REE UNIVI CAL CHAPTER IV. SHAKESPEARE'S CLASSICAL KNOWLEDGE. THE question as to whether Molière was able to read Aristophanes, Terence and Plautus, in the original, would hardly be likely to excite a very lively interest in the mind of any Frenchman. Molière is held to be a great comic poet by his countrymen, and it may be doubted whether,, if they were shown that over and above that he was also a good Greek and Latin scholar, it would greatly add to their estimation of him, or if it were proved that classical authors were only known to him through translations whether their admiration for the author of the "Misanthrope" would suffer any diminution. But in England people think and feel otherwise, and the question regarding Shakespeare's knowledge of Greek and Latin, would appear to be of vast importance in their eyes, to judge from the extraordinary eagerness with which it has generally been discussed. The combatants in this strange dispute are even more curious than the debated point itself, for-admitting for an instant the truth of the most unfavourable conclusions with regard to Shakespeare's classical learning-it is difficult to understand how such an avowal could be harmful to his glory, and that, on the contrary, it should not rather redound to his credit, and redouble our wonder and admiration for the wealth and penetrative power of a genius able, by itself alone, to furnish so many marvellous beauties that have hitherto been, to a certain extent, attributed to study and to the imitation of others. But though the controverted point has no intrinsic importance, the controversy itself is both amusing and in structive. Great value is attached by the English, who are at heart an aristocratic people, to the distinctions inherited by noble birth and to those gained at the universities; the greatest recommendation a man can have is a title of nobility, the next is a university degree. While a democratic Frenchman, in spite of the small amount of personal merit or renown he may possess, affects as a matter of good taste to conceal his title or degree, an Englishman always proclaims and displays them; dukes and earls, those even whose talents and real worth have made them justly famous, are as exacting on this point as the obscurest of country squires; the Bachelor of Arts with his honours fresh upon him is not more careful to write after his name the initials of the degree he has just taken than are Oxford and Cambridge professors of long standing. Influenced by this national prejudice in favour of birth or, in default of that, of the certificate in due official form of a university education as a passport to a position in society, it would almost seem as if Englishmen had been a little ashamed of this poor William Shakespeare, who not only was no lord or earl, like Lord Buckhurst, but was not even a graduate of either of the universities, as Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Lyly, Lodge, Gascoigne, Richard Edwards, and, in short, as nearly all the other dramatic authors of his time were; and also as if they held it necessary for the honour of England to show that he might have been at any rate a Bachelor of Arts. Another reason for the passionate interest with which English critics have fought over this point may be found in their evident predilection, when dealing with poets, for adding a few more units, whether great or small, to the sum of clearly ascertained biographical facts: it matters not that the discovery should be insignificant to the last degree-that it is a fact is all-sufficient. And an excellent opportunity for research of a precise and not too abstract nature, and for questions of small facts, is afforded in the measurement of the exact amount of Shakespeare's classical learning. The subject opens a fine field for erudition. Esthetics, taste, feeling, philosophy and thought are quite unnecessary here, and all that is wanted is to ferret out and scrape together and pile up higher and higher, mountains of notes, proceeding after the manner of rats "Qui, les livres rongeants Se font savants jusques aux dents.” This is where the tribe mentioned by Voltaire in his "Temple of Taste" shines forth, Baldus, Scioppius, Lexieocrassus, Scriblerius, "a swarm of commentators who restored passages and compiled huge volumes about some. word they did not understand." "Là j'aperçus les Daciers, les Saumaises, 'N'allez vous pas dans le Temple du Goût Vous décrasser? Nous, messieurs? point du tout, Le goût n'est rien; nous avons l'habitude De rédiger au long de point en point Ce qu'on pensa; mais nous ne pensons point."" The family of Lexicocrassus is by no means confined to England; in the present day æsthetics are everywhere supplanted by erudition, and criticism conceived as a work of art and of thought is stigmatized with the withering name of dilettanteism, by grammarians who pride themselves on possessing neither style nor ideas; while the easy-going public accepts an auctioneer's catalogue as literature. Careful research in France has recently procured for us an inventory of Molière's library, platechest and carpeting; and truly a knowledge of a poet's stock of household goods is not without its interest—as, for instance, to know that Malherbe's rooms were very shabbily furnished, and that, as Racine says, he had only seven or eight rush-bottomed chairs; and that Victor Hugo surrounds himself with sumptuous and artistic pieces of furniture, is not a matter of indifference to a philosophical thinker, but only on condition of his penetrating through the given facts to the general idea expressed by them, and not remaining absorbed in the contemplation of a pair of tongs, three frying-pans and a couple of chafing-dishes. It is in this philosophical spirit that I wish to approach the task of making out the inventory of Shakespeare's intellectual furniture in the way of learning, endeavouring to extract from the mass of dry details some ideas of general interest, and taking especial care to avoid falling into the weakness of imagining that the genius loci can suffer either increase or diminution of glory from the riches or poverty of the house he dwells in. It is necessary first of all to get rid of a most senseless but common confusion which has too often prevailed in the discussion touching the amount of Shakespeare's knowledge, by which the knowledge of languages has been and still is continually confounded with learning strictly so called. Yet they are assuredly two very different things. (A knowledge of languages is a key wherewith to unlock the treasures of learning, but it is not learning itself. There are persons who think the key so curious that they pass their whole life in examining it, without once using it to open anything what UNIVER Shakespeare's Classical Knowledge. 77 ever, of such are grammarians. But it is better to get into literature by a false key or by any other means, no matter what, than to rest contented with studying the ingenious mechanism of the right key; it is better to read translations of Homer and the Greek tragedians than to be satisfied with being well up in our Greek conjugations and syntax. Few men have been as learned as Goethe; few men have imbibed the Hellenic spirit and have understood it as he did, yet Goethe did not know Greek. Did Shakespeare know Greek, and did he know Latin? The whole question has been reduced to these pedantic limits, and no higher idea has been conceived of the education of a poet. While some have denied him all knowledge of classical languages, others have exaggerated his acquaintance with them, --both assertions, in spite of their contradictory nature, affording equal satisfaction to the vanity of critics; for a pedant can make as much capital by exposing the ignorance of a man of genius, as he can by the opportunity afforded him by the learning possessed by the author under review, to display his own erudition. The origin of the debate is to be found in a line written by Ben Jonson, in an enthusiastic epistle "to the memory of his beloved William Shakespeare," in which he exclaims that the great poet England had just lost outweighed all antiquity, though he knew "small Latin and less Greek." This line has occasioned as much wrangling and hairsplitting as any text in Perseus or Lycophron ; for what, it has been asked, does Ben Jonson mean by "small Latin"? In the estimation of a mighty classical scholar like himself, a very respectable knowledge of Latin might rank as a small matter. And then, it was further remarked, he does not say "no Greek although his metre would have perfectly allowed of his doing so, but "less Greek." Therefore-oh joy!-Shakespeare did know a little Greek. |