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PREFACE 7

I SHAKESPEARE'S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE

I SHAKESPEARE'S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE

THE Shakesperean world is impressed, as a whole, with an unmistakable joy in healthy living. This tells habitually as a pervading spirit, a contagious temper, not as a creed put forward, or an example set up. It is as clear in the presentment of Falstaff or Iago, as of Horatio or Imogen. And nowhere is it clearer than in his handling of the relations between men and women. For here Shakespeare's preferences and repugnances are unusually transparent; what pleased him in the ways of lovers and wedded folks he drew again and again, and what repelled him he rarely and only for special reasons drew at all. Criminal love, of any kind, holds a quite subordinate place in his art; and, on the other hand, if ideal figures are to be found there, it is among his devoted, passionate, but arch and joyous women.

The present study will follow the plan thus indicated. The first section defines the 'norm.' The second describes the kinds of appeal and effect, in Comedy and Tragedy, to which the drama of 'normal' love lent itself. The third traces the gradual approach to the norm in the early Comedies. The fourth and fifth sections, finally, discuss the treatment, in Comedy and Tragedy, of Love-types other than the norm.

The Shakesperean norm of love, thus understood, may be described somewhat as follows. Love is a passion, kindling heart, brain, and senses alike in natural and happy proportions; ardent but not sensual, tender but not sentimental, pure but not ascetic, moral but not puritanic, joyous but not frivolous, mirthful and witty but not cynical. His lovers look forward to marriage as a matter of course, and they neither anticipate its rights nor turn their affections elsewhere. They commonly love at first sight and once for all. Love-relations which do not contemplate marriage occur rarely and in subordination to other dramatic purposes. Tragedy like that of Gretchen does not attract him. Romeo's amour with Rosalind is a mere foil to his greater passion, Cassio's with Bianca merely a mesh in the network of Iago's intrigue; Claudio's with Juliet is the indispensable condition of the plot. The course of love rarely runs smooth; but rival suitors proposed by parents are quietly resisted or merrily abused, never, even by the gentlest, accepted. Crude young girls like Hermia, delicate-minded women like Desdemona and Imogen, the rapturous Juliet and the homely Anne Page, the discreet Silvia and the na?ve Miranda, are all at one on this point. And they all carry the day. The dramatically powerful situations which arise from forced marriage--as when Ford's Penthea or Corneille's Chim?ne is torn by the conflict between love and honour--lie, like this conflict in general, outside Shakespeare's chosen field. And with this security of possession his loving women combine a capacity for mirth and jest not usual in the dramatic representation of passion. Rosalind is more intimately Shakesperean than Juliet.

Love's not love When it is mingled with regards that stand Aloof from the entire point.

Or of Imogen, blind to all but the path of light and air that divides her from Milford Haven:

I see before me, man; nor here, nor here, Nor what ensues, but have a fog in them, That I cannot look through.

For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall A drop of water in the breaking gulf And take unmingled thence that drop again Without addition or diminishing, As take from me thyself and not me too;

an utterance which in its simple pathos anticipates the agonized cry of Othello--the most thrilling expression in Shakespeare of the meaning of wedded unity:

But there, where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live, or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up: to be discarded thence!

The husband in these cases, it is true, neither forgives nor condones, and Shakespeare gives no hint that he would have dissented from the traditional ethics on which Othello and Posthumus and Leontes acted, had their wives in fact been guilty. The wives, on the other hand, encounter the husband's unjust suspicions, or brutal slanders, without a thought of revenge or reprisal. Desdemona, Imogen, Hermione, alike beautifully fulfil the ideal of love presented in the great sonnet:

Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.

The beauty and insight of Shakespeare's finest portrayals of the comedy and the tragedy of love were not reached at once. His conception of love itself was still, at the opening of his career, relatively slight and superficial; his mastery of technique was equally incomplete. The early plays accordingly abound with scenes and situations where from either cause or both the dramatic treatment of love is not yet in the full sense Shakesperean. It will suffice in this sketch to specify two types of each.

But love itself is not, as yet, drawn with any power. Berowne's magnificent account of its attributes and effects is not borne out by any representation of it in the play. The 'taffeta phrases' and 'silken terms precise,' the pointed sallies and punning repartees, full of a hard crackling gaiety, neither express passion nor suggest, like the joyous quips of the later Rosalind, that passion is lurking behind. We are spectators of a rather protracted flirtation, a 'way of love' which was to occupy a minimal place in his later drama. Armado's dramatically unimportant seduction of Jaquenetta is likewise a symptom of his 'apprentice' phase.

For it is plain that precisely the resolute pursuit of a resisting man was uncongenial to Shakespeare's riper art, because unnatural in the type of high-bred and refined womanhood whose ways in love reflected his ideal of healthy love-making. Helena, as the heroine and predominant figure of the play, had to be of the sisterhood of Portia and Rosalind and Beatrice and Viola. But if the plot forbad this? And clearly, the most hazardous incident of all could not be eliminated without breaking up the plot altogether. Why then take up the old play at all? Plainly there must have been in the fundamental theme something which Shakespeare was unwilling to lose as well as something that he would have wished away. This something that attracted him was evidently Helen's clear-sighted resolution in itself; in this she is, in fact, a true sister of Portia and Rosalind, though her seriousness is not, like theirs, irradiated with laughter. Could she be visibly endowed with this grace of clear sight and will, yet at the same time be rather drawn on by circumstances to the final conquest of Bertram than herself the active agent in it? Somewhat thus must the problem have presented itself to Shakespeare. Did he completely solve it? I think not. But we can to some extent follow his procedure.

Strength and delicacy are from the first blended in Helen. Her famous lines :

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven.

strike the keynote of her resolute temper. Yet her love, a maiden's idolatry, is content without possession; with her, 'Dian' is 'both herself and love' . If she forms plans for showing her merit and thus commending herself in Bertram's eyes, she takes no step herself; it is the Countess who, having discovered her love, welcomes her prospective daughter-in-law and sends her with all proper convoy to court to 'cure the king.' Her choosing of Bertram is an offer of life-long service, not the appropriation of a well-won prize. And when Bertram bluntly declares that he 'cannot love her nor will strive to do it,' she proposes, turning to the king, to withdraw her whole claim:

That you are well restored, my lord, I'm glad; Let the rest go.

On reading Bertram's letter she is, like Imogen when she reads Posthumus's, for the moment overwhelmed. 'This is a dreadful sentence.' She hardly speaks, and gives no hint to the Countess of her thoughts. But when she is alone she breaks out in the great passionate monologue of renunciation ....

No, come thou home, Rousillon, Whence honour but of danger wins a scar, As oft it loses all: I will be gone; My being here it is that holds thee hence: Shall I stay here to do't? no, no, although The air of paradise did fan the house, And angels office'd all: I will be gone....

This can only imply, since she is alone, that she sincerely proposes to give up all claim to her nominal husband.

Helena's conduct appears, then, to fluctuate, without clear explanation, between resolute pursuit and dignified renunciation.

What I have called the norm of love must thus rank high among the determining forces of his mature drama. Obscured and disguised at the outset by crude conceptions and immature technique, it gradually grew clear, and provided the background of passion, faith, and truth out of which, aided by misunderstandings, pleasant or grave, his most delightful comedy and his most poignant tragedy were evolved. And other types of love--whether they made for comedy or for tragedy, held a relatively slight place in his work. In particular he concerns himself only in a quite exceptional or incidental way either with the high comedy of love or with guilty passion.

Finally, as Shakespeare recognized for purposes of comedy certain types of love-making alien to the ideal norm, so too, more rarely, for the purposes of tragedy. Ideal love, as has been seen, occurs constantly in the tragedies even where it does not directly affect or participate in the tragic issues; as with France and Cordelia, Brutus and Portia, Richard II and his queen, Coriolanus and Virgilia. But the more penetrating sense of evil which becomes apparent in his tragic period contributed to draw more prominently into the sphere of his art the disastrous aspects of the relations between men and women. That he refrained from exploiting in drama the more sinister forms of passion, we have seen. But in some of his ripest and greatest work he drew love with implications and under conditions, which sharply mark it off from the 'marriage of true minds.' It is unstable, or lawless, or grounded on illusion; and thus not merely succumbs easily to assault from without, but directly breeds and fosters tragic ruin within. Even the union of Othello and Desdemona, in every other respect a 'marriage of true minds' which reaches for a moment incomparable intensity and beauty, is rendered fatally precarious by their ignorance of each other.

A diminution in our captain's brain Restores his heart;

and enlarged feeling opens up new regions of imagination and lifts him to unapproached heights of poetry, as in the unarming-scene with Eros and the farewell speeches to Cleopatra . And Cleopatra too, in the 'infinite variety' of her moods, has momentary flickerings of genuine devotion of which she was before incapable. Momentary only, it is true; the egoist, the actress, the coquette, are only fitfully overcome; in her dying speech itself the accent of them all is heard. The 'baser elements' are not expelled, but the nobler 'fire and air' to which she dreams that she is resolved, gleam for a fitful instant in her cry 'Husband, I come,' to yield a moment later to jealous alarm lest Lear should have Antony's kiss, and vindictive satisfaction at having outwitted Caesar.

II THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS

II THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS

This example has led us to the verge of another class of poetic ideas, those in which poetry discovers in the world not merely analogies of mind, but mind itself. This is the commonest, and in some of its phases the cheapest and poorest, intellectually, of all poetic ideas. It touches at one pole the naive personation which peoples earth and air for primitive man with spirits whom he seeks by ritual and magic to propitiate or to circumvent. The brilliant and beautiful woof of myth is, if we will, poetry as well as religion; the primitive and rudimentary poetry of a primitive and rudimentary religion. Yet it points, however crudely, to the subtler kinds of response which a riper poetic insight may discover. If the glorious anthropomorphism of Olympus and Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of life, everywhere pulsing through Nature, and perpetually reborn 'in man and beast and earth and air and sea,' cries to the poet in every moment of his experience with a voice which will not be put by, and the symbols from soul-life by which he seeks to convey his sense of it, if they often read human personality too definitely into the play of that elusive mystery, yet capture something in it which escapes the reasoned formulas of science, and justify the claim of poetic experience to be the source of an outlook upon the world, of a vision of life, with which, no less than with those reached through philosophy and religion, civilization has to reckon.

On the other hand, in its interpretation of Man, the poetic soul-consciousness, so extraordinarily intense on the emotional and imaginative side, has lifted these aspects of soul into prominence; illuminating and sustaining everywhere the impassioned insight which carries men outside and beyond themselves, in heroism, in prophecy, in creation, in love; which makes the past alive for them, and the future urgent; which lifts them to a vision of good and evil beyond that of moral codes; to the perception that danger is the true safety, and death, as Rupert Brooke said, 'safest of all'; which in a word gives wing and scope and power to that in man which endures, as the stream endures though its water is ever gliding on, and makes us 'feel that we are greater than we know.'

I have tried to sketch out some of the ways in which a scientific poetry is possible without disparagement to either element in the description. Let me now proceed to apply some of these ideas to the great poet of science who is our immediate subject.

The atomic system of Democritus, which explained all things in the universe as combinations of different kinds of material particles, was a magnificent contribution to physical science, and the fertility of its essential idea is still unexhausted. It touched the problems of mind and life, of ethics and art, only indirectly, in so far as it resolved mind and all its activities into functions of matter and motion. Epicurus, on the other hand, a saintly recluse, bent only upon showing the way to a life of serene and cheerful virtue, took over the doctrine of the great physicist of Abd?ra, without any touch of dispassionate speculative interest, as that which promised most effectual relief from disturbing interests and cares, and especially from the disturbance generated by fear of the gods and of a life after death. He might have gone to the great Athenian idealists of the fourth century, the immortal masters not only of those who know, but of those who think and create, whether in science or in poetry or in citizenship. But his aim was precisely to liberate from these distracting energies, and allure a weary generation from the forum and the workshop, even the studio of letters or of art, and the temples of the gods, into the choice seclusion of his garden--the garden of a soul at peace, fragrant with innocent and beautiful things. What Epicurus added of his own to Democritus' theory was an accommodation not to truth but to convenience; and the measure of his scientific ardour is given by his easy toleration of conflicting explanations of the same phenomenon, provided they dispense with the intervention of the gods. While the measure of his attachment to poetry is given by his counsel to his disciples to go past it with stopped ears, as by the siren's deadly song.

One might well surmise that a philosophy which a poet could thus ardently proclaim was itself, after all, not without the seeds and springs of poetry; and that Lucretius in choosing to expound it in verse was not staking everything on his power of making good radical defects of substance by effective surface decoration or brilliant digressions. He recognized, no doubt, a difference in popular appeal between his substance and his form, and in a famous and delightful passage compares himself to the physician who touches the edge of the bitter cup with honey, ensnaring credulous childhood to its own good. So, he tells Memmius, he is spreading the honey of the Muses over his difficult matter, that he may hold him by the charm of verse until the nature of things have grown clear to his sight. But Lucretius is here putting himself at the point of view of the indifferent layman, and especially of the rather obtuse layman whose interest he was with almost pathetic eagerness seeking to capture. One guesses that Memmius, like the boy, was by no means reconciled to the wormwood because it was prefaced with honey; and modern critics who, like Mommsen, condemn his choice of subject as a blunder, come near to adopting the resentful boy's point of view. But in the splendid lines which immediately precede, though they form part of the same apology to Memmius, the poet involuntarily betrays his own very different conception of the matter. The hope of glory, he says, has kindled in his breast the love of the Muses, 'whereby inspired I am exploring a virgin soil of poetry hitherto untrodden by any foot. O the joy of approaching the unsullied springs, and quaffing them, O the joy of culling flowers unknown, whence may be woven a splendid wreath for my head, such as the Muses have arrayed no man's brows withal before; first because I am reporting on a great theme, and undoing the tight knot of superstition from the minds of men; and then because I convey dark matters in such transparent verse, touching everything with the Muses' charm.'

Here, in spite of the last words, Lucretius clearly feels that his matter is something more than the wormwood which he overlays with honey; it is a vast region of implicit poetry which he, first of poets, is going to discover and annex; and he rests his claim to the poetic wreath he expects to win, in the first place upon this greatness of the subject matter itself, and secondly, not as the wormwood and honey theory would suggest, on the ingenious fancy which decorates or disguises it, but on the lucid style which allows it to shine in, as through a window, upon the ignorant mind.

Let us then consider from this point of view the subject of Lucretius. This subject, as he conceives it, has two aspects. On the one side it is negative;--an annihilating criticism of all the crude religion founded upon fear--fear of the gods, fear of death and of something after death; criticism delivered with remorseless power and culminating in the sinewy intensity of the terrible line

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,

The other aspect is constructive; the building up of the intellectual and moral framework of a worthy human life, by setting forth the true nature of the universe, the history of life, and the development of man; in other words, the story of his struggle through the ages, with the obstacles opposed to him by the power of untamed nature, by wild beasts, storms, inundations, by the rivalry and antagonism of other men, and by the wild unreason in his own breast. Lucretius saw as clearly as any modern thinker that man's conduct of his life, whether in the narrow circle of domestic happiness and personal duty, or in the larger sphere of civic polity, must be based upon a comprehension of the external world and of the past through which we have grown to what we are; and making allowance for his more limited resources and his more confined point of view, he carried it out with magnificent power. So that if his poem remains in nominal intention a didactic treatise, in its inner substance and purport it might better be described as a colossal epic of the universe, with man for its protagonist and the spectres of the gods for its vanquished foes; and wanting neither the heroic exultations nor the tragic dooms, neither the melancholy over what passes nor the triumph in what endures, which go to the making of the greatest poetry.

These two aspects--criticism and construction--are thus most intimately bound together in the poem, but can yet be considered apart. And to each belongs its own peculiar and distinct vein of poetry. On the whole it is the former, at first sight so much less favourable to poetic purposes, which has most enthralled posterity. For the voice of Lucretius is here a distinctive, almost a solitary voice. The poets for the most part have been the weavers of the veil of dreams and visions in whose glamour the races of mankind have walked: but here came a poet, and one of the greatest, who rent the veil asunder and bade men gaze upon the nature of things naked and unadorned. And his austere chaunt of triumph as he pierces illusion and scatters superstition, has in it something more poignant and thrilling than many a song of voluptuous ecstacy or enchanted reverie. For, after all, the passing of an old order of things and the coming of a new has always at least the interest of colossal drama, and cannot leave us unmoved, however baneful we may hold the old order to have been, however we may exult in the deliverance effected by the new. So Milton's celebration of the birth of Christ only reaches the heights of poetry when he is telling of the passing of the old pagan divinities:

The lonely mountains o'er And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent; With flower-inwoven tresses torn The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thicket mourn.

How often has fear of the gods begotten impious and criminal acts! What else was it that led the chieftains of Greece, foremost of men, foully to stain the altar of Artemis with the blood of the maiden Iphigenia? Soon as the victim's band was bound about her virgin locks, and she saw her father grief-stricken before the altar, and at his side the priests concealing the knife, and the onlookers shedding tears at the sight, dumb with fear she sank on her knees to the ground. And it availed her nothing at that hour that she had been the first to call the king by the name of father; for she was caught up by the hands of men, and borne trembling to the altar; not to have a glad wedding hymn sung before her when these sacred rites were over, but to be piteously struck down, a victim, stained with her own stainless blood, by the hand of a father in the very flower of her bridal years; and all in order to procure that a happy deliverance might be granted to the captive fleet. So huge a mass of evils has fear of the gods brought forth!

Thus the crucial proof of the badness of the old religions is derived from the hideous violence done in their name to the natural and beautiful pieties of the family.

Yet, with all his fierce aversion for this baneful fear, Lucretius feels profoundly how natural it is. His intense imagination enters into the inmost recesses of the human heart, and runs counter, as it were, to the argument of his powerful reason; riveting upon our senses with almost intolerable force the beliefs which he is himself seeking to dispel; so that though there is no trace of doubt or obscurity in his own mind, his words need only to be set in a different context to become a plea for that which he is using them to refute. Thus his very derision of the Stoic doctrine of an all-pervading God is conveyed in language of what one is again prompted to call Hebraic magnificence. 'What power can rule the immeasurable All, or hold the reins of the great deep? who can revolve the heavens and warm the earth with ethereal fires? who can be everywhere present, making dark the sky and thrilling it with clashing sound...?' Do we not seem to listen to an echo of the ironical questions of the Jahveh of the Book of Job?

There he feels only scorn for the believer, in spite of his involuntary imaginative hold upon the belief. But in another passage we see the poet himself shudder with the fear that his logic is in the act of plucking up by the roots:

When we gaze upward at the great vault of heaven, and the empyrean fixed above the shining stars, and consider the paths of sun and moon, then the dread will start into life within us lest haply we should find it to be the immeasurable might of the gods which moves the blazing stars along their diverse ways. For dearth of argument tempts us to wonder whether the world was ever begotten, and whether it be destined to perish when its ceaseless movements have worn it out, or endowed with immortal life glide on perpetually, defying all the might of time. And then what man is there whose heart does not shrink with terror of the gods, whose limbs do not creep with fear, when the parched earth trembles at the lightning stroke, and the roar of thunder rolls through the sky! Do not the peoples shudder, and haughty kings quake with fear, lest for some foul deed or arrogant speech a dire penalty has been incurred and the hour be come when it must be paid? For when the might of the hurricane sweeps the commander of a fleet before it along the seas, with all his force of legions and elephants, does he not approach the gods with prayers for their favour and helping winds; and all in vain, for often enough none the less he is caught in the whirlpool and flung into the jaws of death? So utterly is some hidden power seen to consume the works of man, and to trample and deride all the symbols of his glory and his wrath .

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