Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
have any individual great, except through the general. There is no
choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning,
and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic
continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and
find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I
foresee a new mechanic power:" no, but he finds himself in the river
of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities
of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one
way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go.
The church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out
the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by
her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out
of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the
mind.
3. Shakspeare's youth[527] fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offense easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The
Puritans,[528] a growing and energetic party and the religious among
the Anglican Church,[529] would suppress them. But the people wanted
them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous inclosures
at country fairs, were the ready theaters of strolling players. The
people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress
newspapers now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could
king, prelate, or puritan,--alone or united, suppress an organ, which
was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch,[530] and library,
at the same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their
own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national
interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would
have thought of treating it in an English history,--but not a whit
less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no account, like a
baker's shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers
which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene,[531]
Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford,
Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
4. The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when[532] he left
Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on
the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy,[533] which the audience will
bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Cæsar,[534]
and other stories out of Plutarch,[535] which they never tire of; a
shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut[536] and
Arthur,[537] down to the royal Henries,[538] which men hear eagerly;
and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales,[539] and
Spanish voyages,[540] which all the London prentices know. All the
mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright,
and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the
property of the Theater so long, and so many rising geniuses have
enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or
adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work
of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in
that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had
best lie where they are.
5. Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried.
Had the _prestige_[541] which hedges about a modern tragedy existed,
nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living
England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body
which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a
ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again,
may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the
people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so
much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full
strength for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet
owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in
Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was
the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on
pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was
projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with
reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and
treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still
enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as
the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple
or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of
poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which
no single genius,[542] however extraordinary, could hope to create.
6. In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's[543] laborious computations
in regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in
which, "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
and 1899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding investigation
hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's
sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII, I
think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know
well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy,[544] and the following
scene from Cromwell,[545] where,--instead of the meter of Shakspeare,
whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading
for the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are
constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable
traits of Shakspeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the
coronation,[546] are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to
Queen Elizabeth[547] is in bad rhythm.[548]
7. Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of
sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
to value his memory[549] equally with his invention. He is therefore
little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether
through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in
distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they
are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very
near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a
good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken
wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high
place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer,[550]
perhaps; of Chaucer,[551] of Saadi.[552] They felt that all wit was
their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as
poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales
of the world,--
"Presenting Thebes'[553] and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine."
The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been
beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.[556]
Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and
Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the
Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius,[560]
Ovid,[561] and Statius.[562] Then Petrarch,[563] Boccaccio,[564] and
the Provençal poets,[565] and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the
Rose[566] is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide,[567] from Lollius of Urbino: The
Cock and the Fox,[568] from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of
Fame,[569] from the French or Italian: and poor Gower[570] he uses as
if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build
his house. He steals by this apology,--that what he takes has no worth
where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to
be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once
shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to
steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the
property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately
place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts;
but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our
own.
8. Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.
The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister,[571] or at
Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency,
and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of
their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by
correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence,
anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and
resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert
Peel[572] and Mr. Webster[573] vote, so Locke[574] and Rousseau[575]
think for thousands; and so there were foundations all around
Homer,[576] Menu,[577] Saada,[578] or Milton,[579] from which they
drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all