Shakespeare and "Things to Come"
Up to now Shakespeare remains among English poets a "topless tower" — sole and inexplicable. Inexplicable in his inspired prolificity, and not, as the Baconians urge, by having masterpieces ascribed to his "ill-educated" mind. It is argued that what tells against his authorship of the plays is not only their success as literature but also their being packed with versatile learning. One has, however, just to point out Bernard Shaw and ask: What efficient school-education did he have to equip him for his excellence in the field of letters? Shaw is nowhere near Shakespeare as a creative genius, but the fact stands that, without academic education, he could write brilliantly, wittily, learnedly, that he could be play-wright, dramatic critic, judge of the fine arts, authority on Socialism, and could hold forth in most competent a vein on education itself, show keen insight into the medical psychology, assimilate with a fine force biological science into his Weltanschauung. Might not Shakespeare, while exploiting a greater artistic gift after prolonged stage-work, bring in classical allusions with which his fellow-craftsmen must have almost tiresomely familiarised him, write knowingly about legal points which a practical turn of mind such as his biography exhibits could in a most natural way seize during his contact with the motley mass of money-grubbers and their calculating clerks round theatre-land, represent with a vivid understanding military science and court-life and political practice when each man's nostrils were filled with the breath of colonial adventure, all eyes were coloured by eager observation of picturesque heroes and glittering courtiers, every head was buzzing with diplomatic questions raised by unsettled thrones and touch-and-go balances of power?
Besides, it is not likely that Bacon who was most apprehensive about the lasting value of the English language and wished all his works to be written in Latin should have spent
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years creating masterpieces in a tongue he underrated if not despised. Perhaps the most decisive proof against him is the difference of psychological atmosphere between his compositions and Shakespeare's. Shakespeare wrote on occasion like a book-worm, a lawyer, a commander-in-chief, a courtier, a politician; what he could never do was to introduce the genuine philosophical accent. The whole cast and vibration of his style is determined by a vital gusto, impetuousness or ingenuity and not intellectual contemplation; while, if Bacon was anything, he was an intellectual. Shakespeare dragged into his plays all that he was or knew: why is that element not there which most distinguished Bacon's mentality — his half philosophical half scientific thinking, the "Novum Organum" note? If a writer creates even in part out of himself, how is it that Bacon in writing Shakespeare left his essential nature out? Milton, Wordsworth, even Shelley had, unlike Shakespeare, an intellectual substance and their rhythm reflects it; Bacon too would have given his dramas some touch at least of an inspiration uttering in a dynamic or moved or illuminative language the ideas of the pure intelligence. Shakespeare's thought springs from an exuberance of the life-energy; a vivid excitement of feeling and sensation, throws up rich idea-effects, but there is no pressure of the detaching intellect or the seeking for a world-view through the eyes of the inspired reason. Even the moments of what may be called his "message" are steeped in the tones of a mind fixed on potencies of passion and emotion.
For, what he offers us is the colour and complexity of the life-movement converting spontaneously its soul of multi-form desire into word-music. And it is a music all his own — unsurpassed for its continual excellence in three respects. It comes from his characters bearing the unique breath and idiosyncrasy of each as well as the exact substance and stress of every experience they undergo. It comes not merely from them but also through them, as if impelled by some hidden universe of vitality focusing itself in personal moulds and motives, so that each figure vibrates with a sort of genius, a
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superabundant animation. Lastly, it is a speech of inexhaustible picturesqueness, the phrases are gorged with metaphor, word follows word prodigious with assimilated imagery. And by an art little short of the miraculous, this music has a ring of inevitability to suit every occasion possible. It can give us Cleopatra impatient and scornful, uttering her sense of the physical pain of death when she applies an asp to her breast, yet putting into her words all that queenly will of hers by which she takes death unto herself freely in order to satisfy her "immortal longings", her passion for the departed Antony, and not as a common necessity to which she must surrender —
Come, thou mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool,
Be angry and dispatch.
But Shakespeare's vivid nobility can be perfect also in a tone of exquisite naturalness that holds depths of the sublime as genuine in their subdued self-revelation as the heights when each phrase rings out massive and masterful. Cleopatra's acceptance of death as a means to reach Antony becomes an intimate sense of Antony's own all-satisfying person as soon as Iras falls heart-broken after being kissed farewell by the queen:
If thou and nature can so gently part,
The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch
Which hurts and is desired.
This simile, simple yet profound, is followed by one step more in the disclosure of the sheer woman-soul in Cleopatra. When the asp has clung to her breast, the identification of death with love comes with an overwhelming force to her emotion and on Charmian's poignant praise of her — "O eastern star!" — she gives tongue to a metaphorical reprimand
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which is an unexcelled triumph of art:
Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
The sudden change, from death as the lover, to death as the lover's child distils from the crisis the entire sweetness of passion: the whole cycle of emotional ecstasy possible to a woman through her chosen mate is compassed and the psychological transfiguration of mortality stands complete. The penetrative magic employed fairly takes one's breath away by its unforced originality and a rhythmic sibilance that echoes the anxious motherly gesture on Cleopatra's part to silence all that may disturb the soothing act of suckling her imagined child.
It is precisely in perfection of expressive rhythm no less than phrase that Shakespeare's claim to be the greatest creator of poetic drama lies. He has, no doubt, a fine constructive instinct. Though the incidents he projects are unified not by conscious dovetailing but by a rambling method in which the main theme progresses as in actual life with a lot of clinging side-swirls, Shakespeare's lack of economy and adroitness is not a fault, because the crowded picture he builds up is most effective by the play of contrasts and foils it provides for etching out all the more vividly the chief characters and events. But this is so on account of the surprising way his people become real to us on a life-breath of word-music. Webster is often almost as good in pure dramatic construction, but his poetry except in a small number of half-scenes and scattered sentences contains no masterful grace of rhythmic expression: he does not play upon his metrical base with skill enough to provide a sustained justification for choosing blank verse instead of prose. Shakespeare's style leads us to feel that the turn and rhythm of prose would entirely rob his language of its living faithfulness, its onomatopoeic response to the meaning he
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has in mind. What writer of his day could have given us King Lear's lament over the dead Cordelia:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button —
where the audacity of "sprung rhythm" and dramatic anticlimax has not a streak of crudeness or bathos and is a change the unpatterned movement of prose can never emphasise? Or take the mad Lear on the heath:
Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, called you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.
Mark how the extra syllable at the close of lines two, three and four produces by its falling rhythm a suggestion as if Lear were breaking down pathetically after each expression of his argument and it is extremely apposite that the point of breaking down in each case is a word reminding him directly of the cause of his misery — "daughters", "unkindness", "children". Mark also the repeated sob in the last line, where the words, even apart from the meaning, seem to represent its psychology by their massed stresses and peculiarly combined tones just as those in the second convey in a like manner their particular substance of overpowering energy.
The result by analogous means in line two of Hamlet's touching plea to Horatio is well known:
Absent thee from felicity a while
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
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It is impossible to read that line without difficulty and strain in the breath, especially as it follows one which is most musically smooth. Macbeth is, perhaps, fullest with this alert or rather instinctive skill in the use of words and their sounds. I can never forget, for instance, the impression of perfect artistry given by Macbeth's famous soliloquy when his wife has left him with an injunction to remove the filthy evidence of his deed:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
The point which rivets the attention is the word "incarna-dine" — a strongly beautiful effect on the ear, but not that alone. Macbeth has invoked a daring comparison, blood-stained hands pitted against "all Neptune's ocean"; and to support it he must somehow bring out the enormity of his crime, all the more when he applies a thirteen-lettered epithet like "multitudinous" to "seas". Only a strikingly big word can prove competent to match that epithet as well as the ocean-idea, and "incarnadine" does this with unerring success. We feel that the evil with which the hand is stained is vast enough to pollute with its indelible heinousness the whole world of waters.... Nor have we appreciated Shakespeare's art enough if we have caught no other point in the quotation. Having accomplished what was psychologically required, he could have dropped the three-foot line which prolongs the sentence by a participial clause: Lady Macbeth who now re-enters does not even finish it with the remaining two feet, and Shakespeare by omitting it would have got an obvious climax; but he was a poet-dramatist beyond the ordinary. He seems to have divined that, since the hand that committed the murder was a small thing though its offence was tremendous, the latter implication by a polysyllable was not enough while treating the ocean-idea: the sea in its turn
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must somehow appear small and become capable of being stained by a human limb. Hence the sonorous is succeeded by the simple, and, even, as "multitudinous" was matched by "incarnadine", "green" is contraposed to "red": it is a device which, besides stressing more explicitly the colour-contrast between water and blood, brings down Macbeth's widening imagination to the reality, to a mood that expresses, without obliterating his great inner sense of guilt, his desire to lay the outer ghost, so to speak, and deal practically with the limited symbol and evidence of his crime — the stained hands.
Macbeth, however, is the Mount Everest of Shakespeare's Himalaya not only because, over and above the usual organic heat and constructive onrush, it has a more uniform poetic inspiration than anywhere else. The poetry and the drama now depict, with a keener vision than ever before, a bursting out of forces from behind the external consciousness. The supernatural takes possession of the field, and incident, atmosphere, expression are all surcharged with uncanny presences. Shakespeare has always a power to put into words the very stuff of what he describes or imagines, but here he makes language throb with a still rarer life, a deeper and more uncommon experience. In this category the most marvellous lines are those in which Macbeth conveys the terror of the voice he heard reverberating around him after Duncan had been stabbed while asleep:
Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!'
Shakespeare has found for the original turn to which he has subjected the idea of retribution a verbal scheme with a warp of repetition and a woof of variety, which combines with awe and bewilderment. While the large tone of "sleep no more" stuns us by its recurrence, the different proper names "Glamis", "Cawdor", "Macbeth" perplex us and by yet
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meaning the same person maddeningly multiply the intensity of the curse pronounced on him. If only "Glamis" or either of the other two had been reiterated, the accumulated power would not have been so colossal; now it seems as though the dooms of three separate persons were heaped together upon the head of one at the same time that we understand through our knowing the identity behind the three names that the same individual has been repeatedly condemned. Further, the names are all majestic and answer back the dominant rhythms. The result is assonances and consonances enforcing an intricate and fearful sonority which carries in it the omnipotence of some occult cosmos of avenging life-force risen up against Macbeth.
A similar gust from behind the veil comes in Lady Macbeth's weird invocation:
Come, come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, 'Hold, hold!'
Read out the passage slowly and with contained fury and you will find the blood thickening and the air full of shadows. I have heard formulas to call spirits "from the vasty deep" but none so genuine as this — a most dangerous hail to the powers and principalities that lurk beyond the surface
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consciousness. It is a snatch of black magic establishing a real contact with occult beings: that we do not get possessed is due to the absence of Macbethan circumstances — no man contemplating murder would be able to check himself once he has made his desire touch the mighty madness here immortalised. The poetic art is throughout perfect, but now and again it becomes more markedly effective. The climax comes when the lines —
you murdering ministers,
You wait on nature's mischief! —
draw out the rhythm from between compressed lips, suddenly loosen it forth into spacious and darkened vistas, unknown, unseen, yet felt as alive with strange hisses of hatred. And that phrase "the blanket of the dark", referring back to "night's pall" and "the dunnest smoke of hell", fuses the preternatural with the human, making the latter a battlefield whereon some titanic devilry would repulse the intervening grace of heaven. The vivid homely term "blanket" becomes a haunting realism pregnant with a sense of ghostly vastitudes materialising and concentrating themselves for covert action within the narrow earth-limits.
It is in such passages that Shakespeare is most true to Victor Hugo's similitude of him — a sea of sound: an elemental power not only wide and manifold, giving us humanity's universal nature, but also like the sea profound. Profound, again, in a double connotation: not merely does the word come, as always, from some depth of revealing intuition with a force of actuality — it comes, too, from unfamiliar kingdoms of life below or behind the moods Shakespeare is accustomed to interpret. Like a dream-dragon with a million heads, the word-waves rise and curve and sway and dart towards the terra firma of the wakeful mind. In Lady Macbeth's speech they come with a slaughtering wickedness, while, in the voices that Macbeth heard ringing
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through the house, they emerge in a retributive wrath — a kind of action and reaction from the same occult plane. It is also a breath from there which perturbs the equilibrium of Hamlet's soul, a breath blown upon him as if his father's sepulchre
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws.
In Lear the occult invades the surface existence like a tremendous storm rather than a sinister breath, whirling in an uncontrollable catastrophe the human figures: the commotion on the heath is but an outward symbol of a mysterious madness. Iago's "motiveless malignity" is another and less apparent way of hinting the incalculable behind life and its conscious aims; and it evokes against it a corresponding incalculable — the demoniac obsession of Othello:
Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont;
Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.
But in the Moor's tragedy Shakespeare's eye is not cast deliberately inward on the occult. It is even doubtful whether, when he does seem to scrutinise and use the secret suggestions from "the undiscovered country", he sets himself to do it or just happens to have his gaze turned inward without any intention to plumb the unknown. He is as a rule occupied with mirroring the subtle and large region of consciousness immediately behind external life — a near subjective background to human activity from which that activity itself is a narrower projection. Thus he is not bound as most Elizabethan dramatists to the absolutely superficial
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crudenesses, violences, caprices of passion; but he stands no more than a few paces of widening freedom beyond the superficialities — that is, enough to give his representation a universal human touch, a comprehensive interpreting force in the domain of life's psychology, yet not any deliberate grasp on the occult and the ultra-human, the good or evil sources mightier than the subtle human background and governing the latter by their own interplay or their conflicting velleities towards the earth-scene. When his dramatic genius was at its intensest, they somehow broke through and with their cross-currents brought about those giant ship-wrecks of purpose which constitute his greatest plays. It is, however, a pity that he was not inclined to a deliberate study of the unknown, for by his intuitive style he was the one poet most gifted to do so; nobody after him has combined his ample scope, his varicoloured energetic beauty and his plucking the poetic word as if from the heart of his object.
If he had plunged still beyond the occult and felt too some lasting impression of the mystic truth, we would have had a verse vivid and compact with a godlike glow, bringing the mystical into the very senses and the flesh. But if he was little of an intentional occultist he was all the less drawn towards mysticism. It is surprising that in the multifarious world he created of characters that breathe and move and utter themselves with a vitality more royal and authentic than even ours, there is not a single individual fired with religious or spiritual passion. He did try to mirror the intellect: Hamlet is his closest vision of the intellect through the life-force. Yes, through the life-force, because, though among Shakespeare's heroes, Hamlet thinks the most puissantly, the most curiously, we have only to read
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
side by side with Keats's
To thy high requiem become a sod
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to distinguish the rhythm of the élan vital thinking, from that of the poetic intelligence cast into a beautiful turn of phrase but lacking the Shakespearean life-quiver. Or compare
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew
with Shelley's
From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb,
and the result is the same: the one has an impact upon what Sri Aurobindo would call the nerves of mental sensation whereas the other's appeal is from the pure intelligence in a moved imaginative moment. The contrast between
Who would fardels bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary life?
and Wordsworth's
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
is equally striking. In Wordsworth, the grey cells are changing the urgencies of an oppressed existence to philosophic values, presenting deep emotion yet with a detached contemplative air. In Shakespeare, the brain identifies itself with the guts to render coherent the being's instinctive shout of recoil and rebellion: the emotion surges up from the depths with a cutting and devouring power which does not easily allow whatever philosophic values it may have to stand with marked independence. However, Hamlet is as much of the pure intelligence in its reflective state as Shakespeare could seize; but nowhere do we come upon a mystic personation of his creative power.
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Luckily, though, he did have fugitive moods which are interesting as clues to what is possible in the English language when the mystic hue enters the life-mind. There is a sonnet indicating one possibility:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward self so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
This is an expression of the life-mind moulding with unrest of emotion and sensation a mystic idea. It is a sort of complement to the "metaphysical" Donne-effect which came on the heels of the Shakespeare-phenomenon. Here is a thesis, as it were, suggesting from its own depth that antithesis which is at once opposed and continuous with it, the antithesis which is a mystic idea born of the poetic intelligence and moulding emotion and sensation with unrest of ingenuity and curiosity. The famous lines from Hamlet,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,
bear again a mystic substance intuited, with the usual vitality, from the plane of the poetic intelligence. But Shakespeare opens up in other places possibilities still more rich and rare, though it is not always that he gets the mystic
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illumination pure or complete. Cleopatra's
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven
fuses the intensity of a spiritual experience with a tremendous thrill of the life-force, but, instead of raising the latter to a significance beyond itself, the infinitude of the Spirit has become a symbol and suggestion of the sheer acme of that thrill. Passion has used, for revealing its own absolute pitch, for achieving its own apotheosis, the mystic light. Prospero's speech at the end of his magic performance before Ferdinand and Miranda is a complex phenomenon denoting in another way a magnificent might-have-been from a plane above that of mystic ideas:
Our revels now are ended; these our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The meaning is clearly that each human life is like an illusion, soon to dissolve in the sleep of death, in an everlasting annihilation; and that the whole world too will pass away like a phantom into absolute nothingness. But I take this meaning to be only one side of the inspiration which tried to get through and could not have its full implication expressed because Shakespeare was not a philosophic or a mystic thinker. Prospero had spoken to the spirits after the complete
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fading of their masque; so he knew and believed, before delivering the present speech, that they survived even though the masque had totally faded. Hence his premises were such as would compel a conclusion to the effect that like this masque the whole universe would vanish but like the surviving spirits something would still live behind the world-illusion. He grasped the point of dreamlike fading and pressed his analogy no further, instead of giving us an intuition of some transcendental god-self — a being, rapt and remote, to whom mind and life and matter are an "insubstantial pageant" variously conjured up by its creative imagination, a dream-interlude between a divine peace and peace. We would have been reminded of the Upanishad's supreme Soul projecting the cosmic vision but only to dissolve it again and return to its unfeatured ecstasy of repose, its self-absorbed superconsciousness. What Shakespeare manages to convey to us, in spite of the mystic motive being absent, is an impression as though he stood back in a transcendental poise and uttered his dreamlike experience of the so-called real cosmos without remembering to express the nature of his standpoint: he appears to have quite forgotten the standpoint, for otherwise he would not have so unreservedly described the actors as melting "into thin air" or used the word "baseless" as part of the data on which he drew his analogy, unless he meant that the vanished masque was not built from any stuff of fundamental or basic reality and that its seeming to be built from such substance was a mere illusion, an airy nothing, produced by the actor-spirits. The passage remains one of the most curious in literature — a high mystic inspiration which poured itself in splendid poetry with its original meaning completely negated.
But the spiritual light which should have found a temporary focus in this large and lordly language is not lost for ever. An extremely potent feel of it is conveyed by the phrase,
In the dark backward and abysm of Time,
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a phrase at once keen and profound, far-reaching and mysterious with a deific presence. However, the mantric perfection is here as if one felt the inmost and the highest with one's eyes shut. In a sonnet of Shakespeare's it brims up with as dense yet more intimate a force. A line and a half catch by a superb irrelevance to their context a thrill of some eternal existence and visionary godhead:
The prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.
That is mysticism in a ne plus ultra of intuition which, though coloured by the life-mind, plunges into the pure self-knowledge of the Supreme — the rarest and most unplumbable note sounded by the "multitudinous seas" of word-music that are Shakespeare. Outside the writings of Sri Aurobindo and a few of his disciples, there is little in English poetry to match its suggestive vibration except Milton's
Those thoughts that wander through eternity
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
I believe that these two lines by the later poets differ from Shakespeare's in part of their rhythmic psychology, they incorporate a colour more intellectual; but, apart from subtle differences, they bear a striking resemblance to it which can best be described as a quality of substance, style and, above all, sound conveying with an immense yet controlled power the value and figure an experience would have in a Consciousness superhuman, illimitable and everlasting. In short, we get through the poetic afflatus a touch and a thrill as of some divine level of Being where archetypes have been bodied forth whose hints and echoes are what we know as the world of mind and life and matter.
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Everywhere in poetry, the aim is to fashion a word-form and a rhythm-movement that have a sense of absolute perfection: the vision must shine in a body of style and sound shaped to a loveliness irreproachable. Even the grotesque and the tragic are thus ensouled and embodied, and become therefore a source of delight which leaves us breathless by its compelling charm. For, always the poetic intuition seems to afford through an aesthetically flawless word-music an impression of divine archetypes. The thought and the feeling held by it are changed, at the very time that they make their particular human appeal, into a mask of something greater, because the words and the rhythm grow, by a beauty complete and unimprovable, a mysterious language suggesting realities transcendental in terms of realities limited by the earth-nature. If we respond in the right way of aesthesis to any line of genuine poetry, we shall find that the creative art which voices the intuition fills the substance with attributes beyond it, as if a supreme and ideal beauty wore a disguise and came vibrating into our consciousness under an alien form and meaning which yet are not opaque enough to dim the lustre draped by them. But though all genuine art has a touch essentially spiritual, it is more allusive than direct, because the substance and the living thrill are too human. Mysticism shows a way out: its art is not superior, but it is more straight in spiritual impact and fraught with wider, more luminous, more satisfying significances inasmuch as the archetypes are less allusively manifested. By several gradations, however, it leads us out, and not till we encounter the lines I have quoted do we feel that the language and the rhythm have altogether thrown off their disguises and spoken directly the transcendental in terms proper to its own authentic nature. Here it is not just the content that is extremely spiritual; the manner and the music attain too a spiritual extreme both of volume and intensity, as can be proved by a comparison with those of the other mystic instances found accidentally in Shakespeare. I have distinguished spiritual light from mystic idea, and now that light is
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tuned up to its last degree of revelation where it passes into the heart-throb of the archetypal and the infinite. Perhaps examples from mystic verse written in the post-Elizabethan, more intellectual periods will help also to illustrate what I mean.
I saw them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on our days,
gives us an extraordinary spiritual substance and the language is inevitable; yet the style and the rhythm have only a very high ideative quiver — the words, though pressing beyond the pure intellect's inspiration, have not been possessed by the hues and tones of the infinite. Half-way towards the quality I wish to emphasise is
Solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven.
But with
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright.
we are already within the domain of sheer revelation, though not at its centre, whereas in
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone
the penetration is entire: the utmost profundities are visioned and voiced in the poetic surge. From the archetypal point of view achievements like this line are the most precious poetry; one might say that they are the goal, the crowning triumph for which the artistic enthousiasmos aspires in secret through all its intuitive audacities.
According to the nature and sensitive openness of its
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human channels the enthousiasmos works; it has no prejudices as to moral and immoral, religious and profane, for in art the side of godhead to be disclosed is beauty. So long as the intuition comes flawless, the divinity in art suffers no wrong; it consents to be worshipped in passionate Dionysiac temples as in fanes of Apollonian calm, to lust on Sappho's lips and deny the gods with Lucretius just as excellently as to weave Tagore's song-garlands for an immortal Beloved and, through Dante, hear even the mouth of hell declare God's mercy. Else it would be curious that the largest poetic splendour the modern ages have witnessed should have burst from the one gigantic genius who cared apparently the least about religion and matters spiritual — Shakespeare. Yet, though Shakespeare will remain unsurpassed, a mare magnum in the poetic creation, he is not the last word spoken by the spirit of beauty. For he is not, save in a couple of brief moments, the Word that was in the Beginning; he did not purpose to identify himself increasingly with the direct poetic counterpart of the archetypal Vision that seeks to find tongue in the cosmic flux. Through self-fulfilment in various terms and disguises of consciousness, this counterpart moves towards the profoundest, closest, most comprehensive revelation of its own beauty, and through all sovereign speech and rhythm till now it has but prepared the "things to come". However, an instrument as constantly and as abundantly intuitive as Shakespeare must be found for that revelation before human poetry can realise the plenitude which has been the dream of the wide world's prophetic Soul.
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