Art of Letters — The Politics of Swift and Shakespeare: Shakespeare

(2) SHAKESPEARE

Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster.

He plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox's House of Commons but on Shakespeare's Theatre.

He is apparently interested in men of genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneering activities.

Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New Place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "Vote for Podgkins and Down with the Common People" or "Vote for Podgkins and No League of Nations."

Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and so he exalts Shakespeare.

He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that has made no difference, He would clearly have taken much the same view of Shakespeare if he had never read him.

To be great, said Emerson, is to be misunderstood.

To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr. Whibley.

I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out the chapter on "Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory" as the most representative in his volume of _Political Portraits_.

It would be unjust if one were to suggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this.

His historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever illustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits.

Those essays in which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer.

His studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of them good entertainment.

If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than on these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author's skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test.

Here he has to depend almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of human nature.

Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words.

Mr. Whibley, I fear, comes badly off from the test.

One does not blame him for having written on the theme that "Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also."

It would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare on these lines.

Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him.

There is every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of touch.

Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially the second.

The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance, which he draws from _Troilus and Cressida_, is based on a total misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the necessity of observing "degree, priority and place."

Mr. Whibley, plunging blindly about in Tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech Ulysses, or rather Shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy in its place.

"Might he not," he asks, "have written these prophetic lines with his mind's eye upon France of the Terror or upon modern Russia?"

Had Mr. Whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulness without which no man has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but of the aristocracy against which Ulysses--or, if you prefer it, Shakespeare--inveighs in this speech.

The speech is aimed at the self-will and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon.

If there are any moderns who come under the noble lash of Ulysses, they must be sought for not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the persons of such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr. Lloyd George.

It is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeare foresaw Sir Edward Carson's escapades or Mr. Lloyd George's insurbordinate career as a member of Mr. Asquith's Cabinet.

But how admirably they sum up all the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which Mr. Whibley, accountably enough, fails to quote: They tax our policy, and call it cowardice;

Count wisdom as no member of the war;

Forestall prescience, and esteem no act But that of hand; the still and mental parts-- That do contrive how many hands shall strike, When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight-- Why, this hath not a finger's dignity.

They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war: So that the ram, that batters down the wall, For the great swing and rudeness of his poise, They place before his hand that made the engine, Or those that with the fineness of their souls By reason guide his execution.

There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul of the author of the _Letters of an Englishman_.

Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the point of _Troilus and Cressida_.

He blunders with equal assiduity in regard to _Coriolanus_.

He treats this play, not as a play about Coriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour of Coriolanus.

He has not been initiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature, which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without making believe that his vices are virtues.

Shakespeare no more endorses Coriolanus's patrician pride than he endorses Othello's jealousy or Macbeth's murderous ambition.

Shakespeare was concerned with painting noble natures, not with pandering to their vices.

He makes us sympathize with Coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to his better nature, in his death; but from Shakespeare's point of view, as from most men's the Nietzschean arrogance which led Coriolanus to become a traitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with Mr. Whibley) for enthusiasm.

"Shakespeare," cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotes some of Coriolanus's anti-popular speeches, "will not let the people off.

He pursues it with an irony of scorn."

"There in a few lines," he writes of some other speeches, "are expressed the external folly and shame of democracy.

Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even the courage of its own opinions."

It would be interesting to know whether in Mr. Whibley's eyes Coriolanus's hatred of the people is a sufficiently splendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor.

That good Tories have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough in regard to the Ulster trouble before the war.

It may be doubted, however, whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to foresee the necessity of such a gospel in _Coriolanus_.

Certainly, the mother of Coriolanus, who was far from being a Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the very opposite of the gospel of treason.

She warned Coriolanus that his triumph over Rome would be a traitor's triumph, that his name would be "dogg'd with curses," and that his character would be summed up in history in one fatal sentence: The man was noble, But with his last attempt he wiped it out, Destroyed his country, and his name remains To the ensuing age abhorr'd. Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so excessively that he does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) of Coriolanus's crime.

It would, I agree, be foolish to judge Coriolanus too scrupulously from a modern point of view.

But Mr. Whibley has asked us to accept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such in order to discover what Mr. Whibley means.

But, after all, Mr. Whibley's failure as a portrait-painter is a failure of the spirit even more than of the intellect.

A narrow spirit cannot comprehend a magnanimous spirit, and Mr. Whibley's imagination does not move in that large Shakespearean world in which illustrious men salute their mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of He was the noblest Roman of them all.

The author who is capable of writing Mr. Whibley's character-study of Fox does not understand enough about the splendour and the miseries of human nature to write well on Shakespeare.

Of Fox Mr. Whibley says: He put no bounds upon his hatred of England, and he thought it not shameful to intrigue with foreigners against the safety and credit of the land to which he belonged.

Wherever there was a foe to England, there was a friend of Fox.

America, Ireland, France, each in turn inspired his enthusiasm.

When Howe was victorious at Brooklyn, he publicly deplored "the terrible news."

After Valmy he did not hesitate to express his joy.

"No public event," he wrote, "not excepting Yorktown and Saratoga, ever happened that gave me so much delight.

I could not allow myself to believe it for some days for fear of disappointment."

It does not seem to occur to Mr. Whibley that in regard to America, Ireland, and France, Fox was, according to the standard of every ideal for which the Allies professed to fight, tremendously right, and that, were it not for Yorktown and Valmy, America and France would not in our own time have been great free nations fighting against the embattled Whibleys of Germany.

So far as Mr. Whibley's political philosophy goes, I see no reason why he should not have declared himself on the side of Germany.

He believes in patriotism, it is true, but he is apparently a patriot of the sort that loves his country and hates his fellow-countrymen (if that is what he means by "the people," and presumably it must be).

Mr. Whibley has certainly the mind of a German professor.

His vehemence against the Germans for appreciating Shakespeare is strangely like a German professor's vehemence against the English for not appreciating him.

"Why then," he asks, should the Germans have attempted to lay violent hands upon our Shakespeare?

It is but part of their general policy of pillage.

Stealing comes as easy to them as it came to Bardolph and Nym, who in Calais stole a fire-shovel.

Wherever they have gone they have cast a thievish eye upon what does not belong to them.

They hit upon the happy plan of levying tolls upon starved Belgium.

It was not enough for their greed to empty a country of food; they must extract something from its pocket, even though it be dying of hunger....

No doubt, if they came to these shores, they would feed their fury by scattering Shakespeare's dust to the winds of heaven.

As they are unable to sack Stratford, they do what seems to them the next best thing: they hoist the Jolly Roger over Shakespeare's works.

Their arrogance is busy in vain.

Shakespeare shall never be theirs.

He was an English patriot, who would always have refused to bow the knee to an insolent alien.