SHAKESPEARE AND THE BIBLE.
LIVERYBODY is laying hands on some scrap or scraps of .E./ Shakespeare. Even Messrs. Moses and Son are found amongst the number of his admirers, and have issued a testimonial highly honourable to him, containing a eatena of passages to prove that Shakespeare understood clothes, and that their estab- lishment at the Minories may in some sense be regarded as a train- ing-school for the study of the poet. They quote the saying of the foes of Coriolanus, that "his clothes made a false report of him," as a proof of Shakespeare's value for the expressive power of clothes. At all events they hold thatclothes make a true report of Shakespeare, and they gather up conscientiously the references to clothing from every corner of his dramas. The purveyors of the dinner at Strat- ford-on-Avon the other day seem to have indulged in a similar fancy. With beautiful and classical taste they selected a line from Shakes- peare to illustrate each heading in the bill of fare, enhancing the flavour of their "Roast Turkeys" with the appropriate quotation, "Why, here he comes, swelling like a Turkey-cock" (Henry V., v.1); and of their "Dessert cakes, jellies, and creams," with the happy allusion, "The Queen of Curds and Cream" ( Winter's Tale, iv. 3). Again, a book has just been published by a Mr. Sidney Beady on" Shakespeare's garden," in which we have a perfect index to the vegetable physiology of his dramas, with the true botanical names appended and the virtues of the flowers discussed. And in the higher regions of thought the same scramble for signs of his approval is going on. Nobody, indeed, as far as we know, has yet attempted to extract a metaphysical system out of Shakespeare, though one gentleman not long ago proved in an ingenious anct voluminous work that a deep ethnology was the secret principle of his plays. But two books have been published within the last week to show that Shakespeare reflects very closely the teaching of the Bible, and is minutely familiar with the slightest peculiarities of its idiom and thought, —the one by the Bishop of St. Andrew's (Dr. „Wordsworth), who last Sunday preached one of the Shakespeare sermons at Stratford,—the other by the Vicar of Trowse Newton
and Lakenham (Rev. A. Pownall). Even the Archbishop of Dublin (Dr. Trench), who preached the great Shakespeare sermon last Sunday at Stratford, appears by his speech at the dinner to have claimed for Shakespeare a very close sympathy with the spirit of the Church. "There was," he is reported to have said, "an intimate connection between all true art, and therefore especially between the art of ...,liakespare, and faith, and if art be dissevered from that faith it must ultimately perish." Dr. Wordsworth goes much further His works," he says, "have been called a secular Bible ; my object is to show that while they are this they are also something more, being saturated with Divine Wisdom, such as could be del ived only from the very Bible itself."
Now, how far is this really true? Of course no one who really appreciates the wisdom and beauty of the greatest of Eng- lishmen will doubt that his picture of earth and man does, implicitly, involve a recognition of that divine law of harmony without which human nature would be a mere rank garden of wild passions and lawless tastes. No one who understands Shakespeare doubts the thorough healthiness of his imagination ; and a healthy imagination implies a natural obedience to the laws of health. That Shakespeare had studied the Bible well too we do not doubt. It would be very wonderful, if one who had so thoroughly ransacked all the popular literature of his day had omitted to study by far the greatest poems and the sublimest traditions open to him, to say nothing of their spiritual authority for his conscience and his faith. But having admitted thus much, we yet think it would be almost impossible to find any great Christian poet whose type of imagination is so entirely and singularly contrasted with that of the Bible,—or in whom that peculiar faculty which, for want of a better term, we are forced to call the thirst for the supernatural, is more remarkably absent. If, indeed, Mr. Manse's theory that the knowledge of God as given by the Bible is intended to be only "regulative" knowledge, repressive of evil in us, telling us what God wishes us to do or desist from, but not even professing to show Him to us as He is,—if this were true, then perhaps it might be true that Shakespeare's writings are "saturated with Divine Wisdom such as could be derived only from the very Bible itself." But as we apprehend that no criticisn misrepresents the Bible more ludicrously than this, as we take it to be the essence of the Hebrew prophecy to awaken and satisfy the insatiable thirst for the infinite and supernatural fountain of life, as we believe that the key-note of everygreat Hebrew poem is that rapture of spirit which sees all nature and humanity as a sort of earthly transparency through which the divine Will is shining with an almost intolerable glory,—as we hold that unrivalled as is the poetry of the Bible, there is no such thing as conscious art from its opening to its close, unless it be in very elementary germ in the drama of Job and the Song of Solomon,— and as we can see little or no vestige of these biblical characteristics, posi- tive or negative, in Shakespeare,—it seems to us that it would be impossible to find a more remarkable example of a genius wide as the world, yet not in any sense above the world, than our great English poet's. The one English characteristic which Shakespeare has not represented in his poems is the capacity for that intenser religious enthusiasm which, though deep in the national heart, only bursts out now and again under very special conditions. Even Goethe, a thorough humanist, has his study of the "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul ;" but we do not think there is a trace in all Shakespeare of any even imaginative interest in that state of mind which habitually lives in this life as not of it, which feeds on the unseen beauty in preference to feeding on the forms and colours of this fair universe, which rejoices in the Puritan symbolism of Bunyan or the Catholic ecstasies of Saint Theresa or Saint Francis. Shakespeare's poetry seems to us to image, not the slightest reaction against Roman Catholicism,—he was barn a generation too late for that,— .but the first luxuriance of the English imagination rooted deep in the rich mould of the Roman Catholic Church after the direct shadow of its supernatural authority was removed. Shakespeare's was probably that most genial and least intense of all faiths,—the faith of the moderate reformed Catholic, which repudiated the authority of the Roman See, and adopted with hearty sincerity the national principle, but retained as the largest, most various, and least incisive form of popular creed, that easy, many-coloured, and richly artistic Christianity which had gradually adapted itself to the shortcomings of all classes of the laity, because it provided a natural relief for every anguish of the conscience and every form of human disappointment or sorrow. It was a faith which fell in rich folds over the trembling spirit of man, covering and protecting the nakedness and the sores which the Put itan insisted on relentlessly exposing and which the ascetic Romanist still more relentlessly
aggravated by the private use of moral scourge and horse-hair. No doubt Shakespeare read his Bible, but he assimilated it in his own fashion, quenching its tongues of fire in the lambent lightnings of his fancy, and veiling once more the terrible sunlight of its personal revelations behind that permanent bank of human mist and cloud which multiplies the beauty, while it diminishes the glory, of the -eternal sun.
The very essence of Shakespeare's genius—its dramatic nicety—
is in remarkable contrast to the poetry of the Bible. One-half of the modern mistakes in criticizing the Bible are caused by for- getting that it is no part of the purpose of revelation to distinguish between the various shades of human character, but only to mani- fest that eternal light by which all human character must eventually be tried. The Bible distinguishes broadly between the
wicked and the good, but takes no pains to distinguish kinds of .excellence or frailty from each other. The sympathy of the Hebrew poet is with the Infinite righteousness, and trying to gaze upon that sun and to reflect its glory in his heart, all conscious distinction between the various kinds of human goodness or human shortcomings is utterly foreign to his thought. With Shakespeare, on the contrary, it is just the opposite. Human nature is his absolute starting-point. And though the depth and scope of his knowledge of the human heart evidently come from something deeper than mere observation, and would seem to imply a direct intuition of the image of God within man, yet it always seems to be rather the image of God which he apprehends than the
humiliating touch of the divine mind itself upon our own,--some exquisitely developed and statuesque embodiment of human perfec- tions "how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and. admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a God, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,"—instead of that human nature which the Psalmist, thinking of God, wondered that God had taken any ac- count of, "what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him ? for thou haat made him a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honour." Nothing can be more different than the key-note of Shakespeare's poetry and that of the Bible. In Shakespeare human nature receives fresh touches of glory from the divine, but in the Bible it seems to shrink in abasement before the intense grandeur of the beatific vision. The difference between the two is just the difference between the Psalmist's "Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me : such knowledge is too won- derful for me : it is high, I cannot attain unto it," of which the key-note is self-abasement,—and Hamlet's
"Our indiscretion sometimes serves4us well
When our deep plots do fail; and that should teach us There's a divinity cloth shape our ends, Rough-hew them how we will,"
—where the Prince gains consolation for the weakness of human nature in thinking of the protecting providence of God. One of the clerical writers on the Biblical character of Shakespeare, the Bishop of St. Andrew's, quotes a passage from Shakespeare to prove that the frequent metaphors of the Old Testament which describe God as " riding upon the heavens" and "flying upon the wings of the wind" had engraved themselves on the imagination of the great dramatist. His proof is this speech of Romeo's to Juliet :—
" Oh ! speak again, bright angel, for thou art As glorious to this night, being o'er my head, As is a winged messenger of Heaven Unto the white upturned wondering eyes Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him, When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds, And sails upon the bosom of the air."
Whether the Bishop be right or not in supposing the metaphor suggested to Shakespeare by the Bible, it is scarcely possible to conceive its genius more completely altered, and even inverted,— changed as it is from a mysterious sign of mighty invisible power into one of swanlike beauty and almost voluptuous ease. It is a trans- formation even greater than that which takes place in the meta- morphose of St. Peter's description of the day of judgment into Prosperds reflections on the spell which dissolves the enchantments of the magic isle. "The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and they that are therein, shall be burned up,"—has suggested, as the Bishop points out, no doubt, truly,— " 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." No doubt the one passage here suggested the other,—but the poetic drift is exactly opposite. Shakespeare is illustrating the dream- like nature of life, St. Peter its fearful reality. St. Peter is "look- ing for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, where- in the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat ;" Shakespeare in dreamy meditation is reflecting that life, after all, often seems scarcely more real than the gorgeous shaptss of a sunset cloud, or the fanciful enchantments of Prospero's isle.
On the whole, we think it would be difficult to find any first-rate poet in whom there is less trace of any literary influence from the Bible than in Shakespeare. The Archbishop of Dublin's remark that the Christian faith needs true art for its instrument, and that true art needs Christian faith to keep it in healthy life and growth, is most true,—for Art—which is essentially conscious and finite— soon decays, if it be not constantly rekindled by a faith which is in living communion with the Eternal and Infinite. Bet Shakes- peare's art, though it grows out of a living faith, and out of the modes of thought which that faith had been centuries in training, certainly shows far less of the direct pressure of supernatural in- fluences upon his mind than that of the other Christian poets who most nearly approach him in greatness.
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