Carlyle, Thomas

THE HERO AS POET

THE HERO AS POET

OF this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears
a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the
best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is
slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakspeare is the chief of all
Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has
left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know
not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all
the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth;
placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so
true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said,
that in the constructing of Shakspeare’s Dramas there is, apart from
all other ‘faculties’ as they are called, an understanding manifested,
equal to that in Bacon’s Novum Organum. That is true; and it is not
a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we
tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakspeare’s dramatic
materials, we could fashion such a result! The built house seems
all so fit,- everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own
law and the nature of things,- we forget the rude disorderly quarry it
was shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself
had made it, hides the builder’s merit. Perfect, more perfect than any
other man, we may call Shakspeare in this: he discerns, knows as by
instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what
his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory
glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of
the whole matter; it is a calmly seeing eye; a great intellect, in
short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will
construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will
give of it,- is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in
the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; which
unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true beginning, the
true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole force of
insight that is in the man. He must understand the thing; according
to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer be.
You will try him so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of
method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment becomes order?
Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos
make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he
accomplish this.

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,
delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare is
great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is
unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The
thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost
heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him,
so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said:
poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing
sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of
itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not
Shakspeare’s morality, his valour, candour, tolerance,
truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can
triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!
No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with
its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly level mirror;-
that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related
to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how
this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an
Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their
round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum
Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite
secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this.
Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the
same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of
it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he
himself says of Shakspeare: ‘His characters are like watches with dial-
plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and
the inward mechanism also is all visible.’

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of
things; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in
these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing
eye that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things?
You can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way
or other genially relate yourself to them;- you can, at lowest, hold
your peace about them, turn away your own and others’ face from them,
till the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing
them! At bottom, it is the Poet’s first gift, as it is all men’s, that
he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word;
or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write
at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on
accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,- perhaps on
his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his
boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart
of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has
a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist),
is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature
herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To
the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you
cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together,
jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a
Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or
verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old
Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, ‘But are
ye sure he’s not a dunce?’ Why, really one might ask the same
thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and
consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he’s not a dunce?
There is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person.

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a
correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare’s faculty,
I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all
under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they
were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect,
imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a
capital error. Then again, we hear of a man’s ‘intellectual nature’,
and of his ‘moral nature’, as if these again were divisible, and
existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms
of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to
speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It
seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part,
radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep
forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that
man’s spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is
essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy,
understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same
Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other,
physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know
all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man,
what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is
and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see
how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or
want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he
has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is one; and
preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.

Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but,
consider it,- without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a
thoroughly immoral man could not know anything at all! To know a
thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing,
sympathize with it: that is, be virtuously related to it. If he
have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn,
the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he
know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.
Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the
pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is
mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely.- But does not
the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where the
geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the world,
what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it should be
considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine morality,
he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the geese! If he
spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his own misery,
his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so forth; and
had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine
gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too,
that his morality and insight are of the same dimensions; different
faces of the same internal unity of vulpine life!- These things are
worth stating; for the contrary of them acts with manifold very
baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations, modifications
they require, your own candour will supply.

If I say, therefore, that Shakspeare is the greatest of Intellects,
I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakspeare’s
intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious
intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of.
Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are
Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth
in this saying. Shakspeare’s Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth
of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the
deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of
Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in
Shakspeare, new elucidations of their own human being; ‘new harmonies
with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later
ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.’ This well
deserves meditating. It is Nature’s highest reward to a true simple
great soul, that he get thus to be a part of herself. Such a man’s
works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and forethought
shall accomplish, grow up withal unconsciously, from the unknown
deeps in him;- as the oak-tree grows from the Earth’s bosom, as the
mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded on
Nature’s own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in
Shakspeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to
himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like
roots, like sap and forces working underground! Speech is great;
but Silence is greater.

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not
blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true
battle,- the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakspeare greater
than Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not, he
had his own sorrows: those Sonnets of his will even testify
expressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for
his life;- as what man like him ever failed to have to do? It seems to
me a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on the
bough; and sang forth, free and offhand, never knowing the troubles of
other men. Not so; with no man is it so. How could a man travel forward
from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not fall in with
sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a man delineate a
Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic hearts, if
his own heroic heart had never suffered?- And now, in contrast with
all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love of
laughter! You would say, in no point does he exaggerate but only
in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to be
found in Shakspeare; yet he is always in measure here; never what
Johnson would remark as a specially ‘good hater’. But his laughter
seems to pour from him in floods; he heaps all manner of ridiculous
nicknames on the butt he is bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all
sorts of horse-play; you would say, roars and laughs. And then, if not
always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. Not at mere
weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what
we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character
only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so.
Laughter means sympathy; good laughter is not ‘the crackling of thorns
under the pot’. Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakspeare does
not laugh otherwise than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very
hearts; and we dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we
like the poor fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they
will get on well there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch.-
Such laughter, like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.

We have no room to speak of Shakspeare’s individual works; though
perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we,
for instance, all his plays reviewed as Hamlet, in Wilhelm
Meister, is! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm
Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, Henry Fifth and the
others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National
Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but
what he had learned from Shakspeare. There are really, if we look to
it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably
seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it
is, as Schlegel says, epic;- as indeed all delineation by a great
thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces,
which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of
Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort, we
anywhere have of Shakspeare’s. The description of the two hosts: the
worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, when the
battle shall begin; and then that deathless valour: ‘Ye good yeomen,
whose limbs were made in England!’ There is a noble Patriotism in it,-
far other than the ‘indifference’ you sometimes hear ascribed to
Shakspeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong, through
the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better for
that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too had
a right stroke in him, had it come to that!

But I will say, of Shakspeare’s works generally, that we have no full
impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works
are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that
was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory,
imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and
there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that
come upon you like splendour out of Heaven; bursts of radiance,
illuminating the very heart of the thing: you say, ‘That is true,
spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an open
human soul, that will be recognized as true!’ Such bursts, however,
make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is, in
part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakspeare had to write for the
Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into
that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us all.
No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own
free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it into
the stone that was given, with the tools that were given. Disjecta
membra are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man.

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that he
too was a Prophet, in his way; of an insight analogous to the
Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to
this man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven:
‘We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!’ That scroll in Westminster
Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any Seer.
But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante
the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call
Shakspeare the still more melodious Priest of a true Catholicism,
the ‘Universal Church’ of the Future and of all times? No narrow
superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or
perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold
hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men
worship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises a
kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakspeare too; not unfit to make
itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony with
these, if we understood them, but in harmony!- I cannot call this
Shakspeare a ‘Sceptic,’ as some do; his indifference to the creeds and
theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither
unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; nor sceptic,
though he says little about his Faith. Such ‘indifference’ was the
fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand
sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies,
vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right
glorious thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought
us? For myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in
the fact of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to
us all; a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?- And, at bottom, was
it not perhaps far better that this Shakspeare, everyway an unconscious
man, was conscious of no Heavenly message?…

Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager
of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of
Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many
thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him
a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;- on which point there were
much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad
state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakspeare has
actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this land
of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not give up rather than
the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest Dignitaries that
we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we have yet done. For
our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English
Household, what item is there that we would not surrender rather than
him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your Indian
Empire or your Shakspeare, you English; never have had any Indian
Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare? Really it were a grave
question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official language;
but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer: Indian
Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakspeare! Indian
Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare does not go,
he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakspeare!

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,
marketable, tangibly useful possession. England, before long, this
Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in
America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there
will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what
is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so
that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike
intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the
greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and
governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish
this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot.
America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it
not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an
English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of
Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, in
crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet
strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable
in that point of view, than any other means or appliance whatsoever?
We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen,
a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever,
under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are,
they will say to one another: ‘Yes, this Shakspeare is ours: we
produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind
with him.’ The most common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may
think of that.

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an
articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth
melodiously what the heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy
lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or
treaty as a unity at all; yet the noble Italy is actually one:
Italy produced its Dante; Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias,
he is strong, with so many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does a
great feat in keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but
he cannot yet speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb
greatness. He has had no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and
times. He must learn to speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto.
His cannons and Cossacks will all have rusted into nonentity, while
that Dante’s voice is still audible. The Nation that has a Dante is
bound together as no dumb Russia can be.- We must here end what we
had to say of the Hero-Poet.