Page images
PDF
EPUB

pression, which not only never was used in real society, but which never could be, without a violation of the laws both of language and of thought. The dialect of tragedy is not the style which men on the stage of life, influenced as they are by temporary and accidental conditions of speech, actually use, but it is the diction which, according to the permanent and essential genius of the language, and the supposed moral and intellectual categories of the personages, constitutes the truest and most precise expression of the thoughts and purposes which animate them.

Although the phraseology which the earlier English playwrights put into the mouths of their personages is in a high degree unnatural and inappropriate, yet in the wide variety of their characters, and of the circumstances in which they placed them, they not unfrequently unwittingly strayed into a fit and expressive style, and thus there was gradually accumulated a fragmentary and scattered store of material for a copious and multifarious dramatic diction.

In speaking of the relations of Chaucer to his time and to the earlier literature of the language, I observed that his style of expression was eclectic, that he coined no words and imported few, but contented himself with the existing stock of native and already naturalized foreign terms the excellence of his diction consisting in the judgment and taste of his selection, and his mutual adaptation of terms individually familiar.

For the purposes of Chaucer and his age, for the expression of the limited range of thought and subject with which the English nature of his time was conversant, a limited vocabulary sufficed, and the existing literature of England supplied nearly the entire stock of words demanded for the uses of the poet.

But in Shakespeare's day, though humanity, English humanity especially, was still the same, yet the philosophical conception of humanity was immensely enlarged, diversified, and enriched. The myriad-minded Shakespeare-as, by an application of a term borrowed from one of the Greek fathers, Coleridge has so appropriately called him-took in this vast conception in all its breadth, and was endowed with a faculty of self-transformation into all the shapes in which the nature of man has been incarnated. He hence required a variety of phraseologies-words and combinations of words-as great as the varieties of humanity itself

are numerous.

Now this compass and flexibility of expression could be found only in the language of a people who possessed such a moral and intellectual constitution, and had enjoyed such a moral and social training, as had previously fallen to the lot of no modern nation.

English life, in the sixteenth century, was full of multifarious experiThere had always been a greater number and variety of stimulating tendencies and influences, and greater practical liberty of yielding

ences.

to them, in England than in any other modern nation; and consequently, in the time of Shakespeare, the human intellect, the human heart, affections, and passions, were there more fully and variously developed, and the articulate expression of all these mental and moral conditions and impulses more cultivated and diversified, than in any contemporaneous people.

In all the facilities for the observation of human life and nature on a wide and comprehensive scale, the Englishman of Shakespeare's time was at a more advanced point than has even yet been reached in the society of any other of the Gothic or Romance nations. This is one of the reasons why the plays of Shakespeare have such an incontestable superiority over the drama of all other modern countries, and why so many thoughts which, in the recent literature of Continental Europe, have been hailed as new revelations, are, to the Englishman, but the thousandth repetition of old and familiar oracles, or generalizations which have, from time immemorial, been matters of too universal and every-day consciousness to have been thought worthy of a place in English literature at all.

Shakespeare stood, to the age of Elizabeth and of James, in just the position which Chaucer occupied with respect to that of Edward III. and of Richard II.; and in these two authors the genius and the literature of their respective ages reached its culminating point. For the excellence of each, all preceding English history and literature was a necessary preparation, and the dialect of each was composed by an application of the same principles to the philological material which earlier laborers had gathered for them.

The material thus prepared for the two great masters of the English tongue was in a very different state when it passed under their respective manipulation; and it may be seriously questioned whether, simply as a philological constructor, Chaucer were not the greater architect of the two. In Chaucer's time, every department of the language was rude, defective, and unpolished, and the task of enriching, harmonizing, and adapting was performed by him alone. Shakespeare had been preceded by a multitude of skilful artists, who had improved and refined all the various special vocabularies which make up the totality of the English language; and the common dialect which more or less belongs to all imaginative composition had been carried by others to almost as high a pitch of perfection as is found in Shakespeare himself.

Chaucer, as a linguistic reformer, had great advantages over Shakespeare, in possessing a better philological training. He grew up in an almost equal familiarity with French, then a highly cultivated dialect, and with his mother tongue, and he was also well acquainted with Latin and with Italian; but we have no reason to believe that Shakespeare had

VOL. VI.-5

acquired anything more than the merest smattering of any language but his own.

But although the dialect of Shakespeare does not exhibit the same relative superiority as that of Chaucer over all older and contemporaneous literature, its absolute superiority is, nevertheless, unquestionable. I have before had occasion to remark that the greatest authors very often confine themselves to a restricted vocabulary, and that the power of their diction lies, not in the multitude of words, but in skilful combination and adaptation of a few. This is strikingly verified by an examination of the stock of words employed by Shakespeare. He introduces, indeed, terms borrowed from every art and every science, from all theoretical knowledge and all human experience; but his entire vocabulary little exceeds fifteen thousand words, and of these a large number, chiefly of Latin origin, occur but once or at most twice in his pages. The affluence of his speech arises from variety of combination, not from numerical abundance. And yet the authorized vocabulary of Shakespeare's time probably embraced twice or thrice the number of words which he found necessary for his purposes; for though there were at that time no dictionaries which exhibit a great stock of words, yet in perusing Hooker, the old translators, and the early voyagers and travellers, we find a verbal wealth, a copiousness of diction, which forms a singular contrast with the philological economy of the great dramatist.

In his theory of dramatic construction, Shakespeare owes little—in his conception of character, nothing to earlier or contemporary artists; but in his diction, everything except felicity of selection and combination. The existence of the whole copious English vocabulary was necessary, in order that his marvellous gift of selection might have room for its exercise. Without a Cimabue and a Giotto, a Fra Angelico and a Perugino, there could not have been a Raphael; and all previous English philology and literature were indispensable to the creation of a medium through which such revelations of man as had not yet been made to man might be possible to the genius of a Shakespeare.

John Augustus Stone.

BORN in Concord, Mass., 1801. DROWNED, while suffering mental derangement, in the Schuylkill River, near Philadelphia, Penn., 1834.

THE COUNCIL SCENE IN "METAMORA."

[Metamora. A Tragedy. First performed at the Park Theatre, New York, 1829, for the benefit of Edwin Forrest, whose impersonation of the Indian Chief was most heroic in the following Scene.-Copied from the Prompter's Text, by permission of Mr. James Walter Collier, the present owner of this unpublished Play.]

SCENE.-Council chamber, interior of English fort, formed of hewn logs with loop-holes for musketry. A long oaken table with books.

ERRINGTON, Sir Arthur Vaughan, Church, elders, officers, guards, villagers, ladies, discovered. Enter MORDAUNT and FITZ ARNOLD.

etc.,

ERRINGTON. 'Tis news that asks from us most speedy action!

Heaven has in sounds most audible and strange,—

In sights, too, that amaze the lookers on,-
Forewarned our people of approaching ills.
'Tis time to lift the arm so long supine
And with one blow cut off this heathen race
Who, spite of reason and the Word revealed,
Continue hardened in their devious way,
And make the chosen tremble. Colleagues,
Your voices. Speak-are you for peace or war?

SIR ARTHUR. What proof is there your Indian neighbors round

Mean not as fairly towards our settlement

As did King Philip's father, Massasoit ?

ERR. [Shows paper.] Sir,

We have here full proof that Philip is our foe.—

Sassamon, that faithful servant of our cause,

Has been despatched

By Philip's men, set on to murder him.

One of his tribe confessed the horrid truth

And will, when time shall call, give proof on 't.

I say this chieftain is a man of blood,

And heaven will bless the valiant arm that slays him.

[At this moment METAMORA enters boldly, looking the last speaker full in the face. Some are confounded and all are silent. METAMORA looks around and pauses.]

MET. You sent for me, and I am come. [No one replies.] If ye have nothing to say,

I will go back. [Pause.] Do ye fear to question? Metamora does not fear to

answer.

ERR. Philip, [METAMORA starts] 'tis thought that still you love us not, And, most unmindful of our league of peace,

In secret plot against our common weal.

MɛT. Do your fears counsel ye? What is it that makes your old men sorrowful and your young warriors grasp their fire-weapons, as if they waited the onset of the

foe? Of what does the white man complain? Brothers, what has Metamora done, that doubt is on all your faces and your spirits are troubled? The just man's heart should be a stranger to fear, and his lips ready to utter the words of truth. ERR. By those who lie not, Chieftain, we are told

Thou didst give shelter to a banished man

Whose deeds unchristian met our just reproof,

And gave us cause to doubt thy faithfulness.

MET. Why was that man sent away from the home of his joy? Because the Great Spirit did not speak to him as he has done to you? Did ye not come across the Great Water and leave the smoke of your father's dwelling because the iron arm was held out against ye? Why do you that have just plucked the red knife from strive thus to stab your brother?

your own wounded sides,

ERR. Indian,

Didst thou not know the sentence of the court

On him whom thou didst shelter?

MET. If my race's enemy had crept unarmed into my wigwam, and his heart was sore, I would not have driven him from my fire, or forbid him to lie down on my mat. Your great Book, you say, teaches ye to give good gifts to the stranger, and deal kindly with him whose heart is sad. The Wampanoag needs no such counsellor, for the Great Spirit has with his own finger written it on his heart. MORD. Why hast put weapons in thy people's hands,

And given the means to urge great mischief on?

MET. If my people do wrong, I am quick to punish. Do ye not set a snare in their path, that they may fall down, making them mad with the firewater which the Evil Spirit gave ye in the hour of his triumph? The red man sickens in the house of the Palefaces, as the leaping stream of the mountain is made impure by the foul brooks that mingle with it.

SIR A. Chieftain, since these things are so,

Sell us thy lands and seek another home.

MET. Sell you my lands! What more? Have ye not enough? No, white man, never will Metamora forsake the home of his fathers and let the plough of the stranger disturb the bones of his kindred.

CHURCH. These are bold words, Chieftain.

MET. They are true ones.

ERR. They give no token of thy love of peace.

We would deal fairly with thee-nay, be generous.

MET. Then would ye pay back that which fifty snows ago ye received from the hands of my father, Massasoit. Your backs were turned towards the land of your fathers, and the son of the forest took ye as a little child and opened the door of his wigwam. The keen blast of the north howled in the leafless wood, but the Indian covered ye with his broad right hand and put it back. Your little ones smiled when they heard the loud voice of the storm, for our hearths were warm and the Indian was the white man's friend.

ERR. Such words are needless now.

MET. I will speak no more.-I am going.
ERR. Hold yet a moment, Philip.

We've to speak

Of faithful Sassamon, who met his death,
On our own ground, by hand of treachery.

MET. So should the treacherous man fall, by the keen knife, in the darkness, and not ascend from the strife of battle up to the bright home where the dead warrior dwells in glory.

« PreviousContinue »