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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. |
