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Arnold Bennett on "The Man Shakespeare"

The following is Arnold Bennett's astonishingly positive review of Frank Harris's The Man Shakespeare, published in the "New Age", October 21, 1909.

Bennett's small cavil about Harris's description of Shakespeare as "snobbish" was replied to by Harris in the issue published two weeks later.

Books and Persons.

(AN OCCASIONAL CAUSERIE.)

If this column has any interest of originality, it is that
it expresses the point of view of the creative artist as
distinguished from that of the critic. There is a one-sided feud between artists and critics.
When a
number of artists are gathered together you will soon
in the conversation come upon signs of that feud. I
admit that the general attitude of artists to critics is
unfair. They expect from critics an imaginative comprehension which in the nature of the case only a
creative artist can possess. On the other hand, a
creative artist cannot do the work of a critic because
he has neither the time nor the inclination to master the
necessary critical apparatus Hence critical work
seldom or never satisfies the artist, and the artist’s
ideal of what critical work ought to be is an impossible
dream. I find confirmation of my view in other arts
than my own. The critical work of Mr. Bernhard
Berenson, for instance, seems to me wonderful and
satisfying. But when I mention Mr. Berenson to a
painter I invariably discover that that painter’s secret
attitude towards Mr. Berenson is-well, aristocratic.
The finest, and the only first-rate, criticism is produced
when, by an. exceptional accident, a creative artist of
balanced and powerful temperament is moved to deal
exhaustively with a subject. Among standard critical
works the one that has most impressed me is Lessing's
"Laocoon" - at any rate the literary parts of it. Here
(I have joyously said to myself) is somebody who
knows what he is talking about! Here is someone
who has been there. But how rare the accident! I
make these remarks to introduce - not without the
solemnity which I most genuinely feel - another of those
rare accidents, Mr. Frank Harris's "The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life Story", published by
Frank Palmer. I shall not attempt here - I could
only do it in the form of fiction - to express the emotion,
the ever-increasing emotion, which I experienced as I
read steadily through his elaborate book. I can only
compare it with unforgettable sensations that have perturbed me at moments when I stood between earth and
sky on some high tor of Dartmoor. . . . I realised that
a masterpiece on Shakspere had at length been written.

I say "at length" because I suppose it to be the
first. It must surely be the first that could satisfy a
creative artist. I am not a Shaksperean scholar. I
regret it. The private regret of very many artists is
that they cannot be scholars. I dare say that any
University Extension Lecturer could double me up on
a thousand interesting Shaksperean points. But I have
read Coleridge and Swinburne. And I have read Professor Dowden and Professor Bradley and Mr. Sidney
Lee. I believe that Professor Dowden's principal book
comprises nearly all the notions generally received about
Shakspere in correct circles. In asserting that these
writers leave me cold or tepid I do not wish to be rude
to them, especially to Coleridge and Swinburne. Swinburne was a great critic, but he did not attack the whole
subject, and his illumination is a series of flashes.
Coleridge was a great but capricious critic - and he is
responsible for nine-tenths of all the bad Shaksperean
criticism that exists. I can give you an instance of the
sort of thing that exasperated me in Coleridge. He
fastens on the introduction of the gardener (what a
gardener!) in Act III, Scene IV of "Richard II" as
an example of Shakspere's "wonderful judgment," and
claims that it helps to realise the situation. The pronouncement reaches the final degree of ineptitude. It
is too silly for contradiction. Shaksperean criticism is
full of similar absurdities. Coleridge was an artist.
Yes, one of the greatest and one of the worst. But he
was not a dramatic artist. I could show fifty things in
Coleridge's Shaksperean criticism that a dramatic artist
of any experience at all would be bound to smile at.
What is true of Coleridge is still truer of his imitators.
They are cultured fellows; they refrain from violence;
they serve a harmless purpose in describing the adventures of their sensitive souls amid the Himalayas of
Shakspere. But when it comes to explaining the artist,
his psychology, and his methods, they simply do not
know what they are talking about; not one of them!
The artist is completely hidden from them. They are
incapable of getting themselves into his skin. And,
quite unconsciously, they give themselves away, by
turns of phrase, on every page. Thus Professor
Dowden: "Practical, positive, and alive to material interests, Shakspere unquestionably was. But there is
another side to his character." Good Lord! To me,
in the spectacle of a n excellent person like Professor
Dowden sitting down to write a book under the title
"Shakspere, his Mind and Art" there is something
tragically comic; so hopeless is it that Professor
Dowden could ever come within miles of any sort of
imaginative understanding of Shakspere's artistic mind.
Nothing is more sure than that the pretentious weavings of men like Professors Dowden and Bradley, with
all their petty and nice eloquence, are fated to eternal
death, the death of the unimportant. These and similar critics are receptive, feminine, and naught else. Still,
I would not; deny their temporary utility.

The opening pages of "The Man Shakspere" at
once produce certainty that the mind of its author is
worldly, non-academic, and powerfully creative. I use
"worldly" in a good sense. I mean that the author
knows the actual world, moves about in it freely, and
is versed in life itself: qualities denied to professors, or
to most of them. And he writes as an artist. He
does not fit words ingeniously together; he plastically
moulds the whole phrase. Also he has no use for the
Ark of the Covenant. In England Shakspere has
come to be only a little less sacred than the Bible. The
mandarins have built up a tradition according to which
you must speak delicately when you say anything about
Shakspere. All English literature is divided into
Shakspere and the rest, and in the subconsciousness
of the race is a notion that Shakspere's defects are
finer than other writers' virtues. Mr. Frank Harris
has a very short way with all this. His fist goes
through the pane instantly, and the breezes of commonsense blow through the stuffy chambers where the
commentators have been mumbling at their priest-like
task. Naturally Shakspere has been praised for the
wrong things, all sorts of wrong things. Mr. Frank
Harris sets these matters right. "He could not construct plays or invent stories," says Mr. Harris. It
will shock, but it is true, of course. As for the claim
made on Shakspere's behalf that his range was as wide
as human nature, Mr. Harris demolishes it in two
toothsome pages. "He never drew a reformer,
never conceived a man as swimming against the stream
of his time." "The best of a Wordsworth or a
Turgenev is outside him." Obviously true, when you
think it over! The claim of universality is ridiculous,
will not stand looking at. And yet it has been seriously
made a thousand times.. Decidedly refusing to treat
Shakspere as a god, or even as half of one, Mr. Harris
treats him lovingly and reasonably as a man. The
book is full of passionate admiration.

The main thesis of the work deals a tremendous blow
to the accepted theory of Shakspere's august invisibility
behind his plays, due to a supposed large and god-like
impartiality. "As it is the object of a general to win
battles so it is the life-work of an artist to show himself
to us, and the completeness with which he reveals
his own individuality is perhaps the best measure of
his genius." Yet Hallam .said that it was "impossible
to learn anything certain about the man Shakspere,"
and how many have not followed Hallam! Mr. Harris
everywhere insists that the material out of which
Shakspere built the essential part of his plays was himself. Only a creative artist knows this. Only a creative
artist can feel that the artist's paramount desire is self-expression. The creative artist is continually thrown
back on himself. Minute portions of himself are built
into every character, and his greatest characters at their
greatest moments contain most of what is finest in himself. The mere notion of a creative artist "keeping
himself out" of his work is grotesque. In examining
the plays Mr. Harris works upon the theory (a) that if
in an artist's work the same important character is
created and re-created again and again, that character
reveals most of the artist's self - that character is
broadly, and as far as it goes, the artist himself; and
(b) that the assurance of identity between the artist and
the type-character is strengthened into absolute certainty if the artist, when by momentary error he drops
out of any dissimilar character which he may be drawing, unconsciously drops into the type-character. On
this impregnable rock the entire book is constructed,
and by the time it is finished you have a picture, not of a
legendary demi-god, but of a clearly individualised and
very living man.

The type character is, of course, Hamlet. Everybody
is agreed that Shakspere put himself into Hamlet. But
it has needed Mr. Frank Harris to trace the same
character, in earlier or in later stages of development,
in many other of Shakspere's personages: Romeo,
Jaques, Posthumus, Duke Vincentio, Duke Orsino,
Antonio, Macbeth, and others. When, a dozen years
ago in the "Saturday Review," Mr. Harris began to
show that the so-called savage Thane of Cawdor was
simply Hamlet grown older, the astonishing revelation
came with a thrill. It startled Oscar Wilde. Some
people cut out the articles and kept them. Others,
including a professor, merely appropriated the idea.
Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton had noticed that bits of
Hamlet were scattered all through the plays, and had
most weirdly and mandarinically conjectured, to explain
the phenomenon, that "Shakspere seems to have kept a
sort of Hamlet note-book, full of Hamlet thoughts,"
and to have "tossed them indiscriminately into other
plays." What an exquisite ignorance of creative processes is here disclosed! Mr. Harris alone has furnished the true explanation, now in the finished book
exceedingly brilliant and complete. I shall not attempt
here to transcribe briefly his portrait of Shakspere. It
is too elaborate, and too surprising in its immense
convincingness. I will quote from the last page:-
"Shakespeare was not the kind of man Englishmen
are accustomed to admire. By a curious irony of fate
Jesus was sent to the Jews, the most unworldly soul
to the most material of peoples; and Shakespeare to
Englishmen, the most gentle, sensuous charmer to a
masculine, rude race. It may be well for us to learn
what infinite virtue lay in that frail, sensual singer."
There is not much of Professor Dowden's "prosperous
country gentleman" left when Mr. Harris has done.
The one thing that I object to in the delineation is the
word "snobbishness" to describe Shakspere's indubitable love of courts and titles and his equally indubitable
lack of sympathy with the common people. Standards
and ideals have changed since Shakspere's time, even
since George the Fourth's, and snobbishness is an
unfair and misleading word. The second part of the
book disengages Shakspere's life from the plays. This
portion of the exegesis is not put forward with the
same certainty as the portrait of the man, but to myself
it is just as convincing. The epic and utterly disastrous
nature of his passion for Mary Fitton is richly proved.
The innocence of Shakspere's relations with Herbert
seems to me to be less clearly established, but many
excellent people will be glad to have Mr. Harris's
authority for believing that the first sequence of
Sonnets is not, after all, unspeakable. I have far
outrun my habitual space, and I am still far from having expressed my estimate of this book. It is probably
unique. It is unquestionably unique in the annals of
Shaksperean criticism. It is bound to, be received in
certain quarters with contumely or with anger, for it
abrades a hundred susceptibilities and deracinates a
hundred pet ideas. But by its courage, its originality,
its force, its patient ingenuity, its comprehension of art
and the artist, its acquaintance with life, and its perfectly astounding acquaintance with Shakspere's plays,
the ultimate destiny of the book is assured. It marks
an epoch. It has destroyed nearly all previous Shaksperean criticism, and it will be the parent of nearly all
the Shaksperean criticism of the future.

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