David Masson

“ But it is Literature that reads us the lesson most fully and convincingly. Some of those great men of action have left little or no direct speech of themselves. They mingled their minds with the rage of things around them; they worked, and strove, and died. But the books we have from all periods, the poems, the songs, the treatises, the pleadings—some of them from men great also in the world of action, but most from men who only looked on, and thought, and tried to rule the spirit, or to find how it might be ruled—these remain with us and can be studied yet microscopically. ”

“ Shakespeare lived and died, we may say, in the pre-scientific period; he lived and died in the belief of the fixedness of our earth in space and the diurnal wheeling round her of the ten spectacular spheres. Not the less was he Shakespeare; and none of us dares to say that there is now in the world, or has recently been, a more superb thinking apparatus of its order than his mind was, a spiritual transparency of larger diameter, or vivid with grander gleamings and pulses. ”

“ And this, we say, is Melancholy. It is more. It is that mood of man, which, most of all moods, is thoroughly, grandly, specifically human. That which is the essence of all worth, all beauty, all humour, all genius, is open or secret reference to the supernatural; and this is sorrow. The attitude of a finite creature, contemplating the infinite, can only be that of an exile, grief and wonder blending in a wistful longing for an unknown home.
As we consider this frame of mind to have been characteristic of Shakespeare, so we find that as a poet he has not forgotten to represent it. ”

“ To Shakespeare, as we have already said, life was but as a little island on the bosom of a boundless sea: men must needs know what the island contains, and act as those who have to till and [Pg 119] rule it; still, with that expanse of waters all round in view, and that roar of waters ever in the ear, what can men call themselves or pretend their realm to be? “Poor fools of Nature” is the poet’s own phrase—the realm so small that it is pitiful to belong to it! ”

“ If he had not Sir Walter Scott’s positive conviction that every man ought to be either a laird or a lawyer, casting in authorship as a mere addition if it were to be practised at all, he at least led so full and keen a life, and was drawn forth on so many sides by nature, society, and the unseen, that Literature, out of the actual moments in which he was engaged in it, must have seemed to him a mere bagatelle, a mere fantastic echo of not a tithe of life. ”

“ When the storm of some great civil contest is blowing, it is impossible for even the serenest man to shut himself quite in from the noise, and turn over the leaves of his Horace, or practise his violin, as undistractedly as before. Great is the power of pococurantism; and it is a noble sight to see, in the midst of some Whig and Tory excitement which is throwing the general community into sixes and sevens, and sending mobs along the streets, the calm devotee of hard science, or the impassioned lover of the ideal, going on his way, aloof from it all, and smiling at it all. ”

“ Accordingly, in all great poets there may be discerned this familiarity of the imagination with the world figured as a poor little ball pendent in space and moving forward out of a dark past to a future of light or gloom. But in this respect Shakespeare exceeds them all; and in this respect, therefore, no poet is more religious, more spiritual, more profoundly metaphysical, than he. Into an inordinate amount of that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of sensible things, infuse the peculiar moral germ of Christianity, and you have the religion of Shakespeare. ”

“ Mephistopheles is the Spirit of Evil in modern society. Goethe’s Faust is an illustration of this spirit’s working in the history of an individual. The case selected is a noble one. Faust, a man of grand and restless nature, is aspiring after universality of feeling. Utterly dissatisfied and disgusted with all human method and all human acquisition, nay, fretting at the constitution of human nature itself, he longs to spill out his soul, so that, mingling with the winds, it may become a part of the ever-thrilling spirit of the universe and know the essence of everything. ”

“ In order, then, that Goethe might hold permanently a first rank even among his own countrymen, it was necessary that he should be a man of a genius quite distinct from that of Shakespeare, a man who, having or not having certain Shakespearian qualities, should at all events signalize such qualities as he had by a marked character and function of his own. And, if this was necessary to secure to Goethe a first rank in the literature of Germany, much more was it necessary to ensure him a place as one of the intellectual potentates of the whole modern world. ”

“ Moreover, there was abundant matter, capable of being treated consistently with either Whiggism or Toryism, in the social foibles and peculiarities of the day, as we see in the Tatler and the Spectator. Nor could a genial mind like that of Steele, a man of taste and fine thought like Addison, and an intellect so keen, exquisite, and sensitive as that of Pope, fail to variegate and surround all the duller and harder literature thus called into being with more lasting touches of the humorous, the fanciful, the sweet, the impassioned, the meditative, and the ideal. ”

“ Or, again, if we will have an image of that which from its nature is unimaginable, then, in our efforts to be as pure and abstract as possible, we find ourselves driven, as I have said, into a fancy of mind as a kind of clear aërial transparency, unbounded or of indefinite bounds, and yet not a dead transparency, but a transparency full of pulses, powers, motions, and whirls, capable in a moment of clouding itself, ceasing to be a transparency, and becoming some strange solid phantasmagory, as of a landscape smiling in sunshine or a sky dark with a storm. ”

“ And thus Luther went on filling up the Scriptural proposition with his daily experience. He was constantly gaining a clearer conception of his great personal antagonist, constantly stumbling upon some more concealed trait in the Spirit’s character. The Being himself was invisible; but men were walking in the midst of his manifestations. It was as if there were some Being whom we could not see, nor directly in the ordinary way have any intercourse with, but who every morning, before it was light, came and left at our doors some exquisite specimen of his workmanship. ”

“ Not slowly to build up a grand poem of continuous ideal action, not quietly and at leisure to weave forth tissues of fantastic imagery, not perseveringly and laboriously to prosecute one track of speculation and bring it to a close, not earnestly and courageously to throw one’s whole soul into a work of moral agitation and reform, was now what was regarded as natural in literature. ”

“ Given some original force or goodness of nature, and out of even this primary school, and from the teaching of these common rudiments, may there not come, do there not come, minds worthy of mark—the shrewd, keen wit, the upright and robust judgment, the disposition tender and true, the bold and honest man? And though, for perfection, the books and the sciences must be superadded, yet do not the rudiments persist in constant over-proportion and incessant compulsory repetition through all the process of culture, and is not the great result of culture itself a reaction on the rudiments? ”

“ There is a demonic of the supernatural—angels, and seraphs, and white-winged airy messengers, swaying men’s phantasies from above; and there is a demonic of the infra-natural—fiends and shapes of horror tugging at men’s thoughts from beneath. The demonic in Swift was of the latter kind. It is false, it would be an entire mistake as to his genius, to say that he regarded, or was inspired by, only the worldly and the secular—that men, women, and their relations in the little world of visible life, were all that his intellect cared to recognise. ”

“ But it is not so with Shakespeare. Less than almost any man that ever wrote does he inculcate or dogmatise. He is the very type of the poet. He paints, represents, creates, holds the mirror up to nature; but from opinion, doctrine, controversy, theory, he holds instinctively aloof. In each [Pg 75] of his plays there is a “central idea,” to use the favourite term of the German critics—that is, a single thought round which all may be exhibited as consciously or unconsciously crystallized; but there is no pervading maxim, no point set forth to be argued or proved. ”

“ Controversy enough remained to give occasion to plenty of polemical prose; but about the middle of her reign, when England, once more great and powerful abroad as in the time of the Edwards, settled down within herself into a new lease of social order and leisure under an ascertained government, there began an outburst of literary genius such as no age or country had ever before witnessed. The literary fecundity of that period of English history which embraces the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and the whole of the reign of James I. (1580-1625) is a perpetual astonishment to us all. ”

“ It is not in the spirit of a philanthropist that he has accumulated his information; it is in the spirit of a devil. It is not with the benevolent motive of a Duchatelet that he has descended into the lurking-places of iniquity; it is because he delights in knowing the whole extent of human misery. The doing of evil being his function, it is but natural that he should have a taste for even the minutest details of his own profession. ”

“ He was likewise the author of diseases. “I hold,” said Luther, “that the Devil sendeth all heavy diseases and sicknesses upon people.” Diseases are, as it were, the Devil striking people; only, in striking, he must use some natural instrument, as a murderer uses a sword. When our sins get the upper hand, and all is going wrong, then the Devil must be God’s hangman, to clear away obstructions and to blast the earth with famines and pestilences. Whatsoever procures death, that is the Devil’s trade. All sadness and melancholy come of the Devil. ”

“ In Goethe, on the other hand, the tendency to the real existed under easier constitutional conditions, and in a state of such natural preponderance over any concomitant craving for the metaphysical, that it necessarily took, German though he was, a higher place in his estimate of what is desirable in a human character. That world of the real in which Shakespeare delighted, and which he knew so well, seemed to him, all this knowledge and delight notwithstanding, far more evanescent, far more a mere filmy show, far less considerable a shred of all that is, than it did to Goethe. ”

“ And yet, in calling Swift a great genius, we clearly do not mean to rank him in the same order of greatness with such men among his predecessors as Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Milton, or such men among his successors as Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. We even retain instinctively the right of not according to him a certain kind of admiration which we bestow on such men of his own generation as Pope, Steele, and Addison. ”

“ If he spends a few minutes in talk with Martha, it is to make the silly old woman expose her foibles. The Second Part of Faust is devilry all through, a tissue of bewilderments and devilries. And while doing all this Mephistopheles is still the same cold, self-possessed, sarcastic being. If he exhibits any emotion at all, it is a kind of devilish anger. Perhaps, too, once or twice we recognise something like terror or flurry. But on the whole he is a spirit bereft of feeling. What could indicate the heart of a devil more than his words to Faust in the harrowing prison scene? ”

“ What of genius in the ideal survived the seventeenth century in England contented itself with nice little imaginations of scenes and circumstances connected with the artificial life of the time; the moral quality most in repute was kindliness or courtesy; and speculation did not go beyond that point where thought retains the form either of ordinary good sense, or of keen momentary wit. No sooner, in fact, do we pass the time of Milton than we feel that we have done with the sublimities. ”

“ What a purblind perversity then it is for History, professing that its aim is to know the mind or real life of the past, to be fumbling for that mind or life amid old daggers, rusty iron caps and jingling jackets, and other such material relics as the past has transmitted, or even groping for it, as ought to be done most strictly, in statutes and charters and records, if all the while those literary remains of the past are neglected from which the very thing searched for stares us face to face! ”

“ One almost begins to wonder if it was altogether right that an old man should go on, morning after morning, and evening after evening, in such a fashion, talking about art and science and literature as if they were the only interests in the world, taking his guests into corners to have quiet discussions with them on these subjects, and always finding something new and nice to be said about them. ”

“ One quality or attribute of Shakespeare’s genius we do, indeed, contrive to seize out this very difficulty of seizing anything—that quality or attribute of many-sidedness of which we have heard so much for the last century and a half. The immense variety of his characters and conceptions, embracing as it does Hamlets and Falstaffs, Kings and Clowns, Prosperos and Dogberrys, and his apparently equal ease in handling them all, are matters that have been noted by one and all of the critics. ”

“ We are much in the habit, indeed, of speaking of experience, of different kinds of knowledge, as so much material for the mind—material delivered into it, outspread as it were on its floor, and which it, the lord and master, may survey, let lie there for occasion, and now and then select from and employ. True! but not the whole truth! The mind does not stand amid what it knows, as something distinct and untouched; the mind is actually composed at any one moment of all that it has learnt or felt up to that moment. ”