SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XV. No. 379 



the historian, the politician, the man of science himself, are 

 eager to square themselves. And again: since the dramatic 

 is the highest form of literature, and since Shakespeare 

 made it so, the Shakespeare Society is also a dramatic so- 

 ciety, and nothing which is dramatic should be alienated 

 from it. At least, such was the belief of the first Shakespeare 

 Society, founded in London by such gentlemen as the late 

 honored James Orchard Halliwell (since Halliwell-Phillips), 

 John Payne Collier, William Harness, Alexander Dyce, 

 Douglas Jerrold, Bolton Corney, Charles Dickens, Peter 

 Cunningham, Henry Hallam, and others. Harder-headed 

 men than the above enumerated surely never came to- 

 gether; and if any one will take the trouble to look over 

 the titles of the publications of this first Shakespeare Society, 

 he will at least be conscientiously unable to continue to jeer 

 at that Shakespearian Society as a mutual admiration as- 

 sembly. Those publications are entirely devoted to the 

 preservation of such literary matter, records or chronicles, 

 as throw, or threw then, a new light upon the Elizabethan 

 and Jacobean ages, whose central figure William Shake- 

 speare undoubtedly was. I do not know, had "aesthetic 

 criticism" been then invented, whether or not the above- 

 named gentlemen would have succumbed to its temptations; 

 but I find it very hard to imagine that they would have so 

 succumbed. I find it very hard to imagine Halliwell-Phillips 

 and Charles Dickens and Henry Hallam lying "among the 

 daisies, and discoursing in novel phrases of the complicated 

 state of mind" of William Sbakespeare. I am quite sure, 

 indeed, that William Shakespeare himself would have been 

 the very last to accept the "creative" or "aesthetic" (it is the 

 same thing) criticism of the present period; which reads all 

 sorts of sublime eschatological and moral moods, motives, 

 and purposes into the few honest, direct, and laborious years 

 which he passed in the busy London of Elizabeth and her 

 successor, — passed there, at first in a struggle to earn his 

 daily bread as a stranger in the crowded streets; then, later, 

 to accumulate a fortune with which, like Horace's ideal 

 gentleman, "far from the noise of trade" to retire to his boy- 

 hood's home, and "plough with oxen the fields of his ances- 

 tors." Blink the fact as we may:— insist on Shakespeare's 

 moral purposes and immense visions of didactic services to 

 his race as we may : still the fact remains that all the im- 

 mortal plays were written in the course of this struggle, 

 first for bread and then for wealth, and that William Shake- 

 speare himself was, not only a poet and a dramatist, but a 

 practical mounter of plays, and maintainer of theatres and 

 theatrical companies, and lived and died so utterly uncon- 

 scious that he had done any thing more than any other play- 

 right, that he never made the slightest effort to perpetuate 

 a line he had ever written, and took no notice in his will of 

 any thing but his farms, his curtilages, and his cash. This 

 is no place to give a list of the publications of that first 

 Shakespeare Society ; but I happen to recall one of them, a 

 reproduction of the long-lost and forgotten cartoons which 

 Inigo Jones drew in freehand to guide the designers and 

 court carpenters in mounting certain masques for the enter- 

 tainment of royalty, and this one publication may stand 

 here for all the rest. Not in all those twenty or thirty vol- 

 umes was there any posing of Shakespeare as a missionary, 

 or dogmatic philosopher teaching moral, or esthetic, or 

 platonic, or any other sort of doctrines to his race. He 



(Shakespeare) may be a great moral teacher to-day; but, 

 had he been "a great moral teacher" in his own day, he 

 would have played his companies to empty houses. In 

 short, the purpose of the first Shakespeare Society was, what 

 in my opinion the purpose of every Shakespeare club or so- 

 ciety to-day should be: to illustrate rather than supply, and 

 to preserve rather than to create. Here, then, is the point. 

 Shakespeare was, however unwittingly, what we call "scien- 

 tific" in the use of his imagination, not only because he 

 wrote fully up to the despotic requirements of a stage and a 

 scenic art which he could only imagine (since it was to be 

 born centuries after his funeral), but because he selected for 

 perpetuation, out of his own environment, — out of the riff- 

 raff as well as the splendor, the lewd and vulgar as well as 

 the lofty and the romantic, — that which was formative and 

 genuine, and that of which — because it was formative and 

 genuine, and not illusive and temporary — the centuries be- 

 yond him would be interested to study and inquire. Ben 

 Jonson and his associate dramatists were on the ground just 

 as Shakespeare was: they had precisely the access to their 

 contemporary civilization that Shakespeare had; they pre- 

 served the fashions and the fads (what Aubrey called "the 

 coxcombities") of their date just as well as Shakespeare did. 

 But, since they were not vouchsafed what Sir Benjamin 

 Brodie calls "the scientific imagination," as well as the 

 romantic and dramatic imagination, they could not and did 

 not know "which seed would grow, and which would not." 

 The Elizabethan dramatists did not, as a rule, it seems, know 

 to which "airy nothings" to give the "local habitation" and 

 "name" which succeeding centuries should found academies 

 and societies to investigate. Glorious as was the- age they 

 lived in, their eyes, as a rule, were sealed to the possibilities 

 which were being born around him. Only to one among 

 them was it given to body forth and turn to shapes the 

 forms which should be valuable to posterity, — those actual, 

 practical, and scientific forms which we throng our own 

 theatres to-day to see with our own physical eyes, and which 

 we organize our Shakespeare societies to study and to illus- 

 trate. 



This, then, is the situation. Because Shakespeare held the 

 mirror up to the nature which environed him, because he 

 became the chronicler of those manners, societies, and civili- 

 zations of his Elizabethan day which were the germs of our 

 own, it is worth while to organize societies to study him in 

 every aspect and from every point of view. The Shelley 

 society or the Browning society, on the other hand, has and 

 will have only the form, the expression, the mood, of its 

 poet to investigate and debate; for the material in which Shel- 

 ley and Browning worked is not unique or personal either to 

 Browning or to Shelley. Their preserve is just exactly the 

 preserve of all other poets : — the Humanities, which are always 

 to the fore, always the same, and always the quarry of con- 

 temporary poets. And the poet who appears to-day, or who 

 shall appear to-morrow, will be more apt, I think, to write 

 works which the centuries to come after him shall not will- 

 ingly let die, if he looks for his society to be organized in 

 those centuries rather than to-day or to-morrow ; and this 

 because it is only the centuries to come after him which 

 shall be competent to decide whether his work was fit to 

 live, or was only the thing of the moment, — " the tune of 

 the time," as Bamlet called Osric's flourishes. 



