A BOOK OF THE MOMENT

THE SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE

[COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE

New York Times.]

The Sonnets of Shakespeare. Edited from the Quarto of 1609, with Introduction and Notes by Professor T. C. Tucker. (Cambridge University Press. Macmillan and Co. 17s. 6d. net.) To my mind this is by far the best book that has been written on the sonnets. It is not only learned and authoritative from the point of view of history and the text, but is written with an admirable mixture of good feeling and good sense. One seems to be listening to an able doctor of medicine talking about a patient of genius supposed by some people to have gone off his head and shown signs of intellectual and moral depravity, if not worse, in his behaviour. The doctor by his wiser diagnosis shows how false has been the gossip and the common talk, and what a perfectly easy way there is out of the labyrinth of vituperation and suspicion if you will only see things as they are, that is, without prejudice and fear, and with the

sympathy of comprehension. He does not try to make a saint of the patient whose condition he is discussing, but

he very properly will not listen to the " devil-incarnate " view, or the " damnable hypocrite " view, or, again, to the cynic's view, that after all the bulk of our supposed great and noble and virtuous persons are rather below than above the average in the matter of conduct.

I confess that what I admire most in the thousand and one things that have been written about the sonnets in times past is the Preface by Benson, Shakespeare's first critical editor, the man who in the times of Charles the First wrote a preface to his edition of the sonnets. In that preface he in effect tells us that the notable thing about the sonnets is their great clearness and perspicuity. Here are his actual words on the sonnets :—

" In your perusal, you shall find them serene, clear and elegantly plain, such gentle strains as shall recreate and not perplex your brain, no intricate or cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect, but perfect eloquence ; such as will raise your admiration to his praise."

(Benson's Preface to his Edition of the Sonnets, 1640.) This admirable criticism, made only some twenty-five years after Shakespeare's death, was without doubt an entirely sincere description. Yet—such is the Irony of Destiny— men have ever since been perplexing their brains and puzzling their intellects with what they hold to be " the intricate and cloudy stuff " of the sonnets. Which is the true view ?

For myself, I put my money on Benson's horse in the Sonnets Welter Stakes. Perhaps the editor of the reprint went too far ; but I am quite sure that his is the right point of view from which to start reading the sonnets.

Mr. 'Tucker, the able editor of the volume before me, applies to the sonnets—I will not say common-sense methods, because common sense is apt to connote a certain dullness of mind and lack of sensitiveness—but methods which are never forced or devious. He has a fine literary sense and a great deal of human feeling ; but he does not, to use the colloquial phrase, look out for trouble, nor let his mind be clouded by suspicion. He lets the wind of poetry fill his sails and carry him along, and is not always glaring at the horizon and prophesying that a dark cloud will soon envelop him and his author. He will not make heavy weather of it when the sun is shining. At the same time, though he refuses the tragic view, he is always serious, and examines fairly any theory which is not purely fantastic.

Upon the great problem whether the sonnets are auto- biographical there will be endless dispute. For myself, I incline to the belief that there was an autobiographical framework—an excuse for all the Pembroke sonnets and for many of the others, but that this excuse, though it gave a certain send-off to the poems, by no means con- trolled or confined their development. A poet must have a theme, or a text if you will ; but the preacher in verse does not stick very closely to it. This is specially the case when the poet is also a dramatist.

But a poet, whether dramatist, or elegist, or sonateer, or whatever he may be, is in the last resort always offering us criticisms of life. He may start with a compliment to his Mend, but very soon, unless he is of the mechanical

kind, he is shooting at far bigger game. Passion in the widest sense is the motive power of the poet ; but true passion is all-embracing. It includes his technique, that is,

his words and phrases, his rhythms and his metres. It includes his thoughts, his philosophy, his view of life and history, and, of course, his view of human relations of all kinds, and, most poignant of all, his sense of love, beauty and the harmonies of existence. He suffers, and possesses his suffering, enjoys and consumes his enjoyment in all places and at all times. He illustrates in every word he uses that art does not live except through passion.

Let anyone who keeps this guiding thought in his brain read through the sonnets. He will, I am sure, feel that Shakespeare is all the time exulting in his artistry. He may have had Pegasus saddled merely to deliver a message of devotion to his dear Mend, Lord Pembroke ; but once the poet is in the saddle he and his horse, cost them what it will, must have a good gallop through the fields of air. It is the poet's gift to take a small or very simple emotion and by his inspiration raise it to the nth degree of magnitude.

And here I ought to say that in this respect I seem to differ from Mr. Tucker. I take the view that Shakespeare was out to please himself, and also, of course, his readers, and that in the sonnets particularly a display of his glorious powers—a display which delighted himself as well as his public—was the main object. Mr. Tucker thinks, however, that " the implied situations are often too peculiar, and

the expression often takes for granted too intimate an understanding of special circumstances, for us to believe

that a poet who was merely ambitious to exhibit his powers. would have written in so indirect and almost cryptic .0 manner." That, of course, may be true in fact, but I eannol admit that it is true as a general principle. Strange stories and strange situations just give the opportunity desired by the poet to show his powers. Splendid subtleties want subtle pegs, and when they do not exist a poet can easily imagine them. Take the case of the Jesuit Casuists and the mar- vellous situations which they weave in their A B C cases. Nobody supposes that because they are so intimate and so intricate, and often so amazingly horrible, that therefore they must be true to life, or personally known to or experienced by the Casuist who argues upon them. That is a very restricted view of the human imagination. It is much easier for a man of imagination to invent plots than to get them out of the records of the law courts.

I should mention here, however, that in a very remarkable series of ten possible arguments, which he gives against the autobiographical interpretation, Mr. Tucker includes the following :-

" (8). The special headings in the 1640 edition indicate that, at least by Benson and most probably by those who made copies of the sonnets, the poems were felt to be of a general application and sporadic in production."

I say ditto to Mr. Benson, the Caroline editor ; but, at the same time, I do not think that his view in the least negatives the autobiographical view—provided that the argument is not pushed too far, or rather, is limited, as it were, to the inspiration of the sonnet, and provided also that it allows that the poem may travel far beyond autobiographical experi- ence in its final developments.

But perhaps I had better try to restate my conclusions. If I may be allowed to do so, I will do it by putting forward certain things that ought to be borne in mind while reading the sonnets :- (1) Shakespeare was a poet, first, last, and all the time.

(2) The sonnets are dramatic exercises, criticisms of life conveyed in the speeches of counsel—a counsel who was the common advocate of all conditions of men, and who therefore saw life from every angle, and saw it without being frightened, or put off, or brutalized, or disgusted, or corrupted, or even depressed by what he saw.

(8) If you are a poet, you must write about somebody, and

also as somebody. No subject, no poem.

(4) The sonnet was the most popular way of writing inti- mate verse in the particular years in which Shakespeare's sonnets were written. Readers between 1590 and 1610 took sonnets as trout take the May-fly. (5) Personal sonnets probably had the kind of attraction for Shakespeare that miniatures sometimes have for the wielders of big brushes, or the attraction which makes conjurers prefer to do their tricks with two collar-studs and a halfpenny instead of with a paraphernalia of mechanical devices.

(6) If there was a scandal in regard to the sonnets, Ben Jonson, who loved scandal, would have poured it into the ears of Drummond of Hawthornden. His satirical poems show that he was particularly fond of handling this kind of accusation.

(7) Again, if Shakespeare's predilections were of the kind which arc alleged,James the First, with his known proclivities, would probably have been defended by Shakespeare after the manner in which he defends Elizabeth. But Shakespeare in a very marked way does not play the advocate for James the First.

(8) People in the days of Elizabeth, rightly or wrongly, regarded friendship in a perfectly different way from that in which we regard it now. They considered that love, though " love without appetite," might exist and did exist between members of the same sex, and in so sublimated and high a degree that it became even greater and more worthy than the love " twixt sex dividual." Love friendship was thus raised to an heroic height. It was, however, most strictly differenti- ated, as we see from satirists like Ben Jonson, from animalism and lust.

One word more. The sonnets remain some of the greatest and most inspiring things in literature. Shakespeare as he wandered through life threw off sonnets just as he threw off plays. Thorpe (T. T.) gathered up the sonnets and strung them together for us just as the editors of the First Folio gathered up the plays. In both cases the theory spinners and the critics must remember that we owe more to accident than to design, and that we must not look too narrowly in the dark room for the black cat which is not there. I would never put a prohibition upon any sort of enquiry, literary or scientific, legal or political. Search, investigation, study are a prerogative of the human spirit, to deny which is a crime.

When it comes to Shakespeare, the better way in estimating and understanding him seems to me to be by sympathy, by rendering oneself sensitive to the Shakespearean mode of attack, and, above all, by assuming and acting upon the assumption of Shakespeare's universality of understanding. That will serve as a much better guide than trying to discover 'something autobiographical in Shakespeare's best things. It is a fairly safe rule to remember that a poet is least personal when he is most poignant. J. Sr. LOE STRACHEY.