you Like it," "King Lear," "Antony and Cleopatra,” "The Tempest," and if he has not learnt something of the height and depth and breadth of Shakespeare's gen vance from the first unit in the study of literature a single complete work to a larger unit, the group of works to which it belongs, and thence to the mind from which they all proceeded. And now ius he will never learn to know these. larger aspects of beauty and deeper sources of interest begin to reveal themselves. There are lines of force which, as it were, run through "Hamlet," but which have their beginnings elsewhere, and which do not complete themselves until we have reached "The Tempest and; "A Winter's Tale." To trace the majestic sweep of these lines is even a higher delight than to make acquaintance with any prince of Denmark, even though we should indeed pluck out the heart of his mystery and be able to sound him from his lowest note to the top of his compass. The fruit-tree is more valuable than any of its fruits singly, and possesses a higher kind of beauty: "the blossoms, the green and the ripe fruit of an orangetree are more beautiful to behold when on the tree, and seen as one with it, than the same growth detached and seen succes. sively, after their importation into another country and different clime." Let him next place the dramas hitherto read in their chronological order, and add the "Two Gentlemen of Verona " as an early comedy in comparison with "As you Like it;""King Richard III." as an early history in comparison with "King Henry IV." "Romeo and Juliet" as an early tragedy in comparison with "King Lear." He has read indeed only nine plays out of thirty-seven, but if he has not acquired some sense of the growth and history of Shakespeare's powers as a dramatist he will never acquire it. Let one thing more be added, the "Sonnets," in order that his feeling for the man Shakespeare, who forever lurks behind the dramatist, may be quickened and deepened. He has indeed much yet to learn, but very little, it may be hoped, to unlearn. In the case of Shakespeare we labor under the disadvantage of knowing comparatively little of his life. There are To know "Hamlet" aright we must persons indeed to whom this seems to be therefore know Shakespeare. We pass no disadvantage, and the utterance sounds from the study of a book to the study of somewhat heroic in its superiority to facts an author. And here our inquiry is two- and to the common sentiment of men fold; we must endeavor first to perceive when such a person thanks heaven that and comprehend the characteristics of our we can read the poems and plays without author's genius, and secondly to trace its troubling ourselves with any of the gossip development and history. This indeed is of biography. What were we the better an achievement for athletes; but by a for endless chatter about Anne Hathaway? judicious method something can be done I confess that I fall in very contentedly to bring home to the consciousness even with the general feeling of my fellows to of a young student a real sense of the which no relic of the man Shakespeare is greatness and variety of Shakespeare's wholly without interest. I should like to powers, and to enable him to understand know him as well, in all the incidents of how those powers put forth first the bud his life, as I know Dr. Johnson. "All my and blossom and then the ripened fruit. writings," said Goethe, "are fragments of He cannot be expected to be familiar a great confession." And so it is and so with all the comedies, tragedies, histories, poems, which make up Shakespeare's wonderful gift to the world; but we can do something towards putting him in the way of knowing aright Shakespeare's total work and the mind of its creator. He cannot examine carefully seven-and-thirty separate plays; let us then select for his use two small groups-one group intended to bring him into close relation with the poet's genius when working at its highest, the other intended to exhibit the development and history of that genius. Let him read "King Henry IV.," "As Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, Introductory Aphorisms, v. it will be with every great writer who are ac the Antonio ness from the elbow-chair-the "organvoice of England" unheard amid the noise of Restoration riot - or sitting at the door in sunny weather in his grey coarse cloth coat, his face pale but not cadaverous, and his sightless eyes still clear, to outward view, of blemish or of spot. were at odds; with Goethe | of State as Latin secretary; in his house when, after his stormy struggles towards near Bunhill Fields dictating in his blindunbounded spiritual liberty, he found that true freedom was attainable only through a wisely limited activity; with Goethe caught in the toils of his own passions, yet with strong and deliberate hand delivering himself from those toils; with Goethe in the illuminated wisdom, the light, wide and serene, of his elder years. There is of course gossip of biography with which no true student of literature or of life will concern himself. An accumulation of trivial accident and unorganized circumstance on which mind and character have had no play, and which has had no play on these, is not life but mere lumber and litter. Yet it sometimes happens that a seemingly trivial fact, wholly devoid of interest in itself, becomes an essential link in a chain of evidence on which depends some conclusion of weight. Dr. Dryasdust is therefore a person towards whom the true student may at times feel grateful, and of whom he will not lightly think scorn. In order to acquire right methods in what I may call the biographical study of literature the student must set himself down to make complete acquaintance with at least one great author, whose life is far more fully known to us than is the life of Shakespeare. It will be his task to collate the author's life and his works, seeking to interpret each in and through the other; to refund now the life into the writings, and now again the writings into the life; or, if this be impossible, to consider each alternately as the text and the other as its commentary. The task is simpler and easier when the author happens to be one whose genius is not of the dramatic order. It is easier to discover Milton in "Comus" or "Samson Agonistes" than to discover Shakespeare in "Othello "Macbeth." And here the student is fortunate in being able to put himself under the guidance of Professor Masson, so that while attempting to know Milton in " Co. mus" and "Lycidas," in the "Sonnets," in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," in the "Areopagitica" and the "Letter on Education," and other writ ings in verse and prose, one may also come to know him as the lady of his college, virginal in aspect and purity of heart, if virile in intellect and will; as the young recluse at Horton among his books or wandering in the meadows by the banks of the Colne; in London as the armed champion of liberty, domestic, civil, and religious; in the chamber of the Council or Knowing Milton thus, we shall know "Samson Agonistes" more truly and fully than if we had never passed beyond the poem to its author, and we shall also know not only what it is but how it came to be what it is. In refunding the poem into the life, and interpreting the life by the poem, we have come to see and feel many things which otherwise must have escaped our notice. But let Professor Masson take my place and use the expositor's pointing-rod : Like Sam The story of Samson must have seemed to Milton a metaphor or allegory of much of his own life in its later stages. He also, in his veteran days, after the Restoration, was a champion at bay, a prophet warrior left alone among men of a different faith and different ruin of his cause, and wreaked their wrath manners- - Philistines, who exulted in the upon him for his past services to that cause by insults, calumnies, and jeers at his misfortunes and the cause itself. He also was blind as Samson had been-groping about among the malignant conditions that had befallen him, helplessly dependent on the guiding of others, and bereft of the external consolations and means of resistance to his scorners that He might have come to him through sight. past. In that past, too, there were similarialso had to live mainly in the imagery of the ties in his case to that of Samson. son, substantially, he had been a Nazariteno drinker of wine or strong drink, but one who had always been an ascetic in his dedicated service to great designs. And the chief blunder in his life, that which had gone nearest to wreck it, and had left the most marring consequences and the most painful reflections, was the very blunder of which, twice repeated, Samson had to accuse himself. Like Samson, he had married a Philistine woman-one not of his own tribe, and having no thoughts or interests in common with his own; and, like Samson, he had suffered indignities from this wife and her relations, till he had learnt to rue the match. In short, there must have rushed upon Milton, contemplating in his later life the story of the blind Samson with his own case, that there is little wonder among the Philistines, so many similarities that he then selected this subject for poetic While writing treatment. Samson Agonistes" (i.e., Samson the Agonist, Athlete, or Wrestler) he must have been secretly conscious throughout that he was representing every turn. much of his own feelings and experience; and | Was it not, then, the disgusting Milton the reader of the poem who knows anything who acted thus? No, not the disgusting of Milton's life has this pressed upon him at Milton, but the very Milton who beheld the lady of "Comus," and who presents in his pamphlets on divorce noble and exalted views on this same subject of marriage. When, instead of picking and choosing certain fragments of Milton and constructing from these a charming vision to gratify our own particular sentiment, we come to know and understand the actual man, we can do justice, and a justice not devoid of charity, to the errors of the haughty idealist; we shall find new meanings in the Eve and the Dalila of his poems; and if we choose to moralize, we may learn the humbling truth that human greatness and human infirmity are often near akin, and that to dwell in the empyrean, though glorious for a mortal, is not always the best preparation for sitting with grace and amiability by the fireside. In Milton's life, as in Milton's prose writings, occur passages which are not admirable, which are indeed the reverse of admirable. The student of literature, we may presume, is a lover of beauty, and the temptation with him to shirk the ugly passages of a life is a temptation easily understood. Here he may say, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has lately been saying of Shelley, here, in "Comus" and Samson," here, in the Council Chamber sheltering Davenant from dangers incurred through his Royalist ardors, here, in company with Lawrence, listening to the lute well touched, is the Milton we desire to know, the Milton who delights. Let us, at least as long as we are able, avert our eyes from the Milton who disgusts, from the unamiable Milton, the Milton who calls his opponent "an idiot by breeding and a solicitor by presumption," the Milton who helped to embitter his daughters' lives, and remembered them as "unkind children" in his will. What is gained by forcing this disgusting Milton on our at-possessing certain characteristics in comtention? We choose, if we can, to retain a charming picture of the great poet. The delightful true Milton is the Milton after all. Ah, give us back the delightful Mil ton! But the lover of beauty is sometimes a lover of truth, and in the long run he will gain not only more of truth but more of beauty and delight by cultivating the power and habit of seeing things as they are, and understanding them aright, and acquiring the temper of justice and of charity, than if he were to indulge what, to speak plainly, is a kind of fastidious egotism. A man compassed about with infirmity, yet a heroic man, is after all better worth knowing than either a phantom or a fragment of a man. And indeed unless we know the whole man we shall comprehend no fragment aright. It was not admirable in Milton that he should have darkened and saddened his young wife's bridal days. It seems at a first glance ridiculous and odious that he should have celebrated her flight from his house by rushing before the public with a pamphlet on divorce; it seems something worse than odious that he should have proposed marriage to another woman while Mary still lived, and when Miss Davis, had she accepted his proposal, must have sacrificed her reputation, and perhaps her happiness, for his sake. We shall now assume that our student of literature has mastered what I have termed the biographical method of study. Inquiring how this or that piece of literature came to be what it is, he perceived that it belongs to a group of works, all mon, works all of which proceeded from one and the same mind, and he has been led to inquire into the nature of that mind and the history of its development. There are qualities possessed in common by "King Henry IV." and "Measure for Measure" and "Lear" and "The Tempest" which cannot be found in "Sejanus," or "The Jew of Malta," or "The Broken Heart; "signs and tokens there are which would make us cry "Shakespeare !" were we to discover one of these plays for the first time in a copy without title page or trace of the author's name. But looking farther, our student finds certain common characteristics belonging to the plays of Shakespeare and to those of Ben Jonson and Marlowe and Ford which he cannot find in plays by Dryden or Lee or Rowe. It becomes evident to him that all Shakespeare's plays belong to a larger group consisting of the works of the Elizabethan age. Thus, seeking to discover how " Hamlet," or "Lear," or "The Tempest" came to be what it is, he is compelled to pass beyond the author of those plays, to leave the biographical study of literature, and to enter on the wider field of historical study. He now needs to know more than an author, he must know a period. In the study of an individual author the inquirer, as we have seen, first investigates the peculiar nature of the author's genius, and then endeavors to trace its and sorrows, their loves and hatreds, their development through successive stages; laughter and their tears; and hence the so here, in the historical study of litera- possibility of his great dramatic creations. ture, he will seek first to understand the leading characteristics of the age, and secondly, to follow the movement of the age, observing how it arose out of the past, how it culminated, how it prepared the way for a new epoch and then declined. To know a period aright we must know its outward body and its inward spirit; we must study it in its actions, its passions, and its thought. What were its great achievements in the material world and its daily habits of social life? What were its dominant emotions? what were its guiding ideas? And finally, is there any common element or principle which manifests itself alike in ideas, emotions, and action? Can we, for example, perceive any central and ruling tendency in the age which Shakespeare and Bacon and Hooker and Spenser represent in literature? I have elsewhere ventured to assert that a profound interest in reality as opposed to abstractions, a rich feeling for concrete fact, was the dominant characteristic of the Elizabethan age. The greatest theological thinker of the time was not greatly concerned about the abstract dogmas of theology, but gave the full force of his mind to laying the foundations and building up, like a wise master builder, the fabric of the Anglican Church. The great philosopher of the Elizabethan age looked with disdain on the speculations in vacuo, as they appeared to him, of the elder philosophies; his own discoveries were "copied," as he says, "from a very ancient model, even the world itself." He too, like Hooker, desired to be a master builder; he would fain "lay a foundation in the human understanding for a holy temple after the model of the world." Light indeed seemed precious to Bacon, but precious chiefly in order to the attainment of fruit. Spenser, the dreamer of fairyland, in his romantic epic professes not to justify the ways of God to man as Milton afterwards professed; he does not, like Pope, turn into verse a series of philosophical or pseudo-philosophical views concerning the nature and state of man with respect to the universe; he professes no other general intention than "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." And Shakespeare, with his company of fellow-dramatists, is profoundly interested in the characters and deeds of men and women, in their relations one with another, their joys The action, the emotions, and the ideas of an age may to some extent, and as a matter of convenience, be studied apart from one another; the action, in the lives of statesmen and warriors, and above all in records of the social life of the time; the emotions, in its poetry and art; the ideas, in the writings of its theologians, philosophers, moralists, men of science. But we must also endeavor to see ideas, passions, action, in their vital relations and mutual intercourse as parts of a living organism; that is, we must study not only the anatomy but the physiology of the age. There are epochs, such as that of the French Revolution, when ideas have inflamed passions, and passions have transformed themselves into ideas, and when both ideas and passions hurry forward to obtain expression and realization in some stupendous deed; and such epochs of flood and fire seldom pass without displac ing old strata and creating a new stratum, from which flowers and fruits of kinds hitherto unknown will in due time arise. I have said that the student will do more than study the characteristics of the period; he will watch the life of the period in the various moments of its development and its decline. If a writer belongs to an age in which a revolution in ideas is accomplishing itself, in which old dogmas are passing away, although this great fact the dying of an old faith- may be the central characteristic of the epoch, it matters much to the individual whether he is summoned to take part in the movement at this moment or at that. He may arrive at manhood just when the weariness and profound indifference, proper to the first moment in the decay and approaching agony of an old belief, are universal. He will still continue a believer, but his belief will be no more than a piece of lifeless custom. Or he may belong to the moment of awakening doubt and critical inquiry. Or, yet again, to the moment when the negation of a received faith has itself become the newer creed, when the old interests and passions connected with tradi tional beliefs are alarmed, and a combat hand to hand is being waged. Or the epoch of contemptuous jest and mockery may have arrived. Or the first presages may already have been felt of the serious faith of the future.* I have drawn my illustrations from Jouffrey's remarkable study, Comment les Dogmes finissent. No period of our literature lends itself more naturally to historical study, and indeed to biographical study also, than the eighteenth century. The sources of information are abundant; material as delightful as it is important lies open before the student; he is constantly in the company of eminent men and interesting women. The period is sufficiently remote from our own day to permit us to view it dispassionately; and the chief movements of the time can be clearly discerned in their origin, development, and issue. Our historian of English thought in that century, Mr. Leslie Stephen, in a lecture on the study of English literature, lately delivered at St. Andrews, spoke with excellent judgment of acquaintance with the philosophy of an age and acquaintance with its social conditions as essential to a right knowledge of its literature. The lecturer did not quote an admirable page from the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," which is so much to my purpose that I shall make amends for Mr. Stephen's error by copying it here. the last half of the century. Foreign influ ences, again, would have to be considered. French literature was to Dryden and Pope what Italian had been to Spenser and Milton; the influence of Bayle may be traced in the earlier criticism, as at a later period Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire profoundly affected English thought. The attempt, then, to deduce Pope from Clarke, or to connect Swift with Butler, to the neglect of the many conflicting influences, would be necessarily illusory. It is not the less true that remarkable analogies may be traced between the speculative and the imaginative literature. ferred affected both modes of thought; and The complex conditions to which I have resometimes we may best regard the two manifestations as springing from the same root, sometimes as directly influencing each other." Between the epoch of Puritan enthusiasm and the epoch of revolutionary enthusiasm lies this rich level period of common sense, when enthusiasm was discredited and yet could not long be suppressed. If we would understand its literature aright we should study the age not only in "The Rape of the Lock" and the " Essay on Man," in "The Spectator and 66 Gulliver," in "Clarissa" and Walpole and those of Lady Mary Wort"Tom Jones," but in the letters of Horace ley Montagu, the pictures of Hogarth, the sermons of Butler, the lives of Wesley and Whitefield, the operas and oratorios of Handel, the brilliant mockeries of Voltaire, and the tears and raptures of Rousseau. The character of an imaginative literature is a function of many forces. It depends not only upon the current philosophy, but upon the inherited peculiarities of the race, upon its history, its climate, its social and political relations, and upon individual peculiarities of mind and temperament, which defy all attempt at explanation. Thus, in our English literature of the eighteenth century, we can see the reflection of the national character; its sturdy common sense; the intellectual shortsightedOnce more lifting his eyes and looking ness which enables it to grasp details whilst abroad, the student of English literature rejecting general systems; the resulting ten- will perceive that there are groups of dency to compromise, which leads it to acqui- writings not arbitrarily formed and larger esce in heterogeneous masses of opinion; its humor, its deep moral feeling, its prejudices, than can be comprehended within any age its strong animal propensities, and so forth. or even within the history of any nation. Or, again, the social development affects the He will perceive a kinship between “ Macliterature. The whole tone of thought is evi- beth" and "The Orphan" and "Phèdre ” dently colored by the sentiments of a nation and "Le Roi s'amuse " and the " Agamemdefinitely emerging from the older organiza- non" and the "Medea." All these belong tion to a modern order of society. We see to the dramatic order of writings. What the formation of an important middle class then is the drama? What are its laws or and of an audience composed, not of solitary principles? How does it differ from the chants, politicians, lawyers, and doctors, eager epic? What constitutes a tragedy? What for amusement, delighting in infinite personal are the essentials of a tragic plot? What gossip, and talking over its own peculiarities is required in the character of a tragic with ceaseless interest in coffee-houses, clubs, hero? That is to say, the investigator and theatres. Nor, again, are the political who has examined a piece of literature influences unimportant. The cessation of the simply in order to know what it is, and fierce struggles of the previous century culmi- who inquiring then how it came to be nating in the undisputed supremacy of a par- what it is, has studied first the genius of liamentary oligarchy, led to a dying out of the an individual author and next the genius vehement discussions which at other periods of a particular period to which that author have occupied men's minds exclusively, and made room for that theological controversy which I have described, and which itself disappeared as the political interests revived in students or magnificent nobles, but of mer belongs, is now compelled to take a wider * History of English Thought, etc., vol. ii., p. 330. |