A Glance Toward Shakespeare
by . Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922. 16mo, pp. vi + ll6. $1.25.
MANY readers who pick up this book will naturally’ ask, why write about Shakespeare or any of the old standard authors, whom we all know and have always known, when you might write about Mr. Shaw or Miss Amy Lowell? And Mr. Chapman might answer aptly that it. is just because we all know about the classics that it is worth while to write about them. In the vast chaos and multiplicity of modern literary production, so vast that nothing stands out, nothing endures, nothing makes a really universal appeal, the comfortable old authors form a common ground on which past and present, learned and ignorant, can meet and touch. In the excellent phrase with which Mr. Chapman begins his book: ‘The use of great men is to bind the world together.’
But if one is to write about old authors, one must say what is new, and since it is quite impossible to find new facts, one must take a new and independent attitude. The usual mistake of critics is that they treat contemporaries roughly and standard authors with reverence; whereas they should do just the reverse. You can handle contemporaries as tenderly as you like: they will die anyway, if there is nothing in them. But these old, well-worn, stubborn glories will stand a lot of mauling and be all the better for it.
So thinks Mr. Chapman, and his fashion of treating Shakespeare is far indeed from the dull idolatry of learned pedants, so far that such will probably complain of it. They will say that there is little system in Mr. Chapman’s criticism, that it jumps from one thing to another with no coherent development, and sometimes blurs and confuses the issues. They will point out that enough account has uot been taken of Shakespeare’s debt to his sources, of the curious operation of his eager spirit in dealing with the manifold stories which formed the dead substance of his wonderfully vital creation. Especially they will urge that it is not scientific to isolate him so completely from his contemporaries and all the rest of literature.
But this peculiar personal attitude is just what makes Mr. Chapman’s handling so surprisingly fresh and vivid. He seems like a man who has walked into a movie show round the corner and seen the whole vast Shakespearean pageant and come away and tried to condense his impression into a few brief pages. This movie sense, if one may call it so, this show sense, this keen, swift suggestion of an immediate contact, thrills and sparkles everywhere in Mr. Chapman’s book. Conventions are shattered. Prejudices are laughed at. Tradition and reverence are tossed and tousled with the gay carelessness of Shakespeare himself. The august Shakespearean characters are batted about with an impudent and exquisite audacity.
Yet from all this jovial and tumultuous promenade emerges a sense of inexhaustible delight, of fresh, ever-renewed, unfailing ravishment, far, far different from the outcome of German erudition and analytical cleverness. I should not be surprised if scores of readers laid down Mr. Chapman’s book and said. ‘ This Shakespeare, there must be something in him, after all: what if I were to look again and see?’
GAMALIEL BRADFORD.