The Man Shakespeare | Page 5

far as I can from the tyranny of Shakespeare's greatness.

For the new time is upon us, with its new knowledge and new claims,
and we English are all too willing to live in the past, and so lose our
inherited place as leader of the nations.
The French have profited by their glorious Revolution: they trusted
reason and have had their reward; no such leap forward has ever been
made as France made in that one decade, and the effects are still potent.
In the last hundred years the language of Molière has grown fourfold;
the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of the
engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for
special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may
deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb instrument,
while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of
Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class.
Divorced from reality, with its activities all fettered in baby-linen, our
literature has atrophied and dwindled into a babble of nursery rhymes,
tragedies of Little Marys, tales of Babes in a Wood. The example of
Shakespeare may yet teach us the value of free speech; he could say
what he liked as he liked: he was not afraid of the naked truth and the
naked word, and through his greatness a Low Dutch dialect has become
the chiefest instrument of civilization, the world-speech of humanity at
large.
FRANK HARRIS.
LONDON, 1909.

BOOK I
SHAKESPEARE PAINTED BY HIMSELF
CHAPTER I
HAMLET: ROMEO--JAQUES
"As I passed by ... I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE

UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him
declare I unto you." This work of Paul--the discovery and proclaiming
of an unknown god--is in every age the main function of the critic.
An unknown god this Shakespeare of ours, whom all are agreed it
would be well to know, if in any way possible. As to the possibility,
however, the authorities are at loggerheads. Hallam, "the judicious,"
declared that it was impossible to learn anything certain about "the man,
Shakespeare." Wordsworth, on the other hand (without a nickname to
show a close connection with the common), held that Shakespeare
unlocked his heart with the sonnets for key. Browning jeered at this
belief, to be in turn contradicted by Swinburne. Matthew Arnold gave
us in a sonnet "the best opinion of his time":
"Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask--Thou
smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge."
But alas! the best opinion of one generation is in these matters often
flat unreason to the next, and it may be that in this instance neither the
opinion of Hallam nor Browning nor Arnold will be allowed to count.
As it is the object of a general to win battles so it is the life-work of the
artist to show himself to us, and the completeness with which he
reveals his own individuality is perhaps the best measure of his genius.
One does this like Montaigne, simply, garrulously, telling us his height
and make, his tastes and distastes, his loves and fears and habits, till
gradually the seeming-artless talk brings the man before us, a
sun-warmed fruit of humanity, with uncouth rind of stiff manners and
sweet kindly juices, not perfect in any way, shrivelled on this side by
early frost-bite, and on that softened to corruption through too much
heat, marred here by the bitter-black cicatrice of an ancient injury and
there fortune-spotted, but on the whole healthy, grateful, of a most
pleasant ripeness. Another, like Shakespeare, with passionate
conflicting sympathies and curious impartial intellect cannot discover
himself so simply; needs, like the diamond, many facets to show all the
light in him, and so proceeds to cut them one after the other as Falstaff
or Hamlet, to the dazzling of the purblind.

Yet Shakespeare's purpose is surely the same as Montaigne's, to reveal
himself to us, and it would be hasty to decide that his skill is inferior.
For while Montaigne had nothing but prose at his command, and not
too rich a prose, as he himself complains, Shakespeare in magic of
expression has had no equal in recorded time, and he used the lyric as
well as the dramatic form, poetry as well as prose, to give his soul
utterance.
We are doing Shakespeare wrong by trying to believe that he hides
himself behind his work; the suspicion is as unworthy as the old
suspicion dissipated by Carlyle that Cromwell was an ambitious
hypocrite. Sincerity is the birthmark of genius, and we can be sure that
Shakespeare has depicted himself for us with singular fidelity; we can
see him in his works, if we will take the trouble,