Atlantic Monthly | Page 3

the suggestions that come to him are more apt
and congruous; and his faculties of selection, his perceptions of fitness,
beauty, and appropriateness of relation are more keen and watchful. No
lapse in what he writes at such times indicates aught like dreaming or
madness, or any condition of mind incompatible with soundness and
health,--with that perfect sanity in which all the mental powers move in
order and harmony under the control of the rightful sovereign, Reason.
These observations are not intended to bear, except remotely, upon the
question, Which is the true Dramatic Art, the romantic or the ancient?

We shall not venture into that land of drought, where dry minds forever
wander. We can admit both schools. In fact, even the countrymen of
Racine have long since admitted both,--speculatively, at least,--though
practically their temperament will always confine them to artificial
models. We may consider the question as set at rest in these words of
M. Guizot:--"Everything which men acknowledge as beautiful in Art
owes its effect to certain combinations, of which our reason can always
detect the secret when our emotions have attested its power. The
science--or the employment of these combinations--constitutes what we
call Art. Shakspeare had his own. We must detect it in his works, and
examine the means he employs and the results he aims at." Although
we should be far from admitting so general a definition of Art as this,
yet it is sufficient as an answer to the admirers of the purely classic
school.
But it has become necessary in this "spasmodic" day to vindicate our
great poet from the supposition of having written in a state of
somnambulism,--to show that he was even an artist, without reference
to schools. The scope of our observations is to exhibit him in that light;
we wish to insist that he was a man of forethought,--that, though
possessing creative genius, he did not dive recklessly into the sea of his
fancy without knowing its depth, and ready to grasp every pebble for a
pearl-shell; we wish to show that he was not what has been called, in
the cant of a class who mistake lawlessness for liberty, an "earnest
creature,"--that he was not "fancy's child" in any other sense than as
having in his power a beautifully suggestive fancy, and that he
"warbled his native wood-notes wild" in no other meaning than as
Milton warbled his organ-notes,--namely, through the exercise of
conscious Art, of Art that displayed itself not only in the broad outlines
of his works, but in their every character and shade of color. With this
purpose we have urged that he was "natural" from taste and
choice,--artistically natural. To illustrate the point, let us consider his
Art alone in a few passages.
We will suppose, preliminarily, however, that we are largely interested
in the Globe Theatre, and that, in order to keep it up and continue to
draw good houses, we must write a new piece,--that, last salary-day, we

fell short, and were obliged to borrow twenty pounds of my Lord
Southampton to pay our actors. Something must be done. We look into
our old books and endeavor to find a plot out of ancient story, in the
same manner that Sir Hugh Evans would hunt for a text for a sermon.
At length one occurs that pleases our fancy; we revolve it over and over
in our mind,--and at last, after some days' thought, elaborate from it the
plot of a play,--"TIMON OF ATHENS,"--which plot we make a
memorandum of, lest we should forget it. Meantime, we are busy at the
theatre with rehearsals, changes of performance, bill-printing, and a
hundred thousand similar matters that must be each day disposed of.
But we keep our newly-thought-of play in mind at odd intervals, good
things occur to us as we are walking in the street, and we begin to long
to be at it. The opening scenes we have quite clearly in our eye, and we
almost know the whole; or it may be, vice versa, that we work out the
last scenes first; at all events, we have them hewn out in the rough, so
that we work the first with an intention of making them conform to a
something which is to succeed; and we are so sure of our course that
we have no dread of the something after,--nothing to puzzle the will, or
make us think too precisely on the event. Such is the condition of mind
in which we finally begin our labor. Some Wednesday afternoon in a
holiday-week, when the theatres are closed, we find ourselves sitting at
a desk before a sea-coal fire in a quaintly panelled rush-strewn chamber,
the pen in our hand, nibbed with a "Rogers's" pen-knife, [A] and the
blank page beneath it.
[Footnote A: