BOOKS.

MR. SIDNEY LEE ON SHAKESPEARE.*

SHAKESPEARE is a standing dish at the literary board ; and to this no one can take objection. Apart from the splendid flavour of the fare, the variety of ways in which it is pre- pared is in itself sufficient to animate the most jaded palate.

Each critical cook has his own favourite receipt; so that one can obtain one's Shakespeare with every conceivable dressing, from sauce piquante to melted butter. Mr. Sidney Lee, how- ever, employs a style of cookery which contrasts strongly with all the others. He rejects every kind of condiment; and attempts to serve up Shakespeare au naturel. The endeavour is a laudable one; but it is sometimes a little difficult not to

regret the accustomed sauces ; and, after all, is not even the most succulent of meats liable to be tasteless without a pinch

or two of salt P In other words, Mr. Lee, in his hatred of rhetoric, of sentimentalism, and of "gush," is sometimes carried too far towards the opposite extremes of the frigid and the commonplace. In his new volume of essays on Shakespearean subjects he is always interesting and in- structive, but he is very rarely sympathetic. Milton, in his epitaph on Shakespeare, addressing that "admirable dramatic poet" in a somewhat obscure metaphor, says :—

"Thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,

Dost make us marble with too much conceiving" ;

and the words ought surely to be taken to heart by Mr. Leo. After quoting the lines— "We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep,"

Mr. Lee tells us that they are "first-rate poetry." And after an extract from John of Gaunt's dying speech on England,

concluding- " This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world "-

he observes that "the last line identifies with the patriotic instinct the aspiration of a people to deserve well of foreign opinion." What has happened to Mr. Lee's " fancy " P And is there not some danger (to use Milton's phrase) of his " conceiving " too much ?

Mr. Lee's essays, however, have a great deal more in them than an occasional unpleasant hardness of tone. They are full

of matter, lucidly arranged and carefully substantiated. They are serious and scholarly contributions to the literature of

Shakespearean criticism. Several of the essays are concerned with the vexed question of the presentation of Shakespeare's plays on the modern stage; two of them discuss some aspects of Shakespeare's philosophy; and the remainder deal with a

variety of subjects connected with Shakespeare's life and works. Among these one of the most interesting papers is a brief sketch of the history of French opinion upon Shake-

speare. Here Mr. Lee touches upon so many suggestive points that every reader must wish that he had seen his way towards expanding his bare outline into a detailed expasition

of the subject. As it is, the extreme compression of the essay has rendered its treatment of much that is important so super- ficial as to be occasionally misleading. Is it quite fair, for instance, to say that Voltaire's "method of teaching Shake- speare to his countrymen" was "characteristically cynical" P It is true that at first sight the violent invectives of Voltaire's. old age stand out in striking contrast with the tributes of his earlier years; but the more the facts are examined, the more obvious it becomes that Voltaire's attitude towards Shakespeare was really consistent throughout his life. His view was a simple one. Shakespeare was a writer of great

• Shakespeare and the Modern Stags, with other Buns. By Sidney Lee. London: John Murray. [9s. nat.] force, but absolutely devoid of taste. At the beginning of his career, when Shakespeare NM unknown in Franca, it was only natural that lie should wish to impress his countrymen with the merits of the English genius. To explain his subsequent change of front by imputing to him a vulgar jealousy of Shakespeare's fame is an explanation which, though it satisfied Horace Walpole, should not have satisfied Mr. Lee. Voltaire's anger was aroused, not by a fear for his own laurels, but by a genuine disgust for what seemed to him a silly craze over a foreign barbarian. The genius of the barbarian was neither here nor there ; he was a barbarian, and to place him above the masters of French drama was to commit an inexcusable outrage upon literary taste. And, from his own point of view, Voltaire was certainly in the right. As Mr. Lee points out, the worship which eighteenth-century Frenchmen bestowed on Shakespeare was indiscriminating in the highest degree. They went into ecstasies over Othello, while they converted the speeches of Iago into stilted alexandrines, and trans- formed the last act of the play into "a dazzling scene of domestic bliss." Their adaptations showed clearly enough that they recognised, no less than Voltaire, that their idol had feet of clay; they believed, just as he believed, that no tragedy which disregarded the " unities " and contained the word " handkerchief " could be a great work of art. They accordingly concocted a Shakespeare of their own,—a Shakespeare who had read Aristotle, wore a full-bottomed wig, and never spoke of a handkerchief as anything but a gage d'arnour. Voltaire was far more honest; he started from the same premisses, and arrived at a very different conclusion: Shakespeare was a preposterous mountebank, whom it was dangerous to imitate and foolish to applaud. And the conclusion was logical ; it was only the premisses which were mistaken.

• In his discussion of the relations between the Shakespearean drama and the stage of to-day Mr. Lee throws himself vigorously into a familiar controversy. He argues in favour of the establishment of a theatre supported by public funds ; and his argument is powerfully reinforced by an acquaintance with the methods of • Continental stage production too rarely possessed by English critics. Indeed, Mr. Lee puts his own case so well that it is unfortu- nate that he should have paid so little attention to the case of his opponents. Nothing is so unconvincing in an argument as to ignore the other side; and the unbiassed reader of Mr. Lee's pages soon begins to wonder why so much powder and shot should be wasted in order to establish a position which (to judge from Mr. Lee's attitude) nobody could be foolish enough to dispute. There is, in fact, a great deal to be said on both sides of the question. The problem is highly complex one, for it involves not only the determina- tion of some of the most debated of aesthetic principles,, but also the application of these principles to the workings of practical life. Without attempting an adequate discussion of these obscure matters, it may, nevertheless, be worth while to point out a few of the difficulties which surround Mr. Lee's main contention,—that some form of State-aided theatre is essential to the proper production of Shakespearean drama. Put briefly, Mr. Lee's view is that, in London at any rate, the only effective presentations of Shakespeare are of a spectacular nature ; that this form of production is, from the literary point of view, altogether unsatisfactory; and that the only way•of escaping the incubus of the " mnsico-scenic " method is to adopt the Continental system of a subsidised theatre devoted to the production of literary plays. But, in the first place, is not Mr. Lee's estimate of the resources of London managers unwarrantably low P No one who was fortunate enough to see Mr. Forbes Robertson's Othello or Lir. H. B. Irving's Hamlet—to mention only two instances— would be inclined to agree with Mr. Lee in his sweeping assertion that "the pleasure which recent Shakespearean revivals offer to the spectator reaches him mainly through the eye." This, however, is a min.or point; for, even if it were admitted that Shakespeare 'had never been acted so well in London as in Vienna, would it follow that the Viennese example of a municipal theatre ought to be unhesitatingly followed by London ? Mr. Lee wishes to see Shakespeare enthroned in a London playhouse just as Moliere is enthroned at the Theatre Francais. But the parallel suggests what is really the fundamental objection to Mr. Lee's scheme. The playa of Moliere must from their very nature be acted in one way, and in one way alone ; the conditions .of their perform- ance are determined not only by centuries of tradition, but

by the universal agreement of French artists and critics; they are, in short, "classical" plays. But the plays of Shakespeare are no less obviously romantic ; they are woven upon a texture of poetry, of imagination, and of coloured atmosphere which is amenable to no restriction and no law; and to reduce them to a uniformity of presentment is to run grave risks of committing "a fallacy in proportion." But it is clear that this is precisely what an official theatre would tend to do. It would give us a Shakespeare more cultivated perhaps than any we have seen, but a Shakespeare in uniform. And is a Shakespeare in uniform really Shakespeare at all? At any rate, it seems open to doubt whether,, for, the sake of such a consummation, it is worth while sacrificing the system which we already possess,—a system by which the lover of Shake- speare may look upon his master in every variety of aspect, from the severe simplicity of archaism to the gorgeous elaboration of modern scenic art.

The two essays upon Shakespeare's philosophy are the least successful in the book. The account which Mr. Lee gives of the political teaching contained in the plays is little more than a collection of truisms. Patriotism is a good thing, but it should not blind us to the faults of our country ; it is our duty to obey constituted authority, but we must remember that power and virtue are not always the same things ; social distinctions have their uses, but we should never forget that E'ngs are often as unhappy as ordinary persons. Need we go to Shakespeare for these propositions P Or to Mr. Lee to learn that Shakespeare believed them ? The truth is that Mr. Lee, like all searchers after a Shakespearean philosophy, has

been unable to avoid the dilemma of saying either too little or too much. And, if he has said too little upon Shakespeare's

politics, he has erred in the opposite direction over Shake- speare's outlook upon human life. Thus, when he asserts that, in Shakespeare's view, "wavering, impressionable emotion is a main constituent a woman's being," one cannot help wondering how such a generalisation as that could have been

held by the creator of Imogen and Cordelia. Again, Mr. Lee states that, in Shakespeare's opinion, "the self-sufficing, imperturbable will is the ideal possession, beside which all else in the world is valueless," and. that the best of men is

"Free from gross passion, or of mirth or anger,

Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood."

Upon what evidence is this statement based ? Mr. Lee does not say; but it may be pointed out that his description of Shakespeare's ideal man corresponds precisely with the character of Octa.vius in Antony and Cleopatra. We must suppose, then, that Shakespeare would have judged Octavius to be a far better man than Hamlet. If that is so, Shake- speare's views as to his own. characters must have been

singularly paradoxical. Even more arbitrary is the short paragraph in which Mr. Lee lays down the doctrine that

Shakespeare was "at heart,. an optimist." This is a mere assumption, for the truth of which Mr. Lee does not even attempt to produce proof. "There is some .soul of goodness in things evil" is a maxim which "sounds as if it came straight from Shakespeare's lips." Why does not Mr. Lee tell us how we are to recognise such "sounds," and how we are to know that these words, for instance- . " As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport"— are not also of the very utterance of Shakespeare P No!

Such speculations are indeed "empty as air." "We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still." There is no passing behind those impenetrable portals. It is better to scatter incense than to construct theories; and, instead of seeking the unknowable, let us simply admit with Land.or that—

"In poetry there is but one supreme. Though there are many angels round, his throne, Mighty and beauteous; but his face is. hid."