Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882
Shakespeare; or, the Poet
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850
Great men are more distinguished by range and tent than by originality. If we require
the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels;
in finding clay and making bricks and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of
knights and the thick of events; and seeing what men want and sharing their desire, he
adds the needful length of sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest
genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattle-brain, saying what comes uppermost,
and, because he says every thing, saying at last something good; but a heart in unison
with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but
sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions and pointed with the most
determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any individual
great, except through the general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake
up on some fine morning and say, “I am full of life, I will go to sea and find an
Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany and find a new
food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power”:
no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the
ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one
way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The Church has
reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice which her music gave him,
and builds a cathedral needed by her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it
educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the
place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials
collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the
materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way.
The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged the
rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the national
feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended
in the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being
original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering
the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
Shakespeare’s youth fell in a time when the English people were importunate for
dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily at political allusions and
attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and the religious
among the Anglican church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs were the ready
theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not
hope to suppress newspapers now,- no, not by the strongest party,- neither then could
king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which was ballad, epic,
newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at the same time. Probably king, prelate
and puritan, all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national
interest,- by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of
treating it in an English history,- but not a whit less considerable because it was cheap
and of no account, like a baker’s-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of
writers which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman,
Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher.
The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first importance to
the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and
expectation prepared. In the case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he
left Stratford and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates and writers
existed in manuscript and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy,
which the audience will bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Caesar,
and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of English
history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal Henries, which men hear
eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish voyages, which
all the London ‘prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by
every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so
long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech or a
whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work of
numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have few
readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays waste stock,
in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about a
modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living
England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his
airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may
work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to
the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, and in furnishing so much work done to
his hand, leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his
imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple.
Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the
ornament of the temple wall: at first a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief
became bolder and a head or arm was projected from the wall; the groups being still
arranged with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the figures;
and when at last the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing
genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As
soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace,
the art began to decline: freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place of the old
temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous
irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius,
however extraordinary, could hope to create.
In point of fact it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all directions, and was
able to use whatever he found; and the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from
Malone’s laborious computations in regard to the First, Second and Third parts of Henry
VI, in which, “out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakespeare, 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and 1899 were
entirely his own.” And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of
his absolute invention. Malone’s sentence is an important piece of external history. In
Henry VIII I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own
finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a
vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey’s soliloquy,
and the following scene with Cromwell, where instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose
secret is that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best
bring out the rhythm,- here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has
even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains through all its length
unmistakable traits of Shakespeare’s hand, and some passages, as the account of the
coronation, are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the
bad rhythm.
Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he
lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant
demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million.
The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet who appears in
illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is any where radiating.
Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment it is his fine office to bring to his
people; and he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore
little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through translation,
whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration;
from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows
very near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish
things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true
stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of
Homer perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are
librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of
all the hundred tales of the world,-
“Presenting Thebes’ and Pelops’ line
And the tale of Troy divine.”
The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our
early literature; and more recently not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him,
but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily
traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a
huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, *(30) from
Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from
Dares Phrygius, Ovid and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Provencal poets are his
benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris
and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox,
from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he
uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build his house. He
steals by this apology,- that what he takes has no worth where he finds it and the
greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature,
that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth
to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can
entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use
of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them they become our
own.
Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of
the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us
the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of
their wishes; the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes and estimates, and it will bereave
his fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel
and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so there were
fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers,
books, traditions, proverbs,- all perished- which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder.
Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The
appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi
whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and
to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to
other wit would never disturb his consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of
books and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he
has conversed.
It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no
man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the
same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the
English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and
churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was not some
translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of
the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic
church,- these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every
saint and sacred writer all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to
the Lord’s Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use in
the time of Christ, in the Rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous
language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts and the precision and
substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the
sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern.
The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There
never was a time when there was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are
kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same
process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes
liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad,
Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of
such works the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the
farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every
municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day; and the generic catholic genius who is
not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the
next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.
We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare Society, for
ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries celebrated in churches and
by churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular
plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, down to the possession of the
stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered, remodelled and finally made his own.
Elated with success and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no
book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to
decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakespeare
poached or not, whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and
why he left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the
object on which all candles shine and all eyes are turned; the care with which it
registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the Essexes,
Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the
founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,-
the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose
thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds
to receive this and not another bias. A popular player;- nobody suspected he was the poet
of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men
as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human
understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained
his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first
vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him
generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two.
If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare’s time should be
capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years after Shakespeare, and
died twenty-three years after him; and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances,
the following persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of
Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr.
Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta,
Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having
communicated, without enumerating many others whom doubtless he saw,- Shakespeare,
Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest.
Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there
was never any such society;- yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the
universe. Our poet’s mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a
century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did
any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the
history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the father of German literature: it was with
the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his works
by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately
connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of
living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers. *(31) Now,
literature, philosophy and thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond
which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate
fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative
power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.
The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the missing facts,
offered money for any information that will lead to proof,- and with what result? Beside
some important illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted,
they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to property,
of the poet. It appears that from year to year he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars’
Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his
native village with his earnings as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the best
house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of
borrowing money, and the like; that he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was
writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five
shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and in all respects
appears as a good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a
good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking
manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the importance of this
information. It was well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.
But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have
rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet
of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, school-mates, earning of money, marriage,
publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip, no
ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped
at random into the “Modern Plutarch,” and read any other life there, it would
have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow
daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all history.
Malone, Warburton, Dyce and Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent
Garden, Drury Lane, the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble,
Kean and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey and
express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out
immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly torments us with invitations to its
own inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the
pride of the English stage; and all I then heard and all I now remember of the tragedian
was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet’s question to the ghost:-
“What may this
mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”
That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world’s dimension, crowds
it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of
the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the greenroom. Can any
biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night’s Dream admits me?
Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in
Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of
Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia’s villa, “the antres vast and desarts
idle” of Othello’s captivity,- where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
chancellor’s file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word of those
transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,- in the
Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India, in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters,
the Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,- the Genius draws up the ladder
after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age, which sees
the works and asks in vain for a history.
Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing, except
to the Shakespeare in us, that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He
cannot step from off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the
antique documents extricated, analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier, and
now read one of these skyey sentences,- aerolites,- which seem to have fallen out of
heaven, and which not your experience but the man within the breast has accepted as words
of fate, and tell me if they match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or
which gives the most historical insight into the man.
Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare for biographer,
instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which is material; that which
describes character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal
with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on those
questions which knock for answer at every heart,- on life and death, on love, on wealth
and poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters
of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those
mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science and which yet interweave their
malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets
without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the
intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most
susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his
private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the
gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of
friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the
merchant answer for his great heart. So far from Shakespeare’s being the least known, he
is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners,
of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not
settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or
district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma
taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he
not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the
rudeness of his behavior?
Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does
not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher.
I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He
was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking
vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how
well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was,- and he is the best in the world.
But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention
from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all
languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so
that the occasion which gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a
prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its
application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs
for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew
the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man, and
described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their
probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions
by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother’s part
from the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom
and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature: and all the
sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of
Drama or Epic, out of notice. ‘Tis like making a question concerning the paper on which a
king’s message is written.
Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the
crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort,
nestle into Plato’s brain and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still
out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual
self,- the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With
this wisdom of life is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed
the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if they were people who had lived
under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And
they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an
ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his
faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently
appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental
prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part and starves that
other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But
Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no
curiosities; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable
egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small subordinately. He is wise without emphasis
or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes
without effort and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well
to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy,
narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant that each reader is incredulous of the
perception of other readers.
This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music and
verse, makes him the type of the poet and has added a new problem to metaphysics. This is
that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as
announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or
blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the
comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution
into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he
draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature’s, will bear the scrutiny of the solar
microscope.
In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or
fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture. Daguerre
learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, and then proceeds at
leisure to etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never representation.
Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their
portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of
the translation of things into song is demonstrated.
His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though their excellence
is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of
lines, but a total merit of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person,
so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a whole poem.
Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear
to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning and so
linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to connect
some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount and walk
because his horses are running off with him in some distant direction: he always rides.
The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought has suffered a transformation
since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good degree of skill in writing
verses; but it is easy to read, through their poems, their personal history: any one
acquainted with the parties can name every figure; this is Andrew and that is Rachel. The
sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In
the poet’s mind the fact has gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost
all that is exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and
closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace of
egotism.
One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without
which no man can be a poet,- for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its
obligation but for its grace: he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely
light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the
universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his
mistress to partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and
cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says,
“It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
repentance?” Not less sovereign and cheerful,- much more sovereign and cheerful, is
the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of men. If he
should appear in any company of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches
nothing that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.
And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor, when, in
solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we seek to strike the
balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and
it weighs Shakespeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of
humanity.
Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the
visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for
meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a
second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all
their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare employed them
as colors to compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which
seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue which resides in these
symbols and imparts this power:- what is that which they themselves say? He converted the
elements which waited on his command, into entertainments. He was master of the revels to
mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets
given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from their
orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all
towns, “Very superior pyrotechny this evening”? Are the agents of nature, and
the power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a
cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the Koran,- “The heavens and the earth
and all that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?” As long as the
question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But
when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does he profit
me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night’s Dream, or Winter
Evening’s Tale: what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the
Shakespeare Societies comes to mind; that he was a jovial actor and manager. I can not
marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping
with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only
the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave
the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the
science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard
of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,- that he should not be wise for himself;- it
must even go into the world’s history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life,
using his genius for the public amusement.
Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German and Swede, beheld the same
objects: they also saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose? The
beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an
obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly,
joyless, a pilgrim’s progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of
Adam’s fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us;
and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in them.
It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world still wants its
poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakespeare the player, nor shall
grope in graves, with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with
equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than
private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.
[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]
*(30) The dates of Lydgate and Caxton show a mistake as to Emerson’s
use of them. Caxton, following Chaucer, when he introduced the printing press to England,
printed his poems and those of Lydgate, who was younger than Chaucer.
*(31) While writing this, Mr. Emerson was surrounded by persons
paralyzed for active life in the common world by the doubts of conscience or entangled in
over-fine-spun webs of their intellect.
* * *
Crisis Chronicles Cyber Litmag (2008-2015) 