The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

The Educational Value of Great Books.

[William Osborne Brigstocke, 1879-1955, was born in Paris. He married Ruby Helen Craig in 1912; they had three children. He edited an edition of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well in 1904 and helped translate Dietzel's Retaliatory Duties. He was a member of the Unionist Free Trade Club.]

Shakespeare.

"Supposing Shakespeare to have accepted--consciously or not is of little importance--the new terms of the problem which makes character the pivot of dramatic action, and consequently the key of dramatic unity, how far does he succeed?" --J. R. [James Russell] Lowell.

"The series of Shakespeare's dramatic writings is one long study of self-control." --E. [Edward] Dowden.

To say that Shakespeare's works are one long study of self-control is not to imply that he was in any way conscious of the fact; probably he thought as little about it as the twilit Thames of purple or the sunset of its hues. But it does imply that we may--and perhaps profitably--consider all the plays from the single point of view of character. It might be thought that to look at Shakespeare from one point of view would involve false perspective: probably not. Does one wish to study deeply this one book, to become homo unius libri [a man of one book]? Then this one book cannot, I think, be taken as a whole at first,--not even after much study. It is so vast that it must be treated a literature: one distinct point of view must be taken, round which to group the reading; that one point must be, as it were, the centre of the whole nerve system.

"While other poets and dramatists embody isolated phases of character and work inward from the phenomenon to the special law which it illustrates, Shakespeare seems in some strange way unitary with human nature itself, and his own soul to have been the law and life-giving power of which his creations are only phenomena. We justify or criticise the characters of other writers by our memory and experience and pronounce them natural or unnatural; but Shakespeare seems to have worked in the very stuff of which memory and experience are made, and we recognize his truth to Nature by an innate and unacquired sympathy as if he alone possessed the secret of the 'ideal form and universal mould' and embodied genuine types rather than individuals" ([James Russell] Lowell).

The foundation on which one bases such study matters little: it has, so to speak, to support nothing but the scaffolding. Having dwelled and brooded on the plays in the light of self-control, we may forget this support which helped us to fit together the various parts; we may then pursue our inquiry on other lines.

Though I believe that few people who write about Shakespeare can claim to be original, I hold that it may be useful to try sometimes to adopt some particular view and endeavor to understand the full purport of it. In these notes I propose to take a passage from Professor [Edward] Dowden's writings and apply it as fully as possible to all Shakespeare's writings. The passage runs as follows:

"As Shakespeare penetrated farther and farther into the actual facts of our life, he found in those facts more to rouse and kindle and sustain the heart; he discovered more awful and mysterious darkness and also more intense and lovelier light. And it is clearly ascertainable from his plays and poems, that Shakespeare's will grew with advancing age, beyond measure calmer and more strong. Each formidable temptation he succeeded, before he was done with it, in subduing, at least so far as to preclude a fatal result. In the end he obtained serene and indefeasible possession of himself."

Perhaps one of the most mysterious thoughts that ever occurs to thinking beings is the incessant struggle of every human individual, who is on the upward trend, for self-possession. The immortal I AM of the Old Testament still reminds us that we are not. But the mystery of it lies chiefly in the impossibility of our being entirely possessors of ourselves: "we belong to ourselves to make ourselves His"--to paraphrase the well-known words. If we look at the matter from this point of view, taking self-possession, in its very widest sense, to be life's aim, saying, "I live to give myself to God: but I must gain myself before that self is mine to give," if we acknowledge the justice of the outlook, we must confess that no point of view from studying Shakespeare could be more pregnant,--the greatest poet and the greatest theme.

But even if the supreme importance of self-control be denied, no one will say that things have changed, in this respect, since Marcus Aurelius wrote: "I say then, simply and freely choose the highest . . . the end of rational beings is to walk as followers of the reason and the ordinance of the city and commonwealth most high." We understand "city" and "commonwealth" in a wider sense than he did; but, turn where we will, the same fundamental principle underlies all morals: "Gain yourself; it is a gift you need to give to something higher than yourself." What that something higher is, has been felt in different ways. But there is and can only be, one way of understanding ruling one's spirit.

So little is known of Shakespeare's life that we can base no speculations on the few facts we possess. Enough that in his writings we may get an inkling of the way in which he learnt to gain self-mastery. There can be little doubt that we can actually trace the methods by which he practised writing as might the simplest of us. Even he did not attain to his full power without such exercises as the following passage, often quoted:--

"Round hoof'd, short jointed, fetlock shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs. . ." --Venus and Adonis

And it was not only in the actual use of words and phrases that he strove to get full mastery; the disposition of his earlier comedies indicates a close adherence to fixed rules; and probably the main object of the historical plays was the acquisition of more power; of course the subject must have attracted him; but he cannot have been blind to the fact that wrestling with so many difficulties must in the end give him the power to do whatever he might choose.

Turning to Love's Labour's Lost, we find that the first words speak of the "brave conquerors that war against their own desires and the huge army of the world's desires." And not only does the whole play turn upon the resolve they make "not to see ladies--study--fast--not sleep," but it all shows us where the weak point of such an idea must lie.

Most of us have started life--perhaps we start each day--with the firm resolve to do some great impossible thing. This is Quixotic, and to be like Don Quixote is to move in a circle instead of forward and to find in the autumn of one's life that no fruit hangs upon the tree. Others, of course, get up with a more or less avowed determination to do as little as possible. And there is a happy medium, and a reason why this happy medium is so difficult to hit. There is more than the logic of "odds against" to account for the difficulty of this way; namely, the fact that it is a straight path and the one we usually tread is winding and zigzag. We keep wonderfully straight ahead for a while; then we walk awry and wonder what Marcus Aurelius meant when he talked about the "even flow of Nature." Study, of which Shakespeare speaks in this play, is but a type of all our activities:--

"So study evermore is overshot
While it doth study to have what it would
It doth forget to do the thing it should:
And when it hath the thing it hunteth most
'Tis won, as towns with fire; so won, so lost." --Love's Labor Lost, I., i.

The remedy lies in the "staying with patience until the twelvemonth's end," until the sharp wit is matched with a will less blunt, or in the visiting and conversing with misery and suffering--that being the way to choke a gibing spirit. In this connection it is well to remember the brilliant young man Mercutio whose fine follies preluded the grim tragedy of love. Mercutio dies with a jest on his lips: he dies without a glimpse of the real beauty and earnestness of life: he passes away, virtually, without having existed, whereas his friend Romeo was to live an intense life in the few hours that elapsed between his own death and Mercutio's.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the absence of self-control is answerable for nearly all the plot, such as it is. In Romeo and Juliet self-control is swept away by the force of love's torrent. So it is here. But in the former case it was a love almost divine: in this case love is not without some touch of ridiculous--a difference which emboldens us to criticise what in its nobler shape we could not but wonder at and fear. Not without significance is it that in this imaginative play we find the pregnant dialogue:--

"Hippolyta: This is the silliest stuff that e'er I heard.
"Theseus: The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are not worse, if imagination amend them,
"Hippolyta: It must be your imagination then and not theirs."

There is nothing paradoxical in this. The imagination--of all faculties with which we are blessed--must be ours. Some people are apt to think that "imagination" is a gift: it is nothing of the kind. It is as much to be acquired as the power to read and write Greek. As there are degrees in the latter accomplishment, so there are degrees in the former. Most people, who try, end by being able to read Greek fluently: others manage to do what some could never do--write good Greek fluently. And likewise, all of us can understand the conceptions of the imagination. Some create such conceptions. Why should Dr. [Samuel] Johnson have been likely to make his small fish talk like whales? Probably--in the case of average people it would be evidently--because there was a lack of knowledge of the way in which small fish ought to talk. But fish do not talk. That is just where we need the imagination. How can one say that small fish should talk in such and such a way if no one ever heard them talk? And yet there is a right way and a wrong way. Again; why are the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream so infinitely superior to any other fairies? How do we know that "the queen and all her elves" are not "palpable-gross" moonshine--a

"weak and idle theme
No more yielding but a dream."

Why ask? Any child would answer: "Because the fairies are real." And they are real because they do what fairies--if there were fairies--would necessarily do. Atheists might say, men believe in God because great thinkers have imagined and described God as He ought to be if He existed, and have therefore made Him real. And this faculty for creating things as they should be if they existed, is one each one of us may cultivate in a more or less limited way. Try and represent an impersonation of Virtue rather by drawing or verbal description. On what does success depend, if not on the stock of observation we possess respecting the essential qualities of Virtue and the suitable elements of personality with which to express them? We are sometimes startled to find something we had never noticed in a room in which we have often gone. Giving a detailed description of something we see every day--say the street we live in--is a good way of realising our lack of observation. Some are much quicker than others, of course; but all can observe more or less quickly and accurately. And on sound observation, well directed, well controlled, depends that wonderful faculty--the imagination.

In All's Well that Ends Well we have one central figure, Helen; [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge has called her Shakespeare's loveliest heroine. By sheer dint of will (tempered indeed and aided by the power of love) she steadily advanced towards her object and attained it. This play, superficially so similar to Measure for Measure, is in essence quite different. In Measure for Measure we at once enter an atmosphere of sin: the idea of sin and purity is the shade and light of the whole play. In All's Well, on the other hand, the vision of sin, though no doubt revolting at first, is quickly dispelled by the more brilliant picture of Helen's moral courage. We may abuse or excuse Bertram to our heart's content: but about Helen there can be but one opinion,--she achieves what seems at first impossible. Not that she starts out with fixed intent to do certain things: she merely goes with faith, making use of all that happens to come to her hand, never flinching from anything, however difficult, provided only it promise to help forward the one object she has at heart. We too meet with what seem to be insuperable obstacles; and here we have Shakespeare's idea regarding the way in which such difficulties should be faced. Only those who set out with the full understanding that the only stable and indispensable thing is their aim, that anything which bars their access to it must be got rid of or "turned" in a way usually suggested by chance occurrences--only those can hope to win.

Quite another phase of self-control appears in the Merchant of Venice. There we have a glimpse of that old self-possession which we recognise as such a terrible weapon in the hands of an unscrupulous man. Iago is perhaps the most terrible example in Shakespeare: to act as such men do demands a moral self-control analogous to that rigidity of all the muscles which is required of gymnasts. There is one important point to notice in connection with Shylock and Iago. Do we sympathise with either? Evidently with Shylock a little; with Iago not at all. And the reason seems to be that Iago has so absolute a self-control--it scarcely bends even at the incarnation of the power of evil he is. The terrible force he derives from his absolute self-mastery makes him abhorrent to us. Shylock on the other hand, though terribly self-possessed in the first act, gives way in the third act to the grief for the loss of his jewels--and his daughter: that, at any rate, has a touch of human weakness in it. So has the savage whetting of his knife in the law courts. We should not have felt one grain of sympathy had he stood in silence, patiently waiting for his pound of Christian flesh. Perhaps it is not erring on the side of exaggeration to say that the way in which we are all repelled by Iago, morally shocked by the very existence of such a monster, is a proof of the efficacy of, and the necessity for, self-mastery. We feel shocked, because we say: "here is a man who has absolute self-mastery: and he is devoted to evil." The inference is so obvious that one is apt to overlook it. And it is natural to infer, even if we did not know it already, that, if Iago is able to bring goodness to ruin, it follows that the self-possessed who gives himself to good is likewise able to bring evil to ruin.

And if in all these plays we find the results of force or weakness of will, it must not be supposed that the evil-punished-and-the-good-rewarded ending is in any sense meant to be a moral lesson, any more than are the facts of daily life. The natural course of events is a frequent warning to man--it may for awhile be heeded: but in a lapse of time proportionate to the emotion caused by nature's voice, the former looseness of moral discipline will return, the same risks will be run. The lack of self-control is to blame for much of the misfortune we hear of in every-day life and yet the knowledge of this fact has, practically speaking, little effect on us: and in the same way the drama, which is at its best a reflection and an echo of life, emphasizes the same danger with much the same result. One great advantage, however, it possesses: it can and should show a complete whole--whereas, in life, we cannot as a rule understand what is happening and why?--because the causes and the springs of action are unknown to us, and character but half revealed. And to close these notes I venture to quote at length a passage from [Archibald Phillip Primrose] Lord Rosebery's [Napoleon:] The Last Phase. I do so not only because the passage gives a very vivid explanation of how Napoleon overstepped himself and lost his balance, but also because I think the passage indicated in a way that is far beyond me, the spirit in which Shakespeare's plays should be viewed with regard to self-mastery.

"Into a career of a score of years he crowded his own dazzling career, his conquests, his triumphant assault on the old world. In that brief space we see the lean, hungry conqueror swell into the sovereign, and then into the sovereign of sovereigns. Then comes the catastrophe. He loses the balance of his judgment and becomes a curse to his own country and to all others. He cannot be still himself or give mankind an instant of repose. His neighbour's landmarks become playthings to him . . . he manipulates them for the mere love of moving them. His island enemy is on his nerves: he sees her everywhere; he strikes her blindly and wildly. And so he produces universal unrest, universal hostility, the universal sense of his incompatibility with all established society. But he pursues his path as if possessed, as if driven by the inward sting of some burning devil. He has ceased to be sane. The intellect and energy are still there, as it were in caricature: they have become monstrosities. Body and mind are affected by the prolonged strain to be more than mortal. Then there is the inevitable collapse; and at St. Helena we are watching with curious compassion the reaction and decline . . . In the first period of his consulate he was an almost ideal ruler. He was firm, sagacious, far-seeing, energetic, just. He was, moreover, what is not of less importance, ready and anxious to learn. He acquired and assimilated all necessary information with extraordinary rapidity. But when he had learned all that his councillors could teach him, he realized his immeasurable superiority to all men with whom he had been brought in contact. He arrived at the conclusion that his genius was as unfailing and supreme in the art of statesmanship as in the art of war, and that he was as much the first ruler as the first captain of the world. That conviction inspired him with an ambition, at first vague, but growing as it was fed; at last immeasurable and impossible. Nothing seemed impracticable, nothing illusory. Why should it? There seemed nothing in the world to check a second Alexander, even one more reckless and enterprising than he whose career had inspired his own boyish dreams.

". . .Whome God wishes to destroy, says the adage, He first deprives of sanity. And so we see Napoleon, with incredible self-delusion, what of insight, or both, preparing his own destruction by dealing with men as if they were chequers, and moving them about the board according to his momentary whim, without a thought of their passions, or character, or traditions; in a word, by ignoring human nature . . . But this was not the only cause. There was another factor. He was deeply imbued with the passion of warfare-- . . . war . . . the gambling of the gods . . . And Napoleon's character was profoundly affected by the gambling of warfare . . . And so, even in his most desperate straits, he always cherishes the gambler's hope that fortune, or the star of destiny, or whatever it be called, may yet produce another transformation, and restore all his losses by a sudden stroke . . .

"We hold, then, that the Emperor had lost the balance of his faculties long before he finally fell. But this is not to say that he was mad: except, perhaps, in the sense of Juvenal's bitter apostrophe to Hannibal. Sanity is a relative term. Napoleon at his outset was phenomenally sane. His cool, calculating shrewdness and his intense common sense were at least in proportion to his vast, but still bounded, ambition. From such singular sanity to the limited of insanity there is an immeasurable distance. Napoleon's impaired sanity was superior to the judgment of the vast majority of mankind; but--here lay the fatal change--it has ceased to bear any proportion to, or exercise any control over, his ambition. When that check was removed he was a lost man."

The passage is remarkably apposite, I venture to think. Each of Shakespeare's tragedies is "a brief space" and then comes the catastrophe. Then, following in the same footsteps, we may investigate step by step the various phases of the character which is the pivot of the action. Note how he passes rapidly through them to the end--"and at St. Helena we are watching. . ." Then beginning again: "In the first period. . ." And, last, one more cause --"he had a passion." And just as the steps are traced which lead over that "immeasurable distance which lies between such singular sanity to the limits of insanity" so we may trace the steps that separate Romeo, Rosaline's lover, from the "desperate man who sets up his everlasting rest" in Juliet's tomb, so we may trace the fate of Lear, Hamlet and Othello, and many of, if not all, the other figures of Shakespeare's fathomless creation.

Each time we turn anew to Shakespeare's works, intending to study them afresh, we come, as it were, to an unknown country: the surface may be familiar: but the moment we commence to dig, some unexpected treasure reveals itself. I have but suggested the material that is to be dug for in the earlier plays: compared with some of the later plays the treasure is not deeply hidden. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona, for instance, we can watch the inevitable consequences of a certain flow in the character of Porteus. On the other hand, when Valentine forgives, we are reminded of the words of Prospero:--

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason, 'against my fury
Do I take part."

This suggests a comparison of the two plays: and to this we may revert in dealing with The Tempest.

If every man has, within, a great fund of vitality, the really vital thing is to possess the means of ruling and disposing of that energy. Changing George Meredith's words we might say: "In tragic life no villain need be. We are betrayed by what is uncontrolled." And however trite these phrases may be, and however conventional and stale the whole treatment of this theme, I claim that for that very reason there must be some truth in it. And I feel sure that it is a great help to have a fixed base, so to say in attacking so vast a subject of study as Shakespeare; and I know that the interest becomes more and more engrossing the deeper we go. The most casual must realize the interest of such a question as: "How far was Lear's character to blame for the catastrophe?" And I can confidently assert that nearly all the other plays, viewed from this standpoint, furnish topics as interesting, if not always quite as complicated.

Typed by Sarah Delgado, Sep. 2024; Proofread by LNL, Jan. 2025