SHAKESPEARE CLUB.

Otago Witness, Issue 2511, 30 April 1902, Page 29

SHAKESPEARE CLUB.

The Dunedin Shakespeare Club's entertainment on the 23rd attracted an audience •that almost filled the Choral Hall. The "•President (Mr A. Wilson, M.A.) occupied fthe chair, and opened the proceedings with -an address. The members of tho club read ■selections from "Henry IV" (Part 1), the cast of characters being: — King Henry, Mr jVVMtson ; Worcester, Mr Fyf e ; Northumberland, Gadshill, and Douglas, MrDoolan; Hotipur, Mr Hanlon; Blunt, Mr Clowes; 2Talstaff, Mr Stephens; Poms aRd Vernon, Mr W. S. Fisher ; Prince Henry, Mr Brugh ; Bardolph and Prince John, Mr Barrett; Xiady Percy, Miss Holland; Hostess, Miss iNlulbn; chorus, Miss I. Whitson. Mr Stephens carried off the honours of the evening. He assumed the character of the bluff old Falstaff with much credit and cleverness. ;With Mr Hanlon's performance no fault could be found, his words being distinct and forcible. Mr Brugh spoke clearly and gave a reading that was very agreeable. Mr Whiteon was in hiß element, as he always is in Shakespearean plays, and his acquittal of a heavy part could not have been improved upon. The other members filled their parts .•well. Though one might find a few minor Jaults with their efforts, they gave valuable assistance to the others and contributed much to the success of the reading. Misb M. Graham was favoured with » hearty encore for her singing of " Say ' Yes,' " and responded with a very pleasing rendering of "'The love tide." Mr W. Thomson saug " To-morrow will be Friday " acceptably. The concert concluded with the singing by the audisnee of the National Anthem. The following is the address delivered by ihe chairman : — It is well sometimes, as this anniversary comes round, to examine a little into the foundations of one's beliefs. Shakespeare has become for the English-speaking race nothing lc&3 than a secular bible, and the doctrine of plenary inspiration too readily accepted is apt to lead us to indolent ways of taking much for granted which we ought to feel and prove for ourselves. The French say that our reverence is a superstition. Is the Shakespeare cult, then, unreasonable and excessive? Is it an impiety to hint at limitations, faults, terrestrial blemishes in th© god of our idolatry? Are we so very sure after all that Shakespeare is the great poet we take him to be, and that we are not ourselves the dupes of tradition? Tn euch a matter as this one may pretty f-afely trust to the arbitrament of time. It is 286 years since Shakespeare died, and by every mark of immortality he is more alive to-day than ever before. To be Etire, Homer and Selomon have stood a longer test than this: by some 15 centuries or bo ; but three hundred years is a very respectable trial of an author's claims. If a writer is still alive three centuries after his death — that is, genuinely alive, not a mere mummy ewathed in calfskin and set upon a ehelf, but a force still vital to the thought and language of tho world — we may as surely assume that he has in him the inextinguishable flame as if he wero three millenniums old. Relying, therefore, on the essaying quality of time, we may safely take Shakesp.eare*3 greatness for granted. But, for all that, it is not impossible, or even improbable, that there enters into our estimate a considerable amount of national pride, not to say vanity. No doubt Shakespeare is great, but is he not greater because he belongs to us and to nobody else? I believe, for instance, that if you could go to the Dunedin Burns Club and persuade each member tspeak with his hand upon his conscience, you might find that a greater than Shakespeare was born 143 years ago, not a hundred mules from bonnie Doon. In Germany you will find sober comparisons made between •Faust and Hamlet, and in France between .Zaire and Othello. We think such comparisons ridiculous, but are we sure that we are jiot ridiculous in thinking so? The family genius, as we know, is not quit»» t-uch a genius outside the family, ff our admiration for Shakespeare has passed the bounds of sanity, it may be a wholesome corrective to note what they say of him beyond our nation. l\ r either in Germany nor in France, we may be sure, will they bo ready to flaiter Shakespeare because he belongs to n=. Quite the other way about. I propose therefore to note-, as briefly as may be, what a few distinguished Frenchmen have said of Shakespeare. OF Germany I will only say at present that her greatest scholars have vied with each other in their homage to Shakespeare : a homage which in many cases has taken a shape which leaves no doubt as to ils genuineness — the practical shape of laborious study. It is easy perhaps for Germany to admire Shakespeare, but France cannot find it quite co easy. French literature has grown up subject to influences so widely different from those that condition our» that a Frenchman ihas to modify his standard considerably before he can accept much of our literatureas literature at all. Each of the two literatures reflects the political conditions of dheir respective countries. French literature grew up under the protection of a splendid and despotic court, hedged in with a severe and formal etiquette. So much did this court make literature its affair that it founded an academy whose special function dt should be to foster and safeguard the interests of French letters and the French j language. Given this important preliminary condition, you may easily predict what the development of French literature will be, as long, at least, as the French monarchy lasts. It will be an academic literature ; stately, prim, severely hedged in by etiquette, always on its dignity, never appearing abroad except in bag-wig and ruffles. The words you may use are set down in a national dictionary, the idioms and concords you may use, in a national grammar. Jf you write tragedy it must be in rhymed ■couplets, and you must bind yourself to certain conditions of time and place, to .which is given the question-begging name of "unities." And_ the ultimate results of ■this rigorous schooling? One result was th» rapid evolution of an. exquisite prose, nervous, flexible, and idiomatic, possibly the most perfect instrument ever invented for the expression or concealment of human thought. As regards the drama — the drama of tragedy, at least — the result was of a more doubtful kind. The French classical drama, whatever its merits, is certainly very artificial. Nothing unseemly must come between the wind and its nobility. It condescends to nothing that is not dignified, courtly, and well-bied. Its dialogue is not ■ cpnversation, but declamation, long and <H]«iiiiiaw«- l l^rair"*"" iv " I '" iv HTi fl Jinra _nf "^

{syllables. The natural life of man, with its meannesses, vulgarities, artifices, petty passions, illiterate speech, and low manners, would have been indecent on the stag© of CorneiHe. What would have happened in Paris if gravedigger3 or the city watch had been introduced into the Cicl? S>n cmeuto possibly, if not a revolution. A great Roman dramatist held nothing human to be alien to the drama. Certainly much that intimately concerns the teeming millions wae alien to the stage of Corneillc and Racine. How different were the conditions under which English literature grew and prospered. Our literature and our political history reflect the one the other. There have beeu, no doubt, times of grievous storm and stress, but the development has proceeded on consistent and unswerving lines, till at length our constitution and our literature are what they are, the visible incarnated spirit of j the people. The essential quality in both has been liberty, and . evermore liberty : individual independence ; in short, republicanism. There has been no supreme authority, no academy to cay how this or that may or may not be done. Each man has been a law to himself. We do not ask a man, How have you done it? but What have you done? If a genius appears who speaks unlike his neighbours, at first we may regard him askance, but we end by allowing him his .way ; we take him on his own terms, however we may regret that so sweet a kernel should have so sour a rind. To those who have in them the root of the matter, how much do we not pardon — obscurity, slovenliness, negligence, barbarous mangling of our idiom and language, everything but insincerity. But only to those who are worth having at the price. There is no indulgence for the ordinary mortal who take* such liberties. "If you are Apollo, manifest your godhead, and pipe as you choose ; if you are Marsyas, expect to be flayed." Not that we are indifferent to manner, for wo prize certain writers whose only matter is their manner. These, however, are not the great writers. When a great writer arrives — one who Fays great things in a great way — the world considers him for a century or two, and then places him among the select few who are of all times and of all countries. Suoh, to quote the list of a Frenohman well qualified to speak, enumerating those who have reached | lOOdeg centigrade of geniu«, are Homer, Job, uEschylus, Phidias, Isaiah, Ezekiei, St. John the Divine, St. I Paul, Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, Dante, I Michael Angelo, Rabelais, Cervantes, Rembrandt, and Beethoven. Only one Frenchman in the list, you will observe, and that Rabelais, who has given us the adjective " Rabelaisian '" , though it should be noted that Victor Hugo does not profess here to make an exhaustive list of those whose genius has reached the centigrade. And Shakespeare? Ls there no place for him in this Valhalla? Yes, surely, an honoured place, a higher place among the highest. " Perhaps in an extreme case," says Victor Hugo, " you might mark out as the highest summit among those summits, Homer, iEschylus. Job, Isaiah, j Dante, and Shakespeare." But Hugo was an emancipated Frenchman, a child of the Revolution, the man appointed by destiny to vindicate for French literature the liberty secured to French politics by the revolution. | I do not profess a wide acquaintance with j French opinion on Shakespeare, of which there is sufficient to form a literature in itself, but one or two famous names may be cited to show how Frenchmen capable of judging are affected towards our poet. In this connection, one thinks at once of two great Frenchmen — Voltaire and Victor Hugo, — .the one the most distinguished man of letters in France of the eighteenth century, the other the most distinguished in the nineteenth. These are men whose opinion, if it is given honestly, cannot be lightly sot aside. Voltaire was the first to make the name of Shakespeare known in France, the great French classical dramatists having known nothing of their English predecessor. Voltaire visited England in 1726, became acquainted with Shakespeare's dramas, and three years later on his return to France made his discovery known to his countrymen. "I found among the English what I sought, and the paradox of Homer's reputation developed before me. Shakespeare, their first tragic poet, has in England scarcely any other epithet than ' The Divine.' When I had a sufficient acquaintance with the English language, I saw that the English were right, and that it is impossible that a whole nation should be wrong in a matter of sentiment." Such was I Voltaire's opinion at the age of 35, and it was no doubt his honest opinion at the time. But 30 years later when Shakespeare had found a certain vogue in France, had i been translated, and seemed likely to affect ! the inana of the classic school, of which Voltaire was an illustrious exponent, he turned round and abused Shakespeare right heartily. By this time Voltaire was old and waspish, and this is how he lets the venom flow: "Have you read his detectable gibberish, of which there are still five volumes to come? Can you sufficiently hate this impudent idiot? Will you suffer the affront he puts on France? There are not in France tar and feathers enough, fools- caps enough, pillories enough, for such a rascal. The blood boils in my veins when 1 'peak to you about him. If he does not put you in a rage, you are a man without feeling. The dreadful part of it is that tho monster has a following in France, and, to crown this calamity and horror, I was myself the first to spoak of t>hif> Shakespeare ; it m I who first showed to Frenchmen a few pearls that I had found in this enormous muckheap. - 1 never expected that I should one day help to tread underfoot the crowns of Racine and Corneille in order to deck the brows of a barbarian player. . . . The Jacks and Jills of the Foire St. Germain 50 year 3 ago were Cinnas and Polyeuctes compared with the characters of this drunkard of a Shakespeare." Voltaire did an ill turn for his reputation when he wrote that letter. It is dotibtful whether he is not better known to Englishmen by his phrase about the " occasional pearls in the dung-heap " than by his " Candide " or his "Charles the Twelfth." Very different from "Voltaire's estimate is that of Victor Hugo, who, if he was not so universal a genius as Voltaire, was a much greater poet. Some time in the 60s. Hugo solaced his exile by writing a book on Shakespeare, un oetirnaie and appreciation of the poet. And such a book i Nebulous in places as a Delphic oracle, and inspired throughout with the fine fren.sy of a hymn to Apollo. Yet it is a notable book ; and, what i" chiefly to the point, it shows the infight of a great poet into a great poet's mind. Ho would be an exacting devotee j whom thi= lofty pa;an did not satisfy. It is difficult to quote, - because it ia all co 1 tiuotafrla;^

" ShakGspvMro is fertility, force, esube lance, the o\erflo\\ ing biej-t, the foaming rup. the brimful tub, the overrunning sap, tho ovorflooding lava, the whirlwind scattciing germs, the universal ruin of life, everything by thousands, everything by millions, no reticence, no binding, no economy, the inordinate and tranquil prodigality of the creator. To those who feel the bottom of their pocket, the inexhaustible seems insane. Will it stop soon? Never. Shakespeare i* the sower of dazzling wonders. At every turn, the image : at every turn, contrast ; at every turn, light and darkneFS. "The poet, we have said, is nature. Subtle, minute, keen, niieroecopical like nature ; immense. Not discreet, not reserved, not sparing. Simply magnificent." Again: — " Shakespeare (the condor alone gives some idea of such gigantic gait) departs, arrives, starts again, mounts, descends, hovers, dive's, sinks, rushes, plunges into the depths below, plunges into the depths above. He is one of those geniuses that God purposely leaves unbridled, so that they may go headlong and in full flight into the infinite. From time to time comes on this globe one of these spirits. Their passage, as we havo eaid, renews art, science, philosophy, or society. They fill a century, then disappear. Then it is not one century alone that their light illumines : it is humanity from one end to another of tim«, and it is perceived that each of these men was the human mind itself containpd whole in one brain, and coming, at a given moment, to give on earth an impetus to progress. These supreme spirits, once life achieved and the work completed, go in death to rejoin the' mysterious group, and are probably at home in the infinite." When Hugo desists from his rhapsody of praise, it is only to abuse the epicene school which long dominated literature in France — the school which found the path of true genius to lie in th© via media of propriety, restraint, sobriety, respect for authority, irreproachable toilet — in short, in mediocrity. We possess no Engl : sh critic of Shakespeare so eminent as Victor Hugo, and certainly no English criticism that approaches, in appreciative fervour, this fantastic ecstasy. The truth is that Shakespeare is the true emancipator of French literature — Shakespeare, and the spirit of the Revolution ; and Hugo was the great man provided by destiny to strike off the classic fetters. Victor Hugo wab not an imitator, no man less go, but he was quite rware of the source whence he drew his inspiration, and of the debt under which the romantic movement lay to Shakespeare. Madame de Stael, who was a woman of penetration and great independence of character, if not of judgment, has her chapter on Shakespeare. She U impressed with hi 9 originality and power, and commends him for his representations of human passion in its simple and elementary forms, without that toning down for propriety's sake which characterises feebler writers. She finds in Shakespeare the first natural and adequate treatment of overwhelming sorrow, and regards as miraculous such characters as Lear and Oplielia, in which he pourtrays the disordered intellect. But she thinks Shakespeare would have been greater without his faults — his puerilities, absurdities, coarse buffooneries, and tedious repetitions. She could have wished that he had delighted less in horror and bloodshed, and in such repulsive creations as Caliban and Richard lit; not perceiving, honest woman, that the qualities she dislikes, where they are not due to the age, are only the obverse of the qualities she admires. A Shakespeare with the propriety and punctilious delicacy of Racine were indeed " hot ice and wondrous j-trange snow," only a degree less impossible than a Racine with the Titanic strength of Shakespeare. Madame de Stael's attitude is typionl of a good deal of French opinion about Shakespeare. Tame, the distinguished French critic, whose views on English literature are more familiar to most of us than those of any other Frenchman, regards Shakespeare ab a prodigy, with a trifle of the monster : " Shakespeare never sees things tranquilly. All the powers of his mind are concentrated in the present image or idea. He is buried and absorbed in it. With such a genius we are- on the brink of an abyss ; the eddying water dashes in headlong, devouring whatever objects it meets, bringing them to light again, if at all, transformed and mutilated. We pause stupefied before these convulsive metaphors, which might have been written by a fevered hand in a night"? delirium, which gather a pageful of ideas and pictures in half a sentence, which scorch the eyes they would enlighten. Words lose their sense: constructions are put out of joint ; paradoxes of style, apparently false expressions, which a man might occasionally venture upon with diffidence in the transport of his rapture, become the ordinary language; he dazzW, he repels, he terrifies, he disgust*, he oppresses ; his verses are a piercing and sublime song, pitched in too high a key, above tljo reach of our organs, which offends our ear*, of which the mind alone can divine the justice and bpautv." And again : — " Shakespeare is strange and powerful, obscure and original, beyond all the poeth df hj.. or any other age ; the meat immoderate of all violators of language, the most marvellous of all creators of souls, the farthest removed from regular logic and classical reason, the one most capable of ex.citing in us a world of forms, and of placing living beings before lie." Yet again : — " His master faculty is an impassioned imagination, freed from the fetters of reason and morality. He abandons himself to it, and finds in man little that lie would care to lop off. He accepts nature, and finds it beautiful in ita entirety. He paints it in its littleness, its deformities, its weaknesses, its excesses, its irregularities and its rajzes ; he exhibits man at his mrals. in bed. at play, drunk, mad, sick : ho adds that which passes behind the stage to that which passes on the stage. He does not dream of ennobling, but of copying human life, and aspires only tn make tho copy more energetic and more striking than the original." For my part I would not trust Taine'a in.-tinct- in literature as I should Victor Hugo's. Why, for instance, this cry about Shakespeare's obscurity? Jf there is one thing in Shakespeare more than another in which we may rejoice, it is hi« lucidity. When I take up, as I sometimes do, some minor poet whose sole merit is his Egyptian darkness, after doubting for a moment of my own sanity, I lay him down and bless my stars that Shakespeare at least did not find it necessary to be obscure. You may find more sound and fury, more frothy vagueness--, and obseui ity in six chapters of Tame him&elf than in any six of ShakesJRB&EfiJa trajzedjiej. Taine'a ahaster on

Shako ;p&are, ho»\e\ev, if a tiillo hysterical. X subti! and olaar-sigLted His verdict is. iv brief, that S".iakc«pe.-ire i~ a replica of Nature : hk© her vn<=t, merciless, implacable, impaitia). as much interested in the infinitely little as in the infinitely great, selecting nothing, rejecting nothing, without predilections and without antipathics — a giant sphinx, gazing out upon the world with wise and passionless eyes, scrutinising all things, but himself inscrutable. Other professional critics in France have pronounced upon the merits and demerits of, Shakespeare. Amongst these is Villemain, the friend of Cousin, and Professor of Literature at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale, a savant of great learning and eloquence, who by his lectures on genera! literature may be said to have educated the generation of brilliant French literary men which grew up under Louis Philippe. Villeinain's catholic taste did full justice to Shakespeare, but his criticism is chiefly confined to rebutting the scurrilous abuse of Voltaire. Of the later critics of^hakespeare. one of the most distinguished is Edmund Scherer. Seherer, besides being a charming writer and a particularly sane critic, had probably a more extensive acquaintance with English literature than any Frenchman of his time, except perhaps Tame; and a largo proportion of his essays deal with questions of our literature — with Shakespeare amongsr. others. He quarrels with the ioo-rapid change of sentiment in certain of Shakespeare's characters ; the change of feeling in Anfidius, for example, towards Coriolanus, and in Anne towards Richard 111. He further takes exception to the poet's repetition of one idea under a variety of synonyms, to his excessive exuberance of expression, to his quips, conceits, and puns on occasions when such puerilities seem out of place, as at the death-bed of John o' Gaunt. "But," he continues, "if the wit is sometimes out of place in our poet, what sprightliness in this wit, what gaiety, what exuberance! How well does this very excess, this extravagance of nower. to use an expression of Madame de Stael's, befit that boundless invention. And then, I must make haste to add. this wit is only one of the qualities of Shakespeare. He is possessed in an equal degree of imagination and feeling. He feels everything, understands everything. No one has lived more, observed mere, or has better reproduced the external world ; and at the same timu he is the most lyrical of poets. He expresses, in inimitable poetry with the perfection of form, all the emotions of the heart. He says things as no one else says them, in a way that is unfamiliar and striking. He possesses incredible depth and delicacy of intuition. A sovereign wisdom emanates from his writings. In these writings discords neem to disappear in a higher harmony. Shakespeare has extended the realm of the soul ; and, take him for all in all, I do not think that any man has added more than he to the patrimony of the human race." Elsewhere in the same essay Scherer refers to the superstitious regard of the English people for Shakespeare ; but I look in vain in any English author for a more unreserved and generous eulogy of Shakewpeare than I find in the works of Hugo, Tame, and Scherer.