The sun., 1903-01-04
TWO HAMLETS ON rHB BOARDS
SOTHERN AT ONE Ex7REMB.
BONN AT THE OTHER. 60.

like Either In,pcrsOnation- Difficulties
Of Showing Him on the stage.
D'abord. Messieura Lot S be sensible
on this eternal Shakespeare question
Whether il IL Hamlet or Shvtock: whether 1t
be the spirit or the letter OF the text. men
and brethren fall to argument. to railing and
thence by a declension to blows. II would
be silly were il not sad. And thereby hangs
an argument for Sunday sermon. III the
real Hamlet appeared would we recognize
him, and recognizing him could we refrain
from taking critical pot shots at him' That
is the question: or az Ferdinand Bonn says
In his German version-Schlegel' No.
viennese? Perhaps oder NIGHT
Sein." Which IL better than Eugene Morand's s
and Marcel Schwob's: -Etre ou ne pas etre.
c'est la question. az spoken by Sarah Bern
hardt in her epiccne Hamlet
When George Shaw boldly declared that
Shakespeares plays were largely melo-
dramas with purple patches the ietish
worshippers raised hands Of horror When
he furthermore and unabashed swore that
the Ibsen plays were technically better
made than Shskespeares dramas, the per-
turbed spirits took on courage "hat
lester IL Shaw! OF course he doesn't mean
It. And Of course he did. Worse remains
he is in the right and is only echoing in part
judgments of the eighteenth century.
We adore Shake, p ARE blindly, but It
must be admitted that he doesn't always
play well. We plump down before his
bearded image and say impossible prayers
to him. But he reads better than he acts.
"a
Why this Bardolatry? Why this exempt ing
of one man from criticism while hard knocks
are dealt to his contemporaries. to his sue
cessors? Marlowe is bombastic, we say;
Beaumont and Fletcher artificial Shakes
peare. alone. is the central sun. Tut, TUT
Also very true. The sun. however. Is not
srotless, ard we midgets crawling twixt
earth and heaven may be permitted to point
out. with shaky hand, il il true, the where
abouts Of several large and disfiguring
blotches
But We will not avail ourselves Of this
freeman's privilege. We could an we
would; we won't. Suffice to say that no
work of art is great until ii submits to the
ceaseless scrutiny of the many. Shakes
peare has stood the test AZ no one before
him. Despite Voltaires admiration. and
subsequent abuse, We accept the English
man with all his imperfections full blown
upon him. Taine's estimate is the sanest;
coming as it does from supposedly hos
tile camp-what has Shakespeare this glori-
GUS romantic to do with the rule-of-thumb
classics Of France'-it may be accepted as
the verdict Of a man singularly free from
racial or temperamental prcjudices, great
thinker. a catholic critic.
. To the Shakespeare We recon-
mend a cool perlsal of Taine's study.
II dispels the rhapsodic vapors evoked
by that magician in words. Victor Hugo.
and il burdened somewhat by the doc
trindire theory Of environment. the main
thing is accomplished Shakespeare is
shown az a man. an erring man, man of
passions. gross appetites; tender, sensitive,
loving; a soul at one moment rapt into the
seventh heaven, the next hurled to the
nethermost hell; a poets soul He is not
depicted-as he surely was not-a monster
Of impossible perfections in whose brain
we're all PHILOSOPHERS, sciences, learnings.
but he is set faithfully before US as human
being, with a genius the like of which the
world has never seen; withal man OF
heart and sensibility.
We quite subscribe to the view Of another
Frenchman, Paul Bourget. touching on the
personal element In the poets work. 1T
Ia vain to say that they are simply works
OF imagination. For my part. in no way
believe that mental sensiblity can find
action apart from real sensibility. Granted
that a poet does not copy the actual facts
of his own life and that in all his work not
an event can he found that has happened
20 him, nor the portrait OF any person hs
has known, | decline to understand how he
shall write the scene between Hamlet and
his mother, or the storm act in Lear.
IL he has not known in all their bitterness
the sensations that form the theme OF these
two passages, has no: seen on n loved soul
the stain that can never be washed away,
has not suffered or done some irreparable
in Justice" Then he dives into the sOnnets.
where We must leave him.
Put Hamlet Of all the plays the least
favorable for translation. into a foreign
tongue ard wha, rcrnains3 Bald melo-
drama .interspersed with tedious philosophc
speeches And this holds good whether
Joaeph Kanz ia the hero. or only Ferdinand
Sonn--for the lHtter Ii as Suptf ~ " nay
stack and when the wind is north, north
east-a disagreeable, chilly air in Elsinore-
be looks as if he could don a raincoat and
stalk over to Luchow's on Fourteenth
st rect!
1t is then the music, the surge and thunder
Of his words, that keeps Shakespeare in
our heart Of hearts. His philosophy was
the commonplace stuff Of his times. 1t
WAS Montaignes, il was hedonistic; il was
lofty in its Roman Catholic spirituality
wait, he can be proved as good Catholic
as a Northumberland to-day il would
be considered the philosophy Of Fhomme
moven seasuei, as Matthew Arnold calls
the average man. Nothing ages like philo-
sophical systems except melodies. The
tboughts and tunes of one generation are
disliked and carcaturcd by later. 80
II IL the music, the perennial music Of his
phrase that is the salt of Shakespeare's
art
Yes-and his profound knowledge OF
character. All the rest is negligible: his
amorphous plots, his wit, wisdom and
histories. Every year secs new book
about Shakespeare as Jurist;" Shakes
peare as Landscape Gardener; Shnkes-
peare as Scholar" ud nausenm. The fact
N Il