power exer�;ises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find
in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization.
Sucil a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther ; and
such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge ; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of
criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of
Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both
possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their
critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution - of
their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's - which their creative gift
effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his
attention on this play.
Two writers of our time, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor
Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have issued small books
which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll
performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the
critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing that
they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, hut
they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare's art ; and as they insisted on
the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance
of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way,
to the secret of dramatic art in general.
f2!ta work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted ; there is
nothing to interpret ; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art ; and for 'interpretation'
1 I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas
Ry mer's objections to Othello.
45
ESSAYS OF GENER A L I ZA T I O N
I g d !- 1 9 3 0
•
the chief task i s the presentation of relevant historical facts which
the reader is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very
pertinently, how critics have failed in their 'interpretation' of
Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious : that Hamlet
is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men,
each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors.
The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently
if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to
Shakespeare's design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed
upon much cruder material which persists even in the final
form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that
extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham ; and what this play was like we
can guess from three clues : from the Spanish Tragedy itself, from
the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd's Hamlet must have been
based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare's
lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from
the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three sources it is
clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge motive
simply ; that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish
Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards ; and that the 'madness' of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final
play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which
is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly
'blunts' the latter ; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds
of necessity or expediency ; and the effect of the 'madness' is not
to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion. The alteration is not
complete enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there
are verbal parallels so close to the Span ish Tragedy as to leave no
doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of
Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes - the Polonius
Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes - for which there is
little excuse ; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and
not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr.
Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of
reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other
revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr.
Robertson's examination is, we believe, irrefragable : that
Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play
dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that
46
HAMLET
Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon
the 'intractable' material of the old play.
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being
Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic
failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is
none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly
the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains ; and yet he has
left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty
revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines
like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high east em hill,
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act V.
Sc. ii,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep . . .
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark
Grop'd I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger'd their packet;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an
unstable position. We are surely justified in attributing the play,
with that other profoundly interesting play of 'intractable'
material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a
period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which
culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as 'interesting' as
Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most
assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought
Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have
found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the 'Mona
Lisa' of literature.
The grounds of Hamlet's failure are not immediately obvious.
Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the
essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a
guilty mother :
[Hamlet's] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score
of his mother's degradation . . . . The guilt of a mother is an almost
intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely
the 'guilt of a mother' that cannot be handled as Shakespeare
47
ESSAYS OF GENERAL1 Z A T I ON
1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
·
handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or
the pride of Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have
expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-complete, in
the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that
the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate
into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the
sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the
speeches ; indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you
see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might be
claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of
Bussy d'Ambois, Act V. Sc. i. We find Shakespeare's Hamlet not
in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much
as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the
earlier play.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by
finding an 'objective correlative' ; in othu words, a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular emotion ; such that when the external facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's most successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence ; you will
find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep
has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of
imagined sensory impressions ; the words of Macbeth on hearing
of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events,
these words were automatically released by the last event in the
series. The artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of
the external to the emotion ; and this is precisely what is deficient
in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which
is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.
And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine
to this point : that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective
equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his
creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the
difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his
mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops
and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand ;
he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and
obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it ; and
nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet
for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the
donnees of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have
heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to
provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet ; it
is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that
48
H A MLET
she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of
representing.
The 'madness' of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's hand ; in the
earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his
repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of
dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character
Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no
outlet in action ; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an
emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling,
ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is
something which every person of sensibility has known ; it is
doubtless a subject of study for pathologists. It often occurs in
adolescence : the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or
trims down his feelings to fit the business worl d ; the artist keeps
them alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.
The Hamlet of Lafargue is an adolescent ; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which
proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble
puzzle ; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to
express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need
a great many facts in his biography ; and we should like to know
whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal
experience, he read Montaigne, I I . xii, Apologie de Raimond
Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by
hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience
which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should
have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand
himself.
49
THE PERFECT CRITIC
I
'Eriger en lois ses impressions personne//es,
c'est /e grand effort d'un lzomme s'il est sincere.'
LETTRES A ' AMAZONE.
Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a
Arnold - I think it will be conceded - was rather a propagandist
for criticism than a critic, a popularizer rather than a creator of
ideas. So long as this land remains an island (and we are no
nearer the Continent than were Arnold's contemporaries) the
work of Arnold will be important ; it is still a bridge across the
Channel, and it will always have been good sense. Since Arnold's
attempt to correct his countrymen, English criticism has followed
two directions. When a distinguished critic observed recently, in
a newspaper article, that 'poetry is the most highly organized
form of intellectual activity,' we were conscious that we were
reading neither Coleridge nor Arnold. Not only have the words
'organized' and 'activity', occurring together in this phrase, that
familiar vague suggestion of the scientific vocabulary which is
characteristic of modern writing, but one asked questions which
Coleridge and Arnold would not have permitted one to ask. How
is it, for instance, that poetry is more 'highly organized' than
astronomy, physics, or pure mathematics, which we imagine to
be, in relation to the scientist who practises them, 'intellectual
activity' of a pretty highly organized type ? 'Mere strings of
words,' our critic continues with felicity and truth, 'flung like
dabs of paint across a blank canvas, may awaken surprise . . . but
have no significance whatever in the history of literature.' The
phrases by which Arnold is best known may be inadequate, they
may assemble more doubts than they dispel, but they usually
have some meaning. And if a phrase like 'the most highly organized form of intellectual activity' is the highest organization of thought of which contemporary criticism, in a distinguished
representative, is capable, then, we conclude, modern criticism
i� degenerate.
so
THE PERFECT CR I T I C
The verbal disease above noticed may b e reserved for diagnosis
by and by. It is not a disease from which Mr. Arthur Symons (for
the quotation was, of course, not from Mr. Symons) notably
suffers. Mr. Symons represents the other tendency ; he is a
representative of what is always called 'aesthetic criticism' or
'impressionistic criticism'. And it is this form of criticism which
I propose to examine at once. Mr. Symons, the critical successor
of Pater, and partly of Swinburne (I fancy that the phrase 'sick
or sorry' is the common property of all three), is the 'impressionistic critic'. He, if anyone, would be said to expose a sensitive and cultivated mind - cultivated, that is, by the accumulation of
a considerable variety of impressions from all the arts and
several languages - before an 'object' ; and his criticism, if anyone's, would be said to exhibit to us, like the plate, the faithful record of the impressions, more numerous or more refined than
our own, upon a mind more sensitive than our own. A record, we
observe, which is also an interpretation, a translation ; for it must
itself impose impressions upon us, and these impressions are as
much created as transmitted by the criticism. I do not say at once
that this is Mr. Symons ; but it is the 'impressionistic' critic, and
the impressionistic critic is supposed to be Mr. Symons.
At hand is a volume which we may test. 1 Ten of these thirteen
essays deal with single plays of Shakespeare, and it is therefore
fair to take one of these ten as a specimen of the book :
Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonderful, I think, of all Shakespeare's plays . . .
and Mr. Symons reflects that Cleopatra is the most wonderful of
all women :
The queen who ends the dynasty of the Ptolemies has been the star
of poets, a malign star shedding baleful light, from Horace and Propertius down to Victor Hugo ; and it is not to poets only . . .
What, we ask, is this for ? as a page on Cleopatra, and on her
possible origin in the dark lady of the Sonnets, unfolds itself.
And we find, gradually, that this is not an essay on a work of art
or a work of intellect ; but that Mr. Symons is living through the
play as one might live it through in the theatre ; recounting,
commenting :
In her last days Cleopatra touches a certain elevation . . . she would
die a thousand times, rather than live to be a mockery and a scorn in