Chapter II (3)

These preparatory scenes bring out in a most subtle way the egoism at the basis of Romeo's character,--the same lyrical egoism that is in all his language and in all his conduct. When we first see Romeo, he is already in an uneasy dream. He is wandering, aloof from his friends and absorbed in himself. On meeting Juliet he passes from his first dream into a second dream. On learning of the death of Juliet he passes into still a third and quite different dream,--or stage of dream,--a stage in which action is necessary, and in which he displays the calculating intellect of a maniac. The mental abstraction of Romeo continues even after he has met Juliet. In Capulet's garden, despite the directness of Juliet, he is still in his reveries. The sacred wonder of the hour turns all his thoughts, not into love, but into poetry. Juliet's anxieties are practical. She asks him about his safety, how he came there, how he expects to escape. He answers in madrigals. His musings are almost impersonal. The power of the moonlight is over him, and the power of the scene, of which Juliet is only a part.

"With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt;
Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.

* * * * *

Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops--

* * * * *

It is my soul that calls upon my name:
How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears."

These reflections are almost "asides." They ought hardly to be spoken aloud. They denote that Romeo is still in his trance. They have, however, another and unfortunate influence: they retard the action of the play. As we read the play to ourselves, this accompaniment of lyrical feeling on Romeo's part does not interfere with our enjoyment. It seems to accentuate the more direct and human strain of Juliet's love.

But on the stage the actor who plays Romeo requires the very highest powers. While speaking at a distance from Juliet, and in a constrained position, he must by his voice and gestures convey these subtlest shades of feeling, throw these garlands of verse into his talk without interrupting its naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a manner that the audience feels they are in place, even as the reader does. It is no wonder that the rôle of Romeo is one of the most difficult in all Shakespeare. The demands made upon the stage are almost more than the stage can meet. The truth to nature is of a kind that the stage is almost powerless to render.

The character of Romeo cannot hope to be popular. Such pure passion, such unreasonable giving way, is not easily forgiven in a man. He must roll on the floor and blubber and kick. There is no getting away from this. He is not Romeo unless he cries like a baby or a Greek hero. This is the penalty for being a lyric poet. Had he used his mind more upon the problems of his love, and less upon its celebration in petalled phrases, his mind would not have deserted him so lamentably in the hour of his need. In fact, throughout the play, Romeo, by the exigencies of the plot, is in fair danger of becoming contemptible. For one instant only does he rise into respectability,--at the moment of his quarrel with Tybalt. At this crisis he is stung into life by the death of Mercutio, and acts like a man. The ranting manner in which it is customary to give Romeo's words in this passage of the play shows how far most actors are from understanding the true purport of the lines; how far from realizing that these few lines are the only opportunity the actor has of establishing the character of Romeo as a gentleman, a man of sense and courage, a formidable fellow, not unfit to be the hero of a play:--

"Alive, in triumph! and Mercutio slain!
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now!
Now, Tybalt, take the 'villain' back again
That late thou gay'st me;--for Mercutio's soul
Is but a little way above our heads,
Staying for thine to keep him company:
Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him."

The first three lines are spoken by Romeo to himself. They are a reflection, not a declamation,--a reflection upon which he instantly acts. He assumes the calmness of a man of his rank who is about to fight. More than this, Romeo, the man of words and moods, when once roused, as we shall see later, in a worser cause,--when once pledged to action,--Romeo shines with a sort of fatalistic spiritual power. He is now visibly dedicated to this quarrel. We feel sure that he will kill Tybalt in the encounter. The appeal to the supernatural is in his very gesture. The audience--nay, Tybalt himself--gazes with awe on this sudden apparition of Romeo as a man of action.

This highly satisfactory conduct is soon swept away by his behavior on hearing the news of his banishment. The boy seems to be without much stamina, after all. He is a pitiable object, and does not deserve the love of fair lady.

At Mantua the tide of his feelings has turned again, and by one of those natural reactions which he himself takes note of he wakes up unaccountably happy, "and all this day an unaccustom'd spirit lifts him above the ground with cheerful thoughts." It is the lightning before the thunderbolt.

"Her body sleeps to Capel's monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives.
I saw her laid low in her kindred's vault,
And presently took post to tell it you."

Balthasar makes no attempt to break the news gently. The blow descends on Romeo when he least expects it. He is not spared. The conduct of Romeo on hearing of Juliet's death is so close to nature as to be nature itself, yet it happens to be conduct almost impossible to be given on the stage. _He does nothing._ He is stunned. He collapses. For fully five minutes he does not speak, and yet in these five minutes he must show to the audience that his nature has been shaken to its foundations. The delirium of miraculously beautiful poetry is broken. His words are gone. His emotion is paralyzed, but his mind is alert. He seems suddenly to be grown up,--a man, and not a boy,--and a man of action. "Is it even so?" is all he says. He orders post-horses, ink and paper, in a few rapid sentences; it is evident that before speaking at all he has determined what he will do, and from now on to the end of the play Romeo is different from his old self, for a new Romeo has appeared. He is in a state of intense and calm exultation. All his fluctuating emotions have been stilled or stunned. He gives his orders in staccato. We feel that he knows what he is going to do, and will certainly accomplish it. Meanwhile his mind is dominant. It is preternaturally active. His "asides," which before were lyrical, now become the comments of an acute intellect. His vivid and microscopic recollection of the apothecary shop, his philosophical bantering with the apothecary, his sudden violence to Balthasar at the entrance to the tomb, and his as sudden friendliness, his words and conflict with Paris, whom he kills incidentally, absent-mindedly, and, as it were, with his left hand, without malice and without remorse,--all these things show an intellect working at high pressure, while the spirit of the man is absorbed in another and more important matter.

There is a certain state of mind in which the will to do is so soon followed by the act itself that one may say the act is automatic. The thought has already begun to be executed even while it is being formed. This occurs especially where the intent is to do some horrid deed which requires preparation, firmness of purpose, ingenuity, and, above all, external calmness.

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."

This is the phase through which Romeo is passing on the way from Mantua to Verona. His own words give us a picture of him during that ride:--

"What said my man when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode?"

He has come like an arrow, his mind closed to the external world, himself in the blind clutch of his own deadly purpose, driving on towards its fulfilment. Only at the end, when he stands before the bier of Juliet, sure of his will, beyond the reach of hindrance, alone for the first time,--only then is his spirit released in floods of eloquence; then does his triumphant purpose break into speech, and his words soar up like the flames of a great bonfire of precious incense streaming upward in exultation and in happiness.

The whole course of these last scenes of Romeo's life, which are scarcely longer than this description of them, is in the highest degree naturalistic; but the scenes are in the nature of things so difficult to present on the stage as to be fairly impossible. The very long, the very minute description of the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose heart has stopped beating, but whose mind is at work more actively and more accurately than it has ever worked before, is a thing highly sane as to its words. It must be done quietly, rapidly, and yet the impression must be created, which is created upon Balthasar, that Romeo is not in his right mind. A friend seeing him would cross the street to ask what was the matter.

The whole character of Romeo, from the beginning, has been imagined with reference to this self-destroying consummation. From his first speech we might have suspected that something destructive would come out of this man.

There is a type of highly organized being, not well fitted for this world, whose practical activities are drowned in a sea of feeling. Egoists by their constitution, they become dangerous beings when vexed, cornered, or thwarted by society. Their fine energies have had no training in the painful constructive processes of civilization. Their first instincts, when goaded into activity, are instincts of destruction. They know no compromise. If they are not to have all, then no one shall possess anything. Romeo is not suffering in this final scene. He is experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. He glories in his deed. It satisfies his soul. It gives him supreme spiritual activity. The deed brings widespread desolation, but to this he is indifferent, for it means the destruction of the prison against which his desires have always beaten their wings, the destruction of a material and social universe from which he has always longed to be free.

"O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh."

How much of all this psychology may we suppose was rendered apparent to the motley collection of excitable people who flocked to see the play--which appears to have been a popular one--in the years 1591-97? Probably as much as may be gathered by an audience to-day from a tolerable representation of the piece. The subtler truths of Shakespeare have always been lost upon the stage. In turning over the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, we may see that many such matters were pruned ruggedly off by the actors. The early audiences, like the popular audiences of to-day, doubtless regarded action as the first merit of a play, and the stage managers must have understood this. It is noticeable that, in the authentic text, the street fight with which this play opens is a carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to a climax in the entry of the prince. The reporter gives a few words only to a description of the scene. No doubt, in Shakespeare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly or all at once. It is impossible that the longer plays, like King Lear, should have been finished in an evening, unless the scenes moved with a hurry of life very different from the declamatory leisure with which our actors move from scene to scene. To make plain the course of the story was evidently the chief aim of the stage managers. The choruses are finger-posts. It is true that the choruses in Shakespeare are generally so overloaded with curious ornament as to be incomprehensible except as explanations of things already understood. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a riddle to which the play is the answer. One might at first suppose that the need of such finger-posts betrayed a dull audience, but no dull person was ever enlightened by Shakespeare's choruses. They play variations on the theme. They instruct only the instructed.

If interest in the course of the story be the first excitement to the theatre-goer, interest in seeing a picture of contemporary manners is probably the second. Our chief loss in reading Shakespeare is the loss of the society he depicts, and which we know only through him. In every line and scene there must be meanings which have vanished forever with the conditions on which they comment. A character on the stage has need, at the feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will remind us of something we know in real life. The types of Shakespeare which have been found substantial enough to survive the loss of their originals must have had an interest for the first audiences, both in nature and in intensity, very different from their interest to us. The high life depicted by Shakespeare has disappeared. No one of us has ever known a Mercutio. Fortunately, the types of society seem to change less in the lower orders than in the upper classes. England swarms with old women like Juliet's nurse; and as to these characters in Shakespeare whose originals still survive, and as to them only, we may feel that we are near the Elizabethans.

We should undoubtedly suffer some disenchantment by coming in contact with these coarse and violent people. How much do the pictures of contemporary England given us by the novelists stand in need of correction by a visit to the land! How different is the thing from the abstract! Or, to put the same thought in a more obvious light, how fantastic are the ideas of the Germans about Shakespeare! How Germanized does he come forth from their libraries and from their green-rooms!

We in America, with our formal manners, our bloodless complexions, our perpetual decorum and self-suppression, are about as much in sympathy with the real element of Shakespeare's plays as a Baptist parson is with a fox-hunt. Our blood is stirred by the narration, but our constitution could never stand the reality. As we read we translate all things into the dialect of our province; or if we must mouth, let us say that we translate the dialect of the English province into the language of our empire; but we still translate. Mercutio, on inspection, would turn out to be not a gentleman,--and indeed he is not; Juliet, to be a most extraordinary young person; Tybalt, a brute and ruffian, a type from the plantation; and the only man with whom we should feel at all at ease would be the County Paris, in whom we should all recognize a perfectly bred man. "What a man!" we should cry. "Why, he's a man of wax!"

* * * * *

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

Michael Angelo is revealed by his sonnets. He wears the triple crown of painter, poet, and sculptor, and his genius was worshipped with a kind of awe even while he lived, yet we know the man best through these little pieces of himself which he broke off and gave to his friends. The fragments vibrated with the life of the man, and were recognized as wonderful things. Even in his lifetime they were treasured and collected in manuscript, and at a later day they were seized upon by the world at large.

The first published edition of the sonnets was prepared for the press many years after the death of the author by his grandnephew, who edited them to suit the taste of the seventeenth century. The extent and atrocity of his emendations can be realized by a comparison of texts. But the sonnets survived the improvements, and even made headway under them; and when, in 1863, Guasti gave the original readings to the public, the world was prepared for them. The bibliography of editions and translations which Guasti gives is enough to show the popularity of the sonnets, their universal character, their international currency.

There are upward of one hundred sonnets in every stage of perfection, and they have given rise not only to a literature of translations, but to a literature of comment. Some years ago Mrs. Ednah Cheney published a selection of the sonnets, giving the Italian text, together with English translations by various hands. This little volume has earned the gratitude of many to whom it made known the sonnets. The Italians themselves have gone on printing the corrupt text in contempt of Guasti's labors. But it has not been left to the Italians to protect the treasures of their land. The barbarians have been the devoutest worshippers at all times. The last tribute has come from Mr. John Addington Symonds, who has done the sonnets into the English of the pre-Raphaelites, and done them, on the whole, amazingly well. His translations of the more graceful sonnets are facile, apt, and charming, and rise at times into beauty. He has, however, insisted on polishing the rugged ones. Moreover, being deficient in reverence, Mr. Symonds fails to convey reverence. Nevertheless, to have boldly planned and carried out the task of translating them all was an undertaking of so much courage, and has been done with so much success, that every rival must give in his admiration.

The poems are exceedingly various, some being rough and some elegant, some obvious and some obscure, some humorous, some religious. Yet they have this in common, that each seems to be the bearer of some deep harmony, whose vibrations we feel and whose truth we recognize. From the very beginning they seem to have had a provocative and stimulating effect upon others; ever since they were written, cultivated people have been writing essays about them. One of them has been the subject of repeated academical disquisition. They absorb and reflect the spirit of the times; they appeal to and express the individual; they have done this through three centuries and throughout who shall say how many different educational conditions. Place them in what light you will, they gleam with new meanings. This is their quality. It is hard to say whence the vitality comes. They have often a brilliancy that springs from the juxtaposition of two thoughts,--a brilliancy like that produced by unblended colors roughly but well laid on. They have, as it were, an organic force which nothing can render. The best of them have the reflective power which gives back light from the mind of the reader. The profounder ones appear to change and glow under contemplation; they re-echo syllables from forgotten voices; they suggest unfathomable depths of meaning. These sonnets are protean in character; they represent different things to different people,--religion to one, love to another, philosophy to a third.

It is easy to guess what must be the fate of such poems in translation. The translator inevitably puts more of himself than of Michael Angelo into his version. Even the first Italian editor could not let them alone. He felt he must dose them with elegance. This itching to amend the sonnets results largely from the obscurity of the text. A translator is required to be, above all things, comprehensible, and, therefore, he must interpret, he must paraphrase. He is not at liberty to retain the equivocal suggestiveness of the original. The language of a translation must be chastened, or, at least, grammatical, and Michael Angelo's verse is very often neither the one nor the other.

The selections which follow are not given as representative of the different styles in the original. They have been chosen from among those sonnets which seemed most capable of being rendered into English.

The essential nature of the sonnet is replete with difficulty, and special embarrassments are encountered in the Italian sonnet. The Italian sonnet is, both in its form and spirit, a thing so foreign to the English idea of what poetry should be, that no cultivation can ever domesticate it into the tongue. The seeds of flowers from the Alps may be planted in our gardens, but a new kind of flower will come up; and this is what has happened over and over again to the skilled gardeners of English literature in their struggles with the Italian sonnet. In Italy, for six hundred years, the sonnet has been the authorized form for a disconnected remark of any kind. Its chief aim is not so much to express a feeling as an idea--a witticism--a conceit--a shrewd saying--a clever analogy--a graceful simile--a beautiful thought. Moreover, it is not primarily intended for the public; it has a social rather than a literary function.

The English with their lyrical genius have impressed the form, as they have impressed every other form, into lyrical service, and with some success, it must be admitted. But the Italian sonnet is not lyrical. It is conversational and intellectual, and many things which English instinct declares poetry ought not to be. We feel throughout the poetry of the Latin races a certain domination of the intelligence which is foreign to our own poetry. But in the sonnet form at least we may sympathize with this domination. Let us read the Italian sonnets, then, as if they were prose; let us seek first the thought and hold to that, and leave the eloquence to take care of itself. It is the thought, after all, which Michael Angelo himself cared about. He is willing to sacrifice elegance, to truncate words, to wreck rhyme, prosody, and grammar, if he can only hurl through the verse these thoughts which were his convictions.

The platonic ideas about life and love and art, which lie at the bottom of most of these sonnets, are familiar to us all. They have been the reigning commonplace ideas of educated people for the last two thousand years. But in these sonnets they are touched with new power; they become exalted into mystical importance. We feel almost as if it were Plato himself that is talking, and the interest is not lessened when we remember that it is Michael Angelo. It is necessary to touch on this element in the sonnets, for it exists in them; and because while some will feel chiefly the fiery soul of the man, others will be most struck by his great speculative intellect.

It is certain that the sonnets date from various times in Michael Angelo's life; and, except in a few cases, it must be left to the instinct of the reader to place them. Those which were called forth by the poet's friendship for Vittoria Colonna were undoubtedly written towards the close of his life. While he seems to have known Vittoria Colonna and to have been greatly attached to her for many years, it is certain that in his old age he fell in love with her. The library of romance that has been written about this attachment has added nothing to Condivi's simple words:--

"He greatly loved the Marchesana of Pescara, with whose divine
spirit he fell in love, and was in return passionately beloved of
her; and he still keeps many of her letters, which are full of most
honest and tenderest love, such as used to issue from a heart like
hers; and he himself had written her many and many a sonnet full of
wit and tenderness. She often left Viterbo and other places, where
she had gone for pleasure, and to pass the summer, and came to Rome
for no other reason than to see Michael Angelo. And in return he
bore her so much love that I remember hearing him say that he
regretted nothing except that when he went to see her on her
death-bed he had not kissed her brow and her cheek as he had kissed
her hand. He was many times overwhelmed at the thought of her death,
and used to be as one out of his mind."

It seems, from reading the sonnets, that some of those which are addressed to women must belong to a period anterior to his friendship with Vittoria. This appears from the internal evidence of style and feeling, as well as by references in the later sonnets.

One other fact must be mentioned,--both Vittoria and Michael Angelo belonged to, or at least sympathized with, the Piagnoni, and were in a sense disciples of Savonarola. Now, it is this religious element which makes Michael Angelo seem to step out of his country and out of his century and across time and space into our own. This religious feeling is of a kind perfectly familiar to us; indeed, of a kind inborn and native to us. Whether we be reading the English prayer-book or listening to the old German Passion Music, there is a certain note of the spirit which, when we hear it, we perfectly recognize as a part of ourselves. What we recognize is, in fact, the Protestantism which swept over Europe during the century of Michael Angelo's existence; which conquered Teutonic Europe, and was conquered, but not extinguished, in Latin Europe; and a part of which survives in ourselves. If one wishes to feel the power of Savonarola, one may do so in these sonnets. We had connected Michael Angelo with the Renaissance, but we are here face to face with the Reformation. We cannot help being a little surprised at this. We cannot help being surprised at finding how well we know this man.

Few of us are familiar enough with the language of the plastic arts to have seen without prompting this same modern element in Michael Angelo's painting and sculpture. We might, perhaps, have recognized it in the Pieta in St. Peter's. We may safely say, however, that it exists in all his works. It is in the Medicean statues; it is in the Julian marbles; it is in the Sistine ceiling. What is there in these figures that they leave us so awestruck, that they seem so like the sound of trumpets blowing from a spiritual world? The intelligence that could call them forth, the craft that could draw them, have long since perished. But the meaning survives the craft. The lost arts retain their power over us. We understand but vaguely, yet we are thrilled. We cannot decipher the signs, yet we subscribe to their import. The world from which Michael Angelo's figures speak is our own world, after all. That is the reason they are so potent, so intimate, so inimitably significant. We may be sure that the affinity which we feel with Michael Angelo, and do not feel with any other artist of that age, springs from experiences and beliefs in him which are similar to our own.

His work speaks to the moral sense more directly and more powerfully than that of any one,--so directly and so powerfully, indeed, that we whose physical senses are dull, and whose moral sense is acute, are moved by Michael Angelo, although the rest of the _cinque cento_ culture remain a closed book to us.

It is difficult, this conjuring with the unrecoverable past, so rashly done by us all. Yet we must use what light we have. Remembering, then, that painting is not the reigning mode of expression in recent times, and that in dealing with it we are dealing with a vehicle of expression with which we are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet draw conclusions which are not fantastic, if we base them upon the identity of one man's nature some part of which we are sure we understand. We may throw a bridge from the ground in the sonnets, upon which we are sure we stand firmly, to the ground in the frescos, which, by reason of our own ignorance, is less certain ground to us, and we may walk from one side to the other amid the elemental forces of this same man's mind.