SHAKESPEARE'S PROSE
IT might almost be erefted into a rule that a great poet is, if he please, also a master of prose. Tennyson in modern times is the great example of a poet who never spoke without his singing-robes. But we feel an instindlive convidion that Tennyson's prose would have been worth having; that it would have been terse, strong, and pI6luresque — in another fashion from the pi6lorial English of the Anglo-Saxon revivalists. Indeed, there is manifest reason why a poet should have command over ' that other harmony of prose,' as a great master of both has called it. The higher includes the lower, the more the less. He who has subdued to his hand all the resources of language under the exaltedly difficult and specialized conditions of metre should be easy lord of them in the unhindered forms of prose. Perhaps it is lack of inclination rather than of ability which indisposes a poet for the effort. Perhaps, also, the metrical restraints are to him veritable aids and pinions, the lack of which, is severely felt in prose. Perhaps he suffers, like Claudio, ' from too much liberty.*
Though Shakespeare bequeathed us neither letters nor essays, nor so much as a pamphlet, he has not left us without means of estimating what his touch would have been in prose. The evidences of it are scattered through his plays. There is, of course, the plentiful prose-dialogue.
But this can only indirc6lly give us any notion of what might have been his power as a prosewriter. Dramatic and impersonal, it is direfted to reproducing the conversational style of his period, as developed among the pi6turesque and varying classes of Elizabethan men and women. It is one thing with Rosalind, another with Orlando, another with Beatrice, another with Mistress Ford or Master Page^ and yet another with his fools or clowns. Thersites differs from Apemantus, plain-spoken old Lafeu from plain-spoken Kent. At the most we might conje6l:ure hence how Shakespeare talked. And if there be anywhere a suggestion of Shakespeare's talk, v/e would look for it not so much in the overpowering richness of Falstaif, as in the light, urbane, good-humoured pleasantry of Prince Hal. Prince Hal is evidently a model of the cultivated, quick-witted, intelligent gentleman unbending himself in boon society. In his light dexterity, his high-spirited facility, one seems to discern a reminder of the nimblewitted Shakespeare, as Fuller portrays him in the encounters at the ' Mermaid.' No less do the vein of intermittent seriousness running through his talk, the touches of slightly scornful melancholy, conform to one's idea of what Shakespeare may have been in society. One can imagine him, in some fit of disgust with his companions such as prompted the sonnets complaining of his trade, uttering the contemptuous retort of Prince Hal to Poins;
* It would be every man's thought, and thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks; never a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better than thine.'
The noble speech of Brutus to the Romans would alone prove that Shakespeare had a master's touch in prose. The balance, the antithesis, the terseness, the grave simplicity of dicftion make it a model in its kind. Yet one can hardly say that this is the fashion in which Shakespeare would have written prose, had he used that vehicle apart from the drama. It was written in this manner for a special purpose — to imitate the laconic style which Plutarch records that Brutus affe6led. Its laconisms, therefore, exhibit no tendency of the poet's own. To find a passage which we do believe to show his native style we must again go to Prince Hal, in his after-characfter of Henry V. The whole of the King's encounter with the soldiers, who lay on his shoulders the private consequences of war, affords admirable specimens of prose. But in particular we quote his chief defensive utterance:
There is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrament of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers. Some, peradventure, have on them the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder; some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury; some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robber)'. Now, if these men have dcfcate4
the law, and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God: war is His beadle, war is His vengeance; so that here men are punished, for bef ore-breach of the King's laws, in now the King's quarrel: where they feared the death, tliey have borne life away; and where they would be safe, they perish. Then if they die unprovided, no more is the King guilty of their damnation, than he was before guilty of those impieties for the which they are now visited. Every subjeft's duty is the King's, but every subjeft's soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and d}ing so, death is to him advantage: or not dying, the time was blessedly lost, wherein such preparation was gained: and in him that escapes, it were not sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outUve that day to see His greatness, and to teach others how they should prepare.
The whole is on a like level, and it is obvious that Shakespeare's interest in his theme has caused him for the moment to forsake dramatic propriety by adopting a stru6lure much more complete and formal than a man would use in unpremeditated talk. It is Shakespeare defending a thesis with the pen, rather than Henry with the tongue. And you have, in consequence, a fine passage of prose, quite original in movement and style, unlike other prose of the period, and charaderistic (we venture to think) of Shakespeare himself. You would know that style again. Close-knit, pregnant, with a dexterous use of balance and antithesis, ft is yet excellently direft, fluent, and various, the ihetorical arts carefullv restrained, and all insistence on them avoided. Despite its closeness, it is not too close; there is space for free motion: and it has a masculine ring, a cut-andthrust fashion, which removes it far alike from pedantry on the one hand and poetized prose on the other. Such, or something after this manner, would (we think) have been Shakespeare's native style in prose: not the ultraformal style he put (for a reason) into the mouth of Brutus.
With the Baconian dispute revived, it is interesting to ask how such passages compare with the known prose of Bacon. The speech of Brutus might possibly be Bacon's, who loved the sententious. But surely not a typical passage such as we have quoted. Take an average extraft from Bacon's Essays:
It is worth observing that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death; and, therefore, death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; Love delights in it; Honour aspircth to it; Grief flieth to it; nay, we read, after Otho, the Emperor, had slain himself. Pity (which is the tenderest of afTeftions) provoked many to die, out of mere compassion to their Sovereign, and as the truest sort of followers.
Grave, cold, slow, affc6^ing an aphoristic brevity, and erring (when it does err) on the side of pedantry, could this style take on the virile energy and freedom of movement, the equipoise of concision and fluency, which we discern in Henry's speech, as in all Shakespeare's charafteristic passages? We cannot think it. And that other style of Bacon's, exemphfied in the Reign of Henry VII, expanded, formal, in the slow-moving and rather cumbersome periods which he deems appropriate to historic dignity, is yet more distant from Shakespeare. The more one studies Shakespeare, the more clearly one perceives in him a latent but quite individual prosestyle, which, had he worked it out, would have been a treasurable addition to the great hneage of English prose.
BEN JONSON'S PROSE
A SKED haphazard to name the poets who /\ were also prose-writers (why have we not ■* ^-developed a single term for the thing, like the French frosatcur r"), few, probably, would think of including Ben Jonson. There is some reason for not thinking of Ben as a prose-WTiter: he never produced any set and continuous work in prose — not so much as a pamphlet. All he has left us is a colleftion called ^ylva or Tifubcr, corresponding to the memorabilia of what we now call a commonplace book — apparently because it contains the observations which a man thinks are not commonplace. We English have small relish for apophthegms and prose-brevities in general: not among us would a La Rochefoucauld, a Pascal of the Pensces^ a La Bruyere, have found applause. Selden, or Coleridge's Table-Talk^ the exceedingly witty ' Characters ' of ' Hudibras ' Butler, and other admirable literature of the kind, go virtually unread. We want expansion and explanation; we like not being asked to complement the author's wit by our own. So that Sylva has small chance, were it better than it is.
We know two Ben Jonsons, it may be said — the Ben of the plays, rugged, strong, pedantic, unsympathetic, often heavy, coarse and repellent even in his humour, where he is strongest; and the Ben of those surprisingly contrasting lyrics, all too few; small, dclicatef, and exquisite. It is as though Vulcan took to working in filigree. Here, in Syha, is another Ben, who increases our estimation of the man. We have often thought there was a measure of affinity between the two Johnsons — Ben and Sam. Their surnames are the same save in spelling; both have a scriptural Christian name; both were large and burly men, of strong, unbeautiful countenance — ' a mountain belly and a rocky face ' the dram.atist ascribed to himself. Both were convivial spirits, with a magnetic tendency to form a personal following; ' the tribe of Ben ' was paralleled by the tribe of Samuel. Both were men distinguished for learning unusual among the literary men of their time. Both carried it over the verge of pedantry, and at the same time had strong sense. Both were notably combative. Both were mighty talkers, and founded famous literary clubs which made the ' Mermaid ' and the ' Mitre ' illustrious amon? taverns. Both, it seems pretty sure, were overbearing. You can imagine Benjamin as ready to browbeat a man as Samuel. There the parallel ends; Ben was not distinguished for religiosity or benevolence, Ben was never cited as a moralist. But in Syha, it seems to us, we pick it up again.
There is the strong common-sense, and the uncommon sense, which we find in the Doctor's talk; there is the diredness, the straightness ^ i6o to the point. There is, moreover, a robust m.inhness, an eye which discerns, and a hand which strikes for the pith of any matter, a contained vigour which wastes no stroke. Even the style is not without analogies to the spoken style of the great conversationalist — so different from his written style. It has nothing of the occasional stateliness, the latinities, which appeared even in the Doftor's talk. But on the Doctor's vernacular side it has its kinships. It is clean, hardy, well-knit, excellently idiomatic; pithy and well-poised as an English cudgel. Its marked tendency to the use of balance is a further Johnsonian affinity. We would not, however, be understood to say that it is hke the style of Johnson's talk. It is individual, and has the ring common to the Elizabethan style. But it has certain qualities which seem to us akin to the spirit of Johnson's talk. One striking feature is its modernity. It is more modern than Shakespeare's prose. There are many sentences which, with the alteration of a word or so, the substitution of a modern for an archaic infledlion, would pass for very good and pure modern prose. It is singular that prose so vernacular should have had no successor, and that so wide an interval should have elapsed between him and Dryden.
Yet, if Jonson influenced no follower, it certainly deserves more notice than it has received that, thus early, prose so native, showing so much the mettle of its English pasture, could be written. The average style is seen at once in such a passage as this:
No man is so foolish, but may give another good counsel sometimes; and no man is so wise, but may easily err, if he will take no other counsel but his own. But very few men are wise by their own counsel or learned by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by himself, hath a fool for a master.
Save for the antiquated infleilion of ' hath,' that is modern enough. Johnson could put a thing with almost — or quite — brutal terseness; but Ben is still more uncompromisingly effective, as in the last sentence of the following quotation:
Many men believe not themselves what they vi^ould persuade others, and less do the things which they would impose on others... only they set the sign of the Cross over their outer doors, and sacrifice to their guts and their groin in their inner closets.
? It has not the sweetness and light of modern culture; it is ursine: but it sticks in the memory. It is interesting, in reading Syha, to note that Jonson had already formed an opinion on the contest between the Ancients and Moderns, long before it became a burning question in the later Seventeenth, and brought forth Swift's Battle of the Books in the Eighteenth Century. If any man might have been looked for to be a bigoted champion of the Ancients, it was Jonson, who marred his own work and would have i>one hard to mar that of others by his pedantic insistence on classical authority, and lamented Shakespeare's ' little Latin and less Greek.' Yet he maintains a clear-sighted attitude of respe6\ful independence.
One cannot but smile a little, none the less, at Ben's disclaimer of sefts, his ' I will have no man addift himself to me ': Een, the focus of disciples and leader in many a literary /r^r<2j-. Yet, despite his upholding of the just rights of the present against the past, he was not satisfied with the present. It is a strange fa6l that the complaints of decadence in letters, which we hear now, come to us like an echo from the pages of the Sylva. In one passage he observes:
I cannot think Nature is so spent and decayed, that she can bring forth nothing worth her former years. She is always the same, Hke herself, and when she collects her strength, is abler still. Men are decayed, and studies; she is not.
Who could conceive that this last pessimist sentence was written by the friend of Shakespeare, the sharer in the glorious prime of English literature, and one of the great hterary periods of the world? Even in his day he evidently felt the scarcity of true appreciation.