GREAT MEN are more distinguished by range and tent than by originality. If
we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their
web from their own bowels; in finding clay and making bricks and building
the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist
in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of knights and the
thick of events; and seeing what men want and sharing their desire, he adds
the needful length of sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The
greatest genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattle-brain, saying
what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying at last
something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions and pointed with the most
determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any
individual great, except through the general. There is no choice to genius.
A great man does not wake up on some fine morning and say, "I am full of
life, I will go to sea and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square
the circle: I will ransack botany and find a new food for man: I have a new
architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power": no, but he finds
himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas
and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men
look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should
go. The Church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants
and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by trumpet, in
barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties groping to
bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the place of
consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials
collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love
of the materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a
compensation for the shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world
has brought him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him,
sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their
labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the
national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his
powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great genial power, one
would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether
receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour
to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were importunate
for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily at political
allusions and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and
energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican church, would suppress
them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and
extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs were the ready theatres of
strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not
hope to suppress newspapers now,- no, not by the strongest party,- neither
then could king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ
which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at
the same time. Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own
account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,- by no
means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating
it in an English history,- but not a whit less considerable because it was
cheap and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof of its vitality
is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow,
Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford,
Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first
importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle
experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of
Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left Stratford and went
up to London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates and writers existed
in manuscript and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of
Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some part of, every week; the
Death of Julius Caesar, and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never
tire of; a shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut and
Arthur, down to the royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of
doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish voyages, which all the
London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or less
skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and tattered
manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote them first. They
have been the property of the Theatre so long, and so many rising geniuses
have enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or
adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work of
numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We
have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they
are.

Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays
waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige
which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done.
The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in
street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his airy and majestic
fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work,
and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds
him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, and in furnishing
so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure and in full strength
for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend
what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up
in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall: at
first a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder and a
head or arm was projected from the wall; the groups being still arranged
with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
figures; and when at last the greatest freedom of style and treatment was
reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain
calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for
itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to
decline: freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place of the old
temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture,
the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic
materials to which the people were already wonted, and which had a certain
excellence which no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to
create.

In point of fact it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in regard
to the First, Second and Third parts of Henry VI, in which, "out of 6043
lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding Shakespeare, 2373 by him,
on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and 1899 were entirely his own."
And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his
absolute invention. Malone's sentence is an important piece of external
history. In Henry VIII I think I see plainly the cropping out of the
original rock on which his own finer stratum was laid. The first play was
written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his
lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the
following scene with Cromwell, where instead of the metre of Shakespeare,
whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for
the sense will best bring out the rhythm,- here the lines are constructed on
a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the
play contains through all its length unmistakable traits of Shakespeare's
hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like
autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad
rhythm.

Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention
can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at
that day, our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There
was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press,
were unknown. A great poet who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his
sphere all the light which is any where radiating. Every intellectual jewel,
every flower of sentiment it is his fine office to bring to his people; and
he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore
little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through
translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant
countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are equally
welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home. Other
men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things,
and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the
true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the
happy position of Homer perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all
wit was their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as
poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the
world,- "Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine." The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all
our early literature; and more recently not only Pope and Dryden have been
beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which
feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems,
drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton,*(30) from Guido di Colonna,
whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares
Phrygius, Ovid and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Provencal poets
are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation
from William of Lorris and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius
of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame,
from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a
brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build his house. He steals by
this apology,- that what he takes has no worth where he finds it and the
greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in
literature, that a man having once shown himself capable of original
writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at
discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and of him
who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed
thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them they become
our own.

Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The
learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks
and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now invisible
channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes; the crowd of
practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or conversation, are
feeding him with evidence, anecdotes and estimates, and it will bereave his
fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir
Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for
thousands; and so there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or
Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,-
all perished- which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard
speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The
appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast
a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be
verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the
debts which such a man could contract to other wit would never disturb his
consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of books and of other
minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has
conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world,
was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought
like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful
specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not
made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to
perfection. There never was a time when there was not some translation
existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of
the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
Catholic church,- these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers
and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the world. Grotius
makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single
clauses of which it is composed were already in use in the time of Christ,
in the Rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous
language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts and the
precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the
contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in
the countries where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its
excellence by being translation on translation. There never was a time when
there was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and
all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same
process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The
world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay,
Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the
work of single men. In the composition of such works the time thinks, the
market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop,
all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every
municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day; and the generic catholic
genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the
originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment
of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare Society,
for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries
celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final detachment from the
church, and the completion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and
Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession of the stage by the very
pieces which Shakespeare altered, remodelled and finally made his own.
Elated with success and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they
have left no book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file
of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope
to discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held
horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his
will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age
mischooses the object on which all candles shine and all eyes are turned;
the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth and
King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams; and lets
pass without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which
alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,- the man who carries
the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose
thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be
nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular
player;- nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret
was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men as from courtiers and
frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding
for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained
his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame
whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he
has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the
better poet of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare's time
should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years
after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three years after him; and I find, among
his correspondents and acquaintances, the following persons: Theodore Beza,
Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter
Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham
Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta,
Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token
of his having communicated, without enumerating many others whom doubtless
he saw,- Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, the two
Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest. Since the constellation of great men
who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such
society;- yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the
universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain
near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries
had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin
to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakespeare till now;
for he is the father of German literature: it was with the introduction of
Shakespeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his works by
Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was most
intimately connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose
speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet
could find such wondering readers.*(31) Now, literature, philosophy and
thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at
present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm.
Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a silent
appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like Christianity,
qualifies the period.

The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the
missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead to proof,-
and with what result? Beside some important illustration of the history of
the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have gleaned a few facts
touching the property, and dealings in regard to property, of the poet. It
appears that from year to year he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars'
Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: that he bought an
estate in his native village with his earnings as writer and shareholder;
that he lived in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors
with their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that
he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing Macbeth, he
sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five
shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and in
all respects appears as a good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity
or excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in
the theatre, not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors and
managers. I admit the importance of this information. It was well worth the
pains that have been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches
may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which
is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers
of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birth-place,
schooling, school-mates, earning of money, marriage, publication of books,
celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of
relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we
dipped at random into the "Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there,
it would have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to
spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish
the past and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce and Collier have
wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park
and Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and
Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate,
obey and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one
golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly
torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember I
went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English
stage; and all I then heard and all I now remember of the tragedian was that
in which the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet's question to the ghost:-

"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the
big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil
for us the illusions of the greenroom. Can any biography shed light on the
localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream admits me? Did Shakespeare
confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in
Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the
nimble air of Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres
vast and desarts idle" of Othello's captivity,- where is the third cousin,
or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that
has kept one word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as
in all great works of art,- in the Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and
India, in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian painting,
the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,- the Genius draws up the ladder after
him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age,
which sees the works and asks in vain for a history.

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell
nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us, that is, to our most apprehensive
and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod and give us
anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated,
analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier, and now read one of
these skyey sentences,- aerolites,- which seem to have fallen out of heaven,
and which not your experience but the man within the breast has accepted as
words of fate, and tell me if they match; if the former account in any
manner for the latter; or which gives the most historical insight into the
man.

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare for
biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which
is material; that which describes character and fortune, that which, if we
were about to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to know.
We have his recorded convictions on those questions which knock for answer
at every heart,- on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the
prizes of life and the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of
men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and
on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science and which
yet interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who ever
read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there
revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of
friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible,
and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his
private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample
pictures of the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased
him; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful
giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the merchant answer for his
great heart. So far from Shakespeare's being the least known, he is the one
person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of
manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of
life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge
of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not
remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon?
What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not
outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed
in the rudeness of his behavior?

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare
valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely
judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his
dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man, who liked
to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found
the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how
well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was,- and he is the best
in the world. But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as
to withdraw some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose
history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into
songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which
gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a
code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its
application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He
wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life;
the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of
the man in America; he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done
in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second
thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which
virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's
part from the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which
make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the terrors of human
lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye.
And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or
Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a question concerning the paper on
which a king's message is written.

Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out
of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good
reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence; but
not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty,
for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was
the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,- the
subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship.
With this wisdom of life is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric
power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if
they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left
such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as
sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation,
nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his
faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will
presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have
some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams
this part and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the
thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no
importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities; no
cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable
egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small subordinately. He is wise
without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts
the land into mountain slopes without effort and by the same rule as she
floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other.
This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and
love-songs; a merit so incessant that each reader is incredulous of the
perception of other readers.

This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into
music and verse, makes him the type of the poet and has added a new problem
to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural history, as a
main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations.
Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the
fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic
indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful
execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a
dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will
bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production,
more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one
picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate
of iodine, and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There are always
objects; but there was never representation. Here is perfect representation,
at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe
can be given for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the
translation of things into song is demonstrated.

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though their
excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they;
and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of the piece; like the
tone of voice of some incomparable person, so is this a speech of poetic
beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a whole poem.

Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty which
tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is so
loaded with meaning and so linked with its foregoers and followers, that the
logician is satisfied. His means are as admirable as his ends; every
subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to connect some
irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount and
walk because his horses are running off with him in some distant direction:
he always rides.

The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought has suffered a
transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain a
good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to read, through
their poems, their personal history: any one acquainted with the parties can
name every figure; this is Andrew and that is Rachel. The sense thus remains
prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the
poet's mind the fact has gone quite over into the new element of thought,
and has lost all that is exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakespeare.
We say, from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the
lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness,
without which no man can be a poet,- for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue,
not for its obligation but for its grace: he delights in the world, in man,
in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit
of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Epicurus relates that
poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake
of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful
temper. Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says,
"It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
repentance?" Not less sovereign and cheerful,- much more sovereign and
cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation
to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company of human souls, who
would not march in his troop? He touches nothing that does not borrow health
and longevity from his festal style.

And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor, when,
in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we seek to
strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare
both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakespeare also, and finds him to
share the halfness and imperfection of humanity.

Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays
over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples,
and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage
and roads: that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind,
being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a
certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare employed them as colors
to compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step
which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue which
resides in these symbols and imparts this power:- what is that which they
themselves say? He converted the elements which waited on his command, into
entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as if one
should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets given into his
hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits
to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in
all towns, "Very superior pyrotechny this evening"? Are the agents of
nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a street
serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in
the Koran,- "The heavens and the earth and all that is between them, think
ye we have created them in jest?" As long as the question is of talent and
mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the
question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does he
profit me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or
Midsummer-Night's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another
picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare Societies
comes to mind; that he was a jovial actor and manager. I can not marry this
fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of
keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been
less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon,
Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human
fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and
larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity
some furlongs forward into Chaos,- that he should not be wise for himself;-
it must even go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure
and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German and Swede, beheld the
same objects: they also saw through them that which was contained. And to
what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments,
all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled
mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's
progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam's
fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires
before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in
them.

It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world still
wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakespeare
the player, nor shall grope in graves, with Swedenborg the mourner; but who
shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration. For knowledge will
brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than private affection; and
love is compatible with universal wisdom.

 

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philosophy & Classics

The Uncle Taz Library

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