May 9, 1890.] 



SCIENCE. 



285 



Perhaps, in the flood of intellectual commentary and the 

 analysis of Shakespeare's melody, eloquence, and literary 

 style, attention has not been sufficiently attracted to this 

 practical scientific form, — this "local habitation" which 

 Shakespeare gave to his imagination, — how, with this scien- 

 tific use of his imagination, he actually realized and pro- 

 vided for. not only the possibilities of the stage carpenter 

 (an unknown functionary in his day), but that very modern 

 opulence of modern stage architecture and effect which at- 

 tracts us to our own theatres. Nobody can fail to be im- 

 pressed, in witnessing modern Shakespearian revival, with 

 the fact that the costliest and most prodigal of stage mount- 

 ing which can be lavished upon a Shakespeare play on our 

 metropolitan stage actually requires no ampHBcation, or em- 

 bellishment, or enlargement of the text, action or situations, to 

 justify it; and that the stage directions of the acting editions of 

 Shakespeare to day are only those implied, if not expressed, 

 in the text as Shakespeare himself left it. We have seen 

 the splendors of Mr. Rignold's '" Henry the Fifth," and of 

 Mr. Booth's and Mr. Wilson Barrett's and Mr Irving's 

 "Hamlet," " Othello," and "Merchant of Venice," and of 

 Mr. Daly's "Merry Wives of Windsor,'" "Taming of the 

 Shrew," and "Midsummer Night's Dream;" but it should 

 never be left unrealized that this dramitie author, who — three 

 centuries ago — wroughtoutthis dramatic material, neversaw, 

 €xc8pt in imagination, and without the slightest rudimen- 

 tary attempt at stage effect to guide his vision, all this ma- 

 chinery which his work to-day, and for our eyes, so impera- 

 tively demands. 



The stage contrivances of Bottom's company— the man 

 besmeared with loam to represent a wall, the man with a 

 lantern and a dog to represent a moon — were scarcely 'our- 

 lesques upon the meanness and poverty, the petty economies 

 and pitiable makeshifts, of the stage as Shakespeare himself 

 knew it. I was most particularly impressed, in witnessing 

 Mr. Daly's reproduction of "The Merry Wives of Windsor," 

 with Mr. Daly's success in intimating this, without demean- 

 ing the effect of his own lavish stage machinery. Of course, 

 the room in Ford's house in which FalstafP meets the ladies 

 was, in the day to be represented, strewn with rushes (about 

 a century was to elapse before interior luxury had even sug- 

 gested sand). The ceilings were low and the timbers hewn, 

 and the decorations mostly confined to an arrangement of 

 the table utensils: trenchers, tankards, pots, and jugs. But 

 to bring to his audiences the idea of the house of a thriving 

 tradesman who had amassed "legions of angels," and so to 

 tell the story of Falstaff's motives, Mr. Daly, of course, 

 made the room a beautiful interior with carved furniture and 

 wainscotings, and covered the floor with costly rugs. 

 Shakespeare's own plays were not only mounted upon, 

 but were immediately written for, a barren platform, where, 

 if a couch was drawn in to signify a bed-chamber, or a table 

 and two stools to signify an inn taproom, it was the force of 

 a realism which could no further go. It was a company 

 like the clown companies in " Love's Labour's Lost " or the 

 '■ Midsummer Night's Dream," oftener than a company of 

 Burbadges or of Lowins, that spoke Shakespeare's mighty 

 lines in the ear of Shakespeare himself: and his majestic and 

 noble and tender women were, perforce, intrusted to beard- 

 less and callow boys, in days when for a woman to play a 

 woman's part was an ineffable disgrace. The modern stage, 



at the height of its opulence, is, then, but the imagination 

 and the prophetic mind of Shakespeire; and Shakespeare 

 was not only summit of the dramatic creator, but of the 

 dramatic art as well. Like the projector of the continental 

 railway, who sits in his saddle in the primeval forest and 

 sees his vestibuled palace coaches, and hears his panting lo- 

 comotives, Shakespeare stood upon his rude stage in the 

 uncouth barn they called a play-house, and foresaw all that 

 three centuries could amass of stage opulence and the la vish- 

 ness of scenic art; and there and then he devised the situa- 

 tions, and moulded into poetry the dialogue which should 

 describe and justify that opulence and that summit of dra- 

 matic art. There and then he bodied forth the form of 

 things unknown — turned them to shapes, and gave to airy 

 nothings a local habitation and a name. I do not say he 

 knew what he saw, or knew that he was so writing for that 

 which was to be his future. I do not know whether he did 

 or not; but the result is here to day. 



Certainly this age, and the ages to come, may well organ- 

 ize into academies to study the mind and the workmanship 

 of a man and a poetry like these. 



Now, if Shakespeare has a rival; if there is another poet 

 who builds and creates and preserves: and who— with a use 

 of the imagination which we may thus properly call scien- 

 tific — supplies not only his own generation and contempora- 

 ries, but generations yet to be born, with that which is use- 

 ful (in th.it it can be acted) and beautiful (in that it can be 

 admired) in poetry, — then let us organize an academy to 

 that poet also ; let societies be founded in his honor ; and 

 the less time we lose in the work, the better it will be for us. 

 Have we .such another poet? Is it Robert Browning? If 

 there is any truth declared, or any discovery announced, in 

 Mr. Browning's poetry, except the ordinary humanities with 

 which all poetry deals, — the loveliness of virtue, the deadli- 

 ness of vice, etc. (matters rather settled by this time, and as 

 to which further testimony or didactic illustration is merely 

 cumulative), — if there is, then by all means let us have 

 Browning societies, and plenty of them. But if there is not; 

 if it should appear that the great attractiveness of Robert 

 Browning's poetry, the real reason why a taste for it has 

 been sufficient to make it develop into a fad, and why 

 the study of it associates worthy and excellent people into 

 societies and clubs, has always been and is, simply that 

 its meaning is not (like the meaning of Shakespeare's po- 

 etry, for example) apparent on its face: that it is not per- 

 fectly intelligible, that nouns are situated at long distances 

 from their predicates, and that verbs, adverbs, pronouns, 

 prepositions, and various other parts of speech, are under- 

 stood from their absence or are to be guessed at from the 

 tumultuous context; should it appear that, were Mr. Brown- 

 ing's poetry paraphrased into perfectly commonplace Eng- 

 lish, each noun and verb in its place, every substantive and 

 predicate in their proper order, there would be no Browning 

 societies;— then, I submit, it would seem as if Mr. Browning's 

 poetry was and is, nothing but cumulative poetry. And the 

 question arises whether your Browning societies are any 

 thing more than societies for the working out of conun- 

 drums, or puzzles, or rebuses; not, perhaps, adult parsing 

 societies, but societies organized to ask what well-known 

 sentiment could Mr. Browning have intended to express in 

 these five words, what perfectly familiar proposition of mor- 



