A SHAKESPERIAN CRITIC

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 48, 26 February 1927, Page 21

A SHAKESPERIAN CRITIC

(By " Ajax.")

Mr. J. M. Robertson is a writer whom I have hitherto regarded with more respect than sympathy, but the celobra-. tion of his seventieth birthday has reminded me that neither my respect nor my sympathy has been as great as it should bo. It is evidently time that I .acquired a better knowledge of the half-dozen books of his I already possess, and made the acquaintance of some among the three or four dozen 'others which, without including such trifles as novels and plays, stand to his credit. Few writers in our time have covered a wider, range of subjects. Fewer still have spread so far without becoming slack and superficial. The prodigious zeal and industry of Mr. Robertson seem never to*** have failed. . Though the birthday celebration look ..tho form of a complimentary dinner given by the nationalist Press Association, at which special attention was inevitably paid to his religious or anti- - religious iconoclasm, the tributes covered a wide ground, and the 800-guinea cheque v was but a fitting acknowledgment of a lifetime devoted to the disinterested pursuit of the truth. I could find no note of the occasion in the "Times," but, as usual, the "Manchester Guardian" did not" fail.- The following passage from its report on 15th \November of Mr. Robertson's speech will appeal to everybody who is interested in the literary profession and its ;r awards:— v

In dealing with propaganda of a high order it was 'an open secret 7 .that serious/books involving research - -did not, pay for the labour of producing them. That was not a charac- ; teristie peculiar to nationalist literature. A well-known writer of seven L, volumes on the Kenaissance in Italy ; received £.1100 for a solid eleven ■ years' work, exactly a hundred a year, . and half of that income went in expenses'. One of his own books, on which he spent seven years, yielded him 1 exactly nothing. For his first bound book ho got exactly Is Bd. But he was not complaining. He remembered when he was a youth ho held quite reasonable views on the ■- subject, beqauso he told his parents that one day, as a result of all this, he would bo riding in his carriage. , . "At 16 years of age he said to himself .} that he must master Spanish, ge,t - ■ into the copper trade, and make a 1 reasonable fortune in, say, twenty ' years "or so> arid then withdraw himself and devote himself to his books. „ But it had .not come about. At 21 .."he was instructing his fellow-citizens •in Edinburgh as a leader-writer. ■fEven journalism was not a golden 1 road then, though it had since become ,;| more auriferous. He wrote .plays and :■" novels because he thought there was J money in them. But he was always 1 truth-seeking, which seemed to over- ., power all the other lures —seeking to find beauty for its own sake, to find -- ■ the truth about.something. If he had ' ■ gone into copper at sixteen he might have made a fortune, but he did not think he would have had a happier life. : * The life he chose was its own ■■ compensation. » * * » ■ Let me Were confess that I had paid little or no heed to the Robertson dinner 'at the time, but was moved to a retrospective interest in it by some correspondence to which it gave Tise in the 4 'Nation.'' As a lucid and powerful advocate of Free Trade, as, Minister of the Crown for a short term (1911-15), and as ; chairman' of the Liberal Publication Department—a position which ho jstill hoHs —Mr. Robertson has rendered 'the Liberals valuable service. This excellent record was duly acknowledged, and "the wonderful equipment of knowledge and logical power which has enabled this disinterested scholar to accomplish so much, for little or no reward, '.' were duly acknowledged by *' Kappa," the 1 diarist of the "Nation," Vbut in other respects he displayed a decidedly imperfect sympathy with Mr. Robertson's controversial and literary 'Methods. He described Mr. Robertson's and logical intellect*' as "hard ■worked for half a century destroying the pleasing fallacies, religious, political, and literary, in which weak man takes refuge from the blast."

One recent' development of his multifarious activities, ■ "Kappa" proceeded, is his remorseless "disin- ' tcgration" of Shakespeare. Mr. Robertson loves Shakespeare so much' that he would free him of all the •accretions of inferior stuff that have crept into the Canon. I wish myself that Mr. Bobortson had loft Shake- ' speare alone. We can never know, .so why. unsettle our faith and make the reading of the plays an uneasy 'delight. I will cling to the skirts of Sir Edmund Chambers and stop my 'ears to the harsh Scottish voice that ~ "rationalises Shakespeare into frag- / ments. Though.l am not prejudiced against '^jralists or lower critics and have, not -followed Mr. Robertson's researches 'into the text of Shakespeare, the only 'one of his volumes of Shakespearian criticism with which I am acquainted disposed me to sympathy with "Kappa's" pointy of v view. "The Baconian Heresy" is a stout volume of 600 pages, in which, as a "Times Literary Supplement" .reviewer said, ♦'with a ready pen, a considerable ratiocinative power, and no hampering sense of humour." Mr. Robertson proceeds to flatten out the heretics. To the same . authority the book "for thoroughness, and we must add for prolixity, recalls the performances of our Puritan divines.". To me the learning, the heaviness, the solemnity, and the want 'of proportion with which the steam roller, was laboriously passed over the Baconian butterflies and midges seemed to. be so essentially German, that I was ready to suspect the performer 'of a German incapacity to deal with the niceties of Shakespeare's text. My surprise was, therefore, great when in the "Nation" of 4th December I read a protest from Mr. J. Middleton Murry, one of the first critics of the day, against "Kappa's" disparagement of Mr. Robertson's work. The only, part of it, said Mr. Murry, ■ with which I am familiar iv his Shakespeare criticism; but with that I am ■* familiar, and I am quite certain that ■- it is the most valuable single contribution to Shakespeare criticism that w has been made in my time. Ido not suppose I agree with one-half of Mr. Robertson's contentions but every one of them is supported by genuine ".' critical argument. I am afraid . "Kappa" does not know how, rare a 'thing'that'..is, or how deeply stimulating to the intelligent reader of a' great poet. To disagree "en connaissance de cause" with''Mr.. Robertson is an education in criticism: "Kappa's" feeble "We can never know" Is the merest obscurantism. Coming from a man whose strength as a critic is on the aesthetic side, this is extraordinarily high praise, and it is 'astonishing- that a writer of Mr. Robertson range should have deserved it in so highly special- • ised a field. Mr. T. S. Eliot followed on with a charge, against "Kappa" of aiming at "a sweeping out of the temple of Shakespeare of such insignificant insects as Professor Pollard and Pro- , fessor Dover' Wilson, and anyone who ! yhas attempted to clear up any of the problems of. that bewildering'epoch." Shakespeare and his pirates and actoreditors left much of the text in so hopeless a mess that there is ample room for .the" insects'' —insects whose labours

are not by any means entirely destructive—as well-as for the aesthetes. Both functions are well represented in the happy combination of Quiller Couch and Dover Wilson, which is bringing out tho Cambridge! Shakespeare. The two functions may not bo equally necessary, but they are certainly both necessary.

* * * * BY DEPUTT.

As Shakespeare couldn't write his plays (If ■ Mrs. Gallup's not mistaken) I know how wise in many ways He was to have them done by Bacon; 'They; might-have mouldered on the shelf Mere minor dramas (and he knew it!) If he'had written them himself Instead of letting Bacon do it. And if it's true, as Brown and Smith; In many learned tomes have stated, That Homer was an idle myth, He ought to be congratulated, Since thus, evading birth, he rose For men to worship at a distance: He might have penned inferior prose Had he achieved a real existence. To him and Shakespeare men agree In making very nice allusions; But no one thinks of praising me,. For I compose my own effusions: As others wrote their works divine And they immortal thus to-day are, Perhaps had some one written mine I might have been as.great as they are. —From "The Shadow Show," by A. St. John Adcoek.