Fame or Fashion: In Literature

by LAURENCE HOUSMAN

1

THE two words “fame” and “fashion” begin with the same two letters; after that, they have not a letter in common. And what is true of their spelling is true also of what they stand for: fame and fashion have very little in common. What makes a writer fashionable is not what makes him famous; in a good many cases a writer would probably have achieved fame, had all — or most — of the elements which made him fashionable been left out. It would be going too far to say that a writer owed his fashion, his popularity, to all his bad qualities, and to none of his good; but it is very generally true that some, at least, of the qualities which helped him to fashion are not the qualities which add luster to his fame in after years. They had been better away.

Let us take some instances from the day before yesterday — the Victorian Age, which, during the last generation, has stepped into history. Two of the most famous writers of that day (famous and fashionable) were Dickens and Tennyson. Now there can be very little doubt that the popularity of Dickens was enormously enhanced by the way he played down to the intellect of his readers — he was sedulously “low-brow.”

Dickens is never difficult, to understand — he is always terribly easy. He dots the i’s and crosses the t’s of his characters not once but a dozen times. And where his rich humor wears thin (as it sometimes does), he carries on with an arch facetiousness and a heavy-handed exaggeration of statement which not merely require no effort of the intellect for their appreciation, but require that the intellect shall be temporarily nonexistent, or dormant, to make them at all credible, or tolerable.

Take for instance the letter written by Fanny Squeers to Ralph Nickleby after Nicholas has thrashed her father. Blind admirers of Dickens regard that letter as a masterpiece of humor.

SIR,
My pa requests me to write to you, the doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen.
We are in a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now lays. You will judge from this that he has been brought very low.
When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not pollewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have entered her skull. We have a medical certifiket that if it had, the tortershell would have affected the brain.
Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse mistakes.
The monster having sasiated his thirst for blood ran away, taking with him a boy of desperate caracter that he had excited to rebellyon, and a garnet ring belong to my ma, and not having been apprehended by the constables is supposed to have been took up by some stage-coach. My pa begs that if he comes to you the ring may be returned, and that you will let the thief and assassin go, as if we prosecuted him he would only be transported, and if he is let go he is sure to be hung before long which will save us trouble and be much more satisfactory. Hoping to hear from you when convenient
I remain
Yours and cetrer
FANNY SQUEERS
P.S. I pity his ignorance and despise him.

Now, as I say, blind admirers of Dickens do not in their pious blindness regard that performance as a crime to be condoned or hidden away: they regard it as a gem; and its postscript (which by itself is not so bad) has passed into the currency of our language. Why is it, then, that I find it so painful an exhibition of unscrupulous pandering to the cheapest sense of humor?

In ultra-burlesque, incredible statements are permissible — they are part of the game; but in comedy and in novels some relation to real life is demanded. And when Fanny says that she is screaming all the time that she writes, and that her mother’s back comb was driven several inches into her head, and a little more and it would have entered her skull — well, as a bit of isolated extravaganza you may be able to laugh at it. But as part of a letter possible to be written by an angry young

woman whose father has been assaulted — it simply won’t wash: it is so absolutely unreal and so abysmally silly. It is supposed to represent a character prone to exaggerate; but Dickens is not artist enough in restraint to make the exaggeration funny without making it incredible.

Dickens discovered that he could get the cheap laugh from scores of thousands of his countrymen; and he yielded to the temptation. It helped his popularity, but it has not helped his fame.

Another of his popular qualities was his sentiment, as expressed in the deaths of Paul Dombey, Little Nell, Dora, and other small fry, whose dyings were a delight to the Victorian Age — but delight us less now.

Dickens is famous because he created a collection of characters of extraordinary vividness and variety, which remain alive in spite of, and not because of, his absurd exaggerations about them. And because his rich sense of life was infectious, he made his readers feel that (filled though it was with the bad and the indifferent as well as the good) life was aboundingly worth while. Not a sense of beauty, but a sense of vitality, of exuberant spirits, is what we get from Dickens, in full measure pressed down, and bubbling up again. Had Dickens been less extravagant as a caricaturist, and less of a sentimentalist, he would have been just as famous in the present day, but less fashionable in his own.

Then take Tennyson. When Tennyson came into literary being, he was adored by a small group of sensitively cultured minds; but the older critics disliked him. A highly educated Don of Cambridge said, “Tennyson is poetry gone mad.” Curiously, after his death, the charge against Tennyson was that he was “poetry gone tame.” And it is quite true that in the interval much of his poetry, in spite of (perhaps because of) its technical delicacy and polish, had gone tame.

Tennyson achieved his popularity, his fashion, by a taming process, which luckily did not infect all his poems. It infected “The May Queen,” “The Princess,” “Enoch Arden,” “Idylls of the King.” It did not seriously infect “In Memoriam” (which was a far bolder poem for its time than we now realize it to be); it did not infect at all his best short lyrics, or “Maud,” or certain other pieces that one could name. But “Maud” with Tennyson’s contemporaries was never popular — it was deprecated as morbid, hysterical, and unwholesome. And it is only within the last few years that a Neo-Georgian poet, Mr. Humbert Wolfe, has come along to assert boldly that “Maud” is Tennyson’s finest poem and his surest claim (outside his lyrics and a few other pieces) to permanent fame. What made Tennyson fashionable was not what has re-established his fame. It was not on “Idylls of the King” that his reputation recovered from the slump that lasted for a few decades after his death. The only one of the Idylls which keeps its hold is “The Passing of Arthur,” which he cribbed largely from Malory, and made a very beautiful poem.

One of Tennyson’s faults was that he was so self-consciously polished in his diction that sometimes he could not call a spade even remotely a spade. When he wanted to talk of King Arthur’s mustache, he called it “the knightly growth that fringed his lips.” And his Victorian readers thought that was poetic. (It is curious that poets talk freely of a man’s beard, but not of his mustache or of his whiskers. I don’t know why: it simply is not done. Similarly a lover will invite his “Nita, Juanita,” to lean upon his breast, but not upon his chest.) So, with the weight of tradition against it, perhaps one ought not to be too hard upon Tennyson for being so wordily evasive of mentioning King Arthur’s mustache — though “bearded lip” would have been more straightforward and sensible.

2

SOME writers, of course, are in a way “fashionable” — the vogue of a certain set — without achieving popularity in the larger sense. Swinburne was never popular; but he was once very much the vogue. He is less so today. That is not to say that Swinburne has no claim to rank among the famous poets — only that the degree of his fame is by no means yet settled. But it was with some amazement that I heard, not many years ago, a man of brilliant critical discrimination (himself a poet) say that he would not be surprised if, eventually, Christina Rossetti took higher place than Swinburne.

And it amazed me, not because I do not think highly of Christina Rossetti myself, — she attracts me more deeply than Swinburne, — but because it seemed so unlikely that a general estimate of cultured minds could be so drastically reversed; yet there was a critic of penetration, sensitive to the higher values of poetry, saying that it might be so. He may be wrong; but he may be right. We can’t tell. And in the inability of even highly cultured minds to be independent of vogue and fashion, there is something of a mystery.

It seems that fame is necessarily a product of the ages: that it cannot be conferred with certainty by one generation alone. In the realm of literature, we require a communicative gift from age to age to make us more sure of ourselves in giving right judgments concerning fame. For fashionable judgments we can rely entirely on ourselves.

If you look through the history of literature, with Its contemporary judgments, you will be able to pick out great names which would have died and been buried, had their final disposal been in the hands of their contemporaries. And many names (little considered today) would have been foisted upon us as great, had the voice of contemporary approval been able to decide the matter. But it was not. It never will be. Therefore, in delivering our dictums of blessing or cursing on the upstarts of fashion, let us remember that those judgments are not likely to be final; and with caution (avoiding arrogance) be courteous toward experiments which are not popular.

For what becomes easily popular seldom lasts. In my own day I have seen reputations go up like a rocket and come down like the stick. But what is worth notice is that, when those reputations were on the upgrade, they were vouched for by most of our leading critics in poetry and literature. The 1890’s were eager to discover a poet of the first rank (and I still think that some really fine work was then produced). But somehow, most of it lacked staying power.

Possibly hereafter some of it may be retrieved and single pieces may have fame accorded them. For we have, in poetry, instances of single poems to which the rank of fame has been rightly given, where almost everything else by the same writer is forgotten except by students. And of those single poems, one can say confidently that they are firstrate — that, of their kind, nothing has been better done.

Take, for instance, Drayton, whose “Agincourt” is a well-known poem of good but not tremendous quality. But Drayton wrote one sonnet which ranks with the sonnets of Shakespeare and higher than all Milton’s sonnets except his very best.

Take another poet — John Donne. John Donne never was, and never will be, popular; but he has written passages of love poetry, and of religious poetry, which are unbeaten in their intensity of bitter and sweet emotion combined. Yet it is only in the last generation that Donne’s intellectual stature among the poets has been fully recognized. And there is more likelihood of that belated appreciation’s being well-founded than had it been accorded in his own day. Between then and now, so great an authority as Pope belittled him; and Doctor Johnson had not much to say for him of good.

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AND having mentioned Pope, I have mentioned a writer who was once tremendously the fashion; but whose fame is not now (and never will be) so great as fashion once made it. Nevertheless he remains (quite worthily within his limitations) a very considerable figure in English literature.

There are signs today of an attempt to “boost” Pope back into a higher rank among the immortals than his qualities warrant; and I don’t wonder that the untidiness of our present school of poetry should have given the expert tidiness of Pope an attraction (by force of contrast) for those whom untidiness repels. Yes, polish — expert tidiness — was one of Pope’s pre-eminent qualities.

Now, as parody is a good short-cut for getting in with one’s criticism (the “Two Voices” parody of Wordsworth by J. K. Stephens is one of the best criticisms of him that I know), perhaps a little parody may help to indicate one of the defects of Pope’s qualities. And so I have tried to write a small poem in that manner of delicate balance and perfect sobriety which formed so large a part of the recipe for writing poetry which Pope imposed on the Augustan Age.

In thinking of Pope in terms of parody — a seesaw (his admirers will be horrified to hear) came at once to my mind. And my thought was: “If Pope had set himself to rewrite ‘See-saw, Margery Daw,’ how would he have done it?” I suggest that he would have done it (far better no doubt) something like this: —

Now the construction of these lines will have told you, I imagine, why, when one comes to parody Pope, one thinks of a seesaw. I think his mother must have swung daily on a seesaw while she was expecting him.

Can a seesaw become a vehicle of genius? It can; and Pope is the exponent of that extraordinary fact. You may despise the seesaw as an instrument of locomotion; but you cannot despise Pope. Nevertheless you can place him (where he has placed himself, with a gusto which shows how thoroughly the instrument satisfied him) on the seesaw and can watch him exercising himself upon it by the hour.

Look at this: it is from the poem selected in the Oxford Book of English Verse as representing Pope at his best: —

In that poem of eighty-two lines, dedicated to the death of an unfortunate lady, I can only find fourteen of genuinely inspired and moving poetry. And that does not seem to me the proportion due from a great poet when he composes a dirge upon a beautiful and blameless character hounded into suicide. Moreover, not only is the mechanism, though skillful, too obvious for spontaneity of feeling to survive, but the sentiment itself does not bear examination; for, in spite of the statement, “Thy fate unpitied, and thy rites unpaid,” we find, in the concluding lines, that the rites were abundantly paid by foreign hands, and her fate abundantly pitied by strangers. If Pope had really meant us to be heart-wrung, he would have accentuated the indifference with which strangers buried her. But having given grief a graceful turn, Pope is satisfied.

Now if you can convince yourselves that above a quarter of that poem is more than polished artifice, you will think me unfair, and will be the readier to agree with those who rate him more highly. But I should run some risk of unfairness in any case, if I based my criticism on one poem alone. I turn for further illustration, not to less considered examples, but to another of his most famous poems. And there still I find the seesaw at work.

I take the following from the impassioned address of Eloisa to her absent lover, Abelard — which gave (in Pope’s words) “so lively a picture of tho struggles of grace and nature, virtue and passion”: —

That is the “lively” picture as Pope presents it: a sparkling performance, tersely phrased, brilliant in diction. But does it really touch your emotions?

And now for my last example — the brilliance of which I think nobody can dispute: here is Pope doing the thing he was meant to do, and using his recipe, touching it with sharp, delicate flavors, like the chef that he was: —

Now that is top-notch; and it is, of its kind, perfect form. Why? Because it is a satirical attack. Because it is incisive; because it is giving a series of short sharp stabs; because, for dexterity, a stab must be short, sharp, and quick. If it’s long, it’s blundering — it must keep its pace even in the final coup de grdee which closes the account. And that is why, for this sort of thing, Pope’s device of couplets (each couplet containing two antitheses) is a perfect device. But it descends into mechanism when he tries to apply it to the softer emotions, or to continue, for page after page, what should be kept to give climax and clinch to the venomous sentiments which God sent him into the world to express — better than any other poet I know.

And in order to show you just how, to my mind, this system of antithesis becomes a second-rate thing when removed from satire to sentiment, I take the most antithetical passage from Shakespeare that I can remember, and translate from the manner of Shakespeare into the manner of Pope: —

For that sort of thing Pope’s method imposes shackles which even the genius of Pope (so ready of wit, so quick in turn of phrase) is unable to escape.

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FROM Pope, too highly esteemed in his day, let us turn to one whose fortune was just the opposite: one of the most remarkable examples in English literature of contemporary neglect, followed, after a very considerable interval, by fame.

In 1927 the centenary of William Blake’s death was commemorated by the unveiling of a tablet to his memory in St. Paul’s Cathedral. To the critics of his own day, Blake — long-lived, frugal, industrious, but poverty-stricken — was not merely “ poetry gone mad ”: he was mad, nothing else. The charge of madness was allowed to wipe out from the comprehension of his contemporaries (except a very few: Charles Lamb and Wordsworth were two of them) any critical sense of the extraordinary beauty and value of his poems and paintings. And even fifty years ago, when I edited a selection of his writings and poems, a leading critic, Mr. Andrew Lang, began his review of it with the words: “It is the mark of a clique to admire Blake.” It was true enough then — if the word “clique” means a small minority. But it would be difficult today to find anyone of serious literary standing who, whatever he thought of Blake’s sanity, failed to recognize the rare and high qualities of his genius.

The lifelong neglect and dislike of Blake by his contemporaries brings up the question of the effect of environment and of contemporary modes of thought and fashion on a man’s work — the work of a man of genius.

I once heard a lecturer make the acute remark that, had Shakespeare lived in the reign of George II, he could not have been anything like the Shakespeare we know; he could not have produced so well or so spontaneously. For a man of his temperament the age would have been out of joint; and his genius could only have revealed itself with difficulty. That unpropitious atmosphere would either have damped down, or exacerbated, the workings of his brain. Undoubtedly that did happen to Blake. He suffered from his environment. His age would not have him; and, as a consequence, he rebelled against it, kicked violently, forced his note, and said things extravagantly, to annoy and puzzle a generation which (from his point of view) was extraordinarily stupid.

The unimaginative assault and battery which was paid out to Blake by that unreceptive age (and paid back by him more imaginatively in explosive fireworks, which still do his fame some harm) was also, in a certain sense, directed by that same ago against Shakespeare. But Shakespeare was dead, so it did not affect him; it only affected his work in the way it was published and presented during the eighteenth century.

The mangling and “improvement,” to suit contemporary taste, of Shakespeare’s plays had begun under the Restoration; and during the eighteenth century it went on. Why? For the simple reason that Shakespeare and the eighteenth century had not the same sense of beauty, or the same sense of truth, or the same sense of life’s values.

“Exuberance is Beauty” said Blake. “Exuberance is bad taste” said the eighteenth century. And Shakespeare, in his large grasp and love and interpretation of human nature, was exuberant.

The eighteenth century had the defects of its qualities; it couldn’t help it. Shakespeare had also the defects of his qualities; but they were better qualities. And so, to an age which did not especially value those qualities, they were not merely a fallingshort of the perfection aimed at: they were “in bad taste.”

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WHAT else did the eighteenth century dislike, or wish to make different? Its undervaluation of Shakespeare was not likely to stand alone. And it didn’t. Not only was the eighteenth the century which least understood Shakespeare, being least in sympathy with all that Shakespeare stood for: it was also lacking in understanding of two other great influences of the past — Christianity and Gothic architecture.

John Wesley had nothing in common with the cold culture of the age in which he lived: his living Christianity seemed shockingly out of taste. Similarly out of taste, Gothic architecture had become a curiosity: like Christianity, people preferred to see it in ruins; it was more suitable to look at than to live with. Horace Walpole’s reconstruction of Gothic in a toy version for his own domestic amusement was no more than a pet fancy — on a par with the contemporary “tapestries” which Miss Lindley worked in imitation of oil paintings, and framed into pictures. This being the taste of the age, we find that at the theater King Lear was made tolerable by being given a happy ending. And Garrick’s acting versions of other plays afford an accurate measure (in their departure from the text) of the separation between Shakespeare and the eighteenth century.

Two of its most prominent characters passed judgments on him which are representative enough to be worth quoting. “Was there ever such stuff as Shakespeare wrote?” exclaimed George III irritably; while Doctor Johnson declared that you could not find anywhere in Shakespeare six consecutive lines of good poetry.

And yet Doctor Johnson had a great mind — was, indeed, a most sensible person; and if he sometimes said foolish things, those foolish things nevertheless had sense to back them: he said them with reason.

There was, therefore, something the matter, either with Shakespeare or with the eighteenth century, to cause this critical coldness, in a great mind so representative of its age, to the form of Shakespeare’s poetry: Johnson did not question his greatness.

That matter was (as I have already said) that their defects ran in opposite directions. The eighteenth century was overcorrect in its literary conventions — too much ruled by rule, and too limited in vision, to be able to think or write freely. Shakespeare, on the other hand, had no use for correctness; he followed no rule, obeyed an almost limitless vision, was careless of scholarship, and had an exuberant love of human nature, which he expressed on a heroic scale.

A. E. Housman, a critic for whom I have a natural respect, comparing the perfections of Milton with the imperfections of Shakespeare, said that Milton was a great artist, and that Shakespeare was not: that Shakespeare lacked Milton’s great gift of “sobriety.”

That is the opinion of a fine scholarly mind. I am not scholarly; and perhaps it is for that reason that I am inclined to retort: “Who but a pedant wants sobriety from Shakespeare?” Had Shakespeare expressed himself with sobriety, how much of Shakespeare would have remained?

But from the Restoration period onward, producers of Shakespeare for the stage were constantly trying to reduce him to sobriety, by pruning down the too exuberant language of his characters. And so, when Macbeth (his overwrought speech expressive of an overwrought mind) cries out to the messenger of Doom: —

Davenant comes along, and reduces the phrase to “sobriety” by making Macbeth say: “Now, Friend, what means thy change of countenance?” And the character of Macbeth and the state of Macbeth’s mind — sacrificed to sobriety of statement — become, for the moment, nonexistent. Macbeth is wiped off the stage.

But though Shakespeare often indulged in overwrought phrases, with less excellent dramatic excuse than in the instance I have just given, he was always consciously using a form which helped to produce a cumulative effect.

You hear a passage of Shakespeare at his worst: it is still in the Shakespeare style of big utterance; it remains consistent, of a piece, with Shakespeare at his best — with the scale, that is to say, on which Shakespeare molded his characters and gave them accompanying speech. But (and here is the clue to the dramatic value of Shakespeare’s range of style) you might hear a short, specially selected passage of Shakespeare, and not know that it was Shakespeare, unless you came on it in its dramatic setting; and then — if you were intelligent — you would say (not because of its form, which might be extraordinarily stark and simple, but because of the greatness of its invention for the place in which you found it) that nobody but Shakespeare could have thought of it — just there.

Take, for instance, this: —

Disjointed from its setting, it’s nothing: there is no style, no form, about it. One line of it is even bad verse — bald, uneventful, monotonous. But in its place, in that last scene when Lear is dying with Cordelia dead in his arms, it becomes a tremendous invention, a thing of absolute genius.

Out of that general background of large utterance to which he scales his characters comes now and then this utter poignancy of the vox humana, stark and stripped of ornament, terse, direct, simple.

That is what Shakespeare’s form leads up to — to moments when mere form disappears and the very simplest thing that can be said has a tremendous significance: pure human nature emerges pinnacled in tragedy — brought to an ultimate simplicity that is more revealing of the springs of being than any ornament of imagery or rhetoric however grand,

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THE actual range of Shakespeare’s form is, therefore, very wide — from the most elaborate language to the most simple; and it has that range for dramatic reasons, not for mere literary. That is a point which critics sometimes miss. There are occasions in the plays when dramatic value is far more important than literary value; and Shakespeare, being a dramatic artist, is the greater artist because his form varies.

In some of his great scenes “sobriety” would be out of place. It is nonsense to demand it. To go back, then, to this question of the separation which had arisen between the mind of Shakespeare and the mind of the eighteenth century — how did it arise? How should one define it? One might account for a great deal of it in a single word: “enthusiasm.” Shakespeare, in his exuberance, was of an enthusiastic temperament: the eighteenth century was not. The very word had, for the eighteenth century, a reprobate meaning. I turn to an eighteenth-century dictionary, and there I find “Enthusiasm: a vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of Divine favour; heat of imagination.” “Enthusiast: one who vainly imagines a private revelation; one who has a vain confidence of his intercourse wit h God; one of a hot imagination.” And it is only reluctantly, as a last alternative, that the more favorable definition is conceded: “One of elevated fancy, or exalted ideas.”

The earlier definition has etymology behind it; but the word “vain” is opprobriously thrown in without any etymological justification whatever. So, perhaps, to many cultured minds of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare was a “vain fellow,” a man who, by his enthusiastic language, showed that he had a vain confidence of his intercourse with God, in terms of beauty.

Now if Shakespeare needs any excuse for the exuberance of his language (the high key in which he pitched most of his dramatic dialogue), it should be remembered that he was doing on the plastic stage of his own day what in the pictorial stage of our day is not so much required. Shakespeare’s dramatic figures stood out on a platform-stage, without scenery, and practically without background, with the audience on three sides of it. And the whole of his atmosphere and environment had to come from the gestures and language of the actors. When they spoke, they provided their own scenery, which we now provide for them. They had to do a good deal more (when they spoke) than actors have to do nowadays in order to give the setting. They carried the scenery on their backs, as it were, and spoke it in words.

That condition alone made it impossible for Shakespearean drama to be naturalistic in form. But it did aim at giving you human nature. The large utterance of Shakespeare’s characters tends to give them a larger scale, enabling the actors to hold the stage in the difficult circumstances of having so much more than themselves to express. And this particular condition of the Elizabethan stage suited the exuberant temperament of Shakespeare: he adapted himself to it con amore.

But were you to ask me if there was not also a fashion in Shakespeare’s day which made merely for popularity, and which has done some harm, if not to Shakespeare’s fame, to the form in which his plays have come down to us, I should have to say yes.

Shakespeare’s plays would have been better than they are, more acceptable, more completely appealing to the mind of posterity, had they not been affected — adversely affected — by certain fashions of his own day. Certain things which then made for popularity give them a certain unreality now. They are less convincing, less satisfying to us, because they accepted certain rather cheap conventions, devices, and makeshifts which the public of his day liked and were always ready to swallow whole.

The public of his day liked ghosts: they demanded them; if you had a murder, you almost always had to have a ghost also. Without the ghost (if it was the murder of an important person) the murder was not complete. You have a curious instance of that in Webster’s The White Devil or Vittoria Corombona. The wife of one of the characters has been murdered. The husband, who does not know it, begins thinking of her. Immediately her ghost enters. The husband does not know that it is her ghost: he does not know that the ghost is there at all. But the author wants the audience to know; and so, there the ghost stands, while in soliloquy he talks about his wife. And when he has done talking of her, the ghost goes again. It is quite silly; but the fashion of that day required that sort of thing, and got it — got it from Shakespeare along with the rest. And sometimes (not always) Shakespeare’s ghosts would be better away. We could do better without them.

Another contemporary stage fashion of Shakespeare’s day which has become unreal to us is the comedy — or the tragedy — carried to fantastic lengths, of mistaken identity, two people exactly alike; sometimes a boy and a girl — twins. Of course on the Shakespearean stage both actors were boys, which made it just a shade more possible. But though we accept that stage convention today, for the sake of laughter, it is not in the least convincing. And if it had not been the fashion of his day, acceptable, and readily swallowed by all playgoers, Shakespeare would hardly have condescended to it, although in comedy the fairy-tale element in which the play is cast may give it a sort of rightness. But when you have similar devices of mistaken identity in tragedy, the result is sometimes lamentable in its mock make-believe.

Take for instance the play Cymbeline, which contains one of the loveliest of Shakespeare’s female characters — Imogen. But that play is almost ruled out for modern audiences by the crude and clumsy device of Cloten’s headless body left a nasty mess for Imogen to weep over. And because the body wears the clothes of her husband, she proceeds to identify him, with a particularity which leaves one gasping at the nonsensicalness of an age which could swallow such stuffing devoid of all reason:—

Murder in Heaven! ‘Tis nonsense! Here you have a devoted wife, examining the anatomy of another man, piece by piece, and swearing it to be her husband’s, with a particularity which I can only call “luridly domestic.” And with an Elizabethan audience that sort of thing (in spite of its wild improbability) went down. They liked it. We don’t. As for Titus Andronicus, that orgy of bloodshed and mutilation — I don’t know what the latest scholars say about it; for myself, I devoutly hope that Shakespeare didn’t write it.

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THERE you get two instances of the bad effects of fashion on the great literature of its day. We meet with them, it is true, in plays one of which is negligible and the other a work which, in spite of its many beauties, does not take decisive rank.

But I will give you instances from two of Shakespeare’s finest plays, where it seems to me that fashion has imposed on him a stage device which had been better away. In Julius Caesar, in the tent scene (after the quarrel with Cassius, and the military discussion and the Boy’s song that follow), Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus. And if the ghost must appear at all, it is done exceedingly well. But I cannot help feeling that Brutus was not the sort of character to see ghosts visibly. Indeed his way of dealing with the ghost when it appears shows a philosophic acceptance of the pass in which fate has landed him which the apparition does not trouble. Brutus needs no ghost for the stirring of his conscience or the rousing of his fears, for it does neither. But the audience of Shakespeare’s day did need it: so — enter ghost!

Ghosts have another drawback for modem audiences, in addition to their frequent superfluousness. When the ghost appears and all see it alike (as they do see it in the opening scene of Hamlet), then the apparition is consistent and the scene remains all of a piece. But in the scene between Hamlet and his mother (when Hamlet secs it and she does not) credibility is strained. If Horatio and the rest saw the ghost on the ramparts, why does not Hamlet’s mother see it also — especially as she is a rather guilty party to the business? Still I admit there is no possible getting rid of the ghost in Hamlet.

But the other instance, to which I wish specially to call attention, is in that ghost-ridden tragedy, Macbeth. That play is, of course, so steeped in the supernatural (in the scenes with the Witches, and in the whole machinery of doom foretold) that ghostliness has its right setting. But in that play, there is one very effective scene where an apparition is described but remains invisible. I mean in Macbeth’s dagger-soliloquy, beginning: —

It is reported in the annals of the stage that at some time or another, upon the opening of that speech, it was customary for a material dagger to be let down from the flies, like bait to a fish, for Macbeth to bite on. Nobody would do anything so foolish today. The haunted state of Macbeth’s mind is better depicted if no dagger is there.

But apply that — I ask you to apply that same consideration to the banquet scene, where the ghost of the murdered Banquo comes and occupies the seat which is waiting for Macbeth. As the scene is written, nobody sees the ghost except Macbeth. Even Lady Macbeth, his partner in guilt, sees nothing.

Now I am convinced that that scene would be very much more effective, and terrible, and haunting, if no ghost appeared — if the chair were to remain vacant while Macbeth (to the bewilderment of all present) speaks to a ghost which only he sees. That, I believe, has been done at the “Old Vic” in London; and it is a thoroughly sensible thing to do. And I believe that Shakespeare would have done it, if he had not been tied down by the stage fashion of his day, which — after a murder — demanded on all possible occasions a visible ghost.

I have tried to show by example how little fashion is helpful to fame: how sometimes it imposes (even on great writers) the acceptance of puny devices to which they would not have descended had they been more free from the tricks and entanglements of contemporary taste.