]

[Footnote 515: His character lies between those of Fielding and Dr. Johnson.]

[Footnote 516: Mr. David Laing remarks, however, in Drummond's defence, that as "Jonson died August 6, 1637, Drummond survived till December 4, 1649, and no portion of these Notes (Conversations) were made public till 1711, or sixty-two years after Drummond's death, and seventy-four after Jonson's, which renders quite nugatory all Gifford's accusations of Drummond's having published them 'without shame.' As to Drummond decoying Jonson under his roof with any premeditated design on his reputation, as Mr. Campbell has remarked, no one can seriously believe it."--"Archæologica Scotica," vol. IV. page 243.—-Tr.]

[Footnote 517: At the age of forty-four he went to Scotland on foot.]

[Footnote 518: Parts of "Crites" and "Asper."]

[Footnote 519: "Every Man out of his Humour," I; Gifford's "Jonson," p. 30.]

[Footnote 520: Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. Bell, An Epistle Mendicant, to Richard, Lord Weston, Lord High Treasurer (1631), p. 244.]

[Footnote 521: "The Devil is an Ass."]

[Footnote 522: Sejanus, Catiline, passim.]

[Footnote 523: Alfred de Musset, preface to "La Coupe et les Lèvres." Plato: "Ion."]

[Footnote 524: Compare Sir Epicure Mammon with Baron Hulot from Balzac's "Cousine Bette." Balzac, who is learned like Jonson, creates real beings like Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 525: "Every Man out of his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 526: "Poetaster," I. 1.]

[Footnote 527: Ibid.]

[Footnote 528: See the second act of "Catiline."]

[Footnote 529: "The Fall of Sejanus," III. last scene.]

[Footnote 530: Ibid. II.]

[Footnote 531: "The Fall of Sejanus." II.]

[Footnote 532: See "Catiline," Act II; a very fine scene, no less plain spoken and animated, on the dissipation of the higher ranks in Rome.]

[Footnote 533: "The Fall of Sejanus," I.]

[Footnote 534: Ibid. IV.]

[Footnote 535: Ibid. III.]

[Footnote 536: "The Fall of Sejanus," V.]

[Footnote 537: "The Fall of Sejanus," V.]

[Footnote 538: Ibid.]

[Footnote 539: "Every Man in his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 540: Ibid.]

[Footnote 541: Ibid.]

[Footnote 542: "Every Man in his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 543: Compare "Volpone" with Regnard's "Légataire"; the end of the sixteenth with the beginning of the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 544: "Volpone," I. 1.]

[Footnote 545: "Volpone," I. 1.]

[Footnote 546: Ibid. I. 3.]

[Footnote 547: Ibid.]

[Footnote 548: "Volpone," I. 4.]

[Footnote 549: "Volpone," I. 4.]

[Footnote 550: Ibid. I. 5.]

[Footnote 551: "Volpone," I. 5.]

[Footnote 552: Ibid. II. 2.]

[Footnote 553: Ibid.]

[Footnote 554: "Volpone," III. 5. We pray reader to pardon us for Ben Jonson's broadness. If I omit it, I cannot depict the sixteenth century. Grant the same the indulgence to the historian as to the anatomist.]

[Footnote 555: Ibid.]

[Footnote 556: "Volpone," III. 5.]

[Footnote 557: "Volpone" IV. 1.]

[Footnote 558: Ibid. V. 1.]

[Footnote 559: "Volpone," V. 1.]

[Footnote 560: Ibid. V. 8.]

[Footnote 561: "Epicœne," III. 2.]

[Footnote 562: Ibid. III. 2.]

[Footnote 563: Compare M. de Pourceaugnac in Molière.]

[Footnote 564: "Epicœne," IV. I, 2.]

[Footnote 565: Ibid. V.]

[Footnote 566: Compare Polichinelle in "Le Malade imaginaire"; Géronte in "Les Fourberies de Scapin."]

[Footnote 567: Compare "L'École des Femmes, Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois-gentilhomme, Le Malade imaginaire, Georges Dandin."]

[Footnote 568: Compare "Les Fourberies de Scapin."]

[Footnote 569: Compare "Les Fâcheux."]

[Footnote 570: Compare "Les Précieuses Ridicules."]

[Footnote 571: Compare the plays of Destouches.]

[Footnote 572: By Diana, Queen Elizabeth is meant.]

[Footnote 573: "Cynthia's Revels," I. 1.]

[Footnote 574: Ibid.]

[Footnote 575: "Cynthia's Revels," I. 1.]

[Footnote 576: Ibid. V. 2.]

[Footnote 577: Ibid. I. 1.]

[Footnote 578: Ibid. V. 3.]

[Footnote 579: "Cynthia's Revels," last scene.]

[Footnote 580: Celebration of Charis; "Miscellaneous Poems."]

[Footnote 581: "Masque of Beauty."]

[Footnote 582: "The Sad Shepherd," I. 2.]

[Footnote 583: "The Sad Shepherd," III. 2.]

[Footnote 584: This idea may be expanded psychologically: external perception, memory, are real hallucinations, etc. This is the analytical aspect: under another aspect reason and health are the natural goals.]

[Footnote 585: See Spinoza and Dugald Stewart: Conception in its natural state is belief.]

[Footnote 586: "Tempest," IV. 1.]

CHAPTER FOURTH

Shakespeare

I am about to describe an extraordinary species of mind, perplexing to all the French modes of analysis and reasoning, all-powerful, excessive, master of the sublime as well as of the base; the most creative mind that ever engaged in the exact copy of the details of actual existence, in the dazzling caprice of fancy, in the profound complications of superhuman passions; a nature poetical, immoral, inspired, superior to reason by the sudden revelations of its seer's madness; so extreme in joy and grief, so abrupt of gait, so agitated and impetuous, in its transports, that this great age alone could have cradled such a child.