The Man Shakespeare | Page 4

the forms and institutions of a hundred
generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless fabric of a
dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the spirit; a morality
based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on ascertained laws of
moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to statics, like the
morality of the Jews, but to dynamics, and so fitting the nature of each
individual person. Even now conscience with its prohibitions is fading
out of life, evolving into a more profound consciousness of ourselves
and others, with multiplied incitements to wise giving. The old
religious asceticism with its hatred of the body is dead; the servile
acceptance of conditions of life and even of natural laws is seen to be
vicious; it is of the nobility of man to be insatiate in desire and to rebel
against limiting conditions; it is the property of his intelligence to
constrain even the laws of nature to the attainment of his ideal.
Already we are proud of being students, investigators, servants of truth,
and we leave the great names of demi-gods and heroes a little
contemptuously to the men of bygone times. As student-artists we are
no longer content with the outward presentment and form of men: we
want to discover the protean vanities, greeds and aspirations of men,
and to lay bare, as with a scalpel, the hidden motives and springs of
action. We dream of an art that shall take into account the natural daily
decay and up-building of cell-life; the wars that go on in the blood; the
fevers of the brain; the creeping paralysis of nerve-exhaustion; above
all, we must be able even now from a few bare facts, to re-create a man
and make him live and love again for the reader, just as the biologist
from a few scattered bones can reconstruct some prehistoric bird or fish
or mammal.
And we student-artists have no desire to paint our subject as better or
nobler or smaller or meaner than he was in reality; we study his
limitations as we study his gifts, his virtues with as keen an interest as
his vices; for it is in some excess of desire, or in some extravagance of

mentality, that we look for the secret of his achievement, just as we
begin to wonder when we see hands constantly outstretched in pious
supplication, whether a foot is not thrust out behind in some secret
shame, for the biped, man, must keep a balance.
I intend first of all to prove from Shakespeare's works that he has
painted himself twenty times from youth till age at full length: I shall
consider and compare these portraits till the outlines of his character are
clear and certain; afterwards I shall show how his little vanities and
shames idealized the picture, and so present him as he really was, with
his imperial intellect and small snobberies; his giant vices and paltry
self-deceptions; his sweet gentleness and long martyrdom. I cannot but
think that his portrait will thus gain more in truth than it can lose in
ideal beauty. Or let me come nearer to my purpose by means of a simile.
Talking with Sir David Gill one evening on shipboard about the fixed
stars, he pointed one out which is so distant that we cannot measure
how far it is away from us and can form no idea of its magnitude. "But
surely," I exclaimed, "the great modern telescopes must bring the star
nearer and magnify it?" "No," he replied, "no; the best instruments
make the star clearer to us, but certainly not larger." This is what I wish
to do in regard to Shakespeare; make him clearer to men, even if I do
not make him larger.
And if I were asked why I do this, why I take the trouble to re-create a
man now three centuries dead, it is first of all, of course, because he is
worth it--the most complex and passionate personality in the world,
whether of life or letters--because, too, there are certain lessons which
the English will learn from Shakespeare more quickly and easily than
from any living man, and a little because I want to get rid of
Shakespeare by assimilating all that was fine in him, while giving all
that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the
Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an
obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man of
genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic fashion;
he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no Rembrandt, no
Balzac, no greater Tolstoi in English letters? I want to liberate
Englishmen so