No More Learning

And it is in the story
of Richard II. , that unripened Hamlet, and of Henry V. , that ripened
Fortinbras. To poise character against character was an element in
Shakespeare's art, and scarcely a play is lacking in characters that
are the complement of one another, and so, having made the vessel of
porcelain Richard II. , he had to make the vessel of clay Henry V. He
makes him the reverse of all that Richard was. He has the gross vices,
the coarse nerves, of one who is to rule among violent people, and he
is so little 'too friendly' to his friends that he bundles them out of
doors when their time is over. He is as remorseless and undistinguished
as some natural force, and the finest thing in his play is the way his
old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on their way to the
gallows; and instead of that lyricism which rose out of Richard's mind
like the jet of a fountain to fall again where it had risen, instead
of that phantasy too enfolded in its own sincerity to make any thought
the hour had need of, Shakespeare has given him a resounding rhetoric
that moves men, as a leading article does to-day. His purposes are
so intelligible to everybody that everybody talks of him as if he
succeeded, although he fails in the end, as all men great and little
fail in Shakespeare, and yet his conquests abroad are made nothing by a
woman turned warrior, and that boy he and Katherine were to 'compound,'
'half French, half English,' 'that' was to 'go to Constantinople and
take the Turk by the beard,' turns out a Saint and loses all his father
had built up at home and his own life.

Shakespeare watched Henry V. not indeed as he watched the greater
souls in the visionary procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some
handsome spirited horse, and he spoke his tale, as he spoke all tales,
with tragic irony.


VI

The five plays, that are but one play, have, when played one after
another, something extravagant and superhuman, something almost
mythological. Those nobles with their indifference to death and their
immense energy seem at times no nearer the common stature of men
than do the Gods and the heroes of Greek plays. Had there been no
Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other
lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to
the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination;
and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story
whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men
and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave
of some Temple of the Giants. English literature, because it would
have grown out of itself, might have had the simplicity and unity of
Greek literature, for I can never get out of my head that no man, even
though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of
threads that have been spun in many lands.
And yet, could those foreign
tales have come in if the great famine, the sinking down of popular
imagination, the dying out of traditional phantasy, the ebbing out of
the energy of race, had not made them necessary? The metaphors and
language of Euphuism, compounded of the natural history and mythology
of the classics, were doubtless a necessity also that something might
be poured into the emptiness. Yet how they injured the simplicity and
unity of the speech! Shakespeare wrote at a time when solitary great
men were gathering to themselves the fire that had once flowed hither
and thither among all men, when individualism in work and thought
and emotion was breaking up the old rhythms of life, when the common
people, no longer uplifted by the myths of Christianity and of still
older faiths, were sinking into the earth.

The people of Stratford-on-Avon have remembered little about him, and
invented no legend to his glory. They have remembered a drinking-bout
of his, and invented some bad verses for him, and that is about
all. Had he been some hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-riding,
loud-blaspheming Squire they would have enlarged his fame by a legend
of his dealings with the devil; but in his day the glory of a Poet,
like that of all other imaginative powers, had ceased, or almost
ceased, outside a narrow class. The poor Gaelic rhymer leaves a
nobler memory among his neighbours, who will talk of Angels standing
like flames about his death-bed, and of voices speaking out of
bramble-bushes that he may have the wisdom of the world. The Puritanism
that drove the theatres into Surrey was but part of an inexplicable
movement that was trampling out the minds of all but some few thousands
born to cultivated ease.

May, 1901.




WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION.


THERE have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the
future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about
them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake
was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was
because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models
in the world about him. He announced the religion of art, of which no
man dreamed in the world about him; and he understood it more perfectly
than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in
the world about us, because, in the beginning of important things--in
the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of
any work, there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we
understand again until all is finished. In his time educated people
believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination, but
that they 'made their souls' by listening to sermons and by doing or
by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious
people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard
put to it for lack of good reasons.