SUPERFLUOUS KINGS

As the kings lag, and then pass away from the stage of the world, many men will ask what there is to regret. Assuredly nothing, if not royalty in the mind of Shakespeare. Mankind will in time probably forget or deny that there was ever anything in the life of the world answering to Shakespeare’s royalty in Perdita, or to his princeliness in Arviragus and Guiderius, or to his kingliness in Lear, or to his glory in Cleopatra. It may be so, as to the world; there may have been nothing thus answerable. But there was Shakespeare.

And our regrets in regard to him cover all his regalities—the hidden and hereditary and unconscious, and the conscious and braggart and manifest: Perdita’s dignity among the romps, and her sportive disputes as to Art and Nature among the clowns, her unflushed composure amid the junketings, and also Lear’s loud and indignant death. The splendour of Shakespeare’s veneration for kings is perhaps deeper where the kingliness—the blood of it—is unrevealed, as in the shepherdess of The Winter’s Tale, for here it is matter of Shakespeare’s faith. So with the brothers of Imogen who, 8by the way—and not merely by the way—like her, discuss flowers—‘Then to arms!’ They too have the implicit distinction, unknown to the world of their exile, but known to Shakespeare, who is aware of their blood and lineage. Here, and in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare makes his resolute and implicit act of belief in the blood of kings.

In Lear that faith suffers outrage and defies it. Many years ago the great actor, Rossi, who did not gain in England such honour as was rendered to Salvini—I fear because his physical personal dignity was not so obvious as Salvini’s—played King Lear in Italian. But there was one cry, one royal proclamation, that could not be removed from the English. So Rossi said ‘every inch’ in English. It needed Shakespeare’s word to vindicate Shakespeare’s royalism. (One might make sport of any kind of translation: say ‘ogni centimetro’—‘every centimetre a king’ is good farce.) No Italian will serve; the Latin mind has not this degree of imaginative reverence, nor has the Italian language the faculty of giving sudden greatness to a customary word.

But Shakespeare, conceiving for royalty not only ‘the beauteous Majesty of Denmark’, and the ‘courteous action’ of the dead—‘being so majestical’—and the dignity of Hermione’s daughter, and the tempest of Lear’s elemental tragedy, will not consent to touch us with nothing more than pity and terror. He confronts us with the uttermost of pride of life in the royalty he sings; confronts us—no, 9rather brings us to our knees before the arrogant splendour he conceives:

It is the pride of life and the pride of death. Only hand in hand with a queen does Antony venture on the prophecy of that immortal vanity. If to him are given the most surprising lines in any of the tragedies, it is only as the lover of a queen that he has the right to them. To him is assigned that startling word, the incomparable word of amorous and tender ceremony—‘Egypt’.

That territorial name, murmured to his love in the hour of death, and in her arms—I know not in the records of all genius any other such august farewell. Lear’s word is outdone here. Lear a king in every inch of his aged body, but Cleopatra a queen in every league of her ancient realm. Has not majesty spoken its one unexpected word in the mouth of such a lover?

Superfluous kings—Shakespeare’s irony could find no other adjective so overcharged with insolence as this. Kings must be as he conceived them in order to that antithesis:

But an antithesis more complete than that of downfall and of servitude is that of mortality. The 10humiliation of the beaten monarch leaves the Shakespearian conception of kingliness face to face with the mere fortunes of war; the derision of the word ‘superfluous’ implies, in reversal, an inalienable dignity; so in the act of dying, the visible act, done in life; so with ‘sad stories of the death of kings’. The final contradiction is not here; but in the grave itself, in the hidden burial, out of the sight of the populace: it needs the utmost of Shakespeare’s passion of royalty to answer to that depth. And here is poetry, not by him, but wonderfully worthy of him, that tells us of

Shakespeare only, besides Young, could have written this.

Literature, then, will lose this glory, and with this glory this humiliation. Who will say which is greater, the thesis or the antithesis? But they cannot be parted to be compared. There they are, in our national literature, and cannot be effaced. But who shall hinder their becoming, for the student, first a matter of mere literary interest, then a matter of mere literary curiosity, next a matter of some new derision? (We need no new derisions: our wits are apt to mockery.) Is it well that any one of Shakespeare’s many passions should come under our frigid inspection, to be examined so?

When kings are in fact superfluous, Shakespeare’s 11great word ‘superfluous’ will be cancelled out; when kings are no longer flattered, Young’s great word ‘unflattered’ will be a futile word; when there are no full assiduous courts, the ‘thin courts’ will suggest no spectres. Regret is for Shakespeare, as has been said; not for Saul, or Louis the Fourteenth, or Charles the Twelfth. But, short of Shakespeare’s devotion, there will be some sentiment damaged. When the mortality of kings is no sharper sarcasm than is the mortality we all inherit, then the lamps and the gold that enshrine the bony heads of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar at Cologne may take their place, outside of cathedrals, with the unnamed relics of the shepherds who preceded the kings to the manger.

Shakespeare’s greatest splendour, then, that so shines down the splendour of history and the world, is under sentence, and under sentence his greatest compassion, and under sentence his greatest terror, and under sentence his greatest irony. And I have placed at the head of these pages a word of neither terror nor compassion, because the word of irony implies the rest.

STRICTLY AN ELIZABETHAN LYRIST

England has little primitive poetry, because the Reformers not only broke graven images but destroyed libraries, and gave some centuries of minor literature to the flames. We have much ado in raking together a few stones of their hacking and scattering, but fire has saved their posterity the trouble of trying to restore an annihilated national poetry. Our writers, then (with the obvious exceptions), begin soon after the invention of movable type, and so modern are they that the sixteenth century must serve us for comparative antiquity. The language was mobile between Elizabeth and James, tuned by the hands of the masters whose lives lasted from one developing time into another, and who were themselves England, having history in common with their country.

But Robert Greene was absolutely an Elizabethan—man and boy. He was born in the year of the Queen’s accession, and died while she was dancing, an old man of thirty-four, dropsical and horrible, full of repentance, as were then all of his manner of life when they had an illness sufficiently long to give them time. Greene died from too much banqueting, apparently upon the crudest luxuries, but his sorry death-bed gave him room for ample self-reproach, and doubtless Christopher Marlowe 13also would have left a record of his repentance had the manner of his departure, at even an earlier age than his friend’s, been less violent. In later years Carew asked pardon, with many cries, for the greater number of his verses; and, indeed, during these two bright centuries you may hear, if you turn your ear that way, the loud lamentation of poet after dying poet, a single outcry at intervals; not a death-bed without the clamour that closed the song. It is a parting cry, so poignant and sudden that the air rings with it even while the succeeding

singer is heard to be preluding, undaunted for the present. Greene had not a little to repent of in his actions, but nothing to retract in his songs; therefore, the reader who has not beheld his life—his wife was left at ‘six and seven’, as he phrases it, and certainly very forlorn—has little to do with the grief, pain, and fear of the closing scene, and may well be content with the sweetness of the songs. They were sweet and single, like tunes unharmonized. Without following the fashion of using the terms of one art to describe another, we may permit ourselves this mere imagery: the single note of music to represent the sixteenth-century lyric, harmonics for the seventeenth, counterpoint for the nineteenth. Greene’s famous ‘Sephestia’s Song to Her Child’ (by far his best) is the only lyric in which so much as two notes are to be heard; and the double string makes the sound more human.

It is not human to be single as the songs of 14Greene are single; the fading of pleasure, the cruelty of beauty, the inconstancy of love, the happy lot of the shepherd, and the cares of kings—each thing, one at a time, is so unaccompanied that you wonder how a primitive poet should have had time to reject all checking, mingling, and qualifying thoughts together. For it is hardly youth, hardly inexperience that this simplicity suggests, but rather a mind made up, a mind bent on creating other conditions than those which govern an actual world of which the poet has somewhat grown tired.

‘Sephestia’s Song’, however, has the thrill of sweetly jarring notes in the lines that tell the parting of father and mother over their laughing child—lines that seem to have haunted the ear, if not the mind, of Blake in his own song of birth. Blake’s verse has a tempestuous and threatening spiritual wildness of which Greene did not know the language; and it is only in the leaping metre, the clamour of the rhymes that seem striving to be heard above a deafening childish noise, that the two songs have so much likeness.

There is a vociferation, a distraction, and a dandling of the child, and you hear also the crying that the mother is seeking to still with her recital of that late scene of sorrow—‘Weep not, my wanton’.

15Next in beauty to ‘Sephestia’s Song’ comes, perhaps, ‘The Praise of Faunia’:

is a beginning that sounds like a less grave, less strong, and less masculine Shakespeare sonnet. There is sweet line after line in this poem, and many such a phrase as ‘the morning-singer’s swelling throat’ and ‘When she sings, all singers else be still!’ But the poem is famous chiefly, it may be guessed, for the sake of the final couplet, which has a far more modern kind of ample and intelligible beauty:

Next comes that pretty song ‘Radagon in Dianam’, which is to be praised not as a whole, but for some stanzas in which the cypresses keep a golden sun away from a ‘valley gaudy green’, and from nymphs in white. There never was any scene at once warmer and more fresh. The fountain is cool in a shade that the sun never shot an arrow through, but the sense of outer sunshine is intense and clear, and the dark trees seem to flame blackly, as they do on such a sky. ‘Outer darkness’, by the way, is a familiar phrase, but ‘outer sunshine’ is a presence hardly removed in the southern summer.

This vivid impression from Greene’s poem is caused by the most careless of verses. As a lyrist, 16he never leant hard upon anything; he has the lightest foot, and seems rather to whistle than to sing his tunes upon the way. So lightly is the verse given to the wind that you are apt to read it as carelessly, and so to lose something. This Song of the Fountain, for instance, should be read with more leisure than at a glance it seems to merit.

Greene is dull to any reader who does not take the pains to cancel all the conventions of the times that followed his Elizabethan day. The pure fountains, the nymphs, and the other valleys, gaudy green, must be simply forgotten; and the task is not difficult. Greene has all the good luck by his Elizabethanism—inalienable good luck, which was neither to be repeated by others, nor to be taken from his own head upon whom it alighted first. We, who have been wearied by succeeding nymphs, need not be wearied by those nymphs that were his—and this not because his were best, but because his were first.

See now how he made the mere Cupid childish, wild, and dear:

But it is hardly possible not to find him somewhat dull, especially when he is not at his best, because he has so little to say. There never was a poet who said less. These poems of his, after all, were, in his own estimation, not important enough to be written for their own sake; they were but snatches of songs 17in his prose writings—novels and what not; and poems so set flying at any other time and in any other English could not have kept their motion and their spirit so long. They never cost him a thought; and the only sign of attention is in the versification. This is by no means always good, but in ‘Radagon in Dianam’ it is very good indeed; the foot is elastic and moves with a rebound.

But as to thoughts, he is at small expense. Take his charming description of ‘A Shepherd and His Wife’. As though in the idleness of an empty mind, he lets his eyes note what is really hardly matter for verse—the way, for example, in which the flaps of the shepherd’s coat were turned over. It is grotesque to produce a rhyme for such a detail as that. But in the same poem are some lively verses about the wife which seem not only to set her up for admiration and delight, but to dance about her in a round when that is done.

Nor is there more in ‘The Shepherd Wife’s Song’, in which the happiest shepherdess in Thessaly compares her love and state with those of queens, and makes her boast sweetly and with a pretty and apt refrain. But ‘Fair Samela’—oftener quoted—has a weakness and listlessness that spoil its grace; and, after this, what is left? Robert Greene was a small poet among the minor poets; but his hour struck in the cool of the morning, and, whatever kind of simplicity was in his mind, the authentic simplicity was in his English.

‘A MODERN POETESS’

The cruel places of history are for ever emptied of their suffering tenants, and it is only to our inappeasable sympathies that the lifelong prisoners seem to be recaptured, sent back to their intolerable hours and places, long after they have once for all, unchallenged, passed the guard. Every martyrdom of the past has ceased to be; it concerns no one how sharp, how insupportable it was in its day. There is no living pain now in all the universe to continue it, to answer it, to rehearse it, or perhaps to regret it. And if we complain that the past is not to be revoked or undone, we might rather confess the complete consolation of the passing of time, the undoing, the effacement, and the more than death. It is only by moments that we apprehend what it is to be past, or that we perceive how clean is natural oblivion; the uneasy human retrospection stirs nothing but itself, and wounds the now living heart with a present pity for that which is not. Nothing now on earth remembers.

The popular phrase is expressive: ‘I know the thing is over and done; but it afflicts me to think of it.’ So we acknowledge that there is no trouble but in the present, and that though our minds seem to travel into the past, in truth they do not budge; and we, prisoners of our own moment, are fluttered 19with the present sympathy, and not with the vanished sorrow, for this is not.

By far the greater number of human sufferings have been forgotten by man as purely and freshly as by nature. Of a few, that fictitious memory which is history and tradition renews the report with so much attention as to preserve something like the dramatic unity of time. To read of them and to think of them is nearly as long as it was to endure them. But of others again we have the brief record that shows long hollow spaces of time, perfectly dark and indescribed. Among these is the bitter life and death of Arabella Stuart, told by our popular historians in a short paragraph that ends with her death of a ‘broken heart’—the extravagant phrase interrupting the historical style and making the page conspicuous to childish learners.

Evelyn has her in his list of learned women, although she is not in the catalogue of those whom he sacrificed at one blow to the glory of the Duchess of Newcastle. ‘Hilpylas, the mother-in-law of the young Plinie, Cornelia so neere the greate Scipio,’ and Lucretia Marinella, who is not mentioned as any one’s mother-in-law, but as the author of a work Dell’ excellenzia delle Donne, con difetti e mancamenti degli Huomini—with the inferiority of these and such as these does he flatter the surpassing Duchess. The sorrows of Arabella Stuart would have made her name too sad a sacrifice for 20such a train. The other ladies are presented gaily and as it were in garlands: ‘They possesse but that divided which your Grace retaines in one.’

Nevertheless, Arabella was, even for an age when women of station were well taught, notable for her education. Her Latin letters are still there to attest it. She was named a ‘modern poetess’ by Mr. Philips, who was Milton’s nephew. These secondary, second-hand, relative distinctions are in touching disproportion with her original, immediate, and authentic sufferings. The delicately sharp edging that a more or less literary training gives to the natural human mind, making it aware, had been given to hers; and she was so prepared by delicate erudition that the loss of all she loved was complete to her, the suspense of imprisonment inconsolable, and its idleness more than mortal. She lost better than her life, for the prison ruined her reason before it released her body, twice rifled and destitute, and dismissed it to Westminster Abbey and the grave.

It is in her letters to her husband, and only in these, that Arabella Stuart is perceptible as she lived. The letters of entreaty to King James are the letters of those abject times. They declare her to be in despair, not because of the separation from her husband and only friend, and not because of her solitude in perpetual prison, but on account of the King’s disfavour, of her exile from his presence, and by reason of the remorse and contrition of one 21who had disobeyed him, even unwittingly. By these forms of ignominy did men and women rule, not their phrases only, but, apparently, their very thoughts. Such declarations were much more than a courtesy due to kings or the decorum of a style in letter-writing. Hearts beat hard to that most grotesque tune; those were real self-reproaches; they banished real sleep, human sleep, afflicted real consciences, set the tears of men running, and squandered and scattered to waste that human treasure, humility.