all that flows forth from their brains. As for me, I hesitate, I disappoint myself, turn round upon myself in despite: my taste is augmented in proportion as my natural vigour decreases, and I afflict my soul over some dubious word out of all proportion to the pleasure I get from a whole page of good writing. One would have to live two centuries to attain a true idea of any matter whatever. What Buffon said is a big blas- 10 ploying for its one sole purpose that absophemy: genius is not long-continued patience. Still, there is some truth in the statement, and more than people think, especially as regards our own day. Art! art! art! bitter deception! phantom that glows 15 safeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's with light, only to lead one on to destruction.' Again In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one indispensable beauty is, after all, truth: truth to bare fact in the latter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted 5 somewhat from men's ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truth here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, the vraie vérité. And what an eclectic principle this really is! em 'I am growing so peevish about my writing. I am like a man whose ear is true but who plays falsely on the violin: his fingers 20 refuse to reproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the inward sense. Then the tears come rolling down from the poor scraper's eyes and the bow falls from his hand.' Coming slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much labour of mind, but also with so much luster, to Gustave Flaubert, this discovery of the word will be, like lute accordance of expression to idea — all other literary beauties and excellences whatever: how many kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same time deeply pondered evocation of 'the phrase,' are equally good art. Say what you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner possible, with no surplusage:- there, is the justification of the sentence so fortunately born, 'entire, smooth, and round,' that it needs no punctuation, and also (that is the point!) of the most elaborate period, if it be 25 right in its elaboration. Here is the office of ornament: here also the purpose of restraint in ornament. As the exponent of truth, that austerity (the beauty, the function, of which in literature Flaubert under or purism of the mere scholar, but a security against the otiose, a jealous exclusion of what does not really tell towards the pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in the portraiture of one's sense. License again, the making free with rule, if it be indeed, as people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging aside or transforming all that opposes the liberty of beautiful production, will be but faith to one's own meaning. The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Misérables is nothing in itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only redoubled beauty - the phrase so large and so precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation of words to their matter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of profit only so far as they too really serve to bring out the original, initiative, generative, sense in them. all artistic success and felicity, incapable of 30 stood so well) becomes not the correctness strict analysis: effect of an intuitive condition of mind, it must be recognized by like intuition on the part of the reader, and a sort of immediate sense. In every one of those masterly sentences of Flaubert there 35 was, below all mere contrivance, shaping and afterthought, by some happy instantaneous concourse of the various faculties of the mind with each other, the exact apprehension of what was needed to carry the 40 meaning. And that it fits with absolute justice will be a judgment of immediate sense in the appreciative reader. We all feel this in what may be called inspired translation. Well! all language involves translation from 45 inward to outward. In literature, as in all forms of art, there are the absolute and the merely relative or accessory beauties; and precisely in that exact proportion of the term to its purpose is the absolute beauty of 50 style, prose or verse. All the good qualities, the beauties, of verse also, are such, only as precise expression. In this way, according to the well-known saying, 'The style is the man,' complex or and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense 'impersonal.' I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that prose literature was the 5 characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions regarding style arising out of so many natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, 10 of literature presenting to the imagination, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic or expressive, finds thus its justification, the sumptuous good taste of Cicero being as through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free and various as those which music presents to it through sense. And certainly the tendency of what has been here said is truly the man himself, and not another, 15 to bring literature too under those conditions, justified, yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been his portrait by Raffaelle, in full consular splendour, on his ivory chair. by conformity to which music takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form. 20 from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art. A relegation, you may say perhaps a relegation of style to the subjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon transform it into mannerism. Not so! since there is, under the conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every linea-25 ment of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word, recognisable by the sensitive, by others 'who have intelligence' in the matter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in the evanescent and delicate region 30 of human language. The style, the manner, would be the man, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices, involuntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of what is most real to him. 35 great ends, or the depth of the note of reBut let us hear our French guide again. Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all events, not on its form, but on the matter. Thackeray's Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its interests. It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to volt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art; then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each 'Styles (says Flaubert's commentator), Styles, as so many peculiar moulds, each of which bears the mark of a particular writer, who is to pour into it the whole content of 40 his ideas, were no part of his theory. What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certain absolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in all its intensity and colour. For him the form was the work it- 45 other, or to such presentment of new or old self. As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just 50 expression, the measure, the rhythm - the form in all its characteristics.' If the style be the man, in all the colour truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and soul - that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life. 1888 Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) KING LEAR* result, for any reader of human intelligence and decent humility in sight of what is highest in the spiritual world, must always be a sense of adoring doubt and exulting 5 hesitation. In Othello and in Prometheus a single figure, an everlasting and godlike type of heroic and human agony, dominates and dwarfs all others but those of the traitor Iago and the tyrant God. There is no Cly10 tæmnestra in the one, and there is no Cordelia in the other. 'The gentle lady married to the Moor' is too gentle for comparison with the most glorious type of womanhood which even Shakespeare ever forth Imogen. No one could have offered to Cordelia the tribute of so equivocal compliment as was provoked by the submissive endurance of Desdemona - "Truly, an obe Antigone alone can we imagine the meeting of Cordelia in the heaven of heavens - is not so divinely human as Cordelia. We love her all the more, with a love that at once tempers and heightens our worship, for the rough and abrupt repetition of her nobly unmerciful reply to her father's fond and fatuous appeal. Almost cruel and assuredly severe in its uncompromising self-respect, If nothing were left of Shakespeare but the single tragedy of King Lear, it would still be as plain as it is now that he was the greatest man that ever lived. As a poet, the author 15 created before he conceived and brought of this play can only be compared with Eschylus: the Hebrew prophets and the creator of Job are sometimes as sublime in imagination and in passion, but always quite incomparably inferior in imaginative in- 20 dient lady.' Antigone herself -- and with telligence. Sophocles is as noble, as beautiful, and as kindly a thinker and a writer: but the gentle Shakespeare could see farther and higher and wider and deeper at a glance than ever could the gentle Sophocles. Aris- 25 tophanes had as magnificent a power of infinitely joyous wit and infinitely inexhaustible humour: but whom can he show us or offer us to be set against Falstaff or the Fool? It is true that Shakespeare has 30 this brief and natural word of indignantly neither the lyric nor the prophetic power of the Greeks and the Hebrews: but then it must be observed and remembered that he, and he alone among poets and among men, could well afford to dispense even with such 35 the future becomes at once inevitable and transcendent gifts as these. Freedom of thought and sublimity of utterance came hand in hand together into English speech: our first great poet, if loftiness and splendour of spirit and of word be taken as the test 40 of greatness, was Christopher Marlowe. From his dead hand the one man born to excel him, and to pay a due and a deathless tribute to his deathless memory, took up the heritage of dauntless thought, of daring 45 first great critic and apostle or interpreter of imagination, and of since unequalled song. reticent response is the key-note of all that follows the spark which kindles into eternal life the most tragic of all tragedies in the world. All the yet unimaginable horror of assured when she shows herself so young and so untender — so young and true. And what is the hereditary horror of doom once imminent over the house of Atreus to this instant imminence of no supernatural but a more awfully natural fate? Cursed and cast out, she leaves him and knows that she leaves him in the hands of Goneril and Regan. Coleridge, the greatest though not the Shakespeare, has noted 'these daughters and these sisters' as the only characters in Shakespeare whose wickedness is ultranatural-something outside and beyond the The tragedy of King Lear, like the trilogy of the Oresteia, is a thing imcomparable and unique. To compare it with Othello is as inevitable a temptation as to compare the 50 presumable limits of human evil. It would Agamemnon with the Prometheus of the one man comparable with Shakespeare. And the be well for human nature if it were so; but is it? They are 'remorseless, treacherous, *Three Plays of Shakespeare, Harper and Brothers, 1909. By permission of the Publishers. as they are may pass as the substitute for love is but a half-blooded fellow from the infernal as well as the human point of view. His last wish is to undo the last and most 5 monstrous of his crimes. Such a wish would have been impossible to either of the sisters by whom he can boast with his dying breath that Edmund was beloved. 'I pant for life: some good I mean to do, lecherous, kindless'; hot and hard, cold and cunning, savage and subtle as a beast of the field or the wilderness or the jungle. But such dangerous and vicious animals are not more exceptional than the noblest and purest of their kind. An Iago is abnormal: his wonderful intelligence, omnipotent and infallible within its limit and its range, gives to the unclean and maleficent beast that he is the dignity and the mystery of a devil. 10 Goneril and Regan would be almost vulgarly commonplace by comparison with him if the conditions of their life and the circumstances of their story were not so much more extraordinary than their instincts and 15 among all poets and all men approved their acts. 'Regan,' according to Coleridge, 'is not, in fact, a greater monster than Goneril, but she has the power of casting more venom.' A champion who should wish to enter the lists on behalf of Goneril 20 types of imaginable humanity. Kent and might plead that Regan was so much more of a Gadarean sow than her elder sister as to be, for all we know, incapable of such passion as flames out in Goneril at the thought of foreign banners spread in a 25 noiseless land. 'Where's thy drum? France spreads his banners in our noiseless land; With plumed helm thy slayer begins [his] threats; Whiles thou, a moral fool, sit'st still, and criest 'Alack, why does he so?' The incomparable genius of the greatest itself incomparable for ever by the possibly unconscious instinct which in this supreme work induced or compelled him to set side by side the very lowest and the very highest Oswald, Regan and Cordelia, stand out in such relief against each other that Shakespeare alone could have wrought their several figures into one perfect scheme of spiritual harmony. Setting aside for a moment the reflection that outside the work of schylus there is no such poetry in the world, we must remember that there is no such realism. And there is no discord between the supreme 30 sublimities of impassioned poetry and the humblest realities of photographic prose. Incredible and impossible as it seems, the impression of the one is enhanced and intensified by the impression of the other. Beast and she-devil as she is, she rises in that instant to the level of an unclean and a criminal Joan of Arc. Her advocate might 35 also invoke as an extenuating circumstance the fact that she poisoned Regan. François-Victor Hugo, the author of the best and fullest commentary ever written on the text of which he gave us the most 40 wonderful and masterly of all imaginable translations, has perhaps unwittingly enforced and amplified the remark of Coleridge on the difference between the criminality of the one man chosen by chance and pre- 45 destined by nature as the proper paramour of either sister and the monstrosity of the creatures who felt towards him as women feel towards the men they love. Edmund is not a more true-born child of hell than a true- 50 born son of his father. Goneril and Regan are legitimate daughters of the pit; the man who excites in them such emotion as in such That Shakespeare's judgment was as great and almost as wonderful as his genius has been a commonplace of criticism ever since the days of Coleridge; questionable only by such dirty and dwarfish creatures of simian intellect and facetious idiocy as mistake it for a sign of wit instead of dullness, and of distinction instead of degradation, to deny the sun in heaven and affirm the fragrance of a sewer. But I do not know whether his equally unequalled skill in the selection and composition of material for the construction of a masterpiece has or has not been as all but universally recognized. No more happy and no more terrible inspiration ever glorified the genius of a poet than was that which bade the greatest of them all in weave or fuse together the legend of Lear and his daughters with the story of Gloucester and his sons. never thought or felt more deeply or more keenly than an average labourer or an average king. Lear's madness, at all events, was assuredly not his enemy, but his friend. The rule of Elizabeth and her successor may have been more arbitrary than we can now understand how the commonwealth of England could accept and could endure; but how far it was from a monarchy, from a It is possible that an episode in Sidney's Arcadia may have suggested, as is usually supposed or usually repeated, the notion or conception of this more than tragic underplot; but the student will be disappointed 5 who thinks to find in the sweet and sunbright work of Sidney's pure and happy genius a touch or a hint of such tragic horror as could only be conceived and made endurable by the deeper as well as higher, and 10 government really deserving of that odious darker as well as brighter, genius of Shakespeare. And this fearful understudy in terror is a necessary, an indispensable, part of the most wonderful creation ever imagined and realized by man. The author of the 15 mark it for ever as matchless among the and ignominious name, we may judge by the fact that this play could be acted and published. Among all its other great qualities, among all the many other attributes which works of man, it has this above all, that it is the first great utterance of a cry from the heights and the depths of the human spirit on behalf of the outcasts of the world— on behalf of the social sufferer, clean or unclean, innocent or criminal, thrall or free. To satisfy the sense of righteousness, the craving for justice, as unknown and unimaginable by Dante as by Chaucer, a change must come upon the social scheme of things which shall make an end of the actual relations between the judge and the cutpurse, the beadle and the prostitute, the beggar and the king. All this could be uttered, could Book of Job, the author of the Eumenides, can show nothing to be set beside the third act of King Lear. All that is best and all that is worst in man might have been brought together and flashed together upon the 20 mind's eye of the spectator or the student without the intervention of such servile ministers as take part with Goneril and Regan against their father. Storm and lightning, thunder and rain, become to us, even 25 as they became to Lear, no less conscious and responsible partners in the superhuman. inhumanity of an unimaginable crime. The close of the Prometheus itself seems less spiritually and overpoweringly fearful by 30 be prophesied, could be thundered from comparison with a scene which is not the close and is less terrible than the close of King Lear. And it is no whit more terrible than it is beautiful. The splendour of the lightning and the menace of the thunder 35 serve only or mainly to enhance the effect of suffering and the potency of passion on the spirit and the conscience of a man. The sufferer is transfigured: but he is not transformed. Mad or sane, living or dying, he is 40 allowed that his country is not more than passionate and vehement, single-hearted and self-willed. And therefore it is that the fierce appeal, the fiery protest against the social iniquities and the legal atrocities of civilized the English stage at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Were it within the power of omnipotence to create a German or a Russian Shakespeare, could anything of the sort be whispered or muttered or hinted or suggested from the boards of a Russian or a German theatre at the dawn of the twentieth? When a Tolstoi or a Sudermann can do this, and can do it with impunity in success, it will be three centuries behind England in civilization and freedom. Not political reform, but social revolution as beneficent and as bloodless, as absolute and as radical, as enkindled mankind, which none before the greatest of 45 the aspiration and the faith of Victor Hugo, is the key-note of the creed and the watchword of the gospel according to Shakespeare. Not, of course, that it was not his first and last aim to follow the impulse which urged all Englishmen had ever dreamed of daring to utter in song or set forth upon the stage, comes not from Hamlet, but from Lear. The young man whose infinite capacity of thought and whose delicate scrupulosity of 50 him to do good work for its own sake and for conscience at once half disabled and half deified him could never have seen what was revealed by suffering to an old man who had love of his own art: but this he could not do without delivery of the word that was in him the word of witness against wrong |