|
A Midsummer Night's Dream by G. K. Chesterton The greatest of Shakespeare's comedies is also,
from a certain point of view, the greatest of his plays. No one would
maintain that it occupied this position in the matter of psychological study
if by psychological study we mean the study of individual characters in a
play. No one would maintain that Puck was a character in the sense that
Falstaff is a character, or that the critic stood awed before the psychology
of Peaseblossom. But there is a sense in which the play is perhaps a greater
triumph of psychology than <Hamlet> itself. It may well be questioned
whether in any other literary work in the world is so vividly rendered a
social and spiritual atmosphere. There is an atmosphere in <Hamlet>,
for instance, a somewhat murky and even melodramatic one, but it is
subordinate to the great character, and morally inferior to him; the darkness
is only a background for the isolated star of intellect. But <A Midsummer
Night's Dream> is a psychological study, not of a solitary man, but of a
spirit that unites mankind. The six men may sit talking in an inn; they may
not know each other's names or see each other's faces before or after, but
'night or wine or great stories, or some rich and branching discussion may
make them all at one, if not absolutely with each other, at least with that
invisible seventh man who is the harmony of all of them. That seventh man is
the hero of <A Midsummer Night's Dream>. A study of the play from a literary or
philosophical point of view must therefore be founded upon some serious
realisation of what this atmosphere is. In a lecture upon <As You Like
It>, Mr. Bernard Shaw made a suggestion which is an admirable example of
his amazing ingenuity and of his one most interesting limitation. In
maintaining that the light sentiment and optimism of the comedy were regarded
by Shakespeare merely as the characteristics of a more or less cynical
pot-boiler, he actually suggested that the title "As You Like It"
was a taunting address to the public in disparagement of their taste and the
dramatist's own work. If Mr. Bernard Shaw had conceived of Shakespeare as
insisting that Ben Jonson should wear Jaeger underclothing or join the Blue
Ribbon Army, or distribute little pamphlets for the non-payment of rates, he
could scarcely have conceived anything more violently opposed to the whole
spirit of Elizabethan comedy than the spiteful and priggish modernism of such
a taunt. Shakespeare might make the fastidious and cultivated Hamlet, moving
in his own melancholy and purely mental world, warn players against an
over-indulgence towards the rabble. But the very soul and meaning of the
great comedies is that of an uproarious communion between the public and the
play, a communion so chaotic that whole scenes of silliness and violence lead
us almost to think that some of the "rowdies" from the pit have
climbed over the footlights. The title "As you Like It", is, of
course, an expression of utter carelessness, but it is not the bitter carelessness
which Mr. Bernard Shaw fantastically reads into it; it is the god-like and
inexhaustible carelessness of a happy man. And the simple proof of this is
that there are scores of these genially taunting titles scattered through the
whole of Elizabethan comedy. Is "As You Like It" a title demanding
a dark and ironic explanation in a school of comedy which called its plays
"What You Will", "A Mad World, My Masters", "If It
Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It", "The Devil is an Ass", "An
Humorous Day's Mirth", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? Every
one of these titles is flung at the head of the public as a drunken lord
might fling a purse at his footman. Would Mr. Shaw maintain that "If It
Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It", was the opposite of "As You Like
It", and was a solemn invocation of the supernatural powers to testify
to the care and perfection of the literary workmanship? The one explanation
is as Elizabethan as the other. Now in the reason for this modern and pedantic
error lies the whole secret and difficulty of such plays as <A Midsummer
Night's Dream>. The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be summed
up at all, can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of
happiness. That is to say, it is the conception that as man lives upon a
borderland he may find himself in the spiritual or supernatural atmosphere,
not only through being profoundly sad or meditative, but by being
extravagantly happy. The soul might be rapt out of the body in an agony of
sorrow, or a trance of ecstasy; but it might also be rapt out of the body in
a paroxysm of laughter. Sorrow we know can go beyond itself; so, according to
Shakespeare, can pleasure go beyond itself and become something dangerous and
unknown. And the reason that the logical and destructive modern school, of
which Mr. Bernard Shaw is an example, does not grasp this purely exuberant
nature of the comedies is simply 'that their logical and destructive attitude
have rendered impossible the very experience of this preternatural
exuberance. We cannot realise <As You Like It> if we are always
considering it as we understand it. We cannot have <A Midsummer's Night
Dream> if our one object in life is to keep ourselves awake with the black
coffee of criticism. The whole question which is balanced, and balanced nobly
and fairly, in < A Midsummer Night's Dream>, is whether the life of
waking, or the life of the vision, is the real life, the <sine qua non>
of man. But it is difficult to see what superiority for the purpose of
judging is possessed by people whose pride it is not to live the life of
vision at all. At least it is questionable whether the Elizabethan did not
know more about both worlds than the modern intellectual it is not altogether
improbably that Shakespeare would not only have had a clearer vision of the
fairies, but would have shot very much straighter at a deer and netted much
more money for his performances than a member of the Stage Society. In pure poetry and the intoxication of words,
Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play. But in spite of
this fact, the supreme literary merit of <A Midsummer Night's Dream> is
a merit of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral
beauty of that design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the
sane and common world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and
very young friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of
young troubles and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall
on them. They lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of
fairyland. Their words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more
dim and fantastic, like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of
Puck. Then the dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators
begin to awaken together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and
bracing morning. Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous
rationalism, expounds in hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such
psychic experiences, pointing out with a reverent and sympathetic scepticism
that all these fairies and spells are themselves but the emanations, the
unconscious masterpieces, of man himself. The whole company falls back into a
splendid human laughter. There is a rush for banqueting and private
theatricals, and over all these things ripples one of those frivolous and
inspired conversations in which every good saying seems to die in giving
birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his wanderings was at home and
drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house of Theseus. All the
dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream remembered throughout the
morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of any other triumphant
evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began on the earth
and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole midsummer night's dream
in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius. But of this comedy, as I
have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one touch is added
which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with a crashing
finale, full of humour and wisdom and things set right, and silence falls on
the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a moment,
as it were, the' elves look into the house, asking which is the reality. "Suppose
we are the realities and they the shadows." If that ending were acted
properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he had to walk
home from the theatre through a country lane. It is a trite matter, of course, though in a
general criticism a more or less indispensable one to comment upon another
point of artistic perfection, the extraordinarily human and accurate manner
in which the play catches the atmosphere of a dream. The chase and tangle and
frustration of the incidents and personalities are well known to every one
who has dreamt of perpetually falling over precipices or perpetually missing
trains. While following out clearly and legally the necessary narrative of
the drama, the author contrives to include every one of the main peculiarities
of the exasperating dream. Here is the pursuit of the man we cannot catch,
the flight from the man we cannot see; here is the perpetual returning to the
same place, here is the crazy alteration in the very objects of our desire,
the substitution of one face for another face, the putting of the wrong souls
in the wrong bodies, the fantastic disloyalties of the night, all this is as
obvious as it is important. It is perhaps somewhat more -worth remarking that
there is about this confusion of comedy yet another essential characteristic
of dreams. A dream can commonly be described as possessing an utter
discordance of incident combined with a curious unity of mood; everything
changes but the dreamer. It may begin with anything and end with anything, but
if the dreamer is sad at the end he will be sad as if by prescience at the
beginning; if he is cheerful at the beginning he will be cheerful if the
stars fall. <A Midsummer Night's Dream> has in a most singular degree
effected this difficult, this almost desperate subtlety. The events in the
wandering wood are in themselves, and regarded as in broad daylight, not
merely melancholy but bitterly cruel and ignominious. But yet by the
spreading of an atmosphere as magic as the fog of Puck, Shakespeare contrives
to make the whole matter mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic,
and mysteriously charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives
somehow to rob tragedy and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a
toothache or a deadly danger from a tiger, or a precipice, is robbed of its
sharpness in a pleasant dream. The creation of a brooding sentiment like
this, a sentiment not merely independent of but actually opposed to the
events, is a much greater triumph of art than the creation of the character
of Othello. It is difficult to approach critically so great a
figure as that of Bottom the Weaver. He is greater and more mysterious than
Hamlet, because the interest of such men as Bottom consists of a rich sub
consciousness and that of Hamlet in the comparatively superficial matter of a
rich consciousness. And it is especially difficult in the present age which
has become hag-ridden with the mere intellect. We are the victims of a
curious confusion whereby being great is supposed to have something to do
with being clever, as if there were the smallest reason to suppose that
Achilles was clever, as if there were not on the contrary a great deal of
internal evidence to indicate that he was next door to a fool. Greatness is a
certain indescribable but perfectly familiar and palpable quality of size in
the personality, of steadfastness, of strong flavour, of easy and natural
self-expression. Such a man is as firm as a tree and as unique as a
rhinoceros, and he might quite easily be as stupid as either of them. Fully
as much as the great poet towers above the small poet the great fool towers
above the small fool. We have all of us known rustics like Bottom the Weaver,
men whose faces would be blank with idiocy if we tried for -ten days to
explain the meaning of the National Debt, but who are yet great men, akin to
Sigurd and Hercules, heroes of the morning of the earth, because their words
were their own words, their memories their own memories, and their vanity as
large and simple as a great hill. We have all of us known friends in our own
circle, men whom the intellectuals might justly describe as brainless, but
whose presence in a room was like a fire roaring in the grate changing
everything, lights and shadows and the air, whose entrances and exits were in
some strange fashion events, whose point of view once expressed haunts and
persuades the mind and almost intimidates it, whose manifest absurdity clings
to the fancy like the beauty of first-love, and whose follies are recounted
like the legends of a paladin. These ate great men, there are millions of
them in the world, though very few perhaps in the House of Commons. It is not
in the cold halls of cleverness where celebrities seem to be important that
we should look for the great. An intellectual salon is merely a
training-ground for one faculty, and is akin to a fencing class or a rifle
corps. It is in our own homes and environments, from Croydon to St. John's
Wood, in old nurses, and gentlemen with hobbies, and talkative spinsters and
vast incomparable butlers, that we may feel the presence of that blood of the
gods. And this creature so hard to describe, so easy to remember, the august
and memorable fool, has never been so sumptuously painted as in the Bottom of
<A Midsummer Night's Dream>. Bottom has the supreme mark of this real
greatness in that like the true saint or the true hero he only differs from
humanity in being as it were more human than humanity. It is not true, as the
idle materialists of today suggest, that compared to the majority of men the
hero appears cold and dehumanised; it is the majority who appear cold and
dehumanised in the presence of greatness. Bottom, like Don Quixote and Uncle
Toby and Mr. Richard Swiveller and the rest of the Titans, has a huge and
unfathomable weakness, his silliness is on a great scale, and when he blows
his own trumpet it is like the trumpet of the Resurrection. The other rustics
in the play accept his leadership not merely naturally but exuberantly; they
have to the full that primary and savage unselfishness, that uproarious
abnegation which makes simple men take pleasure in falling short of a hero,
that unquestionable element of basic human nature which has never been
expressed, outside this play, so perfectly as in the incomparable chapter at
the beginning of <Evan Harrington> in which the praises of The Great
Mel are sung with a lyric energy by the tradesmen whom he has cheated.
Twopenny sceptics write of the egoism of primal human nature; it is reserved
for great men like Shakespeare and Meredith to detect and make vivid this
rude and subconscious unselfishness which is older than self. They alone with
their insatiable tolerance can perceive all the spiritual devotion in the
soul of a snob. And it is this natural play between the rich
simplicity of Bottom and the simple simplicity of his comrades which
constitutes the unapproachable excellence of the farcical scenes in this
play. Bottom's sensibility to literature is perfectly fiery and genuine, a
great deal more genuine than that of a great many cultivated critics of
literature - "the raging rocks, and shivering shocks shall break the
locks of prison gates, and Phibbus' car shall shine from far, and make and
mar the foolish fates", is exceedingly good poetical diction with a real
throb and swell in it, and if it is slightly and almost imperceptibly
deficient in the matter of sense, it is certainly every bit as sensible as a
good many other rhetorical speeches in Shakespeare put into the mouths of
kings and lovers and even the spirits of the dead. If Bottom liked cant for
its own sake the fact only constitutes another point of sympathy between him
and his literary creator. But the style of the thing, though deliberately
bombastic and ludicrous, is quite literary, the alliteration falls like wave
upon wave, and the whole verse, like a billow mounts higher and higher before
it crashes. There is nothing mean about this folly; nor is there in the whole
realm of literature a figure so free from vulgarity. The man vitally base and
foolish sings "The Honeysuckle and the Bee"; he does not rant about
"raging rocks" and "the car of Phibbus". Dickens, who
more perhaps than any modern man had the mental hospitality and the
thoughtless wisdom of Shakespeare, perceived and expressed admirably the same
truth. He perceived, that is to say, that quite indefensible idiots have very
often a real sense of, and enthusiasm for letters. Mr. Micawber loved
eloquence and poetry with his whole immortal soul; words and visionary
pictures kept him alive in the absence of food and money, as they might have
kept a saint fasting in a desert. Dick Swiveller did not make his inimitable
quotations from Moore and Byron merely as flippant digressions. He made them
because he loved a great school of poetry. The sincere love of books has nothing
to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It
is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of
faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly
person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as
he may be in love with a woman. And the triumph of Bottom is that he loves
rhetoric and his own taste in the arts, and this is all that can be achieved
by Theseus, or for the matter of that by Cosimo di Medici. It is worth
remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his
literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense.
He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, "Thisby, the
flowers of odious savours sweete." "Odours, odours," says
Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold
and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage.
But "Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete", Bottom's
version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The "i"
which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism. There is another aspect of this great play which
ought to be kept familiarly in the mind. Extravagant as is the masquerade of
the story, it is a very perfect aesthetic harmony down to such
<coup-de-maître> as the name of Bottom, or the flower called Love in
Idleness. In the whole matter it may be said that there is one accidental
discord; that is in the name of Theseus, and the whole city of Athens in which
the events take place. Shakespeare's description of Athens in <A Midsummer
Night's Dream> is the best description of England that he or any one else
ever wrote. Theseus is quite obviously only an English squire, fond of
hunting, kindly to his tenants, hospitable with a certain flamboyant vanity.
The mechanics are English mechanics, talking to each other with the queer
formality of the poor. Above all, the fairies are English; to compare them
with the beautiful patrician spirits of Irish legend, for instance, is
suddenly to discover that we have, after all, a folk-lore and a mythology, or
had it at least in Shakespeare's day. Robin Goodfellow, upsetting the old
women's ale, or pulling the stool from under them, has nothing of the
poignant Celtic beauty; his is the horse-play of the invisible world. Perhaps
it is some debased inheritance of English life which makes American ghosts so
fond of quite undignified practical jokes. But this union of mystery with
farce is a note of the medieval English. The play is the last glimpse of
Merrie England, that distant but shining and quite indubitable country. It
would be difficult indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the
phrase "merrie England", though some conception of it is quite
necessary to the comprehension of <A Midsummer Night's Dream>. In some
cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England of today, could conceive of the
idea of a merry supernaturalism. Amid all the great work of Puritanism the
damning indictment of it consists in one fact, that there was one only of the
fables of Christendom that it retained and renewed, and that was the belief
in witchcraft. It cast away the generous and wholesome superstition, it
approved only of the morbid and the dangerous. In their treatment of the
great national fairy-tale of good and evil, the Puritans killed St. George
but carefully preserved the Dragon, And this seventeenth-century tradition of
dealing with the psychic life still lies like a great shadow over England and
America, so that if we glance at a novel about occultism we may be perfectly
certain that it deals with sad or evil destiny. Whatever else we expect we
certainly should never expect to find in it spirits such as those in <Aylwin>
as inspirers of a tale of tomfoolery like the <Wrong Box> or <The
Londoners>. That impossibility is the disappearance of "merrie
England" and Robin Goodfellow. It was a land to us incredible, the land
of a jolly occultism where the peasant cracked jokes with his patron saint,
and only cursed the fairies good-humouredly, as he might curse a lazy
servant. Shakespeare is English in everything, above all in his weaknesses.
just as London, one of the greatest cities in the world, shows more slums and
hides more beauties than any other, so Shakespeare alone among the four
giants of poetry is a careless writer, and lets us come upon his splendours
by accident, as we come upon an old City church in the twist of a city
street. He is English in nothing so much as in that noble cosmopolitan
unconsciousness which makes him look eastward with the eyes of a child
towards Athens or Verona. He loved to talk of the glory of foreign lands, but
he talked of them with the tongue and unquenchable spirit of England. It is
too much the custom of a later patriotism to reverse this method and talk of
England from morning till night, but to talk of her in a manner totally
un-English. Casualness, incongruities, and a certain fine absence of mind are
in the temper of England; the unconscious man with the ass's head is no bad
type of the people. Materialistic philosophers and mechanical politicians
have certainly succeeded in some cases in giving him a greater unity. The
only question is, to which animal has he been thus successfully conformed? |
|
|
|