Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist
by Richard G. Moulton · English · Gutenberg #43435 · 677,322 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist
Author: Richard G. Moulton
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Transcriber's note.
Minor punctuation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. Variable
spelling has been retained. A list of the changes made can be found at
the end of the book. In the Index of Scenes, clarendon typeface is
indicated as bold. Sidenotes are presented [within square brackets].
Mark up: _italic_
=bold=
SHAKESPEARE AS A DRAMATIC ARTIST
_MOULTON_
London
HENRY FROWDE
[Illustration]
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE
AMEN CORNER, E.C.
SHAKESPEARE AS A DRAMATIC ARTIST
A POPULAR ILLUSTRATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM
BY RICHARD G. MOULTON, M.A.
LATE SCHOLAR OF CHRIST'S COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY (EXTENSION)
LECTURER IN LITERATURE
Oxford
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1885
[_All rights reserved_]
PREFACE.
I HAVE had three objects before me in writing this book. The first
concerns the general reader. 'No one needs assistance in order to
perceive Shakespeare's greatness; but an impression is not uncommonly to
be found, especially amongst English readers, that Shakespeare's
greatness lies mainly in his deep knowledge of human nature, while, as
to the technicalities of Dramatic Art, he is at once careless of them
and too great to need them. I have endeavoured to combat this impression
by a series of Studies of Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist. They are
chiefly occupied with a few master-strokes of art, sufficient to
illustrate the revolution Shakespeare created in the Drama of the
world--a revolution not at once perceived simply because it had carried
the Drama at a bound so far beyond Dramatic Criticism that the
appreciation of Shakespeare's plays was left to the uninstructed public,
while the trained criticism that ought to have recognised the new
departure was engaged in clamouring for other views of dramatic
treatment, which it failed to perceive that Shakespeare had rendered
obsolete.
While the earlier chapters are taken up with these Studies, the rest of
the work is an attempt, in very brief form, to present Dramatic Criticism
as a regular Inductive Science. If I speak of this as a new branch of
Science I am not ignoring the great works on Shakespeare-Criticism which
already exist, the later of which have treated their subject in an
inductive spirit. What these still leave wanting is a _recognition_ of
method in application to the study of the Drama: my purpose is to claim
for Criticism a position amongst the Inductive Sciences, and to sketch
in outline a plan for the Dramatic side of such a Critical Science.
A third purpose has been to make the work of use as an educational
manual. Shakespeare now enters into every scheme of liberal education;
but the annotated editions of his works give the student little
assistance except in the explanation of language and allusions; and the
idea, I believe, prevails that anything like the discussion of literary
characteristics or dramatic effect is out of place in an educational
work--is, indeed, too 'indefinite' to be 'examined on.' Ten years'
experience in connection with the Cambridge University Extension, during
which my work has been to teach literature apart from philology, has
confirmed my impression that the subject-matter of literature, its
exposition and analysis from the sides of science, history, and art, is
as good an educational discipline as it is intrinsically valuable in
quickening literary appreciation.
There are two special features of the book to which I may here draw
attention. Where practicable, I have appended in the margin references
to the passages of Shakespeare on which my discussion is based. (These
references are to the Globe Edition.) I have thus hoped to reduce to a
minimum the element of personal opinion, and to give to my treatment at
least that degree of definiteness which arises when a position stands
side by side with the evidence supporting it. I have also endeavoured to
meet a practical difficulty in the use of Shakespeare-Criticism as an
educational subject. It is usual in educational schemes to name single
plays of Shakespeare for study. Experience has convinced me that
methodical study of the subject-matter is not possible within the
compass of a single play. On the other hand, few persons in the
educational stage of life can have the detailed knowledge of
Shakespeare's plays as a whole which is required for a full treatment of
the subject. The present work is so arranged that it assumes knowledge
of only five plays--_The Merchant of Venice_, _Richard III_, _Macbeth_,
_Julius Cæsar_, and _King Lear_. Not only in the Studies, but also in
the final review, the matter introduced is confined to what can be
illustrated out of these five plays. These are amongst the most familiar
of the Shakespearean Dramas, or they can be easily read before
commencing the book; and if the arrangement is a limitation involving a
certain amount of repetition, yet I believe the gain will be greater
than the loss. For the young student, at all events, it affords an
opportunity of getting what will be the best of all introductions to the
whole subject--a thorough knowledge of five plays.
In passing the book through the press I have received material
assistance from my brother, Dr. Moulton, Master of the Leys School, and
from my College friend, Mr. Joseph Jacobs. With the latter, indeed, I
have discussed the work in all its stages, and have been under continual
obligation to his stores of knowledge and critical grasp in all
departments of literary study. I cannot even attempt to name the many
friends--chiefly fellow-workers in the University Extension
Movement--through whose active interest in my Shakespeare teaching I
have been encouraged to seek for it publication.
RICHARD G. MOULTON.
_April, 1885._
CONTENTS.
=INTRODUCTION.=
PLEA FOR AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE OF LITERARY CRITICISM.
=PART FIRST.=
SHAKESPEARE CONSIDERED AS A DRAMATIC ARTIST, _IN TEN STUDIES_.
I.
THE TWO STORIES SHAKESPEARE BORROWS FOR HIS 'MERCHANT OF VENICE.'
PAGE
_A Study in the Raw Material of the Romantic Drama_. 43
II.
_How Shakespeare Improves the Stories in the Telling_.
_A Study in Dramatic Workmanship_. 58
III.
HOW SHAKESPEARE MAKES HIS PLOT MORE COMPLEX IN ORDER TO MAKE IT MORE
SIMPLE.
_A Study in Underplot_. 74
IV.
A PICTURE OF IDEAL VILLANY IN 'RICHARD III.'
_A Study in Character-Interpretation_. 90
V.
'RICHARD III': HOW SHAKESPEARE WEAVES NEMESIS INTO HISTORY.
_A Study in Plot_. 107
VI.
HOW NEMESIS AND DESTINY ARE INTERWOVEN IN 'MACBETH.'
_A further Study in Plot_. 125
VII.
MACBETH, LORD AND LADY.
_A Study in Character-Contrast_. 144
VIII.
JULIUS CÆSAR BESIDE HIS MURDERERS AND HIS AVENGER.
_A Study in Character-Grouping_. 168
IX.
HOW THE PLAY OF 'JULIUS CÆSAR' WORKS UP TO A CLIMAX
AT THE CENTRE.
_A Study in Passion and Movement_. 185
X.
HOW CLIMAX MEETS CLIMAX IN THE CENTRE OF 'LEAR.'
_A Study in more complex Passion and Movement_. 202
=PART SECOND.=
SURVEY OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM AS AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE.
XI.
TOPICS OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM. 227
XII.
INTEREST OF CHARACTER. 237
XIII.
INTEREST OF PASSION. 246
XIV.
INTEREST OF PLOT. 268
INTRODUCTION.
_PLEA FOR AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE OF LITERARY CRITICISM._
INTRODUCTION.
[_Proposition._]
IN the treatment of literature the proposition which seems to stand most
in need of assertion at the present moment is, _that there is an
inductive science of literary criticism_. As botany deals inductively
with the phenomena of vegetable life and traces the laws underlying
them, as economy reviews and systematises on inductive principles the
facts of commerce, so there is a criticism not less inductive in
character which has for its subject-matter literature.
* * * * *
[_Presumption in favour of inductive literary criticism._]
The presumption is clearly that literary criticism should follow other
branches of thought in becoming inductive. Ultimately, science means no
more than organised thought; and amongst the methods of organisation
induction is the most practical. To begin with the observation of facts;
to advance from this through the arrangement of observed facts; to use
_à priori_ ideas, instinctive notions of the fitness of things, insight
into far probabilities, only as side-lights for suggesting convenient
arrangements, the value of which is tested only by the actual
convenience in arranging they afford; to be content with the sure
results so obtained as 'theory' in the interval of waiting for still
surer results based on a yet wider accumulation of facts: this is a
regimen for healthy science so widely established in different tracts of
thought as almost to rise to that universal acceptance which we call
common sense. Indeed the whole progress of science consists in winning
fresh fields of thought to the inductive methods.
[_Current conceptions of criticism coloured by notions other than
inductive._]
Yet the great mass of literary criticism at the present moment is of a
nature widely removed from induction. The prevailing notions of
criticism are dominated by the idea of _assaying_, as if its function
were to test the soundness and estimate the comparative value of
literary work. Lord Macaulay, than whom no one has a better right to be
heard on this subject, compares his office of reviewer to that of a
king-at-arms, versed in the laws of literary precedence, marshalling
authors to the exact seats to which they are entitled. And, as a matter
of fact, the bulk of literary criticism, whether in popular conversation
or in discussions by professed critics, occupies itself with the merits
of authors and works; founding its estimates and arguments on canons of
taste, which are either assumed as having met with general acceptance,
or deduced from speculations as to fundamental conceptions of literary
beauty.
[_Criticism judicial and inductive. The two distinguished._]
It becomes necessary then to recognise two different kinds of literary
criticism, as distinct as any two things that can be called by the same
name. The difference between the two may be summed up as the difference
between the work of a _judge_ and of an _investigator_. The one is the
enquiry into what ought to be, the other the enquiry into what is.
Judicial criticism compares a new production with those already existing
in order to determine whether it is inferior to them or surpasses them;
criticism of investigation makes the same comparison for the purpose of
identifying the new product with some type in the past, or
differentiating it and registering a new type. Judicial criticism has a
mission to watch against variations from received canons; criticism of
investigation watches for new forms to increase its stock of species.
The criticism of taste analyses literary works for grounds of preference
or evidence on which to found judgments; inductive criticism analyses
them to get a closer acquaintance with their phenomena.
Let the question be of Ben Jonson. Judicial criticism starts by holding
Ben Jonson responsible for the decay of the English Drama.
Inductive criticism takes objection to the word 'decay' as suggesting
condemnation, but recognises Ben Jonson as the beginner of a new
tendency in our dramatic history.
But, judicial criticism insists, the object of the Drama is to pourtray
human nature, whereas Ben Jonson has painted not men but caricatures.
Induction sees that this formula cannot be a sufficient definition of
the Drama, for the simple reason that it does not take in Ben Jonson;
its own mode of putting the matter is that Ben Jonson has founded a
school of treatment of which the law is caricature.
But Ben Jonson's caricatures are palpably impossible.
Induction soon satisfies itself that their point lies in their
impossibility; they constitute a new mode of pourtraying qualities of
character, not by resemblance, but by analysing and intensifying
contrasts to make them clearer.
Judicial criticism can see how the poet was led astray; the bent of his
disposition induced him to sacrifice dramatic propriety to his satiric
purpose.
Induction has another way of putting the matter: that the poet
has utilised dramatic form for satiric purpose; thus by the
'cross-fertilisation' of two existing literary species he has added to
literature a third including features of both.
At all events, judicial criticism will maintain, it must be admitted
that the Shakespearean mode of pourtraying is infinitely the higher: a
sign-painter, as Macaulay points out, can imitate a deformity of
feature, while it takes a great artist to bring out delicate shades of
expression.
Inductive treatment knows nothing about higher or lower, which lie
outside the domain of science. Its point is that science is indebted to
Ben Jonson for a new species; if the new species be an easier form of
art it does not on that account lose its claim to be analysed.
The critic of merit can always fall back upon taste: who would not
prefer Shakespeare to Ben Jonson?
But even from this point of view scientific treatment can plead its own
advantages. The inductive critic reaps to the full the interest of Ben
Jonson, to which the other has been forcibly closing his eyes; while, so
far from liking Shakespeare the less, he appreciates all the more keenly
Shakespeare's method of treatment from his familiarity with that which
is its antithesis.
[_The two criticisms confused:_]
It must be conceded at once that both these kinds of criticism have
justified their existence. Judicial criticism has long been established
as a favourite pursuit of highly cultivated minds; while the criticism
of induction can shelter itself under the authority of science in
general, seeing that it has for its object to bring the treatment of
literature into the circle of the inductive sciences. [_conception of
critical method limited to judicial method._] It is unfortunate,
however, that the spheres of the two have not been kept distinct. In the
actual practice of criticism the judicial method has obtained an
illegitimate supremacy which has thrown the other into the shade; it has
even invaded the domain of the criticism that claims to be scientific,
until the word _criticism_ itself has suffered, and the methodical
treatment of literature has by tacit assumption become limited in idea
to the judicial method.
[_Partly a survival of Renaissance influence:_]
Explanation for this limited conception of criticism is not far to seek.
Modern criticism took its rise before the importance of induction was
recognised: it lags behind other branches of thought in adapting itself
to inductive treatment chiefly through two influences. The first of
these is connected with the revival of literature after the darkness of
the middle ages. The birth of thought and taste in modern Europe was the
Renaissance of classical thought and taste; by Roman and Greek
philosophy and poetry the native powers of our ancestors were trained
till they became strong enough to originate for themselves. It was
natural for their earliest criticism to take the form of applying the
classical standards to their own imitations: [_and its testing by
classical models._] now we have advanced so far that no one would
propose to test exclusively by classical models, but nevertheless the
idea of _testing_ still lingers as the root idea in the treatment of
literature. Other branches of thought have completely shaken off this
attitude of submission to the past: literary criticism differs from the
rest only in being later to move. This is powerfully suggested by the
fact that so recent a writer as Addison couples science in general with
criticism in his estimate of probable progress; laying down the
startling proposition that 'it is impossible for us who live in the
later ages of the world to make observations in criticism, in morality,
_or in any art or science_, which have not been touched upon by others'!
[_Partly the methods of journalism have invaded systematic criticism._]
And even for this lateness a second influence goes far to account. The
grand literary phenomenon of modern times is journalism, the huge
apparatus of floating literature of which leading object is to review
literature itself. The vast increase of production consequent upon the
progress of printing has made production itself a phenomenon worthy of
study, and elevated the sifting of production into a prominent literary
occupation; by the aid of book-tasters alone can the ordinary reader
keep pace with production. It is natural enough that the influence of
journalism should pass beyond its natural sphere, and that the review
should tend to usurp the position of the literature for which reviewing
exists. Now in journalism testing and valuation of literary work have a
real and important place. It has thus come about that in the great
preponderance of ephemeral over permanent literature the machinery
adapted to the former has become applied to the latter: methods proper
to journalism have settled the popular conception of systematic
treatment; and the bias already given to criticism by the Renaissance
has been strengthened to resist the tendency of all kinds of thought
towards inductive methods.
[_The limitation defended: theory of taste as condensed experience._]
History will thus account for the way in which the criticism of taste
and valuation tends to be identified with criticism in general: but
attempts are not wanting to give the identification a scientific basis.
Literary appreciation, it is said, is a thing of culture. A critic in
the reviewer's sense is one who has the literary faculty both originally
acute and developed by practice: he thus arrives quickly and with
certainty at results which others would reach laboriously and after
temporary misjudgments. Taste, however arbitrary in appearance, is in
reality condensed experience; judicial criticism is a wise economy of
appreciation, the purpose of which is to anticipate natural selection
and universal experience. He is a good critic who, by his keen and
practised judgment, can tell you at once the view of authors and works
which you would yourself come to hold with sufficient study and
experience.
[_The theory examined. The judicial spirit a limit on appreciation._]
Now in the first place there is a flaw in this reasoning: it omits to
take into account that the judicial attitude of mind is itself a barrier
to appreciation, as being opposed to that delicacy of receptiveness
which is a first condition of sensibility to impressions of literature
and art. It is a matter of commonest experience that appreciation may be
interfered with by prejudice, by a passing unfavourable mood, or even by
uncomfortable external surroundings. But it is by no means sufficient
that the reader of literature should divest himself of these passive
hindrances to appreciation: poets are pioneers in beauty, and
considerable activity of effort is required to keep pace with them.
Repetition may be necessary to catch effects--passages to be read over
and over again, more than one author of the same school to be studied,
effect to be compared with kindred effect each helping the other. Or an
explanation from one who has already caught the idea may turn the mind
into a receptive attitude. Training again is universally recognised as a
necessity for appreciation, and to train is to make receptive. [_On the
other hand sympathy the great interpreter._] Beyond all these conditions
of perception, and including them, is yet another. It is a foundation
principle in art-culture, as well as in human intercourse, that
_sympathy is the grand interpreter_: secrets of beauty will unfold
themselves to the sunshine of sympathy, while they will wrap themselves
all the closer against the tempest of sceptical questionings. Now a
judicial attitude of mind is highly unreceptive, for it necessarily
implies a restraint of sympathy: every one, remarks Hogarth, is a judge
of painting except the connoisseur. The judicial mind has an appearance
of receptiveness, because it seeks to shut out prejudice: but what if
the idea of judging be itself a prejudice? On this view the very
consciousness of fairness, involving as it does limitation of sympathy,
will be itself unfair. In practical life, where we have to act, the
formation of judgments is a necessity. In art we can escape the
obligation, and here the judicial spirit becomes a wanton addition to
difficulties of appreciation already sufficiently great; the mere notion
of condemning may be enough to check our receptivity to qualities which,
as we have seen, it may need our utmost effort to catch. So that the
judicial attitude of mind comes to defeat its own purpose, and disturbs
unconsciously the impression it seeks to judge; until, as Emerson puts
it, 'if you criticise a fine genius the odds are that you are out of
your reckoning, and instead of the poet are censuring your caricature of
him.'
[_The theory refuted by experience: the history of criticism a triumph
of authors over critics._]
But the appeal made is to experience: to experience let it go. It will
be found that, speaking broadly, _the whole history of criticism has
been a triumph of authors over critics_: so long as criticism has meant
the gauging of literature, so long its progress has consisted in the
reversal of critical judgments by further experience. I hesitate to
enlarge upon this part of my subject lest I be inflicting upon the
reader the tedium of a thrice-told tale. But I believe that the ordinary
reader, however familiar with notable blunders of criticism, has little
idea of that which is the essence of my argument--the degree of
regularity, amounting to absolute law, with which criticism, where it
has set itself in opposition to freedom of authorship, has been found in
time to have pronounced upon the wrong side, and has, after infinite
waste of obstructive energy, been compelled at last to accept
innovations it had pronounced impossible under penalty of itself
becoming obsolete.
[_Case of the Shakespearean Drama: retiring waves of critical
opposition._]
Shakespeare-criticism affords the most striking illustration. Its
history is made up of wave after wave of critical opposition, each
retiring further before the steady advance of Shakespeare's fame. They
may almost be traced in the varying apologetic tones of the successive
_Variorum_ editors, until Reed, in the edition of 1803, is content to
leave the poet's renown as established on a basis which will 'bid
defiance to the caprices of fashion and the canker of time.' [I.
_Unmeasured attack._] The first wave was one of unmeasured virulent
attack. Rymer, accepted in his own day as the champion of 'regular'
criticism, and pronounced by Pope one of the best critics England ever
had, says that in Tragedy Shakespeare appears quite out of his element:
His brains are turned; he raves and rambles without any coherence,
any spark of reason, or any rule to control him or set bounds to his
phrensy.
The shouting and battles of his scenes are necessary to keep the
audience awake, 'otherwise no sermon would be so strong an opiate.'
Again:
In the neighing of an horse, or in the growling of a mastiff, there
is a meaning, there is as lively an expression, and, may I say, more
humanity, than many times in the tragical flights of Shakespeare.
The famous Suggestion Scene in _Othello_ has, in Rymer's view, no point
but 'the mops, the mows, the grimace, the grins, the gesticulation.' On
Desdemona's
O good Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
he remarks that no woman bred out of a pig-stye would talk so meanly.
Speaking of Portia he says, 'she is scarce one remove from a natural,
she is own cousin-german, of one piece, the very same impertinent flesh
and blood with Desdemona.' And Rymer's general verdict of
_Othello_--which he considers the best of Shakespeare's tragedies--is
thus summed up:
There is in this play some burlesque, some humour and ramble of
comical wit, some show and some mimicry to divert the spectators:
but the tragical part is plainly none other than a bloody farce,
without salt or savour.
In the eighteenth century Lord Lansdowne, writing on 'Unnatural Flights
in Poetry,' could refuse to go into the question of Shakespeare's
soliloquies, as being assured that 'not one in all his works could be
excused by reason or nature.' The same tone was still later kept up by
Voltaire, who calls Shakespeare a writer of monstrous farces called
tragedies; says that nature had blended in him all that is most great
and elevating with all the basest qualities that belong to barbarousness
without genius; and finally proceeds to call his poetry the fruit of the
imagination of an intoxicated savage. [2. _The Shakespearean Drama held
inadmissible, yet attractive._]--Meanwhile a second wave of opinion had
arisen, not conceiving a doubt as to the total inadmissibility of the
Shakespearean Drama, yet feeling its attraction. This is perhaps most
exactly illustrated in the forgotten critic Edwards, who ruled that
'poor Shakespeare'--the expression his own--must be excluded from the
number of good tragedians, yet 'as Homer from the Republic of Plato,
with marks of distinction and veneration.' But before this the more
celebrated dramatists of the Restoration had shown the double feeling in
the way they reconstructed Shakespeare's plays, and turned them into
'correct' dramas. Thus Otway made the mediæval Capulets and Montagus
presentable by giving them a classical dress as followers of Marius and
Sulla; and even Dryden joined in a polite version of _The Tempest_, with
an original touch for symmetry's sake in the addition to the heroine
Miranda, a maid who had never seen a man, of a suitable hero, a man who
had never seen a maid. [3. _The Shakespearean Drama admitted with
excuses._]--Against loud abuse and patronising reconstruction the silent
power of Shakespeare's works made itself more and more felt, and we
reach a third stage when the Shakespearean Drama is accepted as it
stands, but with excuses. Excuse is made for the poet's age, in which
the English nation was supposed to be struggling to emerge from
barbarism. Heywood's apology for uniting light and serious matter is
allowed, that 'they who write to all must strive to please all.' Pope
points out that Shakespeare was dependent for his subsistence on
pleasing the taste of tradesmen and mechanics; and that his 'wrong
choice of subjects' and 'wrong conduct of incidents,' his 'false
thoughts and forced expressions' are the result of his being forced to
please the lowest of the people and keep the worst of company. Similarly
Theobald considers that he schemed his plots and characters from
romances simply for want of classical information. [4. _The
Shakespearean Drama not felt to need defence as a whole, but praised and
blamed in its parts._]--With the last name we pass to yet another
school, with whom Shakespeare's work as a whole is not felt to need
defence, and the old spirit survives only in their distribution of
praise and blame amongst its different parts. Theobald opens his preface
with the comparison of the Shakespearean Drama to a splendid pile of
buildings, with 'some parts finished up to hit the taste of a
connoisseur, others more negligently put together to strike the fancy of
a common beholder.' Pope--who reflects the most various schools of
criticism, often on successive pages--illustrates this stage in his
remark that Shakespeare has excellences that have elevated him above all
others, and almost as many defects; 'as he has certainly written better
so he has perhaps written worse than any other.' Dr. Johnson sets out by
describing Shakespeare as 'having begun to assume the dignity of an
ancient'--the highest commendation in his eyes. But he goes on to point
out the inferiority of Shakespeare's Tragedy to his Comedy, the former
the outcome of skill rather than instinct, with little felicity and
always leaving something wanting; how he seems without moral purpose,
letting his precepts and axioms drop casually from him, dismissing his
personages without further care, and leaving the examples to operate by
chance; how his plots are so loosely formed that they might easily be
improved, his set speeches cold and weak, his incidents imperfectly told
in many words which might be more plainly described in few. Then in the
progress of his commentary, he irritates the reader, as Hallam points
out, by the magisterial manner in which he dismisses each play like a
schoolboy's exercise. [5. _Finally criticism comes round entirely to
Shakespeare._]--At last comes a revolution in criticism and a new order
of things arises: with Lessing to lead the way in Germany and Coleridge
in England, a school of critics appear who are in complete harmony with
their author, who question him only to learn the secrets of his art. The
new spirit has not even yet leavened the whole of the literary world;
but such names as Goethe, Tieck, Schlegel, Victor Hugo, Ulrici, Gervinus
suggest how many great reputations have been made, and reputations
already great have been carried into a new sphere of greatness, by the
interpretation and unfolding of Shakespeare's greatness: not one critic
has in recent years risen to eminence by attacking Shakespeare.
[_Other examples._]
And the Shakespearean Drama is only the most illustrious example of
authors triumphing over the criticism that attempted to judge them.
[_Milton._] It is difficult for a modern reader to believe that even
Rymer could refer to the _Paradise Lost_ as 'what some are pleased to
call a poem'; or that Dr. Johnson could assert of the minor poems of
Milton that they exhibit 'peculiarity as distinguished from excellence,'
'if they differ from others they differ for the worse.' He says of
_Comus_ that it is 'inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive';
and of _Lycidas_, that its diction is harsh, its rhymes uncertain, its
numbers unpleasing, that 'in this poem there is no nature for there is
no truth, there is no art for there is nothing new,' that it is 'easy,
vulgar, and therefore disgusting,'--after which he goes through the
different parts of the poem to show what Milton should have done in
each. Hallam has pointed out how utterly impotent Dr. Johnson has been
to fix the public taste in the case of these poems; yet even Hallam
could think the verse of the poet who wrote _Paradise Lost_ sufficiently
described by the verdict, 'sometimes wanting in grace and almost always
in ease.' [_Shakespeare's Sonnets._] In the light of modern taste it is
astonishing indeed to find Steevens, with his devotion of a lifetime to
Shakespeare, yet omitting the Sonnets from the edition of 1793, 'because
the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would not compel
readers into their service.' [_Spenser._] It is equally astonishing to
find Dryden speaking of Spenser's 'ill choice of stanza,' and saying of
the _Faerie Queene_ that if completed it might have been more of a
piece, but it could not be perfect, because its model was not true: an
example followed up in the next century by a 'person of quality,' who
translated a book of the _Faerie Queene_ out of its 'obsolete language
and manner of verse' into heroic couplets. [_Gray._] I pass over the
crowd of illustrations, such as the fate of Gray at the hands of Dr.
Johnson, [_Keats._] of Keats at the hands of monthly and quarterly
reviewers, [_Waverley Novels._] or of the various Waverley Novels
capriciously selected by different critics as examples of literary
suicide. But we have not yet had time to forget how Jeffrey--one of the
greatest names in criticism--set in motion the whole machinery of
reviewing in order to put down Wordsworth. [_Wordsworth._] Wordsworth's
most elaborate poem he describes as a 'tissue of moral and devotional
ravings,' a 'hubbub of strained raptures and fantastical sublimities':
his 'effusions on ... the physiognomy of external nature' he
characterises as 'eminently fantastic, obscure, and affected.' Then, to
find a climax, he compares different species of Wordsworth's poetry to
the various stages of intoxication: his Odes are 'glorious delirium' and
'incoherent rapture,' his Lyrical Ballads a 'vein of pretty deliration,'
his _White Doe_ is 'low and maudlin imbecility.' Not a whit the less has
the influence of Wordsworth deepened and solidified; and if all are not
yet prepared to accept him as the apostle of a new religion, yet he has
tacitly secured his place in the inner circle of English poets. In fine,
the work of modern criticism is seriously blocked by the perpetual
necessity of revising and reversing what this same Jeffrey calls the
'impartial and irreversible sentences' of criticism in the past. And as
a set-off in the opposite scale only one considerable achievement is to
be noted: [_Robert Montgomery._] that journalism afforded a medium for
Macaulay to quench the light of Robert Montgomery, which, on Macaulay's
own showing, journalism had puffed into a flame.
[_Defeat of criticism in the great literary questions._]
It is the same with the great literary questions that have from time to
time arisen, the pitched battles of criticism: as Goldsmith says, there
never has been an unbeaten path trodden by the poet that the critic has
not endeavoured to recall him by calling his attempt an innovation.
[_Blank verse._] Criticism set its face steadily from the first against
blank verse in English poetry. The interlocutors in Dryden's _Essay on
the Drama_ agree that it is vain to strive against the stream of the
people's inclination, won over as they have been by Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher; but, as they go on to discuss the rights
of the matter, the most remarkable thing to a modern reader is that the
defence of blank verse is made to rest only on the colloquial character
of dramatic poetry, and neither party seems to conceive the possibility
of non-dramatic poetry other than in rhyme. Before Dryden's _Essay on
Satire_ the _Paradise Lost_ had made its appearance; but so impossible
an idea is literary novelty to the 'father of English criticism' that
Dryden in this Essay refuses to believe Milton's own account of the
matter, saying that, whatever reasons Milton may allege for departing
from rhyme, 'his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was
not his talent, he has neither the ease of doing it nor the graces of
it.' To one so steeped in French fashions as Rymer, poetry that lacks
rhyme seems to lack everything; many of Shakespeare's scenes might, he
says, do better without words at all, or at most the words set off the
action like the drone of a bagpipe. Voltaire estimates blank verse at
about the same rate, and having to translate some of Shakespeare's for
purposes of exact comparison, he remarks that blank verse costs nothing
but the trouble of dictating, that it is not more difficult to write
than a letter. Dr. Johnson finds a theoretic argument in the unmusical
character of English poetry to prove the impossibility of its ever
adapting itself to the conditions of blank verse, and is confident
enough to prophesy: 'poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English
poetry will not often please.' Even Byron is found only one degree more
tolerant than Dryden: he has the grace to except Milton from his dictum
that no one ever wrote blank verse who could rhyme. Thus critical taste,
critical theory, and critical prophecy were unanimous against blank
verse as an English measure: for all that it has become the leading
medium of English poetry, and a doubter of to-day would be more likely
to doubt the permanence of English rhyme than of English blank verse.
[_The 'three unities':_] As to the famous 'three unities,' not only the
principles themselves, but even the refutation of them has now become
obsolete. Yet this stickling for the unities has been merely the chief
amongst many examples of the proneness the critical mind has exhibited
towards limiting literary appreciation and production by single
standards of taste. [_and limitations by still narrower classical
standards._] The same tone of mind that contended for the classical
unities had in an earlier generation contended for the classical
languages as the sole vehicle of literary expression, and the modern
languages of Europe had to assert their rights by hard fighting. In
Latin literature itself a more successful attempt has been made to limit
taste by the writers of a single period, the Augustan age, and so
construct a list of Latin poets which omits Lucretius. And for a short
period of the Renaissance movement the limitation was carried further to
a single one of the Augustan writers, and 'Ciceronianism' struggled hard
against the freedom of style it chose to nickname 'Apuleianism,' till it
fell itself before the laughter of Erasmus. [_Criticism failing to
distinguish the permanent and transitory._] It would seem almost to be a
radical law of the critical temperament that admiration for the past
paralyses faith in the future; while criticism proves totally unable to
distinguish between what has been essential in the greatness of its
idols and what has been as purely accidental as, to use Scott's
illustration, the shape of the drinking-glass is to the flavour of the
wine it contains. And if criticism has thus failed in distinguishing
what is permanent in past literature, it has proved equally mistaken in
what it has assumed to be accidental and transitory. Early commentators
on Shakespeare, whatever scruples they may have had upon other points,
had no misgivings in condemning the irregularities of his English and
correcting his grammar. This was described as obsolete by Dryden half a
century after the poet's death; while it is delicious to hear Steevens,
in the Advertisement to his edition of 1766, mentioning that 'some have
been of opinion that even a particular syntax prevailed in the time of
Shakespeare'--a novel suggestion he promptly rejects. If the two could
have lived each a century later, Dryden would have found Malone laying
down that Shakespeare had been the great purifyer and refiner of our
language, and Steevens would have seen Shakespeare's grammar studied
with the same minuteness and reduced to the same regular form as the
grammar of his commentators and readers; while one of the most
distinguished of our modern grammarians, instituting a comparison
between Elizabethan and nineteenth century English, fancies the
representative of the old-fashioned tongue characterising current speech
in the words of Sebastian:
Surely
It is a sleepy language!
[_Critical works where inductive retain their force, where judicial have
become obsolete._]
The critics may themselves be called as chief witnesses against
themselves. Those parts of their works in which they apply themselves to
analysing and interpreting their authors survive in their full force:
where they judge, find fault, and attempt to regulate, they inevitably
become obsolete. Aristotle, the founder of all criticism, is for the
most part inductive in his method, describing poetry as it existed in
his day, distinguishing its different classes and elements, and
tabulating its usages: accordingly Aristotle's treatise, though more
than two thousand years old, remains the text-book of the Greek Drama.
In some places, however, he diverges from his main purpose, as in the
final chapter, in which he raises the question whether Epic or Tragic is
more excellent, or where he promises a special treatise to discuss
whether Tragedy is yet perfect: here he has for modern readers only the
interest of curiosity. Dr. Johnson's analysis of 'metaphysical poetry,'
Addison's development of the leading effects in _Paradise Lost_, remain
as true and forcible to-day as when they were written: Addison
constructing an order of merit for English poets with Cowley and Sprat
at the head, Dr. Johnson lecturing Shakespeare and Milton as to how they
ought to have written--these are to us only odd anachronisms. It is like
a contest with atomic force, this attempt at using ideas drawn from the
past to mould and limit productive power in the present and future. The
critic peers into the dimness of history, and is found to have been
blind to what was by his side: Boileau strives to erect a throne of
Comedy for Terence, and never suspects that a truer king was at hand in
his own personal friend Molière. It is in vain for critics to denounce,
their denunciation recoils on themselves: the sentence of Rymer that
the soul of modern Drama was a brutish and not a reasonable soul, or of
Voltaire, that Shakespeare's Tragedy would not be tolerated by the
lowest French mob, can harm none but Rymer and Voltaire. If the critics
venture to prophesy, the sequel is the only refutation of them needed;
if they give reasons, the reasons survive only to explain how the
critics were led astray; if they lay down laws, literary greatness in
the next generation is found to vary directly with the boldness with
which authors violate the laws. If they assume a judicial attitude, the
judgment-seat becomes converted into a pillory for the judge, and a
comic side to literary history is furnished by the mockery with which
time preserves the proportions of things, as seen by past criticism, to
be laid side by side with the true perspective revealed by actual
history. In such wise it has preserved to us the list of 'poets
laureate' who preceded Southey: Shadwell, Tate, Rowe, Eusden, Cibber,
Whitehead, Warton, Pye. It reveals Dryden sighing that Spenser could
only have read the rules of Bossu, or smitten with a doubt whether he
might not after all excuse Milton's use of blank verse 'by the example
of Hannibal Caro'; Rymer preferring Ben Jonson's _Catiline_ to all the
tragedies of the Elizabethan age, and declaring Waller's _Poem on the
Navy Royal_ beyond all modern poetry in any language; Voltaire wondering
that the extravagances of Shakespeare could be tolerated by a nation
that had seen Addison's _Cato_; Pope assigning three-score years and ten
as the limit of posthumous life to 'moderns' in poetry, and celebrating
the trio who had rescued from the 'uncivilised' Elizabethan poetry the
'fundamental laws of wit.' These three are Buckingham, Roscommon, and
Walsh: as to the last of whom if we search amongst contemporary
authorities to discover who he was, we at last come upon his works
described in the _Rambler_ as 'pages of inanity.'
[_In actual practice criticism is found to have gradually approached
induction._]
But in the conflict between judicial criticism and science the most
important point is to note how the critics' own ideas of criticism are
found to be gradually slipping away from them. Between the Renaissance
and the present day criticism, as judged by the methods actually
followed by critics, has slowly changed from the form of laying down
laws to authors into the form of receiving laws from authors. [_Five
stages. 1. Idea of judging solely by classical standards._] The process
of change falls into five stages. In its first stage the conception of
criticism was bounded by the notion of comparing whatever was produced
with the masterpieces and trying it by the ideas of Greek and Roman
literature. Boileau objected to Corneille's tragedies, not because they
did not excite admiration, but because admiration was not one of the
tragical passions as laid down by Aristotle. To Rymer's mind it was
clearly a case of classical standards or no standards, and he describes
his opponents as 'a kind of stage-quacks and empirics in poetry who have
got a receipt to please.' And there is a degree of _naïveté_ in the way
in which Bossu betrays his utter unconsciousness of the possibility that
there should be more than one kind of excellence, where, in a passage in
which he is admitting that the moderns have as much spirit and as lucky
fancies as the ancients, he nevertheless calls it 'a piece of injustice
to pretend that our new rules destroy the fancies of the old masters,
and that they must condemn all their works who could not foresee all our
humours.' Criticism in this spirit is notably illustrated by the
Corneille incident in the history of the French Academy. The fashionable
literary world, led by a Scudéry, solemnly impeach Corneille of
originality, and Richelieu insists on the Academy pronouncing judgment;
which they at last do, unwillingly enough, since, as Boileau admitted,
all France was against them. The only one that in the whole incident
retained his sense of humour was the victim himself; who, early in the
struggle, being confronted by critics recognising no merit but that of
obedience to rules, set himself to write his _Clitandre_ as a play
which should obey all the rules of Drama and yet have nothing in it: 'in
which,' he said, 'I have absolutely succeeded.' [2. _Recognition of
modern as illegitimate merit._]--But this reign of simple faith began to
be disturbed by sceptical doubts: it became impossible entirely to
ignore merit outside the pale of classical conformity. Thus we get a
Dennis unable to conceal his admiration for the daring of Milton, as a
man who knew the rules of Aristotle, 'no man better,' and yet violated
them. Literature of the modern type gets discussed as it were under
protest. Dr. Johnson, when he praises Addison's _Cato_ for adhering to
Aristotle's principles 'with a _scrupulousness_ almost unexampled on the
English stage,' is reflecting the constant assumption throughout this
transitional stage, that departure from classical models is the result
of carelessness, and that beauties in such offending writers are lucky
hits. The spirit of this period is distinctly brought out by Dr. Johnson
where he 'readily allows' that the union in one composition of serious
and ludicrous is 'contrary to the rules of criticism,' but, he adds,
'there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.' [3. _Modern
standards of judging side by side with ancient._]--Once admitted to
examination the force of modern literature could not fail to assert its
equality with the literature of the ancients, and we pass into a third
stage of criticism when critics grasp the conception that there may be
more than one set of rules by which authors may be judged. The new
notion made its appearance early in the country which was the main
stronghold of the opposite view. Perrault in 1687 instituted his
'Parallels' between the ancients and the moderns to the advantage of the
latter; and the question was put in its naked simplicity by Fontenelle,
the 'Nestor of literature,' when he made it depend upon another
question, 'whether the trees that used to grow in our woods were larger
than those which grow now.' Later, and with less distinctness, English
criticism followed the lead. Pope, with his happy indifference to
consistency, after illustrating the first stage where he advises to
write 'as if the Stagirite o'erlooked each line,' and where he contends
that if the classical authors indulge in a licence that licence becomes
a law to us, elsewhere lays down that to apply ancient rules in the
treatment of modern literature is to try by the laws of one country a
man belonging to another. In one notable instance the genius of Dr.
Johnson rises superior to the prejudices of his age, and he vindicates
in his treatment of Shakespeare the conception of a school of Drama in
which the unities of time and place do not apply. But he does it with
trembling: 'I am almost frightened at my own temerity; and when I
estimate the fame and the strength of those who maintain the contrary
opinion, am ready to sink down in reverential silence.' [4. _Conception
of criticism as judging begins to waver:_]--Criticism had set out with
judging by one set of laws, it had come to judge by two: the change
began to shake the notion of _judging_ as the function of criticism, and
the eyes of critics came to be turned more to the idea of literary
beauty itself, as the end for which the laws of literary composition
were merely means. Addison is the great name connected with this further
transitional stage. We find Addison not only arguing negatively that
'there is sometimes a greater judgment shown in deviating from the rules
of art than in adhering to them,' [_changing to the search for
beauties:_] but even laying down as a positive theory that the true
function of a critic is 'to discover the concealed beauties of a
writer'; while the practical illustration of his theory which he gave in
the case of the _Paradise Lost_ is supposed to have revolutionised the
opinion of the fashionable reading-public. [5. _and finally to
investigation of laws in literature as it stands._]--Addison was removed
by a very little from the final stage of criticism, the conception of
which is perhaps most fully brought out by Gervinus, where he declares
his purpose of treating Shakespeare as the 'revealing genius' of his
department of art and of its laws. Thus slowly and by gradual stages has
the conception of criticism been changing in the direction of induction:
starting from judgment by the laws of the ancient classics as standards
beyond which there is no appeal, passing through the transitional stage
of greater and greater toleration for intrinsic worth though of a modern
type, to arrive at the recognition of modern standards of judgment side
by side with ancient; again passing through a further transitional stage
of discrediting judgment altogether as the purpose of criticism in
favour of the search for intrinsic worth in literature as it stands,
till the final conception is reached of analysing literature as it
stands for the purpose of discovering its laws in itself. The later
stages do not universally prevail yet. But the earlier stages have at
all events become obsolete; and there is no reader who will not
acquiesce cheerfully in one of the details Addison gives out for his
ideal theatre, by which Rymer's tragedy _Edgar_ was to be cut up into
snow to make the Storm Scene in Shakespeare's _Lear_.
* * * * *
[_Separateness of the two criticisms._]
It may be well to recall the exact purpose to which the present argument
is intended to lead. The purpose is not to attack journalism and kindred
branches of criticism in the interests of inductive treatment. It would
be false to the principles of induction not to recognise that the
criticism of taste has long since established its position as a fertile
branch of literature. Even in an inductive system journalism would still
have place as a medium for fragmentary and tentative treatment. Moreover
it may be admitted that induction in its formal completeness of system
can never be applied in practical life; and in the intellectual pursuits
of real life trained literary taste may be a valuable acquisition. What
is here attacked is the mistake which has identified the criticism of
taste and valuation with the conception of criticism as a whole; the
intrusion of methods belonging to journalism into treatment that claims
to be systematic. [_Criticism of taste belongs to creative literature:_]
So far from being a standard of method in the treatment of literature,
criticism of the reviewer's order is outside science altogether. It
finds its proper place on the creative side of literature, as a branch
in which literature itself has come to be taken as a theme for literary
writing; it thus belongs to the literature treated, not to the
scientific treatment of it. [_as the lyrics of prose._] Reviews so
placed may be regarded almost as the lyrics of prose: like lyric poems
they have their completeness in themselves, and their interest lies, not
in their being parts of some whole, but in their flashing the
subjectivity of a writer on to a variety of isolated topics; they thus
have value, not as fragments of literary science, but as fragments of
Addison, of Jeffrey, of Macaulay. Nor is the bearing of the present
argument that commentators should set themselves to eulogise the authors
they treat instead of condemning them (though this would certainly be
the safer of two errors). The treatment aimed at is one independent of
praise or blame, one that has nothing to do with merit, relative or
absolute. The contention is for a branch of criticism separate from the
criticism of taste; a branch that, in harmony with the spirit of other
modern sciences, reviews the phenomena of literature as they actually
stand, enquiring into and endeavouring to systematise the laws and
principles by which they are moulded and produce their effects.
Scientific criticism and the criticism of taste have distinct spheres:
and the whole of literary history shows that the failure to keep the two
separate results only in mutual confusion.
Our present purpose is with inductive criticism. What, by the analogy of
other sciences, is implied in the inductive treatment of literature?
[_Application of induction to literary subject-matter._]
The inductive sciences occupy themselves directly with facts, that is,
with phenomena translated by observation into the form of facts; and
soundness of inductive theory is measured by the closeness with which it
will bear confronting with the facts. In the case of literature and art
the facts are to be looked for in the literary and artistic productions
themselves: the dramas, epics, pictures, statues, pillars, capitals,
symphonies, operas--the details of these are the phenomena which the
critical observer translates into facts. A picture is a title for a
bundle of facts: that the painter has united so many figures in such and
such groupings, that he has given such and such varieties of colouring,
and such and such arrangement of light and shade. Similarly the _Iliad_
is a short name implying a large number of facts characterising the
poem: that its principal personages are Agamemnon and Achilles, that
these personages are represented as displaying certain qualities, doing
certain deeds, and standing in certain relations to one another.
[_Difficulty: the want of positiveness in literary impressions._]
Here, however, arises that which has been perhaps the greatest
stumbling-block in the way of securing inductive treatment for
literature. Science deals only with ascertained facts: but the details
of literature and art are open to the most diverse interpretation. They
leave conflicting impressions on different observers, impressions both
subjective and variable in themselves, and open to all manner of
distracting influences, not excepting that of criticism itself. Where in
the treatment of literature is to be found the positiveness of
subject-matter which is the first condition of science?
[_The difficulty not confined to literature._]
In the first place it may be pointed out that this want of certainty in
literary interpretation is not a difficulty of a kind peculiar to
literature. The same object of terror will affect the members of a crowd
in a hundred different ways, from presence of mind to hysteria; yet this
has not prevented the science of psychology from inductively discussing
fear. Logic proposes to scientifically analyse the reasoning processes
in the face of the infinite degrees of susceptibility different minds
show to proof and persuasion. It has become proverbial that taste in art
is incapable of being settled by discussion, yet the art of music has
found exact treatment in the science of harmony. In the case of these
well-established sciences it has been found possible to separate the
variable element from that which is the subject-matter of the science:
such a science as psychology really covers two distinct branches of
thought, the psychology that discusses formally the elements of the
human mind, and another psychology, not yet systematised, that deals
with the distribution of these elements amongst different individuals.
It need then be no barrier to inductive treatment that in the case of
literature and art the will and consciousness act as disturbing forces,
refracting what may be called natural effects into innumerable effects
on individual students. It only becomes a question of practical
procedure, in what way the interfering variability is to be eliminated.
[_The variable element to be eliminated by reference not to taste;_]
It is precisely at this point that _à priori_ criticism and induction
part company. The _à priori_ critic gets rid of uncertainty in literary
interpretation by confining his attention to effects produced upon the
best minds: he sets up _taste_ as a standard by which to try impressions
of literature which he is willing to consider. The inductive critic
cannot have recourse to any such arbitrary means of limiting his
materials; for his doubts he knows no court of appeal except the appeal
to the literary works themselves. [_but to the objective details of the
literature itself._] The astronomer, from the vast distance of the
objects he observes, finds the same phenomenon producing different
results on different observers, and he has thus regularly to allow for
personal errors: but he deals with such discrepancies only by fresh
observations on the stars themselves, and it never occurs to him that he
can get rid of a variation by abstract argument or deference to a
greater observer. In the same way the inductive critic of literature
must settle his doubts by referring them to the literary productions
themselves; to him the question is not of the nobler view or the view in
best taste, but simply what view fits in best with the details as they
stand in actual fact. He quite recognises that it is not the objective
details but the subjective impressions they produce that make literary
effect, but the objective details are the _limit_ on the variability of
the subjective impressions. The character of Macbeth impresses two
readers differently: how is the difference to be settled? The _à priori_
critic contends that his conception is the loftier; that a hero should
be heroic; that moreover the tradition of the stage and the greatest
names in the criticism of the past bear him out; or, finally, falls back
upon good taste, which closes the discussion. The inductive critic
simply puts together all the sayings and doings of Macbeth himself, all
that others in the play say and appear to feel about him, and whatever
view of the character is consistent with these and similar facts of the
play, that view he selects; while to vary from it for any external
consideration would seem to him as futile as for an astronomer to make a
star rise an hour earlier to tally with the movements of another star.
[_Foundation axiom of the inductive criticism: Interpretation of the
nature of an hypothesis._]
We thus arrive at a foundation axiom of inductive literary criticism:
_Interpretation in literature is of the nature of a scientific
hypothesis, the truth of which is tested by the degree of completeness
with which it explains the details of the literary work as they actually
stand_. That will be the true meaning of a passage, not which is the
most worthy, but which most nearly explains the words as they are; that
will be the true reading of a character which, however involved in
expression or tame in effect, accounts for and reconciles all that is
represented of the personage. The inductive critic will interpret a
complex situation, not by fastening attention on its striking elements
and ignoring others as oversights and blemishes, but by putting together
with business-like exactitude all that the author has given, weighing,
balancing, and standing by the product. He will not consider that he has
solved the action of a drama by some leading plot, or some central idea
powerfully suggested in different parts, but will investigate patiently
until he can find a scheme which will give point to the inferior as well
as to the leading scenes, and in connection with which all the details
are harmonised in their proper proportions. In this way he will be
raising a superstructure of exposition that rests, not on authority
however high, but upon a basis of indisputable fact.
[_Practical objection: Did the authors intend those interpretations?_]
In actual operation I have often found that such positive analysis
raises in the popular mind a very practical objection: that the
scientific interpretation seems to discover in literary works much more
in the way of purpose and design than the authors themselves can be
supposed to have dreamed of. Would not Chaucer and Shakespeare, it is
asked, if they could come to life now, be greatly astonished to hear
themselves lectured upon? to find critics knowing their purposes better
than they had known them themselves, and discovering in their works laws
never suspected till after they were dead, and which they themselves
perhaps would need some effort to understand? Deep designs are traced in
Shakespeare's plots, and elaborate combinations in his characters and
passions: is the student asked to believe that Shakespeare really
_intended_ these complicated effects?
[_Answer: changed meaning of 'design' in science._]
The difficulty rests largely upon a confusion in words. Such words as
'purpose,' 'intention,' have a different sense when used in ordinary
parlance from that which they bear when applied in criticism and
science. In ordinary parlance a man's 'purpose' means his conscious
purpose, of which he is the best judge; in science the 'purpose' of a
thing is the purpose it actually serves, and is discoverable only by
analysis. Thus science discovers that the 'purpose' of earthworms is to
break up the soil, the 'design' of colouring in flowers is to attract
insects, though the flower is not credited with fore-sight nor the worm
with disinterestedness. In this usage alone can the words 'purpose,'
'intention,' be properly applied to literature and art: science knows no
kind of evidence in the matter of creative purpose so weighty as the
thing it has actually produced. This has been well put by Ulrici:
The _language_ of the artist is poetry, music, drawing, colouring:
there is no other form in which he can express himself with equal
depth and clearness. Who would ask a philosopher to paint his ideas
in colours? It would be equally absurd to think that because a poet
cannot say with perfect philosophic certainty in the form of
reflection and pure thought what it was that he wished and intended
to produce, that he never thought at all, but let his imagination
improvise at random.
Nothing is more common than for analysis to discover design in what, so
far as consciousness is concerned, has been purely instinctive. Thus
physiology ascertains that bread contains all the necessary elements of
food except one, which omission happens to be supplied by butter: this
may be accepted as an explanation of our 'purpose' in eating butter with
bread, without the explanation being taken to imply that all who have
ever fed on bread and butter have consciously _intended_ to combine the
nitrogenous and oleaginous elements of food. It is the natural order of
things that the practical must precede the analytic. Bees by instinct
construct hexagonal cells, and long afterwards mensuration shows that
the hexagon is the most economic shape for such stowage; individual
states must rise and fall first before the sciences of history and
politics can come to explain the how and why of their mutations.
Similarly it is in accordance with the order of things that Shakespeare
should produce dramas by the practical processes of art-creation, and
that it should be left for others, his critics succeeding him at long
intervals, to discover by analysis his 'purposes' and the laws which
underlie his effects. The poet, if he could come to life now, would not
feel more surprise at this analysis of his 'motives' and unfolding of
his unconscious 'design' than he would feel on hearing that the beating
of his heart--to him a thing natural enough, and needing no
explanation--had been discovered to have a distinct purpose he could
never have dreamed of in propelling the circulation of his blood, a
thing of which he had never heard.
[_Three points of contrast between judicial and inductive criticism._]
There are three leading ideas in relation to which inductive and
judicial criticism are in absolute antagonism: to bring out these
contrasts will be the most effective way of describing the inductive
treatment.
The first of these ideas is order of merit, together with the kindred
notions of partisanship and hostility applied to individual authors and
works. [1. _Comparisons of merit: these outside science._] The minds of
ordinary readers are saturated with this class of ideas; they are the
weeds of taste, choking the soil, and leaving no room for the purer
forms of literary appreciation. Favoured by the fatal blunder of modern
education, which considers every other mental power to stand in need of
training, but leaves taste and imagination to shift for themselves,
literary taste has largely become confused with a spurious form of it:
the mere taste for competition, comparison of likes and dislikes, gossip
applied to art and called criticism. Of course such likes and dislikes
must always exist, and journalism is consecrated to the office of giving
them shape and literary expression; though it should be led by
experience, if by nothing else, to exercise its functions with a double
reserve, recognising that the judicial attitude of mind is a limit on
appreciation, and that the process of testing will itself be tried by
the test of vitality. But such preferences and comparisons of merit must
be kept rigidly outside the sphere of science. Science knows nothing of
competitive examination: a geologist is not heard extolling old red
sandstone as a model rock-formation, or making sarcastic comments on the
glacial epoch. Induction need not disturb the freedom with which we
attach ourselves to whatever attracts our individual dispositions:
individual partisanship for the wooded snugness of the Rhine or the bold
and bracing Alps is unaffected by the adoption of exact methods in
physical geography. What is to be avoided is the confusion of two
different kinds of interest attaching to the same object. In the study
of the stars and the rocks, which can inspire little or no personal
interest, it is easy to keep science pure; to keep it to 'dry light,' as
Heraclitus calls it, intelligence unclouded by the humours of individual
sentiment, as Bacon interprets. But when science comes to be applied to
objects which can excite emotion and inspire affection, then confusion
arises, and the scientific student of political economy finds his
treatment of pauperism disturbed by the philanthropy which belongs to
him as a man. Still more in so emotional an atmosphere as the study of
beauty, the student must use effort to separate the _beauty_ of an
object, which is a thing of art and perfectly analysable, from his
personal _interest_ in it, which is as distinctly external to the
analysis of beauty as his love for his dog is external to the science of
zoology. The possibility of thus separating interest and perception of
beauty without diminishing either may be sufficiently seen in the case
of music--an art which has been already reduced to scientific form.
Music is as much as any art a thing of tastes and preferences; besides
partialities for particular masters one student will be peculiarly
affected by melody, another is all for dramatic effect, others have a
special taste for the fugue or the sonata. No one can object to such
preferences, but the science of music knows nothing about them; its
exposition deals with modes of treatment or habits of orchestration
distinguishing composers, irrespective of the private partialities they
excite. Mozart and Wagner are analysed as two items in the sum of facts
which make up music; and if a particular expositor shows by a turn in
the sentence that he has a leaning to one or the other, the slip may do
no harm, but for the moment science has been dropped.
[_Inductive treatment concerned with differences of kind, not of
degree._]
There is, however, a sort of difference between authors and works, the
constant recognition of which would more than make up to cultured
pleasure for discarding comparisons of merit. Inductive treatment is
concerned with _differences of kind_ as distinguished from differences
of degree. Elementary as this distinction is, the power of firmly
grasping it is no slight evidence of a trained mind: the power, that is,
of clearly seeing that two things are different, without being at the
same time impelled to rank one above the other. The confusion of the two
is a constant obstacle in the way of literary appreciation. It has been
said, by way of comparison between two great novelists, that George
Eliot constructs characters, but Charlotte Brontë creates them. The
description (assuming it to be true) ought to shed a flood of interest
upon both authoresses; by perpetually throwing on the two modes of
treatment the clear light of contrast it ought to intensify our
appreciation of both. As a fact, however, the description is usually
quoted to suggest a preference for Charlotte Brontë on the supposed
ground that creation is 'higher' than construction; and the usual
consequences of preferences are threatened--the gradual closing of our
susceptibilities to those qualities in the less liked of the two which
do not resemble the qualities of the favourite. Yet why should we not be
content to accept such a description (if true) as constituting a
difference of kind, and proceed to recognise 'construction' and
'creation' as two parallel modes of treatment, totally distinct from one
another in the way in which a fern is distinct from a flower, a
distinction allowing no room for preferences because there is no common
ground on which to compare? This separateness once granted, the mind,
instead of having to choose between the two, would have scope for taking
in to the full the detailed effects flowing from both modes of
treatment, and the area of mental pleasure would be enlarged. The great
blunders of criticism in the past, which are now universally admitted,
rest on this inability to recognise differences of kind in literature.
The Restoration poets had a mission to bring the heroic couplet to
perfection: poetry not in their favourite measure they treated, not as
different, but as bad, and rewrote or ignored Spenser and Milton. And
generations of literary history have been wasted in discussing whether
the Greek dramatists or Shakespeare were the higher: now every one
recognises that they constitute two schools different in kind that
cannot be compared.
[_Distinctions of kind a primary element in appreciation._]
It is hardly going too far to assert that this sensitiveness to
differences of kind as distinguished from differences of degree is the
first condition of literary appreciation. Nothing can be more essential
to art-perception than receptiveness, and receptiveness implies a change
in the receptive attitude of mind with each variety of art. To
illustrate by an extreme case. Imagine a spectator perfectly familiar
with the Drama, but to whom the existence of the Opera was unknown, and
suppose him to have wandered into an opera-house, mistaking it for a
theatre. At first the mistake under which he was labouring would distort
every effect: the elaborate overture would seem to him a great 'waste'
of power in what was a mere accessory; the opening recitative would
strike him as 'unnaturally' delivered, and he would complain of the
orchestral accompaniment as a 'distraction'; while at the first aria he
would think the actor gone mad. As, however, arias, terzettos,
recitatives succeeded one another, he must at last catch the idea that
the music was an essential element in the exhibition, and that he was
seeing, not a drama, but a drama translated into a different kind of
art. The catching of this idea would at once make all the objectionable
elements fall into their proper places. No longer distracted by the
thought of the ordinary Drama, his mind would have leisure to catch the
special effects of the Opera: he would feel how powerfully a change of
passion could move him when magnified with all the range of expression
an orchestra affords, and he would acknowledge a dramatic touch as the
diabolic spirit of the conspirator found vent in a double D. The
illustration is extreme to the extent of absurdity: but it brings out
how expectation plays an important part in appreciation, and how the
expectation has to be adapted to that on which it is exercised. The
receptive attitude is a sort of mental focus which needs adjusting
afresh to each variety of art if its effects are to be clearly caught;
and to disturb attention when engaged on one species of literature by
the thought of another is as unreasonable as to insist on one
microscopic object appearing definite when looked at with a focus
adjusted to another object. [_Each author a separate species._] This
will be acknowledged in reference to the great divisions of art: but
does it not apply to the species as well as the genera, indeed to each
individual author? Wordsworth has laid down that each fresh poet is to
be tried by fresh canons of taste: this is only another way of saying
that the differences between poets are differences of kind, that each
author is a 'school' by himself, and can be appreciated only by a
receptive attitude formed by adjustment to himself alone. In a
scientific treatment of literature, at all events, an elementary axiom
must be: [_Second axiom of inductive criticism: its function in
distinguishing literary species._] _That inductive criticism is mainly
occupied in distinguishing literary species_. And on this view it will
clearly appear how such notions as order of merit become disturbing
forces in literary appreciation: unconsciously they apply the
_qualitative_ standard of the favourite works to works which must
necessarily be explained by a different standard. They are defended on
the ground of pleasure, but they defeat their own object: no element in
pleasure is greater than variety, and comparisons of merit, with every
other form of the judicial spirit, are in reality arrangements for
appreciating the smallest number of varieties.
[II. _The 'laws of art': confusion between law external and
scientific._]
The second is the most important of the three ideas, both for its effect
in the past and for the sharpness with which it brings judicial and
inductive criticism into contrast. It is the idea that there exist
'laws' of art, in the same sense in which we speak of laws in morality
or the laws of some particular state--great principles which have been
laid down, and which are binding on the artist as the laws of God or his
country are binding on the man; that by these, and by lesser principles
deduced from these, the artist's work is to be tried, and praise or
blame awarded accordingly. Great part of formal criticism runs on these
lines; while, next in importance to comparisons of merit, the popular
mind considers literary taste to consist in a keen sensitiveness to the
'faults' and 'flaws' of literary workmanship.
This attitude to art illustrates the enormous misleading power of the
metaphors that lie concealed in words. The word 'law,' justly applicable
in one of its senses to art, has in practice carried with it the
associations of its other sense; and the mistake of metaphor has been
sufficient to distort criticism until, as Goldsmith remarks, rules have
become the greatest of all the misfortunes which have befallen the
commonwealth of letters. Every expositor has had to point out the
widespread confusion between the two senses of this term. Laws in the
moral and political world are external obligations, restraints of the
will; they exist where the will of a ruler or of the community is
applied to the individual will. In science, on the other hand, law has
to do not with what ought to be, but with what is; scientific laws are
facts reduced to formulæ, statements of the habits of things, so to
speak. The laws of the stars in the first sense could only mean some
creative fiat, such as 'Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven';
in the scientific sense laws of the stars are summaries of their
customary movements. In the act of getting drunk I am violating God's
moral law, I am obeying his law of alcoholic action. So scientific laws,
in the case of art and literature, will mean descriptions of the
practice of artists or the characteristics of their works, when these
will go into the form of general propositions as distinguished from
disconnected details. The key to the distinction is the notion of
external authority. There cannot be laws in the moral and political
sense without a ruler or legislative authority; in scientific laws the
law-giver and the law-obeyer are one and the same, and for the laws of
vegetation science looks no further than the facts of the vegetable
world. [_The 'laws of art' are scientific laws._] In literature and art
the term 'law' applies only in the scientific sense; the laws of the
Shakespearean Drama are not laws imposed by some external authority upon
Shakespeare, but laws of dramatic practice derived from the analysis of
his actual works. Laws of literature, in the sense of external
obligations limiting an author, there are none: if he were voluntarily
to bind himself by such external laws, he would be so far curtailing
art; it is hardly a paradox to say the art is legitimate only when it
does not obey laws. [_The word 'fault' meaningless in inductive
criticism._] What applies to the term 'law' applies similarly to the
term 'fault.' The term is likely always to be used from its extreme
convenience in art-training; but it must be understood strictly as a
term of education and discipline. In inductive criticism, as in the
other inductive sciences, the word 'fault' has no meaning. If an artist
acts contrary to the practice of all other artists, the result is either
that he produces no art-effect at all, in which case there is nothing
for criticism to register and analyse, or else he produces a new effect,
and is thus extending, not breaking, the laws of art. The great clash of
horns in Beethoven's Heroic Symphony was at first denounced as a gross
fault, a violation of the plainest laws of harmony; now, instead of a
'fault,' it is spoken of as a 'unique effect,' and in the difference
between the two descriptions lies the whole difference between the
conceptions of judicial and inductive criticism. Again and again in the
past this notion of faults has led criticism on to wrong tracks, from
which it has had to retrace its steps on finding the supposed faults to
be in reality new laws. Immense energy was wasted in denouncing
Shakespeare's 'fault' of uniting serious with light matter in the same
play as a violation of fundamental dramatic laws; experience showed this
mixture of passions to be the source of powerful art-effects hitherto
shut out of the Drama, and the 'fault' became one of the distinguishing
'laws' in the most famous branch of modern literature. It is necessary
then to insist upon the strict scientific sense of the term 'law' as
used of literature and art; and the purging of criticism from the
confusion attaching to this word is an essential step in its elevation
to the inductive standard. It is a step, moreover, in which it has been
preceded by other branches of thought. At one time the practice of
commerce and the science of economy suffered under the same confusion:
the battle of 'free trade' has been fought, the battle of 'free art' is
still going on. In time it will be recognised that the practice of
artists, like the operations of business, must be left to its natural
working, and the attempt to impose external canons of taste on artists
will appear as futile as the attempt to effect by legislation the
regulation of prices.
[_Objection as to the moral purpose of literature:_]
Objections may possibly be taken to this train of argument on very high
grounds, as if the protest against the notion of law-obeying in art were
a sort of antinomianism. Literature, it may be said, has a moral
purpose, to elevate and refine, and no duty can be higher than that of
pointing out what in it is elevating and refining, and jealously
watching against any lowering of its standard. [_this outside inductive
treatment, though intrinsically more important._] Such contention may
readily be granted, and yet may amount to no more than this: that there
are ways of dealing with literature which are more important than
inductive criticism, but which are none the less outside it. Jeremy
Collier did infinite service to our Restoration Drama, but his was not
the service of a scientific critic. The same things take different ranks
as they are tried by the standards of science or morals. An enervating
climate may have the effect of enfeebling the moral character, but this
does not make the geographer's interest in the tropical zone one whit
the less. Economy concerns itself simply with the fact that a certain
subsidence of profits in a particular trade will drive away capital to
other trades. But the details of human experience that are latent in
such a proposition: the chilling effects of unsuccess and the dim colour
it gives to the outlook into the universe, the sifting of character and
separation between the enterprising and the simple, the hard thoughts as
to the mysterious dispensations of human prosperity, the sheer misery of
a wage-class looking on plenty and feeling starvation--this human drama
of failing profits may be vastly more important than the whole science
of economy, but economy none the less entirely and rightly ignores it.
[_Objection: Art as an arbitrary product not subject to law._]
To some, I know, it appears that literature is a sphere in which the
strict sense of the word 'law' has no application: that such laws belong
to nature, not to art. The essence, it is contended, of the natural
sciences is the certainty of the facts with which they deal. Art, on the
contrary, is creative; it does not come into the category of objective
phenomena at all, but is the product of some artist's will, and
therefore purely arbitrary. If in a compilation of observations in
natural history for scientific use it became known that the compiler had
at times drawn upon his imagination for his details, the whole
compilation would become useless; and any scientific theories based upon
it would be discredited. But the artist bases his work wholly on
imagination, and caprice is a leading art-beauty: how, it is asked, can
so arbitrary a subject-matter be reduced to the form of positive laws?
[_Third axiom of inductive criticism: art a part of nature._]
In view of any such objections, it may be well to set up a third axiom
of inductive criticism: _That art is a part of nature_. Nature, it is
true, is the vaguest of words: but this is a vagueness common to the
objection and the answer. The objection rests really on a false
antithesis, of which one term is 'nature,' while it is not clear what is
the other term; the axiom set up in answer implies that there is no real
distinction between 'nature' and the other phenomena which are the
subject of human enquiry. The distinction is supposed to rest upon the
degree to which arbitrary elements of the mind, such as imagination,
will, caprice, enter into such a thing as art-production. [_Other
arbitrary products subject to inductive treatment._] But there are other
things in which the human will plays as much part as it does in art, and
which have nevertheless proved compatible with inductive treatment.
Those who hold that 'thought is free' do not reject psychology as an
inductive science; actual politics are made up of struggles of will,
exercises of arbitrary power, and the like, and yet there is a political
science. If there is an inductive science of politics, men's voluntary
actions in the pursuit of public life, and an inductive science of
economy, men's voluntary actions in pursuit of wealth, why should there
not be an inductive science of art, men's voluntary actions in pursuit
of the beautiful? The whole of human action, as well as the whole of
external nature, comes within the jurisdiction of science; so far from
the productions of the will and imagination being exempted from
scientific treatment, will and imagination themselves form chapters in
psychology, and caprice has been analysed.
[III. _Testing by fixed standards inconsistent with inductive
treatment._]
It remains to notice the third of the three ideas in relation to which
the two kinds of criticism are in complete contrast with one another. It
is a vague notion, which no objector would formulate, but which as a
fact does underlie judicial criticism, and insensibly accompanies its
testing and assaying. It is the idea that the foundations of literary
form have reached their final settlement, the past being tacitly taken
as a standard for the present and future, or the present as a standard
for the past. Thus in the treatment of new literature the idea manifests
itself in a secret antagonism to variations from received models; at the
very least, new forms are called upon to justify themselves, and so the
judicial critic brings his least receptive attitude to the new effects
which need receptiveness most. In opposition to this tacit assumption,
inductive criticism starts with a distinct counter-axiom of the utmost
importance: _That literature is a thing of development_. [_Fourth axiom
of inductive criticism: literature a thing of development._] This axiom
implies that the critic must come to literature as to that in which he
is expecting to find unlimited change and variety; he must keep before
him the fact that production must always be far ahead of criticism and
analysis, and must have carried its conquering invention into fresh
regions before science, like settled government in the wake of the
pioneer, follows to explain the new effects by new principles. No doubt
in name literary development is recognised in all criticism; yet in its
treatment both of old literature and new the _à priori_ criticism is
false to development in the scientific sense of the term. [_Ignoring of
development in new literature:_] Such systems are apt to begin by laying
down that 'the object of literature is so and so,' or that 'the purpose
of the Drama is to pourtray human nature'; they then proceed to test
actual literature and dramas by the degree in which they carry out these
fundamental principles. Such procedure is the opposite of the inductive
method, and is a practical denial of development in literature.
[_'purpose' in literature continually modifying._] Assuming that the
object of existing literature were correctly described, such a formula
could not bind the literature of the future. Assuming that there was
ever a branch of art which could be reduced to one simple purpose, yet
the inherent tendency of the human mind and its productions to develop
would bring it about that what were at first means towards this purpose
would in time become ends in themselves side by side with the main
purpose, giving us in addition to the simple species a modified variety
of it; external influences, again, would mingle with the native
characteristics of the original species, and produce new species
compound in their purposes and effects. The real literature would be
ever obeying the first principle of development and changing from simple
to complex, while the criticism that tried it by the original standard
would be at each step removed one degree further from the only standard
by which the literature could be explained. [_Development in past
literature confused with improvement._] And if judicial criticism fails
in providing for development in the future and present, it is equally
unfortunate in giving a false twist to development when looked for in
the past. The critic of comparative standards is apt to treat early
stages of literature as elementary, tacitly assuming his own age as a
standard _up to_ which previous periods have developed. Thus his
treatment of the past becomes often an assessment of the degrees in
which past periods have approximated to his own, advancing from literary
pot-hooks to his own running facility. The clearness of an ancient
writer he values at fifty per cent. as compared with modern standards,
his concatenation of sentences is put down as only forty-five. But what
if a certain degree of mistiness be an essential element in the phase
of literary development to which the particular writer belongs, so that
in him modern clearness would become, in judicial phrase, a fault? What
if Plato's concatenation of sentences would simply spoil the flavour of
Herodotus's story-telling, if Jeremy Taylor's prolixity and Milton's
bi-lingual prose be simply the fittest of all dresses for the thought of
their age and individual genius? In fact, the critic of fixed standards
confuses development with _improvement_: a parallel mistake in natural
history would be to understand the statement that man is higher in the
scale of development than the butterfly as implying that a butterfly was
God's failure in the attempt to make man. The inductive critic will
accord to the early forms of his art the same independence he accords to
later forms. Development will not mean to him education for a future
stage, but the perpetual branching out of literary activity into ever
fresh varieties, different in kind from one another, and each to be
studied by standards of its own: the 'individuality' of authors is the
expression in literary parlance which corresponds to the perpetual
'differentiation' of new species in science. Alike, then, in his
attitude to the past and the future, the inductive critic will eschew
the temptation to judgment by fixed standards, which in reality means
opposing lifeless rules to the ever-living variety of nature. He will
leave a dead judicial criticism to bury its dead authors and to pen for
them judicious epitaphs, and will himself approach literature filled
equally with reverence for the unbroken vitality of its past and faith
in its exhaustless future.
[_Summary._]
To gather up our results. Induction, as the most universal of scientific
methods, may be presumed to apply wherever there is a subject-matter
reducible to the form of fact; such a subject-matter will be found in
literature where its effects are interpreted, not arbitrarily, but with
strict reference to the details of the literary works as they actually
stand. There is thus an inductive literary criticism, akin in spirit
and methods to the other inductive sciences, and distinct from other
branches of criticism, such as the criticism of taste. This inductive
criticism will entirely free itself from the judicial spirit and its
comparisons of merit, which is found to have been leading criticism
during half its history on to false tracks from which it has taken the
other half to retrace its steps. On the contrary, inductive criticism
will examine literature in the spirit of pure investigation: looking for
the laws of art in the practice of artists, and treating art, like the
rest of nature, as a thing of continuous development, which may thus be
expected to fall, with each author and school, into varieties distinct
in kind from one another, and each of which can be fully grasped only
when examined with an attitude of mind adapted to the special variety
without interference from without.
* * * * *
To illustrate the criticism thus described in its application to
Shakespeare is the purpose of the present work.
The scope of the book is limited to the consideration of Shakespeare in
his character as the great master of the Romantic Drama; and its
treatment of his dramatic art divides itself into two parts. The first
applies the inductive method in a series of Studies devoted to
particular plays, and to single important features of dramatic art which
these plays illustrate. One of the purposes of this first part is to
bring out how the inductive method, besides its scientific interest, has
the further recommendation of assisting more than any other treatment to
enlarge our appreciation of the author and of his achievements. The
second part will use the materials collected in the first part to
present, in the form of a brief survey, Dramatic Criticism as an
inductive science: enumerating, so far as its materials admit, the
leading topics which such a science would treat, and arranging these
topics in the logical connection which scientific method requires.
PART FIRST.
SHAKESPEARE CONSIDERED AS A DRAMATIC ARTIST _IN TEN STUDIES_.
I.
THE TWO STORIES SHAKESPEARE BORROWS FOR HIS MERCHANT OF VENICE.
_A Study in the Raw Material of the Romantic Drama_.
[_Story as the Raw Materials of the Romantic Drama._]
THE starting-point in the treatment of any work of literature is its
position in literary history: the recognition of this gives the attitude
of mind which is most favourable for extracting from the work its full
effect. The division of the universal Drama to which Shakespeare belongs
is known as the 'Romantic Drama,' one of its chief distinctions being
that it uses the stories of Romance, together with histories treated as
story-books, as the sources from which the matter of the plays is taken;
Romances are the _raw material_ out of which the Shakespearean Drama is
manufactured. This very fact serves to illustrate the elevation of the
Elizabethan Drama in the scale of literary development: just as the
weaver uses as his raw material that which is the finished product of
the spinner, so Shakespeare and his contemporaries start in their art of
dramatising from Story which is already a form of art. In the
exhibition, then, of Shakespeare as an Artist, it is natural to begin
with the raw material which he worked up into finished masterpieces. For
illustration of this no play could be more suitable than _The Merchant
of Venice_, in which two tales, already familiar in the story form, have
been woven together into a single plot: the Story of the Cruel Jew, who
entered into a bond with his enemy of which the forfeit was to be a
pound of this enemy's own flesh, and the Story of the Heiress and the
Caskets. The present study will deal with the stories themselves,
considering them as if with the eye of a dramatic artist to catch the
points in which they lend themselves to dramatic effect; the next will
show how Shakespeare improves the stories in the telling, increasing
their dramatic force by the very process of working them up; a third
study will point out how, not content with two stories, he has added
others in the development of his plot, making it more complex only in
reality to make it more simple.
[_Story of The Jew._]
In the Story of the Jew the main point is its special capability for
bringing out the idea of _Nemesis_, one of the simplest and most
universal of dramatic motives. Described broadly, Nemesis is retribution
as it appears in the world of art. [_Nemesis as a dramatic idea._] In
reality the term covers two distinct conceptions: in ancient thought
Nemesis was an artistic bond between excess and reaction, in modern
thought it is an artistic bond between sin and retribution. The
distinction is part of the general difference between Greek and modern
views of life. [_Ancient conception: artistic connection between excess
and reaction._] The Greeks may be said to be the most artistic nation of
mankind, in the sense that art covered so large a proportion of their
whole personality: it is not surprising to find that they projected
their sense of art into morals. Aristotle was a moral philosopher, but
his system of ethics reads as an artistically devised pattern, in which
every virtue is removed at equal distances from vices of excess and
defect balancing it on opposite sides. The Greek word for law signifies
proportion and distribution, _nomos_; and it is only another form of it
that expresses _Nemesis_ as the power punishing violations of proportion
in things human. Distinct from Justice, which was occupied with crime,
Nemesis was a companion deity to Fortune; and as Fortune went through
the world distributing the good things of life heedlessly without regard
to merit, so Nemesis followed in her steps, and, equally without regard
to merit, delighted in cutting down the prosperity that was high enough
to attract her attention. Polycrates is the typical victim of such
Nemesis: cast off by his firmest ally for no offence but an unbroken
career of good luck, in the reaction from which his ally feared to be
involved; essaying as a forlorn hope to propitiate by voluntarily
throwing in the sea his richest crown-jewel; recognising when this was
restored by fishermen that heaven had refused his sacrifice, and
abandoning himself to his fate in despair. But Nemesis, to the moral
sense of antiquity, could go even beyond visitation on innocent
prosperity, and goodness itself could be carried to a degree that
invited divine reaction. Heroes like Lycurgus and Pentheus perished for
excess of temperance; and the ancient Drama startles the modern reader
with an Hippolytus, whose passionate purity brought down on him a
destruction prophesied beforehand by those to whom religious duty
suggested moderate indulgence in lust.
[_Modern conception: artistic connection between sin and retribution._]
Such malignant correction of human inequalities is not a function to
harmonise with modern conceptions of Deity. Yet the Greek notion of
Nemesis has an element of permanency in it, for it represents a
principle underlying human life. It suggests a sort of elasticity in
human experience, a tendency to rebound from a strain; this is the
equilibrium of the moral world, the force which resists departure from
the normal, becoming greater in proportion as departure from the normal
is wider. Thus in commercial speculation there is a safe medium certain
to bring profit in the long run; in social ambition there is a certain
rise though slow: if a man hurries to be rich, or seeks to rise in
public life by leaps and bounds, the spectator becomes aware of a secret
force that has been set in motion, as when the equilibrium of physical
bodies has been disturbed, which force threatens to drag the aspirant
down to the point from which he started, or to debase him lower in
proportion to the height at which he rashly aimed. Such a force is
'risk,' and it may remain risk, but if it be crowned with the expected
fall the whole is recognised as 'Nemesis.' This Nemesis is deeply
embedded in the popular mind and repeatedly crops up in its proverbial
wisdom. Proverbs like 'Grasp all, lose all,' 'When things come to the
worst they are sure to mend,' exactly express moral equilibrium, and the
'golden mean' is its proverbial formula. The saying 'too much of a good
thing' suggests that the Nemesis on departures from the golden mean
applies to good things as well as bad; while the principle is made to
apply even to the observation of the golden mean itself in the proverb
'Nothing venture, nothing have.' Nevertheless, this side of the whole
notion has in modern usage fallen into the background in comparison with
another aspect of Nemesis. The grand distinction of modern thought is
the predominance in it of moral ideas: they colour even its imagination;
and if the Greeks carried their art-sense into morals, modern instincts
have carried morals into art. In particular the speculations raised by
Christianity have cast the shadow of Sin over the whole universe. It has
been said that the conception of Sin is unknown to the ancients, and
that the word has no real equivalent in Latin or Classical Greek. The
modern mind is haunted by it. Notions of Sin have invaded art, and
Nemesis shows their influence: vague conceptions of some supernatural
vindication of artistic proportion in life have now crystallised into
the interest of watching morals and art united in their treatment of
Sin. The link between Sin and its retribution becomes a form of
art-pleasure; and no dramatic effect is more potent in modern Drama than
that which emphasises the principle that whatsoever a man soweth that
shall he also reap.
[_Dramatic Nemesis latent in the Story of the Jew._]
Now for this dramatic effect of Nemesis it would be difficult to find a
story promising more scope than the Story of the Cruel Jew. It will be
seen at once to contain a double nemesis, attaching to the Jew himself
and to his victim. The two moreover represent the different conceptions
of Nemesis in the ancient and modern world; Antonio's excess of moral
confidence suffers a nemesis of reaction in his humiliation, and
Shylock's sin of judicial murder finds a nemesis of retribution in his
ruin by process of law. The nemesis, it will be observed, is not merely
two-fold, but double in the way that a double flower is distinct from
two flowers: it is a nemesis _on_ a nemesis; the nemesis which visits
Antonio's fault is the crime for which Shylock suffers his nemesis.
Again, in that which gives artistic character to the reaction and the
retribution the two nemeses differ. Let St. Paul put the difference for
us: 'Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some
they follow after.' So in cases like that of Shylock the nemesis is
interesting from its very obviousness and the impatience with which we
look for it; in the case of Antonio the nemesis is striking for the very
opposite reason, that he of all men seemed most secure against it.
[_Antonio: perfection and self-sufficiency, the Nemesis of Surprise._]
Antonio must be understood as a perfect character: for we must read the
play in the light of its age, and intolerance was a mediæval virtue. But
there is no single good quality that does not carry with it its special
temptation, and the sum of them all, or perfection, has its shadow in
self-sufficiency. It is so with Antonio. Of all national types of
character the Roman is the most self-sufficient, alike incorruptible by
temptation and independent of the softer influences of life: [=iii.= ii.
297.] we find that 'Roman honour' is the idea which Antonio's friends
are accustomed to associate with him. Further the dramatist contrives to
exhibit Antonio to us in circumstances calculated to bring out this
drawback to his perfection. In the opening scene we see the dignified
merchant-prince suffering under the infliction of frivolous visitors, to
which his friendship with the young nobleman exposes him: his tone
throughout the interview is that of the barest toleration, and suggests
that his courtesies are felt rather as what is due to himself than what
is due to those on whom they are bestowed. [=i.= i. 60-64.] When
Salarino makes flattering excuses for taking his leave, Antonio replies,
first with conventional compliment,
Your worth is very dear in my regard,
and then with blunt plainness, as if Salarino were not worth the trouble
of keeping up polite fiction:
I take it, your own business calls on you
And you embrace the occasion to depart.
[=i.= i. 8.]
The visitors, trying to find explanation for Antonio's seriousness,
suggest that he is thinking of his vast commercial speculations; Antonio
draws himself up:
[=i.= i. 41.]
Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it,
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.
Antonio is saying in his prosperity that _he_ shall never be moved. But
the great temptation to self-sufficiency lies in his contact, not with
social inferiors, but with a moral outcast such as Shylock: confident
that the moral gulf between the two can never be bridged over, Antonio
has violated dignity as well as mercy in the gross insults he has heaped
upon the Jew whenever they have met. [=i.= iii. 99 &c.] In the Bond
Scene we see him unable to restrain his insults at the very moment in
which he is soliciting a favour from his enemy; [=i.= iii. 107-130.] the
effect reaches a climax as Shylock gathers up the situation in a single
speech, reviewing the insults and taunting his oppressor with the
solicited obligation:
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say,
'Shylock, we would have moneys': you say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit.
There is such a foundation of justice for these taunts that for a
moment our sympathies are transferred to Shylock's side. But Antonio, so
far from taking warning, is betrayed beyond all bounds in his defiance;
and in the challenge to fate with which he replies we catch the tone of
infatuated confidence, the _hybris_ in which Greek superstition saw the
signal for the descent of Nemesis.
[=i.= iii. 131.]
I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends ...
_But lend it rather to thine enemy,
Who, if he break, thou may'st with better face
Exact the penalty_.
To this challenge of self-sufficiency the sequel of the story is the
answering Nemesis: the merchant becomes a bankrupt, the first citizen of
Venice a prisoner at the bar, the morally perfect man holds his life and
his all at the mercy of the reprobate he thought he might safely insult.
[_Shylock: malignant justice, the Nemesis of Measure for Measure._]
So Nemesis has surprised Antonio in spite of his perfectness: but the
malice of Shylock is such as is perpetually crying for retribution, and
the retribution is delayed only that it may descend with accumulated
force. In the case of this second nemesis the Story of the Jew exhibits
dramatic capability in the opportunity it affords for the sin and the
retribution to be included within the same scene. [=iv.= i.] Portia's
happy thought is a turning-point in the Trial Scene on the two sides of
which we have the Jew's triumph and the Jew's retribution; the two sides
are bound together by the principle of measure for measure, and for each
detail of vindictiveness that is developed in the first half of the
scene there is a corresponding item of nemesis in the sequel. [_Charter_
v. _statute_. =iv.= i. 38; compare 102, 219.] To begin with, Shylock
appeals to the charter of the city. It is one of the distinctions
between written and unwritten law that no flagrant injustice can arise
out of the latter. If the analogy of former precedents would seem to
threaten such an injustice, it is easy in a new case to meet the special
emergency by establishing a new precedent; where, however, the letter of
the written law involves a wrong, however great, it must, nevertheless,
be exactly enforced. Shylock takes his stand upon written law; [compare
=iii.= iii. 26-31.] indeed upon the strictest of all kinds of written
law, for the charter of the city would seem to be the instrument
regulating the relations between citizens and aliens--an absolute
necessity for a free port--which could not be superseded without
international negotiations. But what is the result? As plaintiff in the
cause Shylock would, in the natural course of justice, leave the court,
when judgment had been given against him, with no further mortification
than the loss of his suit. He is about to do so when he is recalled:
It is enacted in the laws of Venice, &c.
[=iv.= i. 314.]
Unwittingly, he has, by the action he has taken, entangled himself with
an old statute law, forgotten by all except the learned Bellario, which,
going far beyond natural law, made the mere attempt upon a citizen's
life by an alien punishable to the same extent as murder. Shylock had
chosen the letter of the law, and by the letter of the law he is to
suffer. [_Humour_ v. _quibble_.] Again, every one must feel that the
plea on which Portia upsets the bond is in reality the merest quibble.
It is appropriate enough in the mouth of a bright girl playing the
lawyer, but no court of justice could seriously entertain it for a
moment: by every principle of interpretation a bond that could justify
the cutting of human flesh must also justify the shedding of blood,
which is necessarily implied in such cutting. But, to balance this, we
have Shylock in the earlier part of the scene refusing to listen to
arguments of justice, and taking his stand upon his 'humour': [=iv.= i.
40-62.] if he has a whim, he pleads, for giving ten thousand ducats to
have a rat poisoned, who shall prevent him? The suitor who rests his
cause on a whim cannot complain if it is upset by a quibble. Similarly,
throughout the scene, every point in Shylock's justice of malice meets
its answer in the justice of nemesis. He is offered double the amount of
his loan:
[_Offer of double_ v. _refusal of principal._]
If every ducat in six thousand ducats
Were in six parts, and every part a ducat,
he answers, he would not accept them in lieu of his bond. [=iv.= i. 318,
336.] The wheel of Nemesis goes round, and Shylock would gladly accept
not only this offer but even the bare principal; but he is denied, on
the ground that he has refused it in open court. They try to bend him to
thoughts of mercy:
[_Complete security_ v. _total loss._]
How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?
He dares to reply:
What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?
The wheel of Nemesis goes round, and Shylock's life and all lie at the
mercy of the victim to whom he had refused mercy and the judge to whose
appeal for mercy he would not listen. [_Exultation_ v. _irony._] In the
flow of his success, when every point is being given in his favour, he
breaks out into unseemly exultation:
[=iv.= i. 223, 246, 250, 301, 304.]
A Daniel come to judgement! yea, a Daniel!
The ebb comes, and his enemies catch up the cry and turn it against him:
[=iv.= i. 313, 317, 323, 333, 340.]
A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel!
I thank thee, Jew, for _teaching_ me that word.
Such then is the Story of the Jew, and so it exhibits nemesis clashing
with nemesis, the nemesis of surprise with the nemesis of equality and
intense satisfaction.
* * * * *
[_The Caskets Story._]
In the Caskets Story, which Shakespeare has associated with the Story of
the Jew, the dramatic capabilities are of a totally different kind. In
the artist's armoury one of the most effective weapons is Idealisation:
[_Idealisation:_] inexplicable touches throwing an attractiveness over
the repulsive, uncovering the truth and beauty which lie hidden in the
commonplace, and showing how much can be brought out of how little with
how little change. [_the exhibition of a commonplace experience in a
glorified form._] A story will be excellent material, then, for dramatic
handling which contains at once some experience of ordinary life, and
also the surroundings which can be made to exhibit this experience in a
glorified form: the more commonplace the experience, the greater the
triumph of art if it can be idealised. The point of the Caskets Story to
the eye of an artist in Drama is the opportunity it affords for such an
idealisation of the commonest problem in everyday experience--what may
be called the Problem of Judgment by Appearances.
[_Problem of Judgment by Appearances._]
In the choice between alternatives there are three ways in which
judgment may be exercised. The first mode, if it can be called judgment
at all, is to accept the decision of chance--to cast lots, or merely to
drift into a decision. An opposite to this is purely rational choice.
But rational choice, if strictly interpreted as a logical process,
involves great complications. If a man would choose according to the
methods of strict reason, he must, first of all, purge himself of all
passion, for passion and reason are antagonistic. Next, he must examine
himself as to the possibility of latent prejudice; and as prejudice may
be unconsciously inherited, he must include in the sphere of his
examination ancestral and national bias. Then, he must accumulate all
the evidence that can possibly bear upon the question in hand, and
foresee every eventuality that can result from either alternative. When
he has all the materials of choice before him, he must proceed to
balance them against one another, seeing first that the mental faculties
employed in the process have been equally developed by training. All
such preliminary conditions having been satisfied, he may venture to
enquire on which side the balance dips, maintaining his suspense so long
as the dip is undecided. And when a man has done all this he has
attained only that degree of approach to strictly rational choice which
his imperfect nature admits. Such pure reason has no place in real life:
judgment in practical affairs is something between chance and this
strict reason; it attempts to use the machinery of rational choice, but
only so far as practical considerations proper to the matter in hand
allow. This medium choice is what I am here calling Judgment by
Appearances, for it is clear that the antithesis between appearance and
reality will obtain so long as the materials of choice are
scientifically incomplete; the term will apply with more and more
appropriateness as the divergence from perfect conditions of choice is
greater.
[_This idealised: a maximum in the issue._]
Judgment by Appearances so defined is the only method of judgment proper
to practical life, and accordingly an exalted exhibition of it must
furnish a keen dramatic interest. How is such a process to be glorified?
Clearly Judgment by Appearances will reach the ideal stage when there is
the maximum of importance in the issue to be decided and the minimum of
evidence by which to decide it. These two conditions are satisfied in
the Caskets Story. In questions touching the individual life, that of
marriage has this unique importance, that it is bound up with wide
consequences which extend beyond the individual himself to his
posterity. With the suitors of Portia the question is of marriage with
the woman who is presented as supreme of her age in beauty, in wealth
and in character; [=ii.= i. 40, &c.] moreover, the other alternative is
a vow of perpetual celibacy. So the question at issue in the Caskets
Story concerns the most important act of life in the most important form
in which it can be imagined to present itself. [_and a minimum in the
evidence._] When we turn to the evidence on which this question is to be
decided we find that of rational evidence there is absolutely none. The
choice is to be made between three caskets distinguished by their metals
and by the accompanying inscriptions:
[=ii.= vii. 5-9.]
Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.
Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.
Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.
However individual fancies may incline, it is manifestly impossible to
set up any train of _reasoning_ which should discover a ground of
preference amongst the three. And it is worth noting, as an example of
Shakespeare's nicety in detail, that the successful chooser reads in the
scroll which announces his victory,
[=iii.= ii. 132.]
You that choose not by the view,
Chance _as_ fair, and choose _as_ true:
Shakespeare does not say '_more_ fair,' '_more_ true.' [=i.= ii. 30-36.]
This equal balancing of the alternatives will appear still clearer when
we recollect that it is an intentional puzzle with which we are dealing,
and accordingly that even if ingenuity could discover a preponderance of
reason in favour of any one of the three, there would be the chance that
this preponderance had been anticipated by the father who set the
puzzle. The case becomes like that of children bidden to guess in which
hand a sweetmeat is concealed. They are inclined to say the right hand,
but hesitate whether that answer may not have been foreseen and the
sweetmeat put in the left hand; and if on this ground they are tempted
to be sharp and guess the left hand, there is the possibility that this
sharpness may have been anticipated, and the sweetmeat kept after all in
the right hand. If then the Caskets Story places before us three
suitors, going through three trains of intricate reasoning for guidance
in a matter on which their whole future depends, whereas we, the
spectators, can see that from the nature of the case no reasoning can
possibly avail them, we have clearly the Problem of Judgment by
Appearances drawn out in its ideal form; and our sympathies are
attracted by the sight of a process, belonging to our everyday
experience, yet developed before us in all the force artistic setting
can bestow.
[_Solution of the problem: the characters of the choosers determine
their fates._]
But is this all? Does Shakespeare display before us the problem, yet
give no help towards its solution? The key to the suitors' fates is not
to be found in the trains of reasoning they go through. [=iii.= ii, from
43; esp. 61.] As if to warn us against looking for it in this
direction. Shakespeare contrives that we never hear the reasonings of
the successful suitor. By a natural touch Portia, who has chosen
Bassanio in her heart, is represented as unable to bear the suspense of
hearing him deliberate, and calls for music to drown his meditations; it
is only the conclusion to which he has come that we catch as the music
closes. The particular song selected on this occasion points dimly in
the direction in which we are to look for the true solution of the
problem:
[=iii.= ii. 63.]
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
'Fancy' in Shakespearean English means 'love'; and the discussion,
whether love belongs to the head or the heart, is no inappropriate
accompaniment to a reality which consists in this--that the success in
love of the suitors, which they are seeking to compass by their
reasonings, is in fact being decided by their characters.
To compare the characters of the three suitors, it will be enough to
note the different form that pride takes in each. [=ii.= i, vii.] The
first suitor is a prince of a barbarian race, who has thus never known
equals, but has been taught to consider himself half divine; as if made
of different clay from the rest of mankind he instinctively shrinks from
'lead.' [=ii.= vii. 20.] Yet modesty mingles with his pride, and though
he feels truly that, so far [=ii.= vii. 24-30.] as the estimation of him
by others is concerned, he might rely upon 'desert,' yet he doubts if
desert extends as far as Portia. [=ii.= vii, from 36.] What seizes his
attention is the words, 'what many men desire'; and he rises to a flight
of eloquence in picturing wildernesses and deserts become thoroughfares
by the multitude of suitors flocking to Belmont. But he is all the while
betraying a secret of which he was himself unconscious: he has been led
to seek the hand of Portia, not by true love, but by the feeling that
what all the world is seeking the Prince of Morocco must not be slow to
claim. Very different is the pride of Arragon. [=ii.= ix.] He has no
regal position, but rather appears to be one who has fallen in social
rank: [compare =ii.= ix. 47-9.] he makes up for such a fall by intense
pride of family, and is one of those who complacently thank heaven that
they are not as other men. The 'many men' which had attracted Morocco
repels Arragon:
[=ii.= ix. 31.]
I will not choose what many men desire,
Because I will not jump with common spirits,
And rank me with the barbarous multitudes.
[=ii.= ix, from 36.] He is caught by the bait of 'desert.' It is true he
almost deceives us with the lofty tone in which he reflects how the
world would benefit if dignities and offices were in all cases purchased
by the merit of the wearer; yet there peeps through his sententiousness
his real conception of merit--the sole merit of family descent. His
ideal is that the 'true seed of honour' should be 'picked from the chaff
and ruin of the times,' and wrest greatness from the 'low peasantry' who
had risen to it. He accordingly rests his fate upon desert: and he finds
in the casket of his choice a fool's head. [=iii.= ii, from 73.] Of
Bassanio's soliloquy we hear enough to catch that his pride is the pride
of the soldier, who will yield to none the post of danger, [compare =i.=
ii. 124.] and how he is thus attracted by the 'threatening' of the
leaden casket:
thou meagre lead,
Which rather threatenest than dost promise aught,
Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence.
Moreover, he is a lover, and the threatening is a challenge to show what
he will risk for love: his true heart finds its natural satisfaction in
'giving and hazarding' his all. This is the pride that is worthy of
Portia; and thus the ingenious puzzle of the 'inspired' father has
succeeded in piercing through the outer defence of specious reasoning,
and carrying its repulsion and attraction to the inmost characters of
the suitors.
[_General principle: character as an element in judgment._]
Such, then, is Shakespeare's treatment of the Problem of Judgment by
Appearances: while he draws out the problem itself to its fullest extent
in displaying the suitors elaborating trains of argument for a
momentous decision in which we see that reason can be of no avail, he
suggests for the solution that, besides reason, there is in such
judgments another element, character, and that in those crises in which
reason is most fettered, character is most potent. An important solution
this is; for what is character? A man's character is the shadow of his
past life; it is the grand resultant of all the forces from within and
from without that have been operating upon him since he became a
conscious agent. Character is the sandy footprint of the commonplace
hardened into the stone of habit; it is the complexity of daily tempers,
judgments, restraints, impulses, all focussed into one master-passion
acting with the rapidity of an instinct. To lay down then, that where
reason fails as an element in judgment, character comes to its aid, is
to bind together the exceptional and the ordinary in life. In most of
the affairs of life men have scope for the exercise of commonplace
qualities, but emergencies do come where this is denied them; in these
cases, while they think, like the three suitors, that they are moving
voluntarily in the direction in which they are judging fit at the
moment, in reality the weight of their past lives is forcing them in the
direction in which their judgment has been accustomed to take them. Thus
in the moral, as in the physical world, nothing is ever lost: not a
ripple on the surface of conduct but goes on widening to the outermost
limit of experience. Shakespeare's contribution to the question of
practical judgment is that by the long exercise of commonplace qualities
we are building up a character which, though unconsciously, is the
determining force in the emergencies in which commonplace qualities are
impossible.
II.
HOW SHAKESPEARE IMPROVES THE STORIES IN THE TELLING.
_A Study in Dramatic Workmanship._
[_Two points of Dramatic Mechanism._]
IN treating the Story as the raw material of the Romantic Drama it has
already been shown, in the case of the stories utilised for _The
Merchant of Venice_, what natural capacities these exhibit for dramatic
effect. The next step is to show how the artist increases their dramatic
force in the process of working them up. Two points will be illustrated
in the present study: first, how Shakespeare meets the difficulties of a
story and reduces them to a minimum; secondly, how he improves the two
tales by weaving them together so that they assist one another's effect.
[_Reduction of difficulties specially important in Drama._]
The avoidance or reduction of difficulties in a story is an obvious
element in any kind of artistic handling; it is of special importance in
Drama in proportion as we are more sensitive to improbabilities in what
is supposed to take place before our eyes than in what we merely hear of
by narrative. This branch of art could not be better illustrated than in
the Story of the Jew: never perhaps has an artist had to deal with
materials so bristling with difficulties of the greatest magnitude, and
never, it may be added, have they been met with greater ingenuity. The
host of improbabilities gathering about such a detail as the pound of
flesh must strike every mind. [_First difficulty: monstrosity of the
Jew's character._] There is, however, preliminary to these, another
difficulty of more general application: the difficulty of painting a
character bad enough to be the hero of the story. It might be thought
that to paint excess of badness is comparatively easy, as needing but a
coarse brush. On the contrary, there are few severer tests of creative
power than the treatment of monstrosity. To be told that there is
villainy in the world and tacitly to accept the statement may be easy;
it is another thing to be brought into close contact with the villains,
to hear them converse, to watch their actions and occasionally to be
taken into their confidence. We realise in Drama through our sympathy
and our experience: in real life we have not been accustomed to come
across monsters and are unfamiliar with their behaviour; in proportion
then as the badness of a character is exaggerated it is carried outside
the sphere of our experience, the naturalness of the scene is
interrupted and its human interest tends to decline. So, in the case of
the story under consideration, the dramatist is confronted with this
dilemma: he must make the character of Shylock absolutely bad, or the
incident of the bond will appear unreal; he must not make the character
extraordinarily bad, or there is danger of the whole scene appearing
unreal.
[_Its repulsiveness counteracted by sympathy with his wrongs._]
Shakespeare meets a difficulty of this kind by a double treatment. On
the one hand, he puts no limits to the blackness of the character
itself; on the other hand, he provides against repulsiveness by giving
it a special attraction of another kind. In the present case, while
painting Shylock as a monster, he secures for him a hold upon our
sympathy by representing him as a victim of intolerable ill-treatment
and injustice. The effect resembles the popular sympathy with criminals.
The men themselves and their crimes are highly repulsive; but if some
slight irregularity occurs in the process of bringing them to
justice--if a counsel shows himself unduly eager, or a judge appears for
a moment one-sided, a host of volunteer advocates espouse their cause.
These are actuated no doubt by sensitiveness to purity of justice; but
their protests have a ring that closely resembles sympathy with the
criminals themselves, whom they not unfrequently end by believing to be
innocent and injured. [e.g. in =iii.= i, iii; =iv.= i; =ii.= 5.] In the
same way Shakespeare shows no moderation in the touches of
bloodthirstiness, of brutality, of sordid meanness he heaps together in
the character of Shylock; but he takes equal pains to rouse our
indignation at the treatment he is made to suffer. [e.g. =iii.= i.;
=iv.= i, &c.] Personages such as Gratiano, Salanio, Salarino, Tubal,
serve to keep before us the mediæval feud between Jew and Gentile, and
the persecuting insolence with which the fashionable youth met the
money-lenders who ministered to their necessities. [=i.= iii. 107-138.]
Antonio himself has stepped out of his natural character in the
grossness of his insults to his enemy. [=iii.= i. 57, 133; =iii.= iii.
22; and =i.= iii. 45.] Shylock has been injured in pocket as well as in
sentiment, Antonio using his wealth to disturb the money-market and
defeat the schemes of the Jew; according to Shylock Antonio has hindered
him of half-a-million, and were he out of Venice the usurer could make
what merchandise he would. Finally, our sense of deliverance in the
Trial Scene cannot hinder a touch of compunction for the crushed
plaintiff, as he appeals against the hard justice meted out to him:--the
loss of his property, the acceptance of his life as an act of grace, the
abandonment of his religion and race, which implies the abandonment of
the profession by which he makes his living.
[=iv.= i. 374.]
Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.
By thus making us resent the harsh fate dealt to Shylock the dramatist
recovers in our minds the fellow-feeling we have lost in contemplating
the Jew himself. [_Dramatic Hedging._] A name for such double treatment
might be 'Dramatic Hedging': as the better covers a possible loss by a
second bet on the opposite side, so, when the necessities of a story
involve the creation of a monster, the dramatic artist 'hedges' against
loss of attractiveness by finding for the character human interest in
some other direction. So successful has Shakespeare been in the present
instance that a respectable minority of readers rise from the play
partisans of Shylock.
[_Difficulties connected with the pound of flesh._]
We pass on to the crop of difficulties besetting the pound of flesh as a
detail in the bond. That such a bond should be proposed, that when
proposed it should be accepted, that it should be seriously entertained
by a court of justice, that if entertained at all it should be upset on
so frivolous a pretext as the omission of reference to the shedding of
blood: these form a series of impossible circumstances that any
dramatist might despair of presenting with even an approach to
naturalness. Yet if we follow the course of the story as moulded by
Shakespeare we shall find all these impossibilities one after another
evaded.
[_Proposal of the bond._]
At the end of the first scene Antonio had bidden Bassanio go forth and
try what his credit could do in Venice. [=i.= i. 179.] Armed with this
blank commission Bassanio hurries into the city. As a gay young nobleman
he knows nothing of the commercial world except the money-lenders; and
now proceeds to the best-known of them, apparently unaware of what any
gossip on the Rialto could have told him, the unfortunate relations
between this Shylock and his friend Antonio. [compare =i.= iii. 1-40.]
At the opening of the Bond Scene we find Bassanio and Shylock in
conversation, Bassanio impatient and irritated to find that the famous
security he has to offer seems to make so little impression on the
usurer. [=i.= iii. 41.] At this juncture Antonio himself falls[1] in
with them, sees at a glance to what his rash friend has committed him,
but is too proud to draw back in sight of his enemy. Already a minor
difficulty is surmounted, as to how Antonio comes to be in the position
of asking an obligation of Shylock. Antonio is as impatient as dignity
will permit to bring an awkward business to a conclusion. Shylock, on
the contrary, to whom the interview itself is a triumph, in which his
persecutor is appearing before him in the position of a client, casts
about to prolong the conversation to as great a length as possible. Any
topic would serve his purpose; but what topic more natural than the
question at the root of the feud between the two, the question of
lending money on interest? It is here we reach the very heart of our
problem, how the first mention of the pound of flesh is made without a
shock of unreality sufficient to ruin the whole scene. Had Shylock asked
for a forfeiture of a million per cent., or in any other way thrown into
a commercial form his purpose of ruining Antonio, the old feud and the
present opportunity would be explanation sufficient: the real difficulty
is the total incongruity between such an idea as a pound of human flesh
and commercial transactions of any kind. [_The proposal led up to by the
discourse on interest._] This difficulty Shakespeare has met by one of
his greatest triumphs of mechanical ingenuity: his leading up to the
proposal of the bond by the discussion on interest. The effect of this
device a modern reader is in danger of losing: [=i.= iii, from 69.] we
are so familiar with the idea of interest at the present day that we are
apt to forget what the difficulty was to the ancient and mediæval mind,
which for so many generations kept the practice of taking interest
outside the pale of social decency. This prejudice was one of the
confusions arising out of the use of a metal currency. The ancient mind
could understand how corn put into the ground would by the agency of
time alone produce twentyfold, thirtyfold, or a hundredfold; they could
understand how cattle left to themselves would without human assistance
increase from a small to a large flock: but how could metal grow? how
could lifeless gold and silver increase and multiply like animals and
human beings? The Greek word for interest, _tokos_, is the exact
equivalent of the English word _breed_, and the idea underlying the two
was regularly connected with that of interest in ancient discussions.
The same idea is present throughout the dispute between Antonio and
Shylock. Antonio indignantly asks:
[=i.= iii. 134.]
when did friendship take
A _breed_ for _barren metal_ of his friend?
[=i.= iii. 72.]
Shylock illustrates usury by citing the patriarch Jacob and his clever
trick in cattle-breeding; showing how, at a time when cattle were the
currency, the natural rate of increase might be diverted to private
advantage. Antonio interrupts him:
[=i.= iii. 96.]
Is your gold and silver ewes and rams?
Shylock answers:
I cannot tell; I make it _breed_ as fast;
both parties thus showing that they considered the distinction between
the using of flesh and metal for the medium of wealth to be the
essential point in their dispute. With this notion then of flesh
_versus_ money floating in the air between them the interview goes on to
the outbursts of mutual hatred which reach a climax in Antonio's
challenge to Shylock to do his worst; [=i.= iii, from 138.] this
challenge suddenly combines with the root idea of the conversation to
flash into Shylock's mind the suggestion of the bond. In an instant he
smoothes his face and proposes friendship. He will lend the money
without interest, in pure kindness, nay more, he will go to that extent
of good understanding implied in joking, and will have a merry bond;
while as to the particular joke (he says in effect), since you
Christians cannot understand interest in the case of money while you
acknowledge it in the case of flesh and blood, suppose I take as my
interest in this bond a pound of your own flesh. In such a context the
monstrous proposal sounds almost natural. It has further been ushered
in a manner which makes it almost impossible to decline it. When one who
is manifestly an injured man is the first to make advances, a generous
adversary finds it almost impossible to hold back. A sensitive man,
again, will shrink from nothing more than from the ridicule attaching to
those who take serious precautions against a jest. And the more
incongruous Shylock's proposal is with commercial negotiations the
better evidence it is of his non-commercial intentions. In a word, the
essence of the difficulty was the incongruity between human flesh and
money transactions: it has been surmounted by a discussion, flowing
naturally from the position of the two parties, of which the point is
the relative position of flesh and money as the medium of wealth in the
past.
[_Difficulty of legally recognising the bond evaded:_]
The bond thus proposed and accepted, there follows the difficulty of
representing it as entertained by a court of justice. With reference to
Shakespeare's handling of this point it may be noted, first, that he
leaves us in doubt whether the court would have entertained it: [=iv.=
i. 104.] the Duke is intimating an intention of adjourning at the moment
when the entrance of Portia gives a new turn to the proceedings. [=iv.=
i. 17.] Again, at the opening of the trial, the Duke gives expression to
the universal opinion that Shylock's conduct was intelligible only on
the supposition that he was keeping up to the last moment the
appearance of insisting on his strange terms, in order that before the
eyes of the whole city he might exhibit his enemy at his mercy, and then
add to his ignominy by publicly pardoning him: a fate which, it must be
admitted, was no more than Antonio justly deserved. This will explain
how Shylock comes to have a hearing at all: when once he is admitted to
speak it is exceedingly difficult to resist the pleas Shakespeare puts
into his mouth. [=iv.= i. 38.] He takes his stand on the city's charter
and the letter of the law, and declines to be drawn into any discussion
of natural justice; [=iv.= i. 90.] yet even as a question of natural
justice what answer can be found when he casually points to the
institution of slavery, which we must suppose to have existed in Venice
at the period? Shylock's only offence is his seeking to make Antonio's
life a matter of barter: what else is the accepted institution of
slavery but the establishment of power over human flesh and blood and
life, simply because these have been bought with money, precisely as
Shylock has given good ducats for his rights over the flesh of Antonio?
No wonder the perplexed Duke is for adjourning.
[_Difficulty as to the traditional mode of upsetting the bond met._]
There remains one more difficulty, the mode in which, according to the
traditional story, the bond is upset. It is manifest that the agreement
as to the pound of flesh, if it is to be recognised by a court of
justice at all, cannot without the grossest perversion of justice be
cancelled on the ground of its omitting to mention blood. Legal evasion
can go to great lengths. It is well known that an Act requiring cabs to
carry lamps at night has been evaded through the omission of a direction
that the lamps were to be lighted; and that importers have escaped a
duty on foreign gloves at so much the pair by bringing the right-hand
and left-hand gloves over in different ships. But it is perfectly
possible to carry lamps without lighting them, while it is a clear
impossibility to cut human flesh without shedding blood. Nothing of
course would be easier than to upset the bond on rational
grounds--indeed the difficulty is rather to imagine it receiving
rational consideration at all; but on the other hand no solution of the
perplexity could be half so dramatic as the one tradition has preserved.
The dramatist has to choose between a course of procedure which shall be
highly dramatic but leave a sense of injustice, and one that shall be
sound and legal but comparatively tame. Shakespeare contrives to secure
both alternatives. He retains the traditional plea as to the blood, but
puts it into the mouth of one known to his audience to be a woman
playing the lawyer for the nonce; [=iv.= i. 314, 347.] and again, before
we have time to recover from our surprise and feel the injustice of the
proceeding, he follows up the brilliant evasion by a sound legal plea,
the suggestion of a real lawyer. Portia has come to the court from a
conference with her cousin Bellario, the most learned jurist of Venice.
[=iii.= iv. 47; =iv.= i. 143.] Certainly it was not this doctor who hit
upon the idea of the blood being omitted. His contribution to the
interesting consultation was clearly the old statute of Venice, which
every one else seems to have forgotten, which made the mere attempt on
the life of a citizen by an alien punishable with death and loss of
property: according to this piece of statute law not only would
Shylock's bond be illegal, but the demand of such security constituted a
capital offence. Thus Shakespeare surmounts the final difficulty in the
story of the Jew in a mode which retains dramatic force to the full, yet
does this without any violation of legal fairness.
* * * * *
[_The interweaving of the two stories._]
The second purpose of the present study is to show how Shakespeare has
improved his two stories by so weaving them together that they assist
one another's effect.
First, it is easy to see how the whole movement of the play rises
naturally out of the union of the two stories. One of the main
distinctions between the progress of events in real life or history and
in Drama is that the movement of a drama falls into the form technically
known as Complication and Resolution. [_Complication and Resolution._]
A dramatist fastens our attention upon some train of events: then he
sets himself to divert this train of events from its natural course by
some interruption; this interruption is either removed, and the train of
events returns to its natural course, or the interruption is carried on
to some tragic culmination. In _The Merchant of Venice_ our interest is
at the beginning fixed on Antonio as rich, high-placed, the protector
and benefactor of his friends. By the events following upon the incident
of the bond we see what would seem the natural life of Antonio diverted
into a totally different channel; in the end the old course is restored,
and Antonio becomes prosperous as before. Such interruption of a train
of incidents is its Complication, and the term Complication suggests a
happy Resolution to follow. Complication and Resolution are essential to
dramatic movement, as discords and their 'resolution' into concords
constitute the essence of music. [_The one story complicated and
resolved by the other._] The Complication and Resolution in the story of
the Jew serve for the Complication and Resolution of the drama as a
whole; and my immediate point is that these elements of movement in the
one story spring directly out of its connection with the other. [=i.= i,
from 122; =i.= iii.] But for Bassanio's need of money and his blunder in
applying to Shylock the bond would never have been entered into, and the
change in Antonio's fortunes would never have come about: thus the cause
for all the Complication of the play (technically, the Complicating
Force) is the happy lover of the Caskets Story. Similarly Portia is the
means by which Antonio's fortunes are restored to their natural flow: in
other words, the source of the Resolution (or Resolving Force) is the
maiden of the Caskets Story. The two leading personages of the one tale
are the sources respectively of the Complication and Resolution in the
other tale, which carry the Complication and Resolution of the drama as
a whole. Thus simply does the movement of the whole play flow from the
union of the two stories.
[_The whole play symmetrical about its central scene._]
One consequence flowing from this is worth noting; that the scene in
which Bassanio makes his successful choice of the casket is the Dramatic
Centre of the whole play, as being the point in which the Complicating
and Resolving Forces meet. This Dramatic Centre is, according to
Shakespeare's favourite custom, placed in the exact mechanical centre of
the drama, covering the middle of the middle Act. There is again an
amount of poetic splendour lavished upon this scene which throws it up
as a poetic centre to the whole. More than this, it is the real crisis
of the play. Looking philosophically upon the whole drama as a piece of
history, we must admit that the true turning-point is the success of
Bassanio; the apparent crisis is the Trial Scene, but this is in reality
governed by the scene of the successful choice, and if Portia and
Bassanio had not been united in the earlier scene no lawyer would have
interposed to turn the current of events in the trial. There is yet
another sense in which the same scene may be called central. Hitherto I
have dealt with only two tales; the full plot however of _The Merchant
of Venice_ involves two more, the Story of Jessica and the Episode of
the Rings: it is to be observed that all four stories meet in the scene
of the successful choice. This scene is the climax of the Caskets Story.
[=iii.= ii, from 221.] It is connected with the catastrophe in the Story
of the Jew: Bassanio, at the moment of his happiness, learns that the
friend through whom he has been able to contend for the prize has
forfeited his life to his foe as the price of his liberality. The scene
is connected with the Jessica Story: for Jessica and her husband are the
messengers who bring the sad tidings, and thus link together the bright
and gloomy elements of the play. [=iii.= ii. 173-187.] Finally, the
Episode of the Rings, which is to occupy the end of the drama, has its
foundation in this scene, in the exchange of the rings which are
destined to be the source of such ironical perplexity. Such is the
symmetry with which the plot of _The Merchant of Venice_ has been
constructed: the incident which is technically its Dramatic Centre is at
once its mechanical centre, its poetic centre, and, philosophically
considered, its true turning-point; while, considering the play as a
Romantic drama with its union of stories, we find in the same central
incident all the four stories dovetailed together.
[_Shakespeare as a master of Plot_.]
These points may appear small and merely technical. But is a constant
purpose with me in the present exposition of Shakespeare as a Dramatic
Artist to combat the notion, so widely prevalent amongst ordinary
readers, that Shakespeare, though endowed with the profoundest grasp of
human nature, is yet careless in the construction of his plots: a notion
in itself as improbable as it would be that a sculptor could be found to
produce individual figures exquisitely moulded and chiselled, yet
awkwardly and clumsily grouped. It is the minuter points that show the
finish of an artist; and such symmetry of construction as appears in
_The Merchant of Venice_ is not likely to characterise a dramatist who
sacrifices plot to character-painting.
[_The union of a light with a serious story._]
There remains another point, which no one will consider small or
technical, connected with the union of the two stories: the fact that
Shakespeare has thus united a light and a serious story, that he has
woven together gloom and brightness. This carries us to one of the great
battlefields of dramatic history; no feature is more characteristic of
the Romantic Drama than this mingling of light and serious in the same
play, and at no point has it been more stoutly assailed by critics
trained in an opposite school. I say nothing of the wider scope this
practice gives to the dramatist, nor the way in which it brings the
world of art nearer to the world of reality; my present purpose is to
review the dramatic effects which flow from the mingling of the two
elements in the present play.
[_Dramatic effects arising out of this union._]
In general human interest the stories are a counterpoise to one
another, so different in kind, so equal in the degree of interest their
progress continues to call forth. The incidents of the two tales gather
around Antonio and Portia respectively; [_Effects of Human Interest._]
each of these is a full and rounded character, and they are both centres
of their respective worlds. [=i.= i. 1.] The stories seem to start from
a common point. The keynote to the story of the Jew is the strange
'sadness'--the word implies no more than seriousness--which overpowers
Antonio, and which seems to be the shadow of his coming trouble. Compare
with this the first words we hear of Portia:
[=i.= ii. 1.]
By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.
Such a humorous languor is a fitting precursor to the excitement and
energy of the scenes which follow. But from this common starting-point
the stories move in opposite directions; the spectator's sympathies are
demanded alternately for two independent chains of circumstances, for
the fortunes of Antonio sinking lower and lower, and the fortunes of
Portia rising higher and higher. He sees the merchant and citizen become
a bankrupt prisoner, the lordly benefactor of his friends a wretch at
the mercy of his foe. He sees Portia, already endowed with beauty,
wealth, and character, attain what to her heart is yet higher, the power
to lay all she has at the feet of the man she loves. Then, when they are
at the climax of their happiness and misery, when Portia has received
all that this world can bestow, and Antonio has lost all that this world
can take away, for the first time these two central personages meet face
to face in the Trial Scene. [_Effects of Plot._] And if from general
human interest we pass on to the machinery of plot, we find this also
governed by the same combination: a half-serious frolic is the medium in
which a tragic crisis finds its solution.
[_Emotional effects: increase of tragic passion;_]
But it is of course passion and emotional interest which are mainly
affected by the union of light and serious: these we shall appreciate
chiefly in connection with the Trial Scene, where the emotional threads
of the play are gathered into a knot, and the two personages who are the
embodiments of the light and serious elements face one another as judge
and prisoner. [=iv.= i, from 225.] In this scene it is remarkable how
Portia takes pains to prolong to the utmost extent the crisis she has
come to solve; she holds in her fingers the threads of the tangled
situation, and she is strong enough to play with it before she will
consent to bring it to an end. [178.] She has intimated her opinion that
the letter of the bond must be maintained, [184-207.] she has made her
appeal to Shylock for mercy and been refused, she has heard Bassanio's
appeal to wrest the law for once to [214-222.] her authority and has
rejected it; there remains nothing but to pronounce the decree. [225.]
But at the last moment she asks to see the bond, and every spectator in
court holds his breath and hears his heart beat as he follows the
lawyer's eye down line after line. [227-230.] It is of no avail; at the
end she can only repeat the useless offer of thrice the loan, with the
effect of drawing from Shylock an oath that he will not give way.
[230-244.] Then Portia admits that the bond is forfeit, with a needless
reiteration of its horrible details; yet, as if it were some evenly
balanced question, in which after-thoughts were important, she once more
appeals to Shylock to be merciful and bid her tear the bond, and evokes
a still stronger asseveration from the malignant victor, until even
Antonio's stoicism begins to give way, and he begs for a speedy
judgment. [243.] Portia then commences to pass her judgment in language
of legal prolixity, which sounds like a recollection of her hour with
Bellario:--
For the intent and purpose of the law
Hath full relation to the penalty,
Which here appeareth due upon the bond, &c.
[255-261.]
Next she fads about the details of the judicial barbarity, the balance
to weigh the flesh, a surgeon as a forlorn hope; and when Shylock demurs
to the last, stops to argue that he might do this for charity. At last
surely the intolerable suspense will come to a termination. [263.] But
our lawyer of half-an-hour's standing suddenly remembers she has
forgotten to call on the defendant in the suit, and the pathos is
intensified by the dying speech of Antonio, calmly welcoming death for
himself, anxious only to soften Bassanio's remorse, his last human
passion a rivalry with Portia for the love of his friend.
[=iv.= i. 276.]
Bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love.
[=iv.= i, from 299.]
When the final judgment can be delayed no longer its opening sentences
are still lengthened out by the jingling repetitions of judicial
formality,
The law allows it, and the court awards it, &c.
Only when every evasion has been exhausted comes the thunderstroke which
reverses the whole situation. Now it is clear that had this situation
been intended to have a tragic termination this prolonging of its
details would have been impossible; thus to harrow our feelings with
items of agony would be not art but barbarity. It is because Portia
knows what termination she is going to give to the scene that she can
indulge in such boldness; it is because the audience have recognised in
Portia the signal of deliverance that the lengthening of the crisis
becomes the dramatic beauty of suspense. It appears then that, if this
scene be regarded only as a crisis of tragic passion, the dramatist has
been able to extract more _tragic_ effect out of it by the device of
assisting the tragic with a light story.
[_reaction and comic effect;_]
Again, it is a natural law of the human mind to pass from strain to
reaction, and suspense relieved will find vent in vehement exhilaration.
By giving Portia her position in the crisis scene the dramatist is
clearly furnishing the means for a reaction to follow, and the reaction
is found in the [=iv.= i, from 425.] Episode of the Rings, by which the
disguised wives entangle their husbands in a perplexity affording the
audience the bursts of merriment needed as relief from the tension of
the Trial Scene. The play is thus brought into conformity with the laws
of mental working, and the effect of the reaction is to make the
serious passion more keen because more healthy.
[_effects of mixed passion._]
Finally, there are the effects of mixed passion, neither wholly serious
nor wholly light, but compounded of the two, which are impossible to a
drama that can admit only a single tone. The effect of Dramatic Irony,
which Shakespeare inherited from the ancient Drama, but greatly modified
and extended, is powerfully illustrated at the most pathetic point of
the Trial Scene, [=iv.= i. 273-294.] when Antonio's chance reference to
Bassanio's new wife calls from Bassanio and his followers agonised vows
to sacrifice even their wives if this could save their patron--little
thinking that these wives are standing by to record the vow. But there
is an effect higher than this. [=iv.= i. 184-202.] Portia's outburst on
the theme of mercy, considered only as a speech, is one of the noblest
in literature, a gem of purest truth in a setting of richest music. But
the situation in which she speaks it is so framed as to make Portia
herself the embodiment of the mercy she describes. How can we imagine a
higher type of mercy, the feminine counterpart of justice, than in the
bright woman, at the moment of her supreme happiness, appearing in the
garb of the law to deliver a righteous unfortunate from his one error,
and the justice of Venice from the insoluble perplexity of having to
commit a murder by legal process? And how is this situation brought
about but by the most intricate interweaving of a story of brightness
with a story of trouble?
In all branches then of dramatic effect, in Character, in Plot and in
Passion, the union of a light with a serious story is found to be a
source of power and beauty. The fault charged against the Romantic Drama
has upon a deeper view proved a new point of departure in dramatic
progress; and in this particular case the combination of tales so
opposite in character must be regarded as one of the leading points in
which Shakespeare has improved the tales in the telling.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] No commentator has succeeded in making intelligible the line
[=i.= iii. 42.]
How like a fawning publican he looks!
as it stands in the text at the opening of Shylock's soliloquy. The
expression 'fawning publican' is so totally the opposite of all the
qualities of Antonio that it could have no force even in the mouth of a
satirist. It is impossible not to be attracted by the simple change in
the text that would not only get over this difficulty, but add a new
effect to the scene: the change of assigning this single line to
Antonio, reserving, of course, the rest of the speech for Shylock. The
passage would then read thus [the stage direction is my own]:
_Enter_ ANTONIO.
_Bass._ This is Signior Antonio.
_Ant._ [_Aside_]. How like a fawning publican he looks--
[BASSANIO _whispers_ ANTONIO _and brings him to_ SHYLOCK.
_Shy._ [_Aside_]. I hate him, for he is a Christian, But more, &c.
Both the terms 'fawning' and 'publican' are literally applicable to
Shylock, and are just what Antonio would be likely to say of him. It is
again a natural effect for the two foes on meeting for the first time in
the play to exchange scowling defiance. Antonio's defiance is cut short
at the first line by Bassanio's running up to him, explaining what he
has done, and bringing Antonio up to where Shylock is standing; the time
occupied in doing this gives Shylock scope for his longer soliloquy.
III.
HOW SHAKESPEARE MAKES HIS PLOT MORE COMPLEX IN ORDER TO MAKE IT MORE
SIMPLE.
_A Study in Underplot._
[_Paradox of simplicity by means of increased complexity._]
THE title of the present study is a paradox: that Shakespeare makes a
plot more complex[2] in order to make it more simple. It is however a
paradox that finds an illustration from the material world in every open
roof. The architect's problem has been to support a heavy weight without
the assistance of pillars, and it might have been expected that in
solving the problem he would at least have tried every means in his
power for diminishing the weight to be supported. On the contrary, he
has increased this weight by the addition of massive cross-beams and
heavy iron-girders. Yet, if these have been arranged according to the
laws of construction, each of them will bring a supporting power
considerably greater than its own weight; and thus, while in a literal
sense increasing the roof, for all practical purposes they may be said
to have diminished it. Similarly a dramatist of the Romantic school,
from his practice of uniting more than one story in the same plot, has
to face the difficulty of complexity. This difficulty he solves not by
seeking how to reduce combinations as far as possible, but, on the
contrary, by the addition of more and inferior stories; yet if these new
stories are so handled as to emphasise and heighten the effect of the
main stories, the additional complexity will have resulted in increased
simplicity. In the play at present under consideration, Shakespeare has
interwoven into a common pattern two famous and striking tales; his
plot, already elaborate, he has made yet more elaborate by the addition
of two more tales less striking in their character--the Story of Jessica
and the Episode of the Rings. [_The Jessica Story and the Rings Episode
assist the main stories._] If it can be shown that these inferior
stories have the effect of assisting the main stories, smoothing away
their difficulties and making their prominent points yet more prominent,
it will be clear that he has made his plot more complex only in reality
to make it more simple. The present study is devoted to noticing how the
Stories of Jessica and of the Rings minister to the effects of the Story
of the Jew and the Caskets Story.
[_The Jessica Story. It serves as Underplot for mechanical personages._]
To begin with: it may be seen that in many ways the mechanical working
out of the main stories is assisted by the Jessica story. In the first
place it relieves them of their superfluous personages. Every drama,
however simple, must contain 'mechanical' personages, who are introduced
into the play, not for their own sake, but to assist in presenting
incidents or other personages. The tendency of Romantic Drama to put a
story as a whole upon the stage multiplies the number of such mechanical
personages: and when several such stories come to be combined in one,
there is a danger of the stage being crowded with characters which
intrinsically have little interest. Here the Underplots become of
service and find occupation for these inferior personages. In the
present case only four personages are essential to the main
plot--Antonio, Shylock, Bassanio, Portia. But in bringing out the
unusual tie that binds together a representative of the city and a
representative of the nobility, [e.g. =i.= i; =iii.= iii; =iv.= i.] and
upon which so much of the plot rests, it is an assistance to introduce
the rank and file of gay society and depict these paying court to the
commercial magnate. The high position of Antonio and Bassanio in their
respective spheres will come out still clearer if these lesser social
personages are graduated. [=i.= i; compare =iii.= i. esp. 14-18.]
Salanio, Salerio, and Salarino are mere parasites; [=i.= i. 74-118. =i.=
ii. 124. =v.= i, &c. =i.= ii, &c. =iii.= i. 80, &c.] Gratiano has a
certain amount of individuality in his wit; while, seeing that Bassanio
is a scholar as well as a nobleman and soldier, it is fitting to give
prominence amongst his followers to the intellectual and artistic
Lorenzo. Similarly the introduction of Nerissa assists in presenting
Portia fully; Shylock is seen in his relations with his race by the aid
of Tubal, his family life is seen in connection with Jessica, and his
behaviour to dependants in connection with Launcelot; Launcelot himself
is set off by Gobbo. Now the Jessica story is mainly devoted to these
inferior personages, and the majority of them take an animated part in
the successful elopement. It is further to be noted that the Jessica
Underplot has itself an inferior story attached to it, [=ii.= ii. iii;
=iii.= v.] that of Launcelot, who seeks scope for his good nature by
transferring himself to a Christian master, just as his mistress seeks a
freer social atmosphere in union with a Christian husband. And,
similarly, side by side with the Caskets Story, which unites Portia and
Bassanio, [=iii.= ii. 188, &c.] we have a faintly-marked underplot which
unites their followers, Nerissa and Gratiano. In one or other of these
inferior stories the mechanical personages find attachment to plot; and
the multiplication of individual figures, instead of leaving an
impression of waste, is made to minister to the sense of Dramatic
Economy.
[_It assists mechanical development: occupying the three months'
interval,_]
Again: as there are mechanical personages so there are mechanical
difficulties--difficulties of realisation which do not belong to the
essence of a story, but which appear when the story comes to be worked
out upon the stage. The Story of the Jew involves such a mechanical
difficulty in the interval of three months which elapses between the
signing of the bond and its forfeiture. In a classical setting this
would be avoided by making the play begin on the day the bond falls due;
such treatment, however, would shut out the great dramatic opportunity
of the Bond Scene. The Romantic Drama always inclines to exhibiting the
whole of a story; it must therefore in the present case _suppose_ a
considerable interval between one part of the story and another, and
such suppositions tend to be weaknesses. The Jessica Story conveniently
bridges over this interval. The first Act is given up to bringing about
the bond, which at the beginning of the third Act appears to be broken.
The intervening Act consists of no less than nine scenes, and while
three of them carry on the progress of the Caskets Story, the other six
are devoted to the elopement of Jessica: the bustle and activity implied
in such rapid change of scene indicating how an underplot can be used to
keep the attention of the audience just where the natural interest of
the main story would flag.
[_and so breaking gradually the news of Antonio's losses._]
The same use of the Jessica Story to bridge over the three months'
interval obviates another mechanical difficulty of the main plot. The
loss of all Antonio's ships, the supposition that all the commercial
ventures of so prudent a merchant should simultaneously miscarry, is so
contrary to the chances of things as to put some strain upon our sense
of probability; and this is just one of the details which, too
unimportant to strike us in an anecdote, become realised when a story is
presented before our eyes. The artist, it must be observed, is not bound
to find actual solutions for every possible difficulty; he has merely to
see that they do not interfere with dramatic effect. Sometimes he so
arranges his incidents that the difficulty is met and vanishes;
sometimes it is kept out of sight, the portion of the story which
contains it going on behind the scenes; at other times he is content
with reducing the difficulty in amount. In the present instance the
improbability of Antonio's losses is lessened by the gradual way in
which the news is broken to us, distributed amongst the numerous scenes
of the three months' interval. [=ii.= viii. 25.] We get the first hint
of it in a chance conversation between Salanio and Salarino, in which
they are chuckling over the success of the elopement and the fury of the
robbed father. Salanio remarks that Antonio must look that he keep his
day; this reminds Salarino of a ship he has just heard of as lost
somewhere in the English Channel:
I thought upon Antonio when he told me;
And wish'd in silence that it were not his.
[=iii.= i.] In the next scene but one the same personages meet, and one
of them, enquiring for the latest news, is told that the rumour yet
lives of Antonio's loss, and now the exact place of the wreck is
specified as the Goodwin Sands; Salarino adds: 'I would it might prove
the end of his losses.' Before the close of the scene Shylock and Tubal
have been added to it. Tubal has come from Genoa and gives Shylock the
welcome news that at Genoa it was _known_ that Antonio had lost an
argosy coming from Tripolis; while on his journey to Venice Tubal had
travelled with creditors of Antonio who were speculating upon his
bankruptcy as a certainty. [=iii.= ii.] Then comes the central scene in
which the full news reaches Bassanio at the moment of his happiness: all
Antonio's ventures failed--
From Tripolis, from Mexico and England,
From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,
not one escaped. [=iii.= iii.] In the following scene we see Antonio in
custody.
[_The Jessica Story assists Dramatic Hedging in regard to Shylock._]
These are minor points such as may be met with in any play, and the
treatment of them belongs to ordinary Dramatic Mechanism. But we have
already had to notice that the Story of the Jew contains special
difficulties which belong to the essence of the story, and must be met
by special devices. One of these was the monstrous character of the Jew
himself; and we saw how the dramatist was obliged to maintain in the
spectators a double attitude to Shylock, alternately letting them be
repelled by his malignity and again attracting their sympathy to him as
a victim of wrong. Nothing in the play assists this double attitude so
much as the Jessica Story. Not to speak of the fact that Shylock shows
no appreciation for the winsomeness of the girl who attracts every one
else in the drama, nor of the way in which this one point of brightness
in the Jewish quarter throws up the sordidness of all her surroundings,
[=ii.= iii. 2.] we hear the Jew's own daughter reflect that his house is
a 'hell,' and we see enough of his domestic life to agree with her.
[e.g. =ii.= v.] A Shylock painted without a tender side at all would be
repulsive; he becomes much more repulsive when he shows a tenderness for
one human being, and yet it appears how this tenderness has grown hard
and rotten with the general debasement of his soul by avarice, until, in
his ravings over his loss, [=iii.= i, from 25.] his ducats and his
daughter are ranked as equally dear.
[=iii.= i. 92.] I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the
jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats
in her coffin!
For all this we feel that he is hardly used in losing her. Paternal
feeling may take a gross form, but it is paternal feeling none the less,
and cannot be denied our sympathy; bereavement is a common ground upon
which not only high and low, but even the pure and the outcast, are
drawn together. Thus Jessica at home makes us hate Shylock: with Jessica
lost we cannot help pitying him. The perfection of Dramatic Hedging lies
in the equal balancing of the conflicting feelings, and one of the most
powerful scenes in the whole play is devoted to this twofold display of
Shylock. Fresh from the incident of the elopement, he is encountered by
the parasites and by Tubal: these amuse themselves with alternately
'chaffing' him upon his losses, and 'drawing' him in the matter of the
expected gratification of his vengeance, while his passions rock him
between extremes of despair and fiendish anticipation. [_Jessica
Shakespeare's compensation to Shylock._] We may go further. Great
creative power is accompanied by great attachment to the creations and
keen sense of justice in disposing of them. Looked at as a whole, the
Jessica Story is Shakespeare's compensation to Shylock. [=iv.= i.
348-394.] The sentence on Shylock, which the necessities of the story
require, is legal rather than just; yet large part of it consists in a
requirement that he shall make his daughter an heiress. And, to put it
more generally, the repellent character and hard fate of the father have
set against them the sweetness and beauty of the daughter, together with
the full cup of good fortune which her wilful rebellion brings her in
the love of Lorenzo and the protecting friendship of Portia. Perhaps the
dramatist, according to his wont, is warning us of this compensating
treatment when he makes one of the characters early in the play exclaim:
[=ii.= iv. 34.]
If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,
It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.
[_The Jessica Story explains Shylock's unyieldingness._]
The other main source of difficulty in the Story of the Jew is, as we
have seen, the detail concerning the pound of flesh, which throws
improbability over every stage of its progress. In one at least of these
stages the difficulty is directly met by the aid of the Jessica Story:
it is this which explains Shylock's resolution not to give way. When we
try in imagination to realise the whole circumstances, common sense must
take the view taken in the play itself by the Duke:
[=iv.= i. 17.]
Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too,
That thou but lead'st this fashion of thy malice
To the last hour of act; and then 'tis thought
Thou'lt show thy mercy and remorse more strange
Than is thy strange apparent cruelty.
A life-long training in avarice would not easily resist an offer of nine
thousand ducats. But further, the alternatives between which Shylock has
to choose are not so simple as the alternatives of Antonio's money or
his life. On the one hand, Shylock has to consider the small chance that
either the law or the mob would actually suffer the atrocity to be
judicially perpetrated, and how his own life would be likely to be lost
in the attempt. Again, turning to the other alternative, Shylock is
certainly deep in his schemes of vengeance, and the finesse of malignity
must have suggested to him how much more cruel to a man of Antonio's
stamp it would be to fling him a contemptuous pardon before the eyes of
Venice than to turn him into a martyr, even supposing this to be
permitted. But at the moment when the choice becomes open to Shylock he
has been maddened by the loss of his daughter, who, with the wealth she
has stolen, has gone to swell the party of his deadly foe. It is fury,
not calculating cruelty, that makes Shylock with a madman's tenacity
cling to the idea of blood, while this passion is blinding him to a more
keenly flavoured revenge, and risking the chance of securing any
vengeance at all[3].
[_The Jessica Story assists the interweaving of the main stories._]
From the mechanical development of the main plot and the reduction of
its difficulties, we pass to the interweaving of the two principal
stories, which is so leading a feature of the play. In the main this
interweaving is sufficiently provided for by the stories themselves, and
we have already seen how the leading personages in the one story are the
source of the whole movement in the other story. But this interweaving
is drawn closer still by the affair of Jessica: [_It is thus a Link
Action,_] technically described the position in the plot of Jessica's
elopement is that of a Link Action between the main stories. This
linking appears in the way in which Jessica and her suite are in the
course of the drama transferred from the one tale to the other. At the
opening of the play they are personages in the Story of the Jew, and
represent its two antagonistic sides, Jessica being the daughter of the
Jew and Lorenzo a friend and follower of Bassanio and Antonio. First the
contrivance of the elopement assists in drawing together these opposite
sides of the Jew Story, and aggravating the feud on which it turns.
[=iii.= ii, from 221.] Then, as we have seen, Jessica and her husband in
the central scene of the whole play come into contact with the Caskets
Story at its climax. From this point they become adopted into the
Caskets Story, and settle down in the house and under the protection of
Portia. [_helping to restore the balance between the main stories,_]
This transference further assists the symmetry of interweaving by
helping to adjust the balance between the two main stories. In its
_mass_, if the expression may be allowed, the Caskets tale, with its
steady progress to a goal of success, is over-weighted by the tale of
Antonio's tragic peril and startling deliverance: the Jessica episode,
withdrawn from the one and added to the other, helps to make the two
more equal. Once more, the case, we have seen, is not merely that of a
union between stories, but a union between stories opposite in kind, a
combination of brightness with gloom. [_and a bond between their bright
and dark climaxes._] The binding effect of the Jessica Story extends to
the union between these opposite tones. We have already had occasion to
notice how the two extremes meet in the central scene, how from the
height of Bassanio's bliss we pass in an instant to the total ruin of
Antonio, which we then learn in its fulness for the first time: the link
which connects the two is the arrival of Jessica and her friends as
bearers of the news.
[_Character effects. Character of Jessica._]
So far, the points considered have been points of Mechanism and Plot; in
the matter of Character-Interest the Jessica episode is to an even
greater degree an addition to the whole effect of the play, Jessica and
Lorenzo serving as a foil to Portia and Bassanio. The characters of
Jessica and Lorenzo are charmingly sketched, though liable to
misreading unless carefully studied. To appreciate Jessica we must in
the first place assume the grossly unjust mediæval view of the Jews as
social outcasts. [=ii.= v.] The dramatist has vouchsafed us a glimpse of
Shylock at home, and brief as the scene is it is remarkable how much of
evil is crowded into it. The breath of home life is trust, yet the one
note which seems to pervade the domestic bearing of Shylock is the
lowest suspiciousness. [12, 16, 36.] Three times as he is starting for
Bassanio's supper he draws back to question the motives for which he has
been invited. He is moved to a shriek of suspicion by the mere fact of
his servant joining him in shouting for the absent Jessica, [7.] by the
mention of masques, by the sight of the servant whispering to his
daughter [28, 44.]. Finally, he takes his leave with the words
[52.]
Perhaps I will return immediately,
a device for keeping order in his absence which would be a low one for a
nurse to use to a child, but which he is not ashamed of using to his
grown-up daughter and the lady of his house. The short scene of
fifty-seven lines is sufficient to give us a further reminder of
Shylock's sordid house-keeping, which is glad to get rid of the
good-natured Launcelot as a 'huge feeder'; [3, 46.] and his aversion to
any form of gaiety, which leads him to insist on his shutters being put
up when he hears that there is a chance of a pageant in the streets
[28.]. Amidst surroundings of this type Jessica has grown up, a
motherless girl, mingling only with harsh men (for we nowhere see a
trace of female companionship for her): [=ii.= iii. 20.] it can hardly
be objected against her that she should long for a Christian atmosphere
in which her affections might have full play. Yet even for this natural
reaction she feels compunction:
[=ii.= iii. 16.]
Alack, what heinous sin is it in me
To be ashamed to be my father's child!
But though I am a daughter to his blood,
I am not to his manners.
Formed amidst such influences it would be a triumph to a character if it
escaped repulsiveness; Jessica, on the contrary, is full of attractions.
She has a simplicity which stands to her in the place of principle. More
than this she has a high degree of feminine delicacy. Delicacy will be
best brought out in a person who is placed in an equivocal situation,
and we see Jessica engaged, not only in an elopement, but in an
elopement which, [=ii.= iv. 30.] it appears, has throughout been planned
by herself and not by Lorenzo. Of course a quality like feminine
delicacy is more conveyed by the bearing of the actress than by positive
words; we may however notice the impression which Jessica's part in the
elopement scenes makes upon those who are present. [=ii.= iv. 30-40.]
When Lorenzo is obliged to make a confidant of Gratiano, and tell him
how it is Jessica who has planned the whole affair, instead of feeling
any necessity of apologising for her the thought of her childlike
innocence moves him to enthusiasm, and it is here that he exclaims:
If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,
It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.
[=ii.= vi.]
In the scene of the elopement itself, Jessica has steered clear of both
prudishness and freedom, and when after her pretty confusion she has
retired from the window, even Gratiano breaks out:
[=ii.= vi. 51.]
Now, by my hood, a Gentile and no Jew;
while Lorenzo himself has warmed to see in her qualities he had never
expected:
[=ii.= vi. 52.]
Beshrew me but I love her heartily;
For she is wise, if I can judge of her,
And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true,
And true she is, as she has proved herself,
And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true,
Shall she be placed in my constant soul.
So generally, all with whom she comes into contact feel her spell:
[=ii.= iii. 10.] the rough Launcelot parts from her with tears he is
ashamed of yet cannot keep down; [=iii.= i. 41.] Salarino--the last of
men to take high views of women--resents as a sort of blasphemy
Shylock's claiming her as his flesh and blood; [=iii.= iv, v; =v.= i.]
while between Jessica and Portia there seems to spring in an instant an
attraction as mysterious as is the tie between Antonio and Bassanio.
[_Character of Lorenzo._]
Lorenzo is for the most part of a dreamy inactive nature, as may be seen
in his amused tolerance of Launcelot's word-fencing [=iii.= v.
44-75.]--word-fencing being in general a challenge which none of
Shakespeare's characters can resist; similarly, Jessica's enthusiasm on
the subject of Portia, which in reality he shares, he prefers to meet
with banter [=iii.= v. 75-89.]:
Even such a husband
Hast thou of me as she is for a wife.
But the strong side of his character also is shown us in the play: [=v.=
i. 1-24, 54-88.] he has an artist soul, and to the depth of his passion
for music and for the beauty of nature we are indebted for some of the
noblest passages in Shakespeare. This is the attraction which has drawn
him to Jessica, her outer beauty is the index of artistic sensibility
within: [=v.= i. 69, 1-24.] 'she is never merry when she hears sweet
music,' and the soul of rhythm is awakened in her, just as much as in
her husband, by the moonlight scene. Simplicity again, is a quality they
have in common, as is seen by their ignorance in money-matters, [=iii.=
i. 113, 123.] and the way a valuable turquoise ring goes for a
monkey--if, at least, Tubal may be believed: a carelessness of money
which mitigates our dislike of the free hand Jessica lays upon her
father's ducats and jewels. On the whole, however, Lorenzo's dreaminess
makes a pretty contrast to Jessica's vivacity. And Lorenzo's inactivity
is capable of being roused to great things. This is seen by the
elopement itself: [esp. =ii.= iv. 20, 30; =ii.= vi. 30. &c.] for the
suggestion of its incidents seems to be that Lorenzo meant at first no
more than trifling with the pretty Jewess, and that he rose to the
occasion as he found and appreciated Jessica's higher tone and
attraction. [=iii.= iv. 24, 32.] Finally, we must see the calibre of
Lorenzo's character through the eyes of Portia, who selects him at
first sight as the representative to whom to commit her household in her
absence, of which commission she will take no refusal.
[_Jessica and Lorenzo a foil to Portia and Bassanio._]
So interpreted the characters of Jessica and Lorenzo make the whole
episode of the elopement an antithesis to the main plot. To a wedded
couple in the fresh happiness of their union there can hardly fall a
greater luxury than to further the happiness of another couple; this
luxury is granted to Portia and Bassanio, and in their reception of the
fugitives what picturesque contrasts are brought together! The two pairs
are a foil to one another in kind, and set one another off like gold and
gems. Lorenzo and Jessica are negative characters with the one positive
quality of intense capacity for enjoyment; Bassanio and Portia have
everything to enjoy, yet their natures appear dormant till roused by an
occasion for daring and energy. The Jewess and her husband are
distinguished by the bird-like simplicity that so often goes with
special art-susceptibility; Portia and Bassanio are full and rounded
characters in which the whole of human nature seems concentrated. The
contrast is of degree as well as kind: the weaker pair brought side by
side with the stronger throw out the impression of their strength.
Portia has a fulness of power which puts her in her most natural
position when she is extending protection to those who are less able to
stand by themselves. Still more with Bassanio: he has so little scope in
the scenes of the play itself, which from the nature of the stories
present him always in situations of dependence on others, that we see
his strength almost entirely by the reflected light of the attitude
which others hold to him; in the present instance we have no difficulty
in catching the intellectual power of Lorenzo, and Lorenzo looks up to
Bassanio as a superior. And the couples thus contrasted in character
present an equal likeness and unlikeness in their fortunes. Both are
happy for ever, and both have become so through a bold stroke. Yet in
the one instance it is blind obedience, in face of all temptations, to
the mere whims of a good parent, who is dead, that has been guided to
the one issue so passionately desired; in the case of the other couple
open rebellion, at every practical risk, against the legitimate
authority of an evil father, still living, has brought them no worse
fate than happiness in one another, and for their defenceless position
the best of patrons.
It seems, then, that the introduction of the Jessica Story is justified,
not only by the purposes of construction which it serves, but by the
fact that its human interest is at once a contrast and a supplement to
the main story, with which it blends to produce the ordered variety of a
finished picture.
[_The Rings Episode assists the mechanism of the main stories,_]
A few words will be sufficient to point out how the effects of the main
plot are assisted by the Rings Episode, which, though rich in fun, is of
a slighter character than the Jessica Story, and occupies a much smaller
space in the field of view. The dramatic points of the two minor stories
are similar. Like the Jessica Story the Rings Episode assists the
mechanical working out of the main plot. An explanation must somehow be
given to Bassanio that the lawyer is Portia in disguise; mere mechanical
explanations have always an air of weakness, but the affair of the rings
utilises the explanation in the present case as a source of new dramatic
effects. This arrangement further assists, to a certain extent, in
reducing the improbability of Portia's project. The point at which the
improbability would be most felt would be, not the first appearance of
the lawyer's clerk, for then we are engrossed in our anxiety for
Antonio, but when the explanation of the disguise came to be made; there
might be a danger lest here the surprise of Bassanio should become
infectious, and the audience should awake to the improbability of the
whole story: as it is, their attention is at the critical moment
diverted to the perplexity of the penitent husbands. [_and their
interweaving;_] The Story of the Rings, like that of Jessica, assists
the interweaving of the two main stories with one another, its subtlety
suggesting to what a degree of detail this interlacing extends. Bassanio
is the main point which unites the Story of the Jew and the Caskets
Story; in the one he occupies the position of friend, in the other of
husband. [=iv.= i. 425-454.] The affair of the rings, slight as it is,
is so managed by Portia that its point becomes a test as between his
friendship and his love; and so equal do these forces appear that,
though his friendship finally wins and he surrenders his betrothal ring,
yet it is not until after his wife has given him a hint against herself:
An if your wife be not a mad-woman,
And know how well I have deserved the ring,
She would not hold out enemy for ever
For giving it to me.
The Rings Episode, even more than the Jessica Story, assists in
restoring the balance between the main tales. The chief inequality
between them lies in the fact that the Jew Story is complicated and
resolved, while the Caskets Story is a simple progress to a goal; when,
however, there springs from the latter a sub-action which has a highly
comic complication and resolution the two halves of the play become
dramatically on a par. And the interweaving of the dark and bright
elements in the play is assisted by the fact that the Episode of the
Rings not only provides a comic reaction to relieve the tragic crisis,
but its whole point is a Dramatic Irony in which serious and comic are
inextricably mixed.
[_and assists in the development of Portia's character._]
Finally, as the Jessica Story ministers to Character effect in
connection with the general ensemble of the personages, so the Episode
of the Rings has a special function in bringing out the character of
Portia. The secret of the charm which has won for Portia the suffrages
of all readers is the perfect balance of qualities in her character: she
is the meeting-point of brightness, force, and tenderness. And, to crown
the union, Shakespeare has placed her at the supreme moment of life, on
the boundary line between girlhood and womanhood, when the wider aims
and deeper issues of maturity find themselves in strange association
with the abandon of youth. The balance thus becomes so perfect that it
quivers, and dips to one side and the other. [=i.= ii. 39.] Portia is
the saucy child as she sprinkles her sarcasms over Nerissa's enumeration
of the suitors: in the trial she faces the world of Venice as a heroine.
[=iii.= ii. 150.] She is the ideal maiden in the speech in which she
surrenders herself to Bassanio: [=iv.= i. 184.] she is the ideal woman
as she proclaims from the judgment seat the divinity of mercy. Now the
fourth Act has kept before us too exclusively one side of this
character. Not that Portia in the lawyer's gown is masculine: but the
dramatist has had to dwell too long on her side of strength. He will not
dismiss us with this impression, but indulges us in one more daring feat
surpassing all the madcap frolics of the past. Thus the Episode of the
Rings is the last flicker of girlhood in Portia before it merges in the
wider life of womanhood. We have rejoiced in a great deliverance wrought
by a noble woman: our enjoyment rises higher yet when the Rings Episode
reminds us that this woman has not ceased to be a sportive girl.
It has been shown, then, that the two inferior stories in _The Merchant
of Venice_ assist the main stories in the most varied manner, smoothing
their mechanical working, meeting their special difficulties, drawing
their mutual interweaving yet closer, and throwing their character
effects into relief: the additional complexity they have brought has
resulted in making emphatic points yet more prominent, and the total
effect has therefore been to increase clearness and simplicity. Enough
has now been said on the building up of Dramas out of Stories, which is
the distinguishing feature of the Romantic Drama; the studies that
follow will be applied to the more universal topics of dramatic
interest, Character, Plot, and Passion.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] It is a difficulty of literary criticism that it has to use as
technical terms words belonging to ordinary conversation, and therefore
more or less indefinite in their significations. In the present work I
am making a distinction between 'complex' and 'complicated': the latter
is applied to the diverting a story out of its natural course with a
view to its ultimate 'resolution'; 'complex' is reserved for the
interweaving of stories with one another. Later on 'single' will be
opposed to 'complex,' and 'simple' to 'complicated.'
[3] This seems to me a reasonable view notwithstanding what Jessica says
to the contrary (iii. ii. 286), that she has often heard her father
swear he would rather have Antonio's flesh than twenty times the value
of the bond. It is one thing to swear vengeance in private, another
thing to follow it up in the face of a world in opposition. A man of
overbearing temper surrounded by inferiors and dependants often utters
threats, and seems to find a pleasure in uttering them, which both he
and his hearers know he will never carry out.
IV.
A PICTURE OF IDEAL VILLAINY IN RICHARD III.
_A Study in Character-Interpretation._
[_Villainy as a subject for art-treatment._]
I HOPE that the subject of the present study will not be considered by
any reader forbidding. On the contrary, there is surely attractiveness
in the thought that nothing is so repulsive or so uninteresting in the
world of fact but in some way or other it may be brought under the
dominion of art-beauty. The author of _L'Allegro_ shows by the companion
poem that he could find inspiration in a rainy morning; and the great
master in English poetry is followed by a great master in English
painting who wins his chief triumphs by his handling of fog and mist.
Long ago the masterpiece of Virgil consecrated agricultural toil;
Murillo's pictures have taught us that there is a beauty in rags and
dirt; rustic commonplaces gave a life passion to Wordsworth, and were
the cause of a revolution in poetry; while Dickens has penetrated into
the still less promising region of low London life, and cast a halo
around the colourless routine of poverty. Men's evil passions have given
Tragedy to art, crime is beautified by being linked to Nemesis, meanness
is the natural source for brilliant comic effects, ugliness has reserved
for it a special form of art in the grotesque, and pain becomes
attractive in the light of the heroism that suffers and the devotion
that watches. In the infancy of modern English poetry Drayton found a
poetic side to topography and maps, and Phineas Fletcher idealised
anatomy; while of the two greatest imaginations belonging to the modern
world Milton produced his masterpiece in the delineation of a fiend, and
Dante in a picture of hell. The final triumph of good over evil seems to
have been already anticipated by art.
[_The villainy of Richard ideal in its scale,_]
The portrait of Richard satisfies a first condition of ideality in the
scale of the whole picture. The sphere in which he is placed is not
private life, but the world of history, in which moral responsibility is
the highest: if, therefore, the quality of other villainies be as fine,
here the issues are deeper. [_and in its fulness of development._] As
another element of the ideal, the villainy of Richard is presented to us
fully developed and complete. Often an artist of crime will rely--as
notably in the portraiture of Tito Melema--mainly on the succession of
steps by which a character, starting from full possession of the
reader's sympathies, arrives by the most natural gradations at a height
of evil which shocks. In the present case all idea of growth is kept
outside the field of this particular play; the opening soliloquy
announces a completed process:
[=i.= i. 30.]
I am determined to prove a villain.
What does appear of Richard's past, seen through the favourable medium
of a mother's description, only seems to extend the completeness to
earlier stages:
[=iv.= iv. 167.]
A grievous burthen was thy birth to me;
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;
Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious,
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous,
Thy age confirm'd, proud, subtle, bloody, treacherous,
More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred.
So in the details of the play there is nowhere a note of the hesitation
that betrays tentative action. When even Buckingham is puzzled as to
what can be done if Hastings should resist, Richard answers:
[=iii.= i. 193.]
Chop off his head, man; somewhat we will do.
His choice is only between different modes of villainy, never between
villainy and honesty.
[_It has no sufficient motive._]
Again, it is to be observed that there is no suggestion of impelling
motive or other explanation for the villainy of Richard. He does not
labour under any sense of personal injury, such as Iago felt in
believing, however groundlessly, [_Othello_: =i.= iii. 392, &c.] that
his enemies had wronged him through his wife; [_Lear_: =i.= ii. 1-22.]
or Edmund, whose soliloquies display him as conscious that his birth has
made his whole life an injury. Nor have we in this case the morbid
enjoyment of suffering which we associate with Mephistopheles, and which
Dickens has worked up into one of his most powerful portraits in Quilp.
Richard never turns aside to gloat over the agonies of his victims; it
is not so much the details as the grand schemes of villainy, the
handling of large combinations of crime, that have an interest for him:
he is a strategist in villainy, not a tactician. Nor can we point to
ambition as a sufficient motive. He is ambitious in a sense which
belongs to all vigorous natures; he has the workman's impulse to rise by
his work. But ambition as a determining force in character must imply
more than this; it is a sort of moral dazzling, its symptom is a
fascination by ends which blinds to the ruinous means leading up to
these ends. Such an ambition was Macbeth's; but in Richard the symptoms
are wanting, and in all his long soliloquies he is never found dwelling
upon the prize in view. A nearer approach to an explanation would be
Richard's sense of bodily deformity. Not only do all who come in contact
with him shrink from the 'bottled spider,' [=i.= iii. 242, 228; =iv.=
iv. 81, &c.] but he himself gives a conspicuous place in his meditations
to the thought of his ugliness; from the outset he connects his criminal
career with the reflection that he 'is not shaped for sportive tricks'
[=i.= i. 14.]:
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
Still, it would be going too far to call this the motive of his crimes:
the spirit of this and similar passages is more accurately expressed by
saying that he has a morbid pleasure in contemplating physical ugliness
analogous to his morbid pleasure in contemplating moral baseness. [esp.
=i.= ii. 252-264.]
[_Villainy has become to Richard an end in itself._]
There appears, then, no sufficient explanation and motive for the
villainy of Richard: the general impression conveyed is that to Richard
villainy has become an end in itself needing no special motive. This is
one of the simplest principles of human development--that a means to an
end tends to become in time an end in itself. The miser who began
accumulating to provide comforts for his old age finds the process
itself of accumulating gain firmer and firmer hold upon him, until, when
old age has come, he sticks to accumulating and foregoes comfort. So in
previous plays Gloster may have been impelled by ambition to his crimes:
[compare _3 Henry VI:_ =iii.= ii. 165-181.] by the time the present play
is reached crime itself becomes to him the dearer of the two, and the
ambitious end drops out of sight. This leads directly to one of the two
main features of Shakespeare's portrait: Richard is an _artist in
villainy_. [_Richard an artist in villainy._] What form and colour are
to the painter, what rhythm and imagery are to the poet, that crime is
to Richard: it is the medium in which his soul frames its conceptions of
the beautiful. The gulf that separates between Shakespeare's Richard and
the rest of humanity is no gross perversion of sentiment, nor the
development of abnormal passions, nor a notable surrender in the
struggle between interest and right. It is that he approaches villainy
as a thing of pure intellect, a region of moral indifference in which
sentiment and passion have no place, attractio
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