There is no creature loves me
And if I die no soul will pity me,
adds, with a grin,
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity for myself?
Let me again remind Mr. Harris of Oscar Wilde. We all dreaded to read De Profundis: our instinct was to stop our ears, or run away from the wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart. But we were throwing away our pity. De Profundis was de profundis indeed: Wilde was too good a dramatist to throw away so powerful an effect; but nonetheless it was de profundis in excelsis. There was more laughter between the lines of that book than in a thousand farces by men of no genius. Wilde, like Richard and Shakespeare, found in himself no pity for himself. There is nothing that marks the born dramatist more unmistakably than this discovery of comedy in his own misfortunes almost in proportion to the pathos with which the ordinary man announces their tragedy. I cannot for the life of me see the broken heart in Shakespeare’s latest works. “Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings” is not the lyric of a broken man; nor is Cloten’s comment that if Imogen does not appreciate it, “it is a vice in her ears which horse hairs, and cats’ guts, and the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend,” the sally of a saddened one. Is it not clear that to the last there was in Shakespeare an incorrigible divine levity, an inexhaustible joy that derided sorrow? Think of the poor Dark Lady having to stand up to this unbearable power of extracting a grim fun from everything. Mr. Harris writes as if Shakespeare did all the suffering and the Dark Lady all the cruelty. But why does he not put himself in the Dark Lady’s place for a moment as he has put himself so successfully in Shakespeare’s? Imagine her reading the hundred and thirtieth sonnet!
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wire, black wires grow on her head;
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak; yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was never for a moment safe with Shakespeare. Bear in mind that she was not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes; that Shakespeare’s revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding shows, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got sick when they saw the queen’s conduct; and then ask Mr. Harris whether any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the “sugred” compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain, that seemed to Shakespeare as natural and amusing a reaction as the burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his poems by Cloten and Touchstone.
Jupiter and Semele
This does not mean that Shakespeare was cruel: evidently he was not; but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce Semele to ashes: it was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being a mortal. The one thing Shakespeare’s passion for the Dark Lady was not, was what Mr. Harris in one passage calls it: idolatrous. If it had been, she might have been able to stand it. The man who “dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves,” is tolerable even by a spoilt and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure a man who dotes without doubting; who knows, and who is hugely amused at the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with Yorick’s skull, and inviting “my lady” to laugh at the sepulchral humor of the fact that though she paint an inch thick (which the Dark Lady may have done), to Yorick’s favor she must come at last. To the Dark Lady he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description: an intellectual Caliban. True, a Caliban who could say
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds, methought, would open and show riches
Ready to drop on me: that when I wak’d
I cried to dream again.
which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her ears which Cloten dreaded: she may not have seen the beauty of it, whereas there can be no doubt at all that of “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” etc., not a word was lost on her.
And is it to be supposed that Shakespeare was too stupid or too modest not to see at last that it was a case of Jupiter and Semele? Shakespeare was most certainly not modest in that sense.
