XIII

HAMLET1

I

SHAKESPEARE died just three centuries ago, on the twenty-third of April, 1616. He diedand was forgotten, we may say, for a century, until in 1709 and 1710 Nicholas Rowe published the first approximately complete edition of his works. Then he came to life again, to a life more intense and more vivid than the life he had lived in the rough, confused age of the Virgin Queen. This new life of his has endured for two hundred years. It was initiated by a preRomantic impulse; it was carried to universal fame on that wave of Romanticism whose ripples have not yet subsided, that wave whereby Shakespeare was made to seem a fellow-citizen of Goethe, a brother of Schlegel, a contemporary of Victor Hugo.

But now a second night hangs over Shakespeare; this third centenary is perhaps the beginning of a second and a truer death. Today,

1 Written in 1916, for the third centenary of Shakespeare's death.

silencing for a moment, with the arrogance of fame, the furious reveilles of the world-wide war, he is finding in England and elsewhere men and women to repeat the centenary formulas of love and admiration, each according to his rite and his power, by erudition or exclamation, by rhetoric or anecdote. But we are by no means sure that a hundred years from now Shakespeare will be as dominant in human consciousness as habit and tradition have made him for our own generation.

Nor does it avail to say that Shakespeare is modern and eternal, that his restlessness is our restlessness, that his fear is our fear. For we are changing, and those who are to come after us will change still more. Day by day we are becoming harder to satisfy, more refined, more discontented. Fewer things give us pleasure, and fewer still will please us as time goes on: a painful condition, but a condition that is inevitable if we are to create more than we have found, if we are to add new treasure to the inheritance we have received from those who, though dead, are yet immortal.

We are growing away from Shakespeare. That terrible old dramatic world of his, compact of grandeur and nocturnal dread, is beginning to make us smile. There is too much machinery and scene-painting in his work. We of today want things in essence. His fancy, even when it soars most wildly, is fashioned and controlled

by the specific social forms of theatrical action. His lyric, even when it seems to win an independent life, is the poetry of an alchemist-ornate, Parnassian. It tends toward the madrigal and the tour de force. And we want things in their essence. The drama is composite. It is the first historic form of spoken art—it derives from magic pantomimes, from primitive ceremonies, from sacred mysteries-and it is therefore the most limited and the least legitimate of arts. It carries with it so many social, external, material, and mythical weights and motives that it cannot completely absorb us and convince us. Tragedy presupposes faith-some sort of faith, whatsoever it may be, even an irreligious faith -it presupposes a system of morality, a system of law, and the possibility of opposition between life and law and between life and faith. Death and tragedy spring from the clash between passion and discipline. But today we have lost faith and morality. We have no law, no discipline: the myths and divinities of all the ages are dead and turned to clay. We are beyond struggle, beyond stageable tragedy, beyond the capacity for sharing with eager passion in the old dramatic antitheses. The drama is receding from us, and with it Shakespeare too recedes. The very qualities that have brought him greatness and glory hitherto will hereafter bring forget

ess and disesteem. We of today feel poetry,

that poetry which is absolutely poetic and intimately alive even in its unspoken implications -we feel the lyric. Other forms of literary art, narrative or dramatic, will doubtless appeal for centuries to the higher and lower castes of the incompetent, but as the generations pass they will find less and less approval from those few sensitive minds which after all are the only ones that count, since they are the only ones able to create poetry or understand it. ·

Shakespeare, a portent of dead ages, is not great enough or pure enough in his lyricism to entitle him to immortality even in anthologies: he moves within the sphere of dramatic action and suffering, in those ambiguous, impure, and external forms which are steadily sinking in esteem. For us the death of Shakespeare is beginning now.

II

But Shakespeare is still great, so devotees and conservatives will reply, in his power of penetrating and representing the human soul, of revealing through the torments of his characters -the infamy of man, the blind ferocity of fate, the depths and the terrors of life. Such is, or should be, the judgment of those (and they are in the majority) who have not yet reached the most radical conclusions, the most lacerating and

irremediable solutions. But Shakespeare's psychology and philosophy no longer have their former power for one who has undergone the desolation of the modern spiritual hell, and has won back for himself, stone by stone, and blade of grass by blade of grass, a corner in the cold and cruel paradise of perfect knowledge. Yet the majority of mankind has not yet come even to the point which Shakespeare reached, and is content therefore to wonder and to worship. For the development of the human spirit does not proceed in lines of contemporary parallelism: brutes of the Neanderthal were at large in the very years when Plato lifted his youthful to the face of Socrates and listened to his holy virtuosities.

eyes

I am thinking in particular of Hamlet. Hamlet has been regarded by critics and by the public as the most profound of Shakespeare's plays. Historians, actors, and dilettantes consider it his masterpiece. I, too, many years ago, had a languid fondness for the Prince of Denmark, who returned my affection. How many nights we spent in each other's company! How many fantastic and exciting conversations we enjoyed which are not to be found in any printed text! Hamlet was a brother to me, more than a brother. Side by side we delved, and side by side discovered some of those mysteries that are not dreamt of in human philosophies.