Knight's store of knowledge for all readers: being a collection of treatises, in various departments of knowledge / by several authors.
- Knight, Charles, 1791-1873
- Date:
- [1841]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Knight's store of knowledge for all readers: being a collection of treatises, in various departments of knowledge / by several authors. Source: Wellcome Collection.
14/406 (page 4)
![■1 he has written. Many of our Imbitnul sayliiRg, llmt enter info the mimU even of the iminstnicled os sonietliing to which they liave become familiar wiliiout books, arc Slmkiiiere's. If two men of average edneation converse together for half an liour on gcneml subjects, there can be little doubt tliat, with- out actual quotation, the ever genial wit of Shaksperc will be found to have given jioint, and his universal poetry elevation, to their discourse. Tlie mode in which the mind of Shaksperc is penetrating through all other lands exhibits the stages in the progress of his universality in our own land. He first becomes the property of the highest and the most educated minds. They have acknowledged his influence at first timidly and suspiciously; but the result is invariable: the greatest in- tellects become prostrate before this master intellect. Under false systems of criticism, both in our own and in other countries, the merits of Shaksperc as a whole have been misunderstood; and he has been held as a violator of certain conventional principles of art, upon which poetry was to be built as churches were built in the same age,—with nothing irregular, nothing projecting, a good solid cube, witli one window exactly like another, and a doorway in the middle. The architects of our fine old Gothic cathedrals, and Shakspere, were equally held to be out of the pale of regular art. They were wild and irregular geniuses, more to be wondered at than imitated. But, with all this, there never was a period, how- ever low its standard of taste, when many a votary did not feel a breathless awe as he entered sucli cathedrals as York and Lincoln, and had his devotion raised and refined by the matchless beauty and sublimity of the temple in which lie prayed. And, in the same way, there never was a period since Shakspeve's plays were first acted in a mean theatre, without scenery or decoration,—up to the present time when they are the common possession of Europe, and ai’e known amongst millions of men who inhabit mighty continents and islands where the English tongue was almost or wholly unspoken when he lived,—there never was a period when the love and reverence which England now hears him were not most ardently cherished in the heai’ts of the best and the most influential of the people—those who thought for themselves. Even those who scofl’ed at his art never doubted his power. They would criticise him,—they would attempt to mend him, —but he was always “ the incomparable.” They held, too, that he was uuleanied; but they also held that he knew every- thing without learning. Nature did for him, they said, what study did for other men. Thus they endeavoured to raise him in the mass, and degrade him in the detail; and by dint of their absurd general admiration, and their equally absurd depreciation of minute parts of liis writings, they laboured to propagate an opinion wluch would have been fatal to one less really great,—tliat be was a person, not cxaclly inspired, Imt producing higher eflforts of imagination, and displaying the most varied and accurate knowledge, without the education and the labour by which very inferior productions of literature were ordinarily produced. These were the critics of our own country, from the days of the Hestoration almost up to the end of the reign of George III. But, in the mean while, after the liateful taste was put down tliat we imported from France with all the vices of the court of Charles II., Shaksperc again became the unquestionably best property of the Eiiglisli stage. There never was a period in which he was not dili- gently read. Four folio editions of his works were printed in 62 years—1623 to 1G85, a time most unfavourable to litera- ture. It is in this way—by the multitude of that Spoksjierc luis become univena!. If books were now to perish, if “letters should not be known, the influence of 8hnksi>crc could not be eradicated from amongst those who sjicak bis tongue: the moral and intelloctual influence would remain after the works wlrich liad produced it had porislicd. But they could not perish wholly: some fragments of tlie knowledge of which he is full,—some consecutive words of the exquisite diction in which he alioutids,—some dim abbreviation of the wonderful chnruclors with which he lias peopled tlio oartli,— would st.irt up in remote places, ns the flowers of jmst centuries again make their ap]>earaiice when the forests of more rec^'iii times liave iK'eii swt^pi away. This is a consummation which cannot hapjK'ii. Sbakspore, through the invention of printing, is, in the limited use of the word, eternal. It has i>een considered a proper opening of a work which desires to make the’ great body of the ]>eople familiar with sound and abiding knowledge to devote tlie first numlier, or rather two numlicrs, to a view of the life, in connexion witli the writings, of him to whom was given this praise,—and to him alone it could lie justly given,— ” Ilti was not of an age. but for all time.** One of the editors of .Shakspere,—and he tliat possessed the greatest shrewdness, mixed with the most unreasonable portion of prejudice and unfairness,—Steevens—says, “ All tliat is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakspere is—that he was boni at .Stratford-upon-Avon—married and bad cbil- dren there—went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays—returned to Stratford, made bis will, died, and was buried.” TTiis is not true. The life of the most distinguished modem statesman, whose course may lie traced by document upon document, might be despatched in a similar antithetical summary. This is not “a//that is known with any degree of certainty. There is, indeed, a lament- able deficiency in the materials for Sbakspere’s life, such as perhaps exists in no similar instance of a man so eminetil amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Hallam has justly observed, “ All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have detected about Shakspere serves rather to disappoint and per- plex us than to furnish the slightest illustration of his cliarac- ter. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name, that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary, can be pro- duced. And yet the register of their births, of Ibeir marriages, of the children horn to them, of their deaths, and to which in many cases we may add the record of their wills, are the only traces which are left, after the lajise of two centuries and a half, of die greater number of tliose who have dwelt upon the same earth and in the same country with ourselves. But if there were a proportionate motive in tlie character of any man to connect such meagre records with the time and circum- stances in which he lived, it would not be an unworthy task to attempt to shadow out his life by the help of these imperfect traces of his career. Such is the task which antiquaries arc constantly proposing to themselves with re- gard to men in whom tlie world takes very little interest. There is, jierhaps, no man whose life would not be interesting could we know, and know tnily, all the circumstances of it. If we liave to follow the course of a very distinguislied man, tlie interest of the subject may com]x^n$atc for the paucity of the facts. If we have nothing but registers, and title-deeds, and |>edigrees, and wills, we must be content with these “spoils of time, in the absence of matters which bring us nearer to the individual. Wc have, however, as we have said, to group these records, amidst the mass of circumstances of which they form so small a part. A writer of the present day, who has given an impulse to our abstract tliinking, which like all otlier such imjnilses may eventually lie traced onward to practical results—Mr. Carlyle—in a review of a popular edition of a biographical work, says, “ Along with that tomb- stone information, )>crhaps even without much of it, wc could have liked to gain some answer, in one way or other, to this wide question: What and how EngUeh l^fe in ——> limc¥ w'hercin has ours grown to differ therefrom? In otlicr words : What things have wc to foi^t, what to fancy and re- member, before wc, from such distance, can put ourselves in —'g place; and so, in the full sense of the term, t/ndertland him, Ids sayings and his doings t If we fill up the blank with the name of Shakspere, we have a very clear exixisitiou of tlie spirit in which it a]))icars to us that the Life of Sliakspero ought to be wrillen. Wc have the “ tombstone information,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22013325_0014.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
