Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865», страница 17
What strikes us most forcibly, in considering Hamilton's career, is the remarkably, early development of his powers. At thirteen, he was found competent to take charge of a mercantile establishment. At fifteen, his writings win for him public applause and the aid of friends. At seventeen, he addresses with success a great public meeting. At eighteen, his anonymous productions are attributed to some of the leading men of America. At nineteen, he has thought out that principle of government which is indelibly associated with his name. At twenty, he has not only approved himself a skilful and courageous soldier, but he has won the esteem of the grave and reserved Washington, and is placed by that great man in a post of the closest confidence, and which really makes him the second man in the American service. At twenty-three, he has shown that he is master of the intricate subject of finance. At twenty-five, after an active military life that had allowed no time for study, he is known as a lawyer of the first order. At twenty-six, he is distinguished as a member of Congress. At thirty, he takes a leading part in framing the Constitution of the United States. And in his thirty-third year, he becomes the most extraordinary finance minister the world has ever seen. He was statesman, soldier, writer, and orator, and first in each department; and he was as ready for all the parts which he filled as if he had been long and studiously trained for each of them by the best of instructors. When Mr. Webster so happily compared the instantaneousness and perfection of his financial system to "the fabled birth of Minerva," he did but allude to what is to be remarked of all Hamilton's works. All that he did was perfect, and no one seems to have been aware of his power until he had established the fact of its existence. Such a combination of precocity and versatility stands quite unparalleled. Octavius, William the Third, Henry St. John, Charles James Fox, and William Pitt the younger, all showed various powers at early periods of their lives; but not one of them was the equal of Hamilton in respect to early maturity of intellect, or in ability to command success in every department to which he turned his attention. The historical character of whom he most reminds us is the elder Africanus. In the early development of his faculties, in his self-reliant spirit, in his patriotism, in his kingliness of mind, in his personal purity, in his generosity of thought and of action, and in the fear and envy that he excited in inferior minds, he was a repetition of the most majestic of all the Romans. But, unlike the Roman soldier-statesman, he did not desert the land he had saved, but which had proved ungrateful; and the grave only was to be his Liternum. He died at not far from the same age as that to which Africanus reached. In comparing him with certain other men who achieved fame early, it should be remembered that they all were regularly prepared for public life, and were born to it as to an inheritance; whereas he, though of patrician blood, was possessed of no advantages of fortune, and had to fight the battle of life while fighting the battles of the nation.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES
Memoirs of the Life of William Shakespeare, with an Essay toward the Expression of his Genius, and an Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Drama to the Time of Shakespeare. By Richard Grant White. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
Mr. White's closing-up of his Shakespeare labors has been long in coming, but comes good and acceptable at last. The volume now in hand, however, does not form a part of his edition of the poet; it stands by itself; though a portion of its contents is repeated in the first volume (the last published) of this edition. It is rich in matter, and the workmanship, for the most part, capital. All Shakespearians are bound to relish it; and if any general reader does not find it delectable, he may well suspect some fault in himself.
The contents of the volume are, first, "Memoirs of the Life of William Shakespeare"; second, "An Essay toward the Expression of Shakespeare's Genius"; third, "An Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Drama to the Time of Shakespeare."
In his "Memoirs," the author of course adds nothing to what was already known of the poet's life. But his presentation of the matter is eminently readable, and, in parts, decidedly interesting; which is as much as can fairly be looked for in any writing on that subject. Some readers may think, we do think, that the author is a little at fault on one or two points. For instance, he overworks certain questions touching the poet's wife, worrying up the matter against her to the utmost, and, in fact, tormenting the poor woman's memory in such a way as to indicate something very like spite. Now this is not fair; and Mr. White's general fairness on other subjects makes his proceeding the less excusable in this case.
Of course everybody knows that Mrs. Anne Shakespeare was some eight years older than her husband; that the circumstances of the marriage were not altogether what they should have been; and that the oldest daughter was born a little too soon for the credit of either parent. This is all, all, there is known about the matter. And if conjecture or inference must be at work on these facts, surely it had better run in the direction of charity, especially of charity towards the weaker vessel. We say weaker vessel, because in this case the man must, in all fairness, be supposed to have had the advantage, at least as much in strength of natural understanding as the woman had in years. And as Shakespeare was, by all accounts, a very attractive person, it does not well appear but that the woman had as good a right to lose her heart in his company as he had to lose his head in hers. Yet our author insinuates, perhaps we should say more than insinuates, that the lady immodestly angled for and seduced the youthful lover, and entangled his honor in an obligation of marriage; and he seems quite positive that the poet afterwards hated her, and took refuge in London partly to escape from her society. Moreover, he presumes her to have been a coarse, low, vulgar creature, such as, the fascination of the honeymoon once worn off, the poet could not choose but loathe and detest. Now all this is sheer conjecture; it has no basis of fact or of fair likelihood to stand upon; there is not so much as a particle even of tradition to support it. Rowe hints nothing of the sort; and surely his candor would not have spared the parties, if he had found anything: it was the very point of all others on which scandal would have been most apt to fasten and feed; and yet even Aubrey, arrant old gossip as he was, supplies nothing to justify it.
In default of other grounds, resort has been had to certain passages in the poet's dramas. And Mr. White, though knowing, none better, the poet's wonderful self-aloofness from his representations, thinks it worth the while to make an exception in this particular case. Presuming such and such things to be true in his own experience, the poet, our author observes, must have thought of them while writing certain passages. Our answer is, To be sure, he must have thought of them, and he must have known that others would think of them too; and a reasonable delicacy on his part would have counselled the withholding of anything that he was conscious might be applied to his own domestic affairs. Does not Mr. White see that his inferences in this are just the reverse of what they should be? Sensible men do not write in their public pages such things as would be almost sure to breed or to foster scandal about their own names or their own homes. The man that has a secret cancer on his person will be the last to speak of cancers in reference to others; and if the truth of his own case be suspected at all, it will rather be from his silence than from his speech. We can hardly think Shakespeare was so wanting in a sense of propriety as to have written the passages in question, but that he knew no man could say he was exposing the foulness of his own nest.
But we are dwelling too long on this point; and we confess something of impatience at Mr. White's treatment of it. His animus in the thing is shown, perhaps, in one slight mistake he has made. Speaking of the lady's haste to "provide herself with a husband," he says, "In less than five months after she obtained one she was delivered of a daughter." The bishop's license for the marriage was dated November 28th, 1582, and Susannah Shakespeare was baptized May 26th, 1583; thus leaving an interval of but two days short of six months between the marriage and the birth. As Sir Hugh observes, "I like not when a 'oman has a great peard."
We are moved to add one more item of dissent.—Mr. White thinks, and it appears that the German critic, Gervinus, coincides with him, that Shakespeare must have acquired all his best ideas of womanhood after he went to London, and conversed with the ladies of the city. And in support of this notion he cites the fact—for such it is—that the women of the poet's later plays are much superior to those of his earlier ones. But are not the men of his later plays quite as much superior to the men of his first? Unquestionably they are. Are not his later plays as much better every way, as in respect of the female characters? Mr. White is too wise and too ripe in the theme to question it. The truth seems to be, that Shakespeare saw more of great and good in both man and woman as he became older and knew them better; for he was full of intellectual righteousness in this as in other things. But if there must be any conjecturing about it, we prefer to conjecture that the poet caught his ideas of womanhood, or at least the rudiments of them, from his mother, and other specimens of the sex in his native town. For in this matter it may with something of special fitness be said that a man finds what he brings with him the faculty of finding; and he who does not learn respect for woman in the nursery and at the fireside will hardly learn it at all. The poet's mind did not stay on the surface of things. He had the head to know, and the heart to feel, the claims of humble, modest worth; for, as he was the wisest, so was he also the most human-hearted of men. And to his keen, yet kindly eye, the plain-thoughted women of Stratford may well have been as pure, as sweet, as lovely, as rich in all the inward graces which he delighted to unfold in his female characters, as anything he afterwards found among the fine ladies of the metropolis: though far be it from us to disrepute these latter; for he was, by the best of all rights, a thorough gentleman; and the ladies who pleased him in London had womanhood enough, no doubt, to recognize him as such, without the flourishes of rank. At all events, it is reasonable to infer that the foundations of his mind were laid before he left Stratford, and that the gatherings of the boy's eye and heart were the germs of the man's thoughts. And, indeed, if his great social heart had found all the best delights of society in London, how should he have been so desirous, as Mr. White allows he was, to escape from the city, and set up his rest in his Stratford home?
Mr. White's history of the Drama, though far from copious, supplies enough, perhaps, to put the reader right as regards Shakespeare's historical relations to that great branch of English literature. From what is there given, any one can, with reasonable attention, learn that the English drama, as we have it in Shakespeare, was the well-ripened fruit of centuries of preparation: the form, structure, and order of the thing being settled long before his time. The attentive reader will also see, though this point is not emphasized so much as it might be, that the national mind and taste were ready and eager to welcome the right man as soon as the right man came; so that, in catering wisely for the public taste, the poet could hardly fail of the supremacy due to his transcendent genius; which infers, of course, that the public taste had nearly as much to do in forming him as he had in forming it. On one or two points, as, for instance, in the matter of Shakespeare's senior contemporaries, we should have preferred a somewhat larger outlay of the author's learned and well-practised strength; while, again, in reference to the old plays of "Jeronimo" and "The Spanish Tragedy," he might well have used more economy of strength, as the matter is neither interesting in itself nor helpful to his purpose. Here is a specimen of his felicity, referring to the plays of old John Lily, the euphuist.
"They are in all respects opposed to the genius of the English drama. They do not even pretend to be representations of human life and human character, but are pure fantasy pieces, in which the personages are a heterogeneous medley of Grecian gods and goddesses, and impassible, colorless creatures, with sublunary names, all thinking with one brain, and speaking with one tongue,—the conceitful, crotchety brain, and the dainty, well-trained tongue of clever, witty John Lily."
This is, indeed, the exact truth of the matter, and it could hardly be better said. On divers points, however, the little that he gives us just sets the reader on fire for more: that is, he does not satisfy the desire quite enough in proportion as he stimulates it. But he probably goes on the safe principle, that in such cases an intelligent reader is apt to crave more than he will justify a writer in giving; or, in other words, that he does not seem to have enough, until he has too much.
But the "Essay" is most decidedly the jewel of the volume: not, however, to disparage the other parts; for it is worthy to be the jewel of anybody's volume. A single reading of the "Essay," as it ought to be read, will suffice to make any one glad to own the book, and will almost certainly induce him to mark it down for a second reading, as the second also will for a third. The work, indeed, is a positive, and we think it will prove a permanent addition to our already opulent inheritance of Shakespearian criticism. It is weighty throughout with fresh, yet sober and well-considered thought, expressed in tight and sinewy English,—every part being highly elaborate, but nothing over-labored. The author discusses a large number of topics, all in "a manly style, fitted to manly ears," but is particularly full and instructive in regard to the poet's language and style: a rich field, indeed, which has not been proportionably cultivated by the poet's later critics, who have put their force mainly on what may be called his dramatic architecture, and on his development of character, where there is more room to be philosophical, but less chance of determinate results. Over this field Mr. White walks with the firm, yet graceful step of a master: his current of thought running deep, strong, and clear, and carrying us through page after page full of nice and subtile discrimination, without over-refinement, and of illustrations apt and luminous, yet without a touch of false brilliancy or mere smartness; which is saying a good deal, in these days of high-pressure rhetoric.
We commend the "Essay" to all lovers of solid and well-proportioned critical discourse.
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