An Essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream
By G. K. Chesterton
Assignment: Read At Least the Words in Italics; Answer the Questions in Your Notes
Questions:
Assignment: Read At Least the Words in Italics; Answer the Questions in Your Notes
Questions:
- Who (or what) is the invisible hero of A Midsummer Night's Dream?
- Which Shakespearean play has the most pure poetry, according to Shakespeare?
- What makes Bottom great?
- How does this vision of the fairy supernatural differ from both Celtic and later American visions of the fairy supernatural?
The
greatest of Shakespeare's comedies is also, from a certain point of view, the
greatest of his plays. No one would maintain that it occupied this position in
the matter of psychological study if by psychological study we mean the study
of individual characters in a play. No one would maintain that Puck was a
character in the sense that Falstaff is a character, or that the critic stood
awed before the psychology of Peaseblossom. But there is a sense in which the
play is perhaps a greater triumph of psychology than Hamlet itself. It may well
be questioned whether in any other literary work in the world is so vividly
rendered a social and spiritual atmosphere. There is an atmosphere in Hamlet, for instance, a somewhat murky
and even melodramatic one, but it is subordinate to the great character, and
morally inferior to him; the darkness is only a background for the isolated
star of intellect. But A Midsummer
Night's Dream is a psychological study, not of a solitary man, but of a
spirit that unites mankind. The six men may sit talking in an inn; they may not
know each other's names or see each other's faces before or after, but 'night
or wine or great stories, or some rich and branching discussion may make them
all at one, if not absolutely with each other, at least with that invisible
seventh man who is the harmony of all of them. That seventh man is the hero of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
A
study of the play from a literary or philosophical point of view must therefore
be founded upon some serious realization of what this atmosphere is. In a
lecture upon As You Like It, Mr.
Bernard Shaw made a suggestion which is an admirable example of his amazing
ingenuity and of his one most interesting limitation. In maintaining that the
light sentiment and optimism of the comedy were regarded by Shakespeare merely
as the characteristics of a more or less cynical pot-boiler, he actually
suggested that the title “As You Like It" was a taunting address to the
public in disparagement of their taste and the dramatist's own work. If Mr.
Bernard Shaw had conceived of Shakespeare as insisting that Ben Jonson should
wear Jaeger underclothing (this was a kind of cotton undergarment) or join the
Blue Ribbon Army, or distribute little pamphlets for the non-payment of rates,
he could scarcely have conceived anything more violently opposed to the whole
spirit of Elizabethan comedy than the spiteful and priggish modernism of such a
taunt. Shakespeare might make the fastidious and cultivated Hamlet, moving in
his own melancholy and purely mental world, warn players against an
over-indulgence towards the rabble. But the very soul and meaning of the great
comedies is that of an uproarious communion between the public and the play, a
communion so chaotic that whole scenes of silliness and violence lead us almost
to think that some of the "rowdies" from the pit have climbed over
the footlights. The title "As you Like It", is, of course, an
expression of utter carelessness, but it is not the bitter carelessness which
Mr. Bernard Shaw fantastically reads into it; it is the god-like and
inexhaustible carelessness of a happy man. And the simple proof of this is that
there are scores of these genially taunting titles scattered through the whole
of Elizabethan comedy. Is As You Like It
a title demanding a dark and ironic explanation in a school of comedy which
called its plays What You Will, A Mad World, My Masters, If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It, The Devil is an Ass, An Humorous Day's Mirth, and A Midsummer Night's Dream? Every one of
these titles is flung at the head of the public as a drunken lord might fling a
purse at his footman. Would Mr. Shaw maintain that If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It, was the opposite of As You Like It, and was a solemn
invocation of the supernatural powers to testify to the care and perfection of
the literary workmanship? The one explanation is as Elizabethan as the other.
Now
in the reason for this modern and pedantic error lies the whole secret and difficulty
of such plays as A Midsummer Night's
Dream. The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be summed up at all,
can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of happiness. That is to
say, it is the conception that as man lives upon a borderland he may find
himself in the spiritual or supernatural atmosphere, not only through being
profoundly sad or meditative, but by being extravagantly happy. The soul might
be rapt out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a trance of ecstasy; but it
might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of laughter. Sorrow we know
can go beyond itself; so, according to Shakespeare, can pleasure go beyond
itself and become something dangerous and unknown. And the reason that the
logical and destructive modern school, of which Mr. Bernard Shaw is an example,
does not grasp this purely exuberant nature of the comedies is simply 'that
their logical and destructive attitude have rendered impossible the very
experience of this preternatural exuberance. We cannot realize As You Like It if we are always
considering it as we understand it. We cannot have A Midsummer's Night Dream if our one object in life is to keep
ourselves awake with the black coffee of criticism. The whole question which is
balanced, and balanced nobly and fairly, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is
whether the life of waking, or the life of the vision, is the real life, the sine quâ non (“without which, nothing”) of
man. But it is difficult to see what superiority for the purpose of judging is
possessed by people whose pride it is not to live the life of vision at all. At
least it is questionable whether the Elizabethan did not know more about both
worlds than the modern intellectual it is not altogether improbably that
Shakespeare would not only have had a clearer vision of the fairies, but would
have shot very much straighter at a deer and netted much more money for his
performances than a member of the Stage Society.
In
pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than
he rises in this play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a merit
of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that
design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common
world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young
friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles
and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They
lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their
words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic,
like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck. Then the
dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken
together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning.
Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in
hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing
out with a reverent and sympathetic scepticism that all these fairies and
spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man
himself. The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is
a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things
ripples one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good
saying seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his
wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house
of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream
remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of
any other triumphant evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began
on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole midsummer
night's dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius. But of this
comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one
touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with
a crashing finale, full of humour and wisdom and things set right, and silence
falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a
moment, as it were, the' elves look into the house, asking which is the
reality. "Suppose we are the realities and they the shadows." If that
ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he
had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane.
It
is a trite matter, of course, though in a general criticism a more or less
indispensable one to comment upon another point of artistic perfection, the
extraordinarily human and accurate manner in which the play catches the
atmosphere of a dream. The chase and tangle and frustration of the incidents
and personalities are well known to every one who has dreamt of perpetually
falling over precipices or perpetually missing trains. While following out
clearly and legally the necessary narrative of the drama, the author contrives
to include every one of the main peculiarities of the exasperating dream. Here
is the pursuit of the man we cannot catch, the flight from the man we cannot
see; here is the perpetual returning to the same place, here is the crazy
alteration in the very objects of our desire, the substitution of one face for
another face, the putting of the wrong souls in the wrong bodies, the fantastic
disloyalties of the night, all this is as obvious as it is important. It is
perhaps somewhat more -worth remarking that there is about this confusion of
comedy yet another essential characteristic of dreams. A dream can commonly be
described as possessing an utter discordance of incident combined with a
curious unity of mood; everything changes but the dreamer. It may begin with
anything and end with anything, but if the dreamer is sad at the end he will be
sad as if by prescience at the beginning; if he is cheerful at the beginning he
will be cheerful if the stars fall. A
Midsummer Night's Dream has in a most singular degree effected this
difficult, this almost desperate subtlety. The events in the wandering wood are
in themselves, and regarded as in broad daylight, not merely melancholy but
bitterly cruel and ignominious. But yet by the spreading of an atmosphere as
magic as the fog of Puck, Shakespeare contrives to make the whole matter
mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic, and mysteriously
charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives somehow to rob tragedy
and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a toothache or a deadly danger
from a tiger, or a precipice, is robbed of its sharpness in a pleasant dream.
The creation of a brooding sentiment like this, a sentiment not merely
independent of but actually opposed to the events, is a much greater triumph of
art than the creation of the character of Othello.
It
is difficult to approach critically so great a figure as that of Bottom the
Weaver. He is greater and more mysterious than Hamlet, because the interest of
such men as Bottom consists of a rich subconsciousness, and that of Hamlet in
the comparatively superficial matter of a rich consciousness. And it is
especially difficult in the present age which has become hag-ridden with the
mere intellect. We are the victims of a curious confusion whereby being great
is supposed to have something to do with being clever, as if there were the
smallest reason to suppose that Achilles was clever, as if there were not on
the contrary a great deal of internal evidence to indicate that he was next
door to a fool. Greatness is a certain indescribable but perfectly familiar and
palpable quality of size in the personality, of steadfastness, of strong
flavour, of easy and natural self-expression. Such a man is as firm as a tree
and as unique as a rhinoceros, and he might quite easily be as stupid as either
of them. Fully as much as the great poet towers above the small poet the great
fool towers above the small fool. We have all of us known rustics like Bottom
the Weaver, men whose faces would be blank with idiocy if we tried for ten days
to explain the meaning of the National Debt, but who are yet great men, akin to
Sigurd and Hercules, heroes of the morning of the earth, because their words
were their own words, their memories their own memories, and their vanity as
large and simple as a great hill. We have all of us known friends in our own
circle, men whom the intellectuals might justly describe as brainless, but
whose presence in a room was like a fire roaring in the grate changing
everything, lights and shadows and the air, whose entrances and exits were in
some strange fashion events, whose point of view once expressed haunts and
persuades the mind and almost intimidates it, whose manifest absurdity clings
to the fancy like the beauty of first-love, and whose follies are recounted
like the legends of a paladin. These ate great men, there are millions of them
in the world, though very few perhaps in the House of Commons. It is not in the
cold halls of cleverness where celebrities seem to be important that we should
look for the great. An intellectual salon is merely a training-ground for one
faculty, and is akin to a fencing class or a rifle corps. It is in our own
homes and environments, from Croydon to St. John's Wood, in old nurses, and
gentlemen with hobbies, and talkative spinisters and vast incomparable butlers,
that we may feel the presence of that blood of the gods. And this creature so
hard to describe, so easy to remember, the august and memorable fool, has never
been so sumptuously painted as in the Bottom of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Bottom
has the supreme mark of this real greatness in that like the true saint or the
true hero he only differs from humanity in being as it were more human than
humanity. It is not true, as the idle materialists of today suggest, that
compared to the majority of men the hero appears cold and dehumanised; it is
the majority who appear cold and dehumanised in the presence of greatness.
Bottom, like Don Quixote and Uncle Toby and Mr. Richard Swiveller and the rest
of the Titans, has a huge and unfathomable weakness, his silliness is on a
great scale, and when he blows his own trumpet it is like the trumpet of the
Resurrection. The other rustics in the play accept his leadership not merely
naturally but exuberantly; they have to the full that primary and savage
unselfishness, that uproarious abnegation which makes simple men take pleasure
in falling short of a hero, that unquestionable element of basic human nature
which has never been expressed, outside this play, so perfectly as in the
incomparable chapter at the beginning of Evan Harrington in which the praises
of The Great Mel are sung with a lyric energy by the tradesmen whom he has
cheated. Twopenny sceptics write of the egoism of primal human nature; it is
reserved for great men like Shakespeare and Meredith to detect and make vivid
this rude and subconscious unselfishness which is older than self. They alone
with their insatiable tolerance can perceive all the spiritual devotion in the
soul of a snob.
And
it is this natural play between the rich simplicity of Bottom and the simple
simplicity of his comrades which constitutes the unapproachable excellence of
the farcical scenes in this play. Bottom's sensibility to literature is
perfectly fiery and genuine, a great deal more genuine than that of a great
many cultivated critics of literature - "the raging rocks, and shivering
shocks shall break the locks of prison gates, and Phibbus' car shall shine from
far, and make and mar the foolish fates," is exceedingly good poetical
diction with a real throb and swell in it, and if it is slightly and almost
imperceptibly deficient in the matter of sense, it is certainly every bit as
sensible as a good many other rhetorical speeches in Shakespeare put into the
mouths of kings and lovers and even the spirits of the dead. If Bottom liked
cant for its own sake the fact only constitutes another point of sympathy
between him and his literary creator. But the style of the thing, though
deliberately bombastic and ludicrous, is quite literary, the alliteration falls
like wave upon wave, and the whole verse, like a billow mounts higher and
higher before it crashes. There is nothing mean about this folly; nor is there
in the whole realm of literature a figure so free from vulgarity. The man vitally
base and foolish sings "The Honeysuckle and the Bee"; he does not
rant about "raging rocks" and "the car of Phibbus".
Dickens, who more perhaps than any modern man had the mental hospitality and
the thoughtless wisdom of Shakespeare, perceived and expressed admirably the
same truth. He perceived, that is to say, that quite indefensible idiots have
very often a real sense of, and enthusiasm for letters. Mr. Micawber loved
eloquence and poetry with his whole immortal soul; words and visionary pictures
kept him alive in the absence of food and money, as they might have kept a
saint fasting in a desert. Dick Swiveller did not make his inimitable
quotations from Moore and Byron merely as flippant digressions. He made them
because he loved a great school of poetry. The sincere love of books has
nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere
love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power
of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly
person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he
may be in love with a woman. And the triumph of Bottom is that he loves
rhetoric and his own taste in the arts, and this is all that can be achieved by
Theseus, or for the matter of that by Cosimo di Medici. It is worth remarking
as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is
almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the
rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, "Thisby, the flowers of odious
savours sweete." "Odours, odours," says Quince, in remonstrance,
and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which
require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But "Thisby, the
flowers of odious savours sweete", Bottom's version, is an immeasurably
finer and more resonant line. The "i" which he inserts is an
inspiration of metricism.
There
is another aspect of this great play which ought to be kept familiarly in the
mind. Extravagant as is the masquerade of the story, it is a very perfect
aesthetic harmony down to such coup-de-maître as the name of Bottom, or the
flower called Love in Idleness. In the whole matter it may be said that there
is one accidental discord; that is in the name of Theseus, and the whole city
of Athens in which the events take place. Shakespeare's description of Athens
in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the best description of England that he or any
one else ever wrote.
Theseus is quite obviously only an English squire, fond of
hunting, kindly to his tenants, hospitable with a certain flamboyant vanity.
The mechanics are English mechanics, talking to each other with the queer
formality of the poor. Above all, the fairies are English; to compare them with
the beautiful patrician spirits of Irish legend, for instance, is suddenly to
discover that we have, after all, a folk-lore and a mythology, or had it at
least in Shakespeare's day. Robin Goodfellow, upsetting the old women's ale, or
pulling the stool from under them, has nothing of the poignant Celtic beauty;
his is the horse-play of the invisible world. Perhaps it is some debased
inheritance of English life which makes American ghosts so fond of quite
undignified practical jokes. But this union of mystery with farce is a note of
the medieval English. The play is the last glimpse of Merrie England, that
distant but shining and quite indubitable country. It would be difficult indeed
to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase "merrie
England", though some conception of it is quite necessary to the
comprehension of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In some cases at least, it may be
said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
unlike the England of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism.
Amid all the great work of Puritanism the damning indictment of it consists in
one fact, that there was one only of the fables of Christendom that it retained
and renewed, and that was the belief in witchcraft. It cast away the generous
and wholesome superstition, it approved only of the morbid and the dangerous.
In their treatment of the great national fairy-tale of good and evil, the
Puritans killed St. George but carefully preserved the Dragon, And this
seventeenth-century tradition of dealing with the psychic life still lies like
a great shadow over England and America, so that if we glance at a novel about
occultism we may be perfectly certain that it deals with sad or evil destiny.
Whatever else we expect we certainly should never expect to find in it spirits
such as those in Aylwin as inspirers of a tale of tomfoolery like the Wrong Box or The Londoners. That impossibility is the disappearance of
"merrie England" and Robin Goodfellow. It was a land to us
incredible, the land of a jolly occultism where the peasant cracked jokes with
his patron saint, and only cursed the fairies good-humouredly, as he might
curse a lazy servant. Shakespeare is English in everything, above all in his
weaknesses. just as London, one of the greatest cities in the world, shows more
slums and hides more beauties than any other, so Shakespeare alone among the
four giants of poetry is a careless writer, and lets us come upon his
splendours by accident, as we come upon an old City church in the twist of a
city street.
He is English in nothing so much as in that noble cosmopolitan
unconsciousness which makes him look eastward with the eyes of a child towards
Athens or Verona. He loved to talk of the glory of foreign lands, but he talked
of them with the tongue and unquenchable spirit of England. It is too much the
custom of a later patriotism to reverse this method and talk of England from
morning till night, but to talk of her in a manner totally un-English.
Casualness, incongruities, and a certain fine absence of mind are in the temper
of England; the unconscious man with the ass's head is no bad type of the
people. Materialistic philosophers and mechanical politicians have certainly
succeeded in some cases in giving him a greater unity. The only question is, to
which animal has he been thus successfully conformed?
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