Appreciations, With An Essay on Style
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Walter Horatio Pater >> Appreciations, With An Essay on Style
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Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill:
and Shakespeare strikes a passionate note across it at last, in the
entrance of the messenger, who announces to the princess that the
king her father is suddenly dead.
The merely dramatic interest of the piece is slight enough; only just
sufficient, indeed, to form the vehicle of its wit and poetry. The
scene--a park of the King of Navarre--is unaltered throughout; and
the unity of the [163] play is not so much the unity of a drama as
that of a series of pictorial groups, in which the same figures
reappear, in different combinations but on the same background. It
is as if Shakespeare had intended to bind together, by some inventive
conceit, the devices of an ancient tapestry, and give voices to its
figures. On one side, a fair palace; on the other, the tents of the
Princess of France, who has come on an embassy from her father to the
King of Navarre; in the midst, a wide space of smooth grass.
The same personages are combined over and over again into a series of
gallant scenes--the princess, the three masked ladies, the quaint,
pedantic king; one of those amiable kings men have never loved
enough, whose serious occupation with the things of the mind seems,
by contrast with the more usual forms of kingship, like frivolity or
play. Some of the figures are grotesque merely, and all the male
ones at least, a little fantastic. Certain objects reappearing from
scene to scene--love-letters crammed with verses to the margin, and
lovers' toys--hint obscurely at some story of intrigue. Between
these groups, on a smaller scale, come the slighter and more homely
episodes, with Sir Nathaniel the curate, the country-maid Jaquenetta,
Moth or Mote the elfin-page, with Hiems and Ver, who recite "the
dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the owl
and the cuckoo." The ladies are [164] lodged in tents, because the
king, like the princess of the modern poet's fancy, has taken a vow
to make his court a little Academe,
and for three years' space no woman may come within a mile of it; and
the play shows how this artificial attempt was broken through. For
the king and his three fellow-scholars are of course soon forsworn,
and turn to writing sonnets, each to his chosen lady. These fellow-
scholars of the king--"quaint votaries of science" at first,
afterwards "affection's men-at-arms"--three youthful knights,
gallant, amorous, chivalrous, but also a little affected, sporting
always a curious foppery of language, are, throughout, the leading
figures in the foreground; one of them, in particular, being more
carefully depicted than the others, and in himself very noticeable--a
portrait with somewhat puzzling manner and expression, which at once
catches the eye irresistibly and keeps it fixed.
Play is often that about which people are most serious; and the
humourist may observe how, under all love of playthings, there is
almost always hidden an appreciation of something really engaging and
delightful. This is true always of the toys of children: it is often
true of the playthings of grown-up people, their vanities, their
fopperies even, their lighter loves; the cynic would add their
pursuit of fame. Certainly, this is true without exception [165] of
the playthings of a past age, which to those who succeed it are
always full of a pensive interest--old manners, old dresses, old
houses. For what is called fashion in these matters occupies, in each
age, much of the care of many of the most discerning people,
furnishing them with a kind of mirror of their real inward
refinements, and their capacity for selection. Such modes or
fashions are, at their best, an example of the artistic predominance
of form over matter; of the manner of the doing of it over the thing
done; and have a beauty of their own. It is so with that old
euphuism of the Elizabethan age--that pride of dainty language and
curious expression, which it is very easy to ridicule, which often
made itself ridiculous, but which had below it a real sense of
fitness and nicety; and which, as we see in this very play, and still
more clearly in the Sonnets, had some fascination for the young
Shakespeare himself. It is this foppery of delicate language, this
fashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupied
in Love's Labours Lost. He shows us the manner in all its stages;
passing from the grotesque and vulgar pedantry of Holofernes, through
the extravagant but polished caricature of Armado, to become the
peculiar characteristic of a real though still quaint poetry in Biron
himself, who is still chargeable even at his best with just a little
affectation. As Shakespeare laughs broadly at it in Holofernes or
Armado, so he [166] is the analyst of its curious charm in Biron; and
this analysis involves a delicate raillery by Shakespeare himself at
his own chosen manner.
This "foppery" of Shakespeare's day had, then, its really delightful
side, a quality in no sense "affected," by which it satisfies a real
instinct in our minds--the fancy so many of us have for an exquisite
and curious skill in the use of words. Biron is the perfect flower
of this manner:
A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight:
--as he describes Armado, in terms which are really applicable to
himself. In him this manner blends with a true gallantry of nature,
and an affectionate complaisance and grace. He has at times some of
its extravagance or caricature also, but the shades of expression by
which he passes from this to the "golden cadence" of Shakespeare's
own most characteristic verse, are so fine, that it is sometimes
difficult to trace them. What is a vulgarity in Holofernes, and a
caricature in Armado, refines itself with him into the expression of
a nature truly and inwardly bent upon a form of delicate perfection,
and is accompanied by a real insight into the laws which determine
what is exquisite in language, and their root in the nature of
things. He can appreciate quite the opposite style--
In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes;
he knows the first law of pathos, that
Honest plain words best suit the ear of grief.
[167] He delights in his own rapidity of intuition; and, in harmony
with the half-sensuous philosophy of the Sonnets, exalts, a little
scornfully, in many memorable expressions, the judgment of the
senses, above all slower, more toilsome means of knowledge, scorning
some who fail to see things only because they are so clear:
So here you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes:--
as with some German commentators on Shakespeare. Appealing always to
actual sensation from men's affected theories, he might seem to
despise learning; as, indeed, he has taken up his deep studies partly
in sport, and demands always the profit of learning in renewed
enjoyment. Yet he surprises us from time to time by intuitions which
could come only from a deep experience and power of observation; and
men listen to him, old and young, in spite of themselves. He is
quickly impressible to the slightest clouding of the spirits in
social intercourse, and has his moments of extreme seriousness: his
trial-task may well be, as Rosaline puts it--
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.
But still, through all, he is true to his chosen manner: that gloss
of dainty language is a second nature with him: even at his best he
is not without a certain artifice: the trick of playing on words
never deserts him; and [168] Shakespeare, in whose own genius there
is an element of this very quality, shows us in this graceful, and,
as it seems, studied, portrait, his enjoyment of it.
As happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most
part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are
certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of
self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle
and ingenious creations that we feel this--in Hamlet and King Lear--
as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who,
while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a
peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures
which possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is
no man but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works
of art which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet
wrought of the choicest material. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet,
belongs to this group of Shakespeare's characters--versatile,
mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the
nimble spirits of the arteries,
the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate.
A careful delineation of minor, yet expressive traits seems to mark
them out as the characters of his predilection; [169] and it is hard
not to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in
Love's Labours Lost, is perhaps the most striking member of this
group. In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite
on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the
play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has
just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of
his poetry.
1878.
NOTES
162. *Act V. Scene II. Return.
"MEASURE FOR MEASURE"
[170] IN Measure for Measure, as in some other of his plays,
Shakespeare has remodelled an earlier and somewhat rough composition
to "finer issues," suffering much to remain as it had come from the
less skilful hand, and not raising the whole of his work to an equal
degree of intensity. Hence perhaps some of that depth and
weightiness which make this play so impressive, as with the true seal
of experience, like a fragment of life itself, rough and disjointed
indeed, but forced to yield in places its profounder meaning. In
Measure for Measure, in contrast with the flawless execution of Romeo
and Juliet, Shakespeare has spent his art in just enough modification
of the scheme of the older play to make it exponent of this purpose,
adapting its terrible essential incidents, so that Coleridge found it
the only painful work among Shakespeare's dramas, and leaving for the
reader of to-day more than the usual number of difficult expressions;
but infusing a lavish colour and a profound significance into it, so
that under his [171] touch certain select portions of it rise far
above the level of all but his own best poetry, and working out of it
a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the
central expression of his moral judgments. It remains a comedy, as
indeed is congruous with the bland, half-humorous equity which
informs the whole composition, sinking from the heights of sorrow and
terror into the rough scheme of the earlier piece; yet it is hardly
less full of what is really tragic in man's existence than if Claudio
had indeed "stooped to death." Even the humorous concluding scenes
have traits of special grace, retaining in less emphatic passages a
stray lire or word of power, as it seems, so that we watch to the end
for the traces where the nobler hand has glanced along, leaving its
vestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully, in the rising of the
style.
The interest of Measure for Measure, therefore, is partly that of an
old story told over again. We measure with curiosity that variety of
resources which has enabled Shakespeare to refashion the original
material with a higher motive; adding to the intricacy of the piece,
yet so modifying its structure as to give the whole almost the unity
of a single scene; lending, by the light of a philosophy which dwells
much on what is complex and subtle in our nature, a true human
propriety to its strange and unexpected turns of feeling and
character, to incidents so [172] difficult as the fall of Angelo, and
the subsequent reconciliation of Isabella, so that she pleads
successfully for his life. It was from Whetstone, a contemporary
English writer, that Shakespeare derived the outline of Cinthio's
"rare history" of Promos and Cassandra, one of that numerous class of
Italian stories, like Boccaccio's Tancred of Salerno, in which the
mere energy of southern passion has everything its own way, and
which, though they may repel many a northern reader by a certain
crudity in their colouring, seem to have been full of fascination for
the Elizabethan age. This story, as it appears in Whetstone's
endless comedy, is almost as rough as the roughest episode of actual
criminal life. But the play seems never to have been acted, and some
time after its publication Whetstone himself turned the thing into a
tale, included in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, where it still
figures as a genuine piece, with touches of undesigned poetry, a
quaint field-flower here and there of diction or sentiment, the whole
strung up to an effective brevity, and with the fragrance of that
admirable age of literature all about it. Here, then, there is
something of the original Italian colour: in this narrative
Shakespeare may well have caught the first glimpse of a composition
with nobler proportions; and some artless sketch from his own hand,
perhaps, putting together his first impressions, insinuated itself
between Whetstone's work and the play as we actually read it. Out
[173] of these insignificant sources Shakespeare's play rises, full
of solemn expression, and with a profoundly designed beauty, the new
body of a higher, though sometimes remote and difficult poetry,
escaping from the imperfect relics of the old story, yet not wholly
transformed, and even as it stands but the preparation only, we might
think, of a still more imposing design. For once we have in it a
real example of that sort of writing which is sometimes described as
suggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hints
only, brings into distinct shape the reader's own half-developed
imaginings. Often the quality is attributed to writing merely vague
and unrealised, but in Measure for Measure, quite certainly,
Shakespeare has directed the attention of sympathetic readers along
certain channels of meditation beyond the immediate scope of his
work.
Measure for Measure, therefore, by the quality of these higher
designs, woven by his strange magic on a texture of poorer quality,
is hardly less indicative than Hamlet even, of Shakespeare's reason,
of his power of moral interpretation. It deals, not like Hamlet with
the problems which beset one of exceptional temperament, but with
mere human nature. It brings before us a group of persons,
attractive, full of desire, vessels of the genial, seed-bearing
powers of nature, a gaudy existence flowering out over the old court
and city of Vienna, a spectacle of the fulness and [174] pride of
life which to some may seem to touch the verge of wantonness. Behind
this group of people, behind their various action, Shakespeare
inspires in us the sense of a strong tyranny of nature and
circumstance. Then what shall there be on this side of it--on our
side, the spectators' side, of this painted screen, with its puppets
who are really glad or sorry all the time? what philosophy of life,
what sort of equity?
Stimulated to read more carefully by Shakespeare's own profounder
touches, the reader will note the vivid reality, the subtle
interchange of light and shade, the strongly contrasted characters of
this group of persons, passing across the stage so quickly. The
slightest of them is at least not ill-natured: the meanest of them
can put forth a plea for existence--Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow
that would live!--they are never sure of themselves, even in the
strong tower of a cold unimpressible nature: they are capable of many
friendships and of a true dignity in danger, giving each other a
sympathetic, if transitory, regret--one sorry that another "should be
foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack." Words which seem to exhaust
man's deepest sentiment concerning death and life are put on the lips
of a gilded, witless youth; and the saintly Isabella feels fire creep
along her, kindling her tongue to eloquence at the suggestion of
shame. In places the shadow deepens: death intrudes itself on the
scene, as among other [175] things "a great disguiser," blanching the
features of youth and spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine
Claudio even with its disgraceful associations. As in Orcagna's
fresco at Pisa, it comes capriciously, giving many and long reprieves
to Barnardine, who has been waiting for it nine years in prison,
taking another thence by fever, another by mistake of judgment,
embracing others in the midst of their music and song. The little
mirror of existence, which reflects to each for a moment the stage on
which he plays, is broken at last by a capricious accident; while all
alike, in their yearning for untasted enjoyment, are really
discounting their days, grasping so hastily and accepting so
inexactly the precious pieces. The Duke's quaint but excellent
moralising at the beginning of the third act does but express, like
the chorus of a Greek play, the spirit of the passing incidents. To
him in Shakespeare's play, to a few here and there in the actual
world, this strange practical paradox of our life, so unwise in its
eager haste, reveals itself in all its clearness.
The Duke disguised as a friar, with his curious moralising on life
and death, and Isabella in her first mood of renunciation, a thing
"ensky'd and sainted," come with the quiet of the cloister as a
relief to this lust and pride of life: like some grey monastic
picture hung on the wall of a gaudy room, their presence cools the
heated air of the piece. For a moment we [176] are within the placid
conventual walls, whither they fancy at first that the Duke has come
as a man crossed in love, with Friar Thomas and Friar Peter, calling
each other by their homely, English names, or at the nunnery among
the novices, with their little limited privileges, where
If you speak you must not show your face,
Or if you show your face you must not speak.
Not less precious for this relief in the general structure of the
piece, than for its own peculiar graces is the episode of Mariana, a
creature wholly of Shakespeare's invention, told, by way of
interlude, in subdued prose. The moated grange, with its dejected
mistress, its long, listless, discontented days, where we hear only
the voice of a boy broken off suddenly in the midst of one of the
loveliest songs of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare's school,* is the
pleasantest of many glimpses we get here of pleasant places--the
field without the town, Angelo's garden-house, the consecrated
fountain. Indirectly it has suggested two of the most perfect
compositions among the poetry of our own generation. Again it is a
picture within a picture, but with fainter lines and a greyer
atmosphere: we have here the same passions, the same wrongs, the same
continuance of affection, the same crying out upon death, as in the
nearer and larger piece, though softened, and reduced to the mood of
a more dreamy scene.
[177] Of Angelo we may feel at first sight inclined to say only
guarda e passa! or to ask whether he is indeed psychologically
possible. In the old story, he figures as an embodiment of pure and
unmodified evil, like "Hyliogabalus of Rome or Denis of Sicyll." But
the embodiment of pure evil is no proper subject of art, and
Shakespeare, in the spirit of a philosophy which dwells much on the
complications of outward circumstance with men's inclinations, turns
into a subtle study in casuistry this incident of the austere judge
fallen suddenly into utmost corruption by a momentary contact with
supreme purity. But the main interest in Measure for Measure is not,
as in Promos and Cassandra, in the relation of Isabella and Angelo,
but rather in the relation of Claudio and Isabella.
Greek tragedy in some of its noblest products has taken for its theme
the love of a sister, a sentiment unimpassioned indeed, purifying by
the very spectacle of its passionlessness, but capable of a fierce
and almost animal strength if informed for a moment by pity and
regret. At first Isabella comes upon the scene as a tranquillising
influence in it. But Shakespeare, in the development of the action,
brings quite different and unexpected qualities out of her. It is
his characteristic poetry to expose this cold, chastened personality,
respected even by the worldly Lucio as "something ensky'd and
sainted, and almost an immortal spirit," to two [178] sharp, shameful
trials, and wring out of her a fiery, revealing eloquence. Thrown
into the terrible dilemma of the piece, called upon to sacrifice that
cloistral whiteness to sisterly affection, become in a moment the
ground of strong, contending passions, she develops a new character
and shows herself suddenly of kindred with those strangely conceived
women, like Webster's Vittoria, who unite to a seductive sweetness
something of a dangerous and tigerlike changefulness of feeling. The
swift, vindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this white
spirit, and, stripped in a moment of all convention, she stands
before us clear, detached, columnar, among the tender frailties of
the piece. Cassandra, the original of Isabella in Whetstone's tale,
with the purpose of the Roman Lucretia in her mind, yields gracefully
enough to the conditions of her brother's safety; and to the lighter
reader of Shakespeare there may seem something harshly conceived, or
psychologically impossible even, in the suddenness of the change
wrought in her, as Claudio welcomes for a moment the chance of life
through her compliance with Angelo's will, and he may have a sense
here of flagging skill, as in words less finely handled than in the
preceding scene. The play, though still not without traces of nobler
handiwork, sinks down, as we know, at last into almost homely comedy,
and it might be supposed that just here the grander manner [179]
deserted it. But the skill with which Isabella plays upon Claudio's
well-recognised sense of honour, and endeavours by means of that to
insure him beforehand from the acceptance of life on baser terms,
indicates no coming laxity of hand just in this place. It was rather
that there rose in Shakespeare's conception, as there may for the
reader, as there certainly would in any good acting of the part,
something of that terror, the seeking for which is one of the notes
of romanticism in Shakespeare and his circle. The stream of ardent
natural affection, poured as sudden hatred upon the youth condemned
to die, adds an additional note of expression to the horror of the
prison where so much of the scene takes place. It is not here only
that Shakespeare has conceived of such extreme anger and pity as
putting a sort of genius into simple women, so that their "lips drop
eloquence," and their intuitions interpret that which is often too
hard or fine for manlier reason; and it is Isabella with her grand
imaginative diction, and that poetry laid upon the "prone and
speechless dialect" there is in mere youth itself, who gives
utterance to the equity, the finer judgments of the piece on men and
things.
From behind this group with its subtle lights and shades, its poetry,
its impressive contrasts, Shakespeare, as I said, conveys to us a
strong sense of the tyranny of nature and [180] circumstance over
human action. The most powerful expressions of this side of
experience might be found here. The bloodless, impassible
temperament does but wait for its opportunity, for the almost
accidental coherence of time with place, and place with wishing, to
annul its long and patient discipline, and become in a moment the
very opposite of that which under ordinary conditions it seemed to
be, even to itself. The mere resolute self-assertion of the blood
brings to others special temptations, temptations which, as defects
or over-growths, lie in the very qualities which make them otherwise
imposing or attractive; the very advantage of men's gifts of
intellect or sentiment being dependent on a balance in their use so
delicate that men hardly maintain it always. Something also must be
conceded to influences merely physical, to the complexion of the
heavens, the skyey influences, shifting as the stars shift; as
something also to the mere caprice of men exercised over each other
in the dispensations of social or political order, to the chance
which makes the life or death of Claudio dependent on Angelo's will.
The many veins of thought which render the poetry of this play so
weighty and impressive unite in the image of Claudio, a flowerlike
young man, whom, prompted by a few hints from Shakespeare, the
imagination easily clothes with all the bravery of youth, as he
crosses the stage before us on his way to death, coming so [181]
hastily to the end of his pilgrimage. Set in the horrible blackness
of the prison, with its various forms of unsightly death, this flower
seems the braver. Fallen by "prompture of the blood," the victim of
a suddenly revived law against the common fault of youth like his, he
finds his life forfeited as if by the chance of a lottery. With that
instinctive clinging to life, which breaks through the subtlest
casuistries of monk or sage apologising for an early death, he
welcomes for a moment the chance of life through his sister's shame,
though he revolts hardly less from the notion of perpetual
imprisonment so repulsive to the buoyant energy of youth.
Familiarised, by the words alike of friends and the indifferent, to
the thought of death, he becomes gentle and subdued indeed, yet more
perhaps through pride than real resignation, and would go down to
darkness at last hard and unblinded. Called upon suddenly to
encounter his fate, looking with keen and resolute profile straight
before him, he gives utterance to some of the central truths of human
feeling, the sincere, concentrated expression of the recoiling flesh.
Thoughts as profound and poetical as Hamlet's arise in him; and but
for the accidental arrest of sentence he would descend into the dust,
a mere gilded, idle flower of youth indeed, but with what are perhaps
the most eloquent of all Shakespeare's words upon his lips.
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