Original Size
By a happy ingenuity the garden of the house in Henley Street, now prettily and daintily kept, has been planted to a great extent with Shakspere’s flowers; “pansies for thoughts,” “rosemary for remembrance,” with “columbines,” the “blue-veined violets,” the wild thyme, woodbine, musk-rose, and many more. His works are his true monument; and of these there is, in the same house, a very large and noble collection, with a whole library of literature bearing upon them, gathered with admirable care. Yet how few autobiographical details do the volumes contain! How hopeless the task of constructing, even from the sonnets, a connected picture of his life and career! And of the half-dozen anecdotes which have in one way or other descended to us of his words and ways, who can say that any detail is true?
It is, perhaps, from the portraits, after all, that we may gain the most trustworthy impression of the poet’s individuality. That on the tomb is for obvious reasons the most valuable. There it has been, in the sight of all men, from the very days of Shakspere. The eyes of his widow and of their children must often have rested upon it; and there can be no doubt that it presents the true aspect of the man. The engravings of the bust, and even the photographs, seem to us to exaggerate the calm, serene expression of the countenance. Partly, it may be, from the effect of the colouring on the full and shapely cheeks, there is an air almost of joviality about the face. It is quite as easy to recognise the Warwickshire squire of New Place, as to feel the presence of the poet of all time. There is, in the Henley Street house, a portrait of extraordinary history; lately discovered. The antiquity of this portrait seems indubitable; but the face seems a copy, and, so far as we could judge without seeing the two side by side, of that on the monument. For the we naturally associate with Shakspere, we must go rather to the “Chandos portrait,” now in the National Portrait Gallery, or to the terra-cotta bust, disinterred in 1845, from the site of the old theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and presented by the Duke of Devonshire to the Garrick Club. In a somewhat rough fashion, the Droeshout portrait, prefixed to the first folio edition of the plays, in 1623, gives a similar impression of power; and Ben Jonson, who knew Shakspere personally, testifies strongly to its correctness:
“This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakspere cut;
Wherein the graver had a strife
With Nature, to outdo the Life.”
But most of all is the greatness of Shakspere brought home to us by the simple record of the names of those who, from all quarters of the world, have come to this little Warwickshire town, to do homage to his memory. In all the world there is no shrine of pilgrimage like this, not only in the number of the visitants, but in their wonderful variety in character, temperament, and belief.
The power of the spell shows the magician. The fading pencilled inscriptions which cover the walls of the chamber in Henley Street; the pages of the autograph books; the words in which visitors have recorded their impressions, attest the strange attractiveness and power of this one genius. Perhaps the most interesting of the autograph books is that which was removed from the house in Henley Street many years ago, and is now to be seen in the room over the seed-room, to which we have referred already. It seems to have been purchased and presented by an American gentleman, Mr. T. H. Perkins, of Boston, in 1812; and its pages contain the autographs of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Miss Edge-a Baillie, James Professors Sedgarence,” “Arthur, Duke of Wellington,” with a host beside. A thoughtful hour may well be spent in turning the well-worn pages, and in meditating on “the vanity and glory of literature.”
For there was one point in which even Shakspere failed, and the admiring reverence with which we join the throng of pilgrims to the shrine never passes into worship. We mean, of course, such “worship” as a merely human being may supposably claim; and, in view of the highest possibilities of our nature, we mark in Shakspere a certain limitation on the heavenward side of his genius. The point at which intellectual sympathy and admiring affection pass into adoration, is the point at which we are raised beyond ourselves, and made conscious of the infinite. Never will our moral nature consent to unite with our reason and our heart in yielding its deepest worth, reverence, until it is uplifted into that sphere in which we can only walk by faith, and from which we can look down upon earthly things dwarfed and humbled by the comparison with the illimitable beyond.
Now Shakspere’s genius belongs essentially to the lower sphere. On earth he is the master. Every phase of nature, every subtilty of the intellect, every winding of the heart, is familiar to him. To use the comparison, often repeated because always felt to be so true, his wonderful mind was the mirror of all earthly shapes and various human energies. His own idiosyncracy never appears; the mirror is absolutely colourless and true. His genius is universal: in reading him we are but surveying the face of nature. To many a subtle criticism, the answer has been given, Shakspere surely never meant this! The reply may be, perhaps not, but nature meant it; and, therefore, we have a right to find it there! Such is the highest achievement of literature, whose business it is to reflect the facts of the world, of society, of the human heart—plentifully to declare the thing as it is, and compendiously to reduce this round world into the microcosm of a book. Here is Shakspere’s transcendent power, and the secret of his supremacy among writers. He is simply the greatest literary man that ever lived. The transparency of the mirror, to return to the illustration, is maintained, not only by the absence of intrusive individuality, but by his perfect mastery over the instrument of expression. It is worth while to read his dramas over again, as a study of language alone. No writer has ever approached Shakspere in the precision, picturesqueness, and the finished, yet seemingly careless, beauty of his diction. His prose is even more marvellous than his poetry. In the sense in which we use the word “classic,” his works may truly be called the foremost classic of the world.
What, then, is the defect which will for ever prevent Shakspere from receiving the entire homage of the heart of man? In a sentence, the mirror is turned towards earth alone, and in its very completeness hides heaven from the view. “It would be impossible,” says a contemporary writer, “to find a more remarkable example of a genius wide as the world, yet not in any sense above the world, than our great English poet’s.” And again, “it would be almost impossible to find any great Christian poet whose type of imagination is so entirely and singularly contrasted with that of the Bible, or in whom that peculiar faculty which, for want of a better term, we are forced to call the thirst for the supernatural, is more remarkably absent.”
This statement we accept, in full remembrance of the morals manifold, the theological references, and Scriptural parallels, which are scattered through the poet’s writings. Bishop Wordsworth, of St. Andrew’s, and others, have spent much labour, not altogether unprofitably, in showing that Shakspere knew his Bible: while, oddly enough, among the passages expunged by the estimable Bowdler, the Biblical references occupy a considerable place, as though it had been profanity to introduce them in such a connexion! The most is made of Shakspere’s religiousness by the present Archbishop of Dublin, in a sermon preached at Stratford-upon-Avon at the Shakspere Tercentenary, in 1864.
He knew the deep corruption of our fallen nature, the desperate wickedness of the heart of man; else he would never have put into the mouth of a prince of stainless life such a confession as this: ‘I am myself indifferently honest: but yet I could accuse one of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.... with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.’ He has set forth the scheme of our redemption in words as lovely as have ever flowed from the lips of uninspired man:—
‘Why, all the souls that live were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have Look,
Found out the remedy.’
He has put home to the holiest here their need of an infinite forgiveness from Him who requires truth in the inward parts:
‘How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are?’
“He was one who was well aware what a stewardship was his own in those marvellous gifts which had been entrusted to him, for he has himself told us:—
‘Heaven does with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us,’twere all alike
As if we had them not.’
And again he has told us that
‘Spirits are not finely touched
But for fine issues:’
Assuredly not ignorant how finely his own had been touched, and what would be demanded from him in return. He was one who certainly knew that there is none so wise that he can ‘circumvent God;’ and that for a man, whether he be called early or late,
‘Ripeness is all.’
Who shall persuade us that he abode outside of that holy temple of our faith, whereof he has uttered such glorious things—admiring its beauty, but not himself entering to worship there?
To the same effect, we may quote the preliminary sentence of Shakspere’s will: “I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping, and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting.” With such a master of words, this avowal would be no mere formality. During Shakspere’s last residence at Stratford, moreover, the town was under strong religious influences. Many a “great man in Israel,” in fraternal visits to the Rev. Richard Byfield, the vicar, is said to have been hospitably entertained at New Place; and memorable evenings must have been spent in converse on the highest themes. In addition to all this, the following sonnet furnishes an interesting proof that the heart of Shakspere, at an earlier period, had not been unsusceptible to religious sentiments and aspirations:—
“Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of thine excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy body’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And, death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”
—Sonnet 146.
All that such words suggest we gladly admit among the probabilities of Shakspere’s unknown life. But in his dramas themselves we find no assured grasp of the highest spiritual truth, nothing to show that such truth controlled his views of life with imperial sway; little or nothing to uplift the reader from the play of human passions and the entanglement of human interests to the higher realms of Faith. It is the same Shakspere who reveals the depths of human corruption, and the nobleness of human excellence. But in portraying the latter, he stops short, and fails exactly where the higher light of faith would have enabled him to complete the delineation. His best and greatest characters are a law unto themselves: his men are passionate and strong; his women are beautiful, with a loveliness that scarcely ever reminds us of heaven: he has neither “raised the mortal to the skies,” nor “brought the angel down.”
We turn, then, from Stratford-upon-Avon, feeling, as we have said, more deeply than ever the mystery that overhangs the career of the man, admiring, if possible, more heartily than ever the genius of the poet, and acknowledging, not without mournfulness, how much greater Shakspere might have been. For there was an inspiration within his reach that would have made him chief among the witnesses of God to men; and his magnificent endowments would then have been the richest offering ever placed by human hand upon that Altar which “sanctifieth both the giver and the gift.”