"ROMEO AND JULIET."

Otago Daily Times, Issue 10035, 28 April 1894, Page 1 (Supplement)

"ROMEO AND JULIET."

Following is the concluding portion of the addresß delivered by the President (Mr A. Wilson, M.A) before the members of the Shakespeare Club on Monday evening :— Having spoken these solemn words of commemoration, I may perhaps be allowed to say the usual word or two about the particular play which is to be read this evening. Of some half-dozen pairs of lovers who belong to world literature, and whose story has been consecrated by misfortune, the most immortal are perhaps Danta's Paolo and Franceses and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Dante, as his manner is, has done little more than hint the story of Francesca da Rimini; but a hint of Danta's is often pregnant with the matter of a five-aot tragedy. How Francesca sinned, and how far she was more sinned against, we cannot learn from Dante, but must search for the story in medireval history. If ever woman might have pleaded justification it was Francesca, her wrongs being so great; and if ever judge might have been expected to suffer kindly oblivion to cover her fault, it was Dante, who had, as Carlylo says, possibly dindled Francesca a3 a child upon his . knee. Bat the inflexible Florentine would listen to no extenuation; would allow her not even the hope of purgatory; would bate nothing of what he conceived to bo the demands of justice ; and so ha placed her, with nor Paolo, in the outer circle of his Hell, to be whirled round forever on gyrating winds. Shakespeare, too, is inexorable with his young people, and allows them as brief a taste of happiness as Dante allowed to the lovera of Rimini. Ons Italian summer night rounds the compass of their bliss, or, if you call that happiness which was so largely tempered by mis.ry—the hours of expectation and the stolen visits to tha friar's cell-^ven then their happiness may bo placed within the limits of a Bingle week. Tha stern justica of Dante is intelligible to those who know his appalling austerity. But Shakespeare ? Why should he — the kindly, the genial—have doomed these little better than children to such blackness of misfortune ? Was it merely that he found the story so in the sources whence he drew ?

Postibly ; yet, one is apt to think, it would have cost Shakespeare so litbla to order it otherwise. A single happy accident to the ill-starred Romeo would have turned the current of his life into another channel. Had bat the Friar's messenger found Romeo, had Romeo been a little later in coming to the tomb, or Friar Laurence a little earlier—any slight wind of chance might have changed the Bourse of events, and Romeo and his Juliet might have lived to be a pattern Darby and Joan for all Verona. Was it that Shakespeare then, like Dante, had a moral reason for the catastrophe of his tragedy ? Wore the god» so angry with these young people that only death oonld expiate their peccadillos ? There is no doubt that a severe and frosty moralist might take exception to some parts of the lovers' conduct. If young gallants are to leap walli and climb balconies with rope-ladders, why, it may be asked, haTe orohards gates, and houses doora? And though the old CApulets are a detestable pair, and nobody is particularly sorry for their troubles, yet most mothers, if they were not melted by Juliet's unhappiness, would say that she was a little more than naughty in marrying herself clandestinely to the enemy of her house* Bat granting that the lovers were not so discreet as they probably would have grown to be had they lived a score of yeatß longer, their indiscretions cannot be 6aid to have deserved the hard measure dealt out to them by the gentle Shakespeare. It may ba thought, as indeed is intimated in the prologue, that these two innocents were sacrificed in eipintion of tha sins of their ancestors. It is Nature's way, we know, to set tba children's teeth on edge with the grapes their fathers have eateu. The family pride of the Montagus and Capulets had to be punished, and their rancours ended. And must theso innocents, then, be done to doith that their childless elders may rush into one another's arms in the fifth act, and talk moonshine about erecting statues of pare gold to their victims ? If such reconciliation must be cemented with ceremonies of deatb, who was there fitter for the sacrifice than these same implacable seniors ? And who, for so laudable a purpose, would not with equanimity see offered up a hecatomb of Lord and Lady Capulots ? As to the sanction, however, which the prologue seems to give to the view that the punishment of family prido is the motive of the tragedy, one doca not read Shakespeara all out's life without coming to know at last when one is reading Shakespeare and when not; and if I have any feeling of the subject, the prologue to "ftomeoand Juliet" was not written by Shakespeare at all. Nor is there any good reason for supposing it to be Shakuspeare's, inasmuch as prologues to plays were, ns often as not, written by someone other than tbe dramatist.

I have never b«en able, For my part, to believe that Shakespeare was much influenced by moral considerations of auy kind in determining the catastrophes of hi 9 plays. What ho dusired was to touch tint which men lov« to h'.ve touched—the emotions; and so to make a gwJ play. Tj ba moved to Uughter, or moved to tears, or overcome with astonishment—all three are luxurius which wo are willing to bay at a price; and of the three tb.3 luxury of teirj is not tho least. 16 in surprising what psople will do to be made pleasantly and artistically sad; among other things, they will sit cut a. five-act tragedy. Ooly writ* a play that will make a wbolo theatre weep, and your fortune ia msde. Now, ono of tho best wecpiog plays ever written is " lloineoand Juliet." From the first yoa feel that Romeo must dia — that no youth cm utter sach language and live. He must die to prove th-it he ia in earnest. For before Juliet there had been a Rosaline, about whom Romeo had rhapsodised with as much ingenuity as ho displays in the balcony scene. His frieud3 had seen upon him all the " marks " enumerated by Rosalind to Orlando, and his father had becomo anxious about the stato of tho youth's health. Romeo, in his love sickness, bad taken to get-

ting up before tha sun and Btealing forth to a sycamore grave to think about his mistress, and to weep for her hardness of he»rt—

Many a morning hath he thora been seen, With tears augmenting the fresh morniag's dew, Adding to clouds more clouds with his deepsishs; 15ut all so soon as the all-cheering sun

Should in the farthest (list begin to draw

Tho sliady curtains from Aurora's bed, Away from light steaU home my heavy son. And private in lii» chamber pens himself. Shuts up his windows, lock* fair daylight out, And makes himself an artificial night. Ulack and portentous munt this humour prove, Unless good counsel may the cause roinore.

All this for Rosaline, Juliet's cousin, before he had ever seen Juliet herself. But no cooner does he meet Juliet, than ho is oil wilih the old love and on with the new. It, (iherefore, required some extra-solemn voucher to convince ua that this fickle youth at last really meant what he said.

i It appears to me, however, that Shakespeare never required any stronger reason than his own natural bias to determine him towards sad issues. A French critic has accused the English of being as a nation too prone to the contemplation of death, and ascribes this proclivity to the greyness of tho Buglish climate.

I cannot nay whether we hare any national bent to meditation among the tombj; but if the temperament of the nation is to ba inferred from the temperament of the national pact, the Frenchman has some reason on his side. Though Shakespeare is the most impersonal of dramatists, bo that it is difficult to catch a glimpse of the man through thy inaaks ho wears, yet it is possible to discovor at least two pareonal characteristics of the piel—what earthly blessing it was he most valued, and from what part of mortal fata be most recoiled. For Shakespeare the greatest earthly good was sleep. The most tender epithets in his vocabulary are bestowed upon it. It is—"gentle sleep," " golden sleap," "Nature's soft nurse," "balm of hart minds, great Nature's second course, chief nouriaher in life's feast." His best wish for those he loved would have been

shat" sleep should give them all his rest," or

that "sleep should dwell upon their eyes"; as bit most fearful eursa would have been " Sleep no moro!" When he would rob death itself of terror, ho eanxlo no more than give to it the flattering likeness of his beloved Bleep—"Oar

little life is rounded with asleep," or "After

life's fitful fever ho fil*ep3 well." Shakespeare speaks of deep almost as a lover speaks of his mistress—and of a mistress, too, whom he has found coy aud uncertain; for no man could have written of slepp as ho did who had not often wooed it when it would not c:imo.

But if sleep was Shakespeare's chiefest bloss-

ing, his terror was sleep's twin brother, death; perhaps because vitality was so strong within tho man that to him no calamity in lifo could compare with the IoS3 of life It is in vain that he tries to flitter away this fear with soothing similitudes of sleep and death. Rather is sleep fearful b:causa it resembles death than death less terrible because it resembles sleep. His .imagination indulges and torments itself by dwelling on the purely material changes that tha body suffers. The most fearful expression of this recoil from dissolution is psrhaps that given in " Measure for Measure " —

Ay, but to die, aud go wo know not whore ; To lio in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit To batho in fiery floodj, or to reside Iv thiilling regions of thick-ribbed ice ; To bo imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with reatle3s violence about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of tno3e, that lawless and incartain thoughts Imagine howling I 'Tis to > horrible! The wcarieet and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on Nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death. Yet it is very curious how much tbe imagination is drawn precisely to that from which the rest of our being recoils. That we abhor a thing is uo certain guarantee that we shall not seek it out. There is no accounting for certain prevalent tastes, which we call morbid, except that the imaginative side of our being, like the

physical and the intellectual, craves for stimulus, and that it finds this stimulus, sometimes in unwholesome forms, in stimulants tho

traffic in whieI],1], nnfortunately, no pcohibitioniab league can ever hope to regulate, 'l'be most loathsome of animals is the Bnako; yet I question whether there is any of the lower animals that equally fascinates the imagination, or that enters more frequently or to better effect into imaginative literature. There is no

one, not a criminal, who doss not detest crime, yet there is no uae denying, what thepublic press proves, that tho history of crime is a favourite form of stimulant for the imagination. Again, it is those who are most distressed by suffering that most affect tearful and pathetic literature; because suffering is the thing- that most powerfully moves their imagination. One of the best Juliets that have evsr appeared on the

English stage—if not the best—was Miss Helen Faucit (now Lady Martin); aud she was so because of her refinement, and her large spiritual and intellectual gifts. There is uo one whom, on the face of it, you would suppose less likely to be subject to morbid fascinations. Yet listen to a passage from an account which she gives of her own girlhood:—" I may say that in thosa days, Juliet, like other heroines of my fancy, was attractive to me principally through what she had to suffer, in, which the horror of her tomb, tha 'being stljled in the vault,' always my first terror, played a promi- ! cent part. Our school walks from Greenwich took us at times to Lee churchyard, where there was a vault which to my imagination was altogether terrible. A flight of greeu, 6limylooking steps led down to v massive door with open ironwork at tha upper part, and we girla used to snatch a fearful pleasure by peering through it into tho gloom within. My favourits school-friend was a German girl, with a very pretty face, but in figure so liugainly that she was the despair of our dancing-maafcer. She Bhared my dread of the terrible, and also the attraction I felt towards it.; Over this vault we often talked, aud we both agreed that in just such a tomb must Juliet have been placed. We had seeu the toads and frogs hopping about in and out of it, and devoutly did we hope that Juliet's face was covered. For, oh the horror for her to have a cold, flabby toad upon it! And then had we not road of 'worms that were her chambermaids'? —an awful suggestion to the literal miuds of young girls. How we rejoiced that, when she really awoke, she saw by her Bide tha ' comfortable friar'! To most young minds, I suppose, the terrible and the tragic are always the most alluring. Certaiuly at that time the fourth and fifth acts of 'Romeo aud Juliet'

' weighed heavier in the balance with me than the earlier and happy ones.' " Here then you have an exceptionally bright, young girl—who was one day to be herself a great Julietattracted, not so much by the lova passages on the balcony, as by the dreadful later scenes. As it was with this celebrated Juliet, so was it with the great master whom she tried to interpret. Precisely because he was so appalled by thoughts of death, the subject had for Shakespeare's imagination a horrible attraction. The plays—" Hamlet," "Richard II," "Richard III," and others—give numerous instances of the painful fascination which the merely material side of death had for Shakespeare. The graveyard scene in Hamlet—what a horror it indicates of the mere fact of physical dissolution ! If I were asked what objective faot of human experience most powerfully affected Shakespeare's imagination, I should say it was tbe charnel-house. Ho feared it, he loathed it; yafc was he drawn in spite of himself to peer through its bars at the festering corruption wifchiu. In "Romeoand Juliet" he had free scope for indulging this tendency to tho gruesome. It is true that he found in the works from which he borrowed his story -Arthur Brooke's ballad and Paynter's narrative—ample hints for the bed-chambar and Vault scenes of the play, hints which he had merely to develop. But how he does develop them ! One canaot read that terrible scone—the third of the fourth act—without concluding that he had present to his mind some actual vault of death, something that he had seen, into whoso recesses he had peered, and from whose foul mouth he had himself breathed infection's breath. In the third scene of the fifth act, where Romeo comes to the tomb of the Capulets and finds the sleeping Juliet, there is further gloating over images of death, till, as you read, you could fling tbe book from you in disgust. Truth to tell, the tragedies of Shakespeare are the work of a man who loved melanoholy. That he is supreme in comedy proves nothing to tha contr»ry. - Ho was great in both extremes—in laughter n« in tears, us melancholy men often are. But it seems to me that he never jet oinittad an opportunity of ending a story with a catastrophe. His comedies are comedies in their grain—from their very inception—they are inevitably comedies, Some of his tragic issues do not appear equally inevitable, but soem sometimes to depend on the bins of tha dramatist, whioh leans to the sombre. When Sh»ktspcare went to the theatre, not as a playwright or actor, but as oue of the audiense, which form of entertainment do you suppose he preferred—comedy or tragedy? The records of his life do not say; but I miaioad Shakespeare if hia dear delight was not a tragedy heaped with the details of death.

No better theme for tragic pathos can be fonr.u in the range of the plays than the story of ltameo and Juliet. It is true that pathos cun bo drawu by tho proper hand from any condition of human life—or any age : but to have the utmost reSnemcut of pity tha subject must ba young, beautiful, good, happy—everything, in short, for which our sympathies would crave a long continuance. This craving must bs frustrated, rj that you inly be nude to cry, "Oh, tho pifcy of it!"—and 83 you get tho swaot pain of pathos and tragedy. Now, what docs Shakespeare do? Ho takes two youug aud beautiful creatures, iuthe very blossom of their youth, untouched aa yet by tho sordid cares of the world, full of life, aud hope, and strength, of joy in existence and of innocence, the . nearest approach credible in human beinss to tho perfectly lovable and lovely. Further, they are each tho single hope of au

illustrious house. Surely this is a casa in which Destiny for once might allow some reasonable measure of fulfilment to se much promise. But what does the dramatist representative of Destiny do ? When he h»s lat the two grow sufficiently into yonr heart, he takes them, liko some relentless deity, and stretohoi thorn upon the rack of tha world, aud, after torturing them before your eyes, flings them at last into tho charnelhouso to feed tha maw of death.

Gruel—bu6 in this case, I think, inevitably cruel. Shakespeare was right to ba inexorable. He could not have spired the lovers. The ratification of death was thoneoe3Mry gaarantea of tuair lieroio love and constancy. How else could wo bavo Boceptad Romeo's sixteenthcentury far-fetched oonoeits and hyperboles _? If things had gone smoothly, hia exaggerations must havo appeared ridiculous: but rs you read them, you accept them, not merely aB ths exquisite coinages of poatry, bat as the expression of a true emotion, the reality of which iato ba amply testified by death. A word as to tun character of Romeo and Jaliet—though thera is not much distinctive dramatic character about either of them; as you will feel if you compare them with suon creation? as Hamlet, Fdlstaff, ligo, Kite the Shrew, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind, Beatrice, and others. Juliet is not a character; she U a passion, -an exquisite lyric poem; she is girlhood, the is womanhood; but of distinctive character there U little revealed, considering the very large amount that must have been there. When occasionally she doea reveal herself, and not her passion, the revelation is not always to our satisfaction: ai in the fencing scene with her mother in the third act, where Juliet's ready faculty of prevarication somewhat interferes with that impression of simplicity produoed by the earlier love-scenes. The fact is that Shakespeare presents in this creation a singular combination of endowments; instances of which it wduld be rash to say tb.it Nature naver present*, Boeing that she sometimes works such strange freaks, but which are certainly mo3t rare in nature. Juliet combines the inexperience and the ingenuous simplicity of a girl of 14- with the self-reliance, resource, and intellectnal development of a woman of 40. Only in this nnturity of intellect and iv the intensity of fabling that belongs to a lofty poetio nature ii Juliet to be distinguished from 5000 girls to be found in Italy, iv her own time or any other; who would hiva felt for theic Romeos much what Juliet felt for hers, but who never could' have searched out the subtleties of their passion, or given to them a lyric expression, tha richest ever achieved. I cannot think Romeo, as a creation, at all the equal of Juliet. Possibly it is treason to say bo, but he Beem* to mo to lack virility. It may, however, be doubted whether a Teuton, by virtue of his blood and breeding, is not rendered incapable of any adequate sympathy with a naturo like Romeo's. Romeo is a child of the warm south, to whom the exaggerated expression of emotion is no crime, and self-control no great virtue.1 He has not Juliet's magniflceut earnestness. In Juliet you are sensible that her great emotion is not merely true but absolutely new. Her words have all the fervid spontaneity of inspiration. You see her passion come into being and grow, and when she reveals it to Romeo you feel that it 13 just as muoh a revelation to herself, Romeo, on the other hand, i« a phrasemonger, a skilful joiner of pretty speeches, can quibble nicely and play upon his words, is too ficile in spinning out farfetched conc«it3. He is too consoions of his flno phrases and his fine feelings— gives you, iv short, the impression of bis having handled the tools before. HU love speeches smack of the troubadour, and his despair more than verges on Italian bombast; until tha fifth aofc, when, on recoivirgthe news of Juliet's death, he gives you for the first time any taste of strength. Tha balcony pcene—the lirst meeting and, still more, the last parting—must remain for all time the trauscsndent' model for a lore scene. No other writar in his most triumphant Buccesa can hopo to do more than imitate it. It would have been porfonfc but for that other hateful Capulefc, Rosaline, introduced by Shakespsare in the first act —for what reason it i 3 difficult to see, except that she existed in the original story. Some criticihave admired the audacity of Shakeapoare in making use of this lady. Hallam, who, by tha way, speaks somewhat disparagingly both of Romeo and of Juliet, thinks that Rosaline ia brought forward to indicate a -'.' constitutional susceptibility " in Romeo, and ho implies his commendation by saying that no vulgar poet would have mentioned Romeo's first passion: but no doubt if Romeo had been represented in love with his own grandmother Home critics would have found in the fact evidence of the dramatist's wisdom. One can judge the matter only by the effect it has on our conception of the character concerned; and 5 the effect is to deprive Romeo of that which 1 constitutes Juliet's chief charm—an air of I absolute freshness and sincerity.—(Applause).