[ay 9, 1890.] 



SCIENCE. 



283 



sciences shall in due time arrange for, aad the arts accom- 

 plish. Goethe himself expresses this, — 



' ' Thus in the roaring loom of Time I ply. 

 And weave for God the garment thou seest him by." 



There is also that nearer use of the imagination which is of 

 immediate commercial importance, as when the promoter of 

 a continental railway sees, iu his mind's eye, a location 

 through yawning cafions, and trackless forests on unbeaten 

 mountain-sides, where his locomotives may clamber. And 

 tliere is yet a third use of the imagination, which discerns 

 enough importance in material and passing things, which to 

 the general reader seem trivial and valueless, to lead the 

 poet to preserve and chronicle them, and so perpetuate 

 that whicli otherwise would disappear, and be lost forever 

 to the student of humanity and of history. Poetry, then, in 

 the latter case, has its practical as well as its sentimental 

 uses, and it is not a matter of supererogation that organiza- 

 tions of individuals should meet to study and interpret the 

 worjjs of a poet as well as the works of a publicist or a phi- 

 losopher. But when the poetry of a certain poet, however 

 naagnificent, is merely delineation of, or soliloquy concern- 

 ing, that of which all the race is tenant in common along with 

 the poet, it would seem as if the organization of a great so- 

 ciety or a learned academy to penetrate that particular poetry 

 or that particular poet was rather what we call a " fad," or a 

 crochet, thanaworkof any value to anybody. To illustrate the 

 situation by use of an honored name (to which name I have 

 no wish to allude other than with the highest respect) : the 

 death of Mi\ Eobert Browning has terminated what I think 

 is one of the most wonderful — certainly the most unprece- 

 dented — phenomena in literature; namely, the spectacle of 

 a poet writing poetry, and of the simultaneous organization 

 on two continents of learned societies to comprehend that 

 poetry as fast as it was written. Indeed, the remark of the 

 witty person — that, just as great physical works are beyond 

 the capacity of individuals, and so must be intrusted to cor- 

 porations, so the comprehension of Mr. Browning's poetiy, 

 being beyond the single intellect, was committed to aggre- 

 gations of intellect known as ''Browning Societies" — ap- 

 pears to have been less a bon mot, and much nearer the 

 truth, than had been generally supposed; for Dr. Furnivall 

 tells us why he founded the original Browning Society. 

 "The main motive for taking the step," says the excellent 

 doctor, " was some talk and writing of a certain cymbal- 

 tinkler being a greater poet (that is, maker) than Browning. 

 I couldn't stand that! " which rather appears to be only an- 

 other way of saying that Browning was in danger of being 

 neglected, simply because people could not readily ascertain 

 whether there was any thing in him to study; and so that 

 organizations must be formed, not to study something or 

 other that was in him, but to find out if that something or 

 other was there. 



What I propose in this paper is an attempt to show, that, 

 unlike the Browning Society, the Shakespeare Society is not 

 an institution of this character, not organized to worship 

 Shakespeare, or to study the Shakespearian method and form : 

 but that it is an institution productive of real benefit, be- 

 cause its purpose is to study the matter (the material) in 

 which Shakespeare deals; because we know that this matter 

 is in him, without the organization of any preliminary pars- 



ing societies — simply because, so unapproachably simple 

 and coherent and scientific is his form, that we are able 

 at a glance to ascertain whether he is worth studying or 

 not. 



Indeed, it would appear, from this very statement of the 

 founder of Browning societies, that he himself perfectly well 

 understood that a study of Browning merely meant a study 

 of the particular Browning expression, fashion, method, 

 form (or neglect of form, of which Browning himself boasts 

 in his " The Inn Album "). And, if this were the excellent 

 founder's meaning, we can well understand that he was 

 right: for certainly, if Mr. Browning's own contemporary 

 must quarry in Mr. Browning's poetry — must go at him with 

 pick and spade just as a twenty-second century grammarian 

 might do, he must not expect the yield he unearths to be 

 any secret of his own century, — any thing not already his 

 own property iu common with Browning himself; any thing 

 he did not know before, or could not have procured with 

 less or equal labor elsewhere, — for certainly Mr. Brown- 

 ing had no sources of information, or access to sources 

 of information, which his contemporaries did and do 

 not enjoy or cannot procure. What the Browning 

 Society occupies itself with, then, must be exactly that 

 which, had Shakespeare societies been organized during 

 Shakespeare's lifetime or immediately after his death, those 

 societies would have been occupied with as to Shakespeare. 

 The Shakespeare societies of 1600-16 would have found 

 themselves in precisely the same position as to their poet as 

 are our Browning societies to theirs. Their aim would have 

 necessarily been, not to learn about their own century, about 

 their own manners, their own customs, their own emotions, 

 sensations, habits and speech, from the writings of one of 

 themselves, but would have been limited simply to a study 

 and interpretation of William Shakespeare's expression 

 of his delineation of those customs, sensations, and emo- 

 tions. 



The Shakespeare Society of our day, as I understand it, 

 has no such purpose as that outlined above. It is not 

 founded and maintained in order to study, still less to wor- 

 ship, either Shakespeare the man, or Shakespeare the ex- 

 pressionist. Still less than either, I may remark in passing, 

 is the Shakespeare Society organized to translate Shakespeare 

 into the vernacular of the nineteenth century. As a matter 

 of fact, Shakespeare's language is actually nearer our own 

 than is that of any writer of any century preceding ours. 

 Attempts to paraphrase usually end in obscuring him. 

 There is not a sentence in the plays the drift and point of 

 which — however an obsolete word, or archaic construction, 

 or typographical error therein, may occasionally baffle us — 

 is not perfectly intelligible. The Shakespeare Society is 

 formed, rather, to study the age and customs in which and 

 among which Shakespeare lived and wrote: the Shake- 

 speare Society, in other words, is an antiquarian society, 

 which has limited its researches to that the most interesting 

 age of the English speaking world, — the age in which those 

 modern institutions which we prize most — art, manners, 

 letters, society, jurisprudence, the common law which pro- 

 tects all these — were all springing to birth; of which institu- 

 tions, it seems, WUliam Shakespeare epitomized the very 

 life, fibre, and being; leaving behind him not only a litera- 

 ture for the library and the student, but a record to which 



