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Mr. Gerald Massey gave the first two of a course of ten Lectures, in St.
George's Hall, Langham Place, London, on Tuesday and Friday evenings of
last week, on Shakespeare and Burns.
THE MAN
SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF.
Mr. Massey said
that his object was to present the human personality of the great poet.
How few of all who ever read his works or made use of his name, had any
adequate or even shapeable conception of the man Shakespeare. He who
of all poets came the nearest home to us with his myriad touches of
nature, seemed the most remote from men in his own personality. Yet
we know that somewhere at the centre of the glory radiating from his
works, there dwells the spirit of all the brightness, however lost in
light Shakespeare's own life, Shakespeare himself, not Bacon, nor another,
is at the heart of it all. He was a man, and one of the most
intensely human that ever walked our world, although as a dramatist the
most elusive Protean spirit that ever played bo-peep with us from behind
the mask of matter. But the known facts of his life were few.
The lecturer gave a brief and interesting sketch of the England into which
Shakespeare was born; and the new spirit of national adventure which was
just then beginning to get daringly afloat. When our Shakespeare was
sixteen years of age there was a William Shakespeare drowned at Stratford,
in the river Avon. This fact offered a rare chance for those
purblind followers of poor Delia Bacon, who were suffering from the
delusion that her namesake was the author of Shakespeare's works.
They should complete their case by boldly swearing that that was our
William Shakespeare who was drowned, and there was an end of him once for
all; nothing short of proving some such alibi could ever establish
their theory. Possibly his early life in London was a time of trial
for Shakespeare; but, unlike Byron, who wrote most eloquently about
himself, largeness of sympathy with others, rather than intensity of
sympathy with self, was Shakespeare's nobler poetic motive. This was
provable by means of his poems and plays, and was not to be gainsaid by
any false reading of the sonnets. We should know still less than we
do of the man Shakespeare, but for his evident ambition to make the best
of this world. He had seen quite enough of poverty in his father's
home. So he set about gaining what money he could for himself, and
gripped it firmly too when he had got it. Mr. Massey thought it was
to Gabriel Harvey that we owe the first recognition of Shakespeare's
genius, in the letters "especially touching parties abused by Robert
Greene." Harvey expostulates with the Greene clique on behalf of
this new poet, whom he proclaims to be "the sweetest and divinest muse
that ever sung in English or other language." Mr. Massey adduced
various instances of Shakespeare's retorts to the attacks make on him by
his contemporaries, the most amusing of which were in reply to old John
Davies, of Hereford, who wrote the epigram on "Drusus the deer-stealer."
The lecturer suggested that the character of Malvolio was intended for
John Davies. We might depend upon it, whether we accepted the
particular illustrations or not, that Shakespeare was a great mimic by
nature, and the mimicry was not limited to the player when on the stage.
He was a merry mocker beneath the dramatic mask. See how he quizzed
the euphuistic affectations, and other non-national and non-natural
fashions; how he burlesqued the bombast of Tamburlane, and made fun of the
mythical heroes of Homer, who he knew were not men of nature's making.
Mr. Massey said he dwelt on these aspects because it had been too commonly
the habit to look at Shakespeare with the faculty of wonder alone.
Of all great poets he drew most from real life, and his men and women are
so life-like and genuine for us to-day, because he held the mirror up to
nature, and so faithfully rendered those of his own day. It is not
the subjective kind of mind, which goes ballooning aloft out of sight of
the earth below, that can ever apprehend the robust reality and
matter-of-fact details, political or personal, to be found in the work of
Shakespeare, which is the essence of the national character made concrete.
No true representation of Shakespeare could be given with a false
interpretation of the sonnets. If we read them as wholly personal to
himself we have to reverse all that we know of him—the happy soul
delighting in his wealth of work and "well contented day" becomes a
moody, disappointed, discontented man, envious of this one's art and that
one's scope, disgusted with his work, which brought him friends and made
his fortune; disgraced by writing for the stage or hearing the name of
"player" as a brand; miserable in his lot; an outcast in his life; blotted
and stained in his character; meanly immoral in his friendship; a
hypocrite, a knave, and a fool. And all because a sort of one-eyed
folk cannot see that the greatest dramatic poet in the world could also
write dramatically, or vicariously, when composing "sonnets for his
private friends." The autobiographic theory was false. The
sonnets were also dramatic. In his life we know that he left the
impress of a cheery, healthful nature, a catholic and jocund soul, on all
who came near him. Only twenty-four years after the poet's death the
publisher Benson says the sonnets are of the "same purity that the author
himself avouched when living." They would find in Shakespeare an
active sense of the supernatural, and the reality and nearness of the
spirit-world, but he never took sides with any religious sect or system.
He was a world too wide for any or all of the theologies, and when these
had passed away, said Mr. Massey, like a mist dispersed, there will be but
little superseded in the work of Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, in his
tribute to Shakespeare, his "book and his fame," uttered the very one word
once for all, when he said, "Thou wert not of an age but for all time."
He had nothing, merely Elizabethan or Archaic in his work; his language
never gets obsolete; in spirit he is modern up to the latest minute; other
writers may be outgrown by their readers as they ripen with age, or lose
the glory of their youth, but not Shakespeare. At every age he is
still mature, still ahead of his readers, just as he always overtops his
actors.
The lecturer was frequently applauded, and many valuable hints were given
and suggestions offered, to Shakespearean students.
ROBERT BURNS,
POET AND FREE-THINKER.
In his essay on Burns, Carlyle remarks that if the boy Robert had been
sent to school, and had struggled forward to the university, he
might have come forth, not a rustic wonder, but as a well-trained,
intellectual workman, and changed the whole course of British literature.
This dictum, the lecturer ventured to dispute; he could not regret that
books had no more to do with the intellectual making of Robert Burns.
We had altogether overrated the power of making mind out of books; we need
more rapport with, and relationship to, the living source of mind
in nature itself; a closer study of records, a nearer, subtler communion
with her works and ways. What could they have done with Burns at
college beyond making out of him one more misleading parson or professor,
or possibly have turned out another mis-trained literary man—the more
literary, the less a man? What had been and still is the great cause
of mental sterility but the casting of new minds in obsolete moulds of
thought? Burns got the very best education that was not to be had
for money, whereas the collegian sometimes got the very worst that money
could purchase, because it was misleading. Mr. Ruskin once wrote to
him (Mr. Massey), "Your education was a terrible one, but mine was a
thousand-fold worse." "Yet," said the lecturer, "he had all that
wealth could buy, and I had all that poverty could bring, and was forced
to do my own thinking for myself." The world had been suffering for
centuries from a religion of anti-naturalism, and a poet like Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Burns exerted a must beneficent influence in
rescuing men from the pious pretenders who taught that all things natural
are wrong. The people must produce their own poetry, and Robert
Burns possessed the very soul of the people. Perhaps no poet ever
existed who was so intensely national; his generous heart flowed with
sympathy for the poor, who were so often compelled to creep through ways
too low for the lofty spirit to walk in at full height. His tear of
pity for the wee dying daisy hangs on it an immortal dew-drop. And
how his feeling heart ached to see the little field mouse turned out of
its "cosie, wee bit housie" just as it was built for shelter from the
coming winter. But in all these outgoings of the poet's sympathy
there was never a taint of the sentimental. The most cynical
Saturday Reviewer even dare not snigger nor sneer when Burns sheds tears.
Burns' sympathy was large enough to include the devil in its embrace.
It was often a great difficulty for the self-educated man to fling aside
the fustian in his writing long after he had ceased to wear it in his
work, but Burns seemed to have begun where other writers had ended, with
reliance on simplicity and perfect trust in truth. He was
Wordsworth's immediate predecessor and teacher. The revolution in poetry
completed by Wordsworth was begun by Burns. Wordsworth had said of
him—
|
He showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth. |
But Burns was
the more essentially and inevitably human in his love of nature. His
brother man was more to Burns than his mother earth, and he struck his
deepest root in human soil. Speaking of the drinking songs and
customs, Mr. Massey said it did seem at times as if Scotch whisky were the
sole relief from the dreary drizzle that had soaked and sodden the souls
of men with the Calvinistic mist of misery—as if Scotch whisky were the
natural and necessary antidote to Scotch theology. (Laughter.) No subject
tickled the Scottish sense of humour more irresistibly than that which
brought out in a broad light the droll aspects of character under the
influence of drink, especially if illustrated by the lapse of some godly
man who had been spirituously overcome in his unequal conflict with the
tempter, the delightful incongruity of the douce, canny man becoming
devil-may-care, the straight-laced letting out tuck after tuck till Nature
asserted herself, large as life—the over-cautious permitting the mask of
prudence to fall, or dashing it off like an old wig and going in for it
neck or nothing, barefaced and bald-headed. This, too, Burns said
and celebrated. We could not possibly estimate the genius of Burns apart
from the surroundings of his life. It was, in fact, by the eclipse
which his life suffered that, like astronomers dealing with the sun, we
could best measure the corona of his glory and see how far it soars beyond
eclipse. It was such a strong, clear spring of life, welling fresh
from the Infinite and working its way outward from the stiff soil of
poverty, through all obstacles, to water and give life to many waste
places of the world. At times the poor fellow was, as he described
himself, "half mad, half-fed, and half-sarkit." All he asked of his
native land when he made his little venture of publishing his first poems
(the final folly he intended to commit) was just £20 to enable him to
leave it for ever. And when he was dying he was threatened with the
horrors of a gaol on account of a debt (the only debt we hear of him
owing) for his regimental suit, in which he had sought to serve a grateful
country; whilst his petition that his full salary might be continued to
his wife and children during the time he was dying was not granted; add to
these things the fact that he suffered fearfully from low spirits, and had
a constitutional melancholy. That dark cloud of Calvinism, under which he
was begotten and born and bred, was never quite lifted from the soul of
Burns; he suffered horribly from that creed which sets men all at cross
purposes with themselves, and with nature within and without so soon as
they begin to think. On behalf of his fellows his whole nature rose
in revolt against this theology. His own recklessness was at times
in sheerest defiance of its damnatory doctrines. Think of these
things, said Mr. Massey, and then remember that Burns in his poetry is one
of the blithe powers of nature, and his art is dedicated to joy.
Personal suffering or discontent do not set him singing. He was not
one of the half-poets who are cradled into poetry by wrong, but one of
those who mirror the round of human life in the range of their own
experience. He did not apotheosize sorrow as an image of the
Eternal. He was heartily opposed to the gospel of gloom, and his
poems supplied an antidote to Auld Scotland's lugubrious curse of
Calvinism. The poet Goethe had characterised the history of a nation
as a mighty fugue, in which the voice of the people is heard last.
In our national development we, the people, got adequate expression for
the first time by the voice of Robert Burns. In him the soul of the
common people, the toilers, the peasantry, straightened the bent back, and
rose up to manhood full-statured to wipe the sweat off the brow proudly,
look out of his eyes, dare to be poor, and feel enfranchised through him.
As a poet he was the first, and remained the foremost, great
representative of labour. He asserted our right to join in the
onward march of humanity, and share audibly in the national life. The flag
of the workers, which waved out only the other day in our House of
Commons, and will soon have manhood suffrage emblazoned on it, was first
unfurled on its way there by our banner-bearer, Robert Burns. He had
the "glorious insufficiencies" which are often more admirable than the
"narrower perfectness"; and we are drawn more directly to a nature like
this, with all it flaws and failings, than to the man whose only fault
might be that from lack of force he had no fault at all. As we are
humanly constituted, a far more perfect man might have called forth a
lesser love than that which we feel for Robert Burns.
The numerous eloquent passages and the humorous and satirical touches in
Mr. Massey's address, elicited frequent bursts of applause. |
