Dark Lady of the Sonnets | Page 8

position as soon as he gained the means to keep it up.

This Side Idolatry
There is another matter which I think Mr Harris should ponder. He says
that Shakespear was but "little esteemed by his own generation." He

even describes Jonson's description of his "little Latin and less Greek"
as a sneer, whereas it occurs in an unmistakably sincere eulogy of
Shakespear, written after his death, and is clearly meant to heighten the
impression of Shakespear's prodigious natural endowments by pointing
out that they were not due to scholastic acquirements. Now there is a
sense in which it is true enough that Shakespear was too little esteemed
by his own generation, or, for the matter of that, by any subsequent
generation. The bargees on the Regent's Canal do not chant
Shakespear's verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said to chant the
verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some reason
during my stay in Venice: at least no gondolier ever did it in my
hearing). Shakespear is no more a popular author than Rodin is a
popular sculptor or Richard Strauss a popular composer. But
Shakespear was certainly not such a fool as to expect the Toms, Dicks,
and Harrys of his time to be any more interested in dramatic poetry
than Newton, later on, expected them to be interested in fluxions. And
when we come to the question whether Shakespear missed that
assurance which all great men have had from the more capable and
susceptible members of their generation that they were great men, Ben
Jonson's evidence disposes of so improbable a notion at once and for
ever. "I loved the man," says Ben, "this side idolatry, as well as any."
Now why in the name of common sense should he have made that
qualification unless there had been, not only idolatry, but idolatry
fulsome enough to irritate Jonson into an express disavowal of it?
Jonson, the bricklayer, must have felt sore sometimes when Shakespear
spoke and wrote of bricklayers as his inferiors. He must have felt it a
little hard that being a better scholar, and perhaps a braver and tougher
man physically than Shakespear, he was not so successful or so well
liked. But in spite of this he praised Shakespear to the utmost stretch of
his powers of eulogy: in fact, notwithstanding his disclaimer, he did not
stop "this side idolatry." If, therefore, even Jonson felt himself forced to
clear himself of extravagance and absurdity in his appreciation of
Shakespear, there must have been many people about who idolized
Shakespear as American ladies idolize Paderewski, and who carried
Bardolatry, even in the Bard's own time, to an extent that threatened to
make his reasonable admirers ridiculous.

Shakespear's Pessimism
I submit to Mr Harris that by ruling out this idolatry, and its possible
effect in making Shakespear think that his public would stand anything
from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation of the faults
of such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that Shakespear's
passion for the Dark Lady "cankered and took on proud flesh in him,
and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness." In Timon the
intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear tried once too
often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is thrown into
despair by a comparison of actual human nature with theoretical
morality, actual law and administration with abstract justice, and so
forth. But Shakespear's perception of the fact that all men, judged by
the moral standard which they apply to others and by which they justify
their punishment of others, are fools and scoundrels, does not date from
the Dark Lady complication: he seems to have been born with it. If in
The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night's Dream the persons of
the drama are not quite so ready for treachery and murder as Laertes
and even Hamlet himself (not to mention the procession of ruffians
who pass through the latest plays) it is certainly not because they have
any more regard for law or religion. There is only one place in
Shakespear's plays where the sense of shame is used as a human
attribute; and that is where Hamlet is ashamed, not of anything he
himself has done, but of his mother's relations with his uncle. This
scene is an unnatural one: the son's reproaches to his mother, even the
fact of his being able to discuss the subject with her, is more repulsive
than her relations with her deceased husband's brother.
Here, too, Shakespear betrays for once his religious sense by making
Hamlet, in his agony of shame, declare that his mother's conduct makes
"sweet religion a rhapsody of words." But for that passage we might
almost suppose that the feeling of Sunday