Chapter 12

"Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said unto her, I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? She saith unto him,"--

and although she had difficulty in breathing, Sonia raised her voice, as if in reading the words of Martha she was making her own confession of faith:--

"Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world."

She stopped, raised her eyes rapidly on him, but cast them down on her book, and continued to read. Raskolnikoff listened without stirring, without turning toward her, his elbows resting on the table, looking aside. Thus the reading continued till the thirty-second verse.

"Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled, and said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him. And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died?"

Raskolnikoff turned towards her and looked at her with agitation. His suspicion was a correct one. She was trembling in all her limbs, a prey to fever. He had expected this. She was getting to the miraculous story, and a feeling of triumph was taking possession of her. Her voice, strengthened by joy, had a metallic ring. The lines became misty to her troubled eyes, but fortunately she knew the passage by heart. At the last line, "Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind--" she lowered her voice, emphasizing passionately the doubt, the blame, the reproach of these unbelieving and blind Jews, who a moment after fell as if struck by lightning on their knees, to sob and to believe. "Yes," thought she, deeply affected by this joyful hope, "yes, he--he who is blind, who dares not believe--he also will hear--will believe in an instant, immediately, now, this very moment!"

"Jesus therefore, again groaning in himself, cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days."

She strongly emphasized the word _four_.

"Jesus saith unto her. Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always; but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. _And he that was dead came forth,_"--

(on reading these words Sonia shuddered, as if she herself had been witness to the miracle)

"bound hand and foot with grave-clothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. _Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him._"

She read no more,--such a thing would have been impossible to her,--closed the book, and briskly rising, said in a low-toned and choking voice, without turning toward the man she was talking to, "So much for the resurrection of Lazarus." She seemed afraid to raise her eyes on Raskolnikoff, whilst her feverish trembling continued. The dying piece of candle dimly lit up this low-ceiled room, in which an assassin and a harlot had just read the Book of books.

EDWARD DOWDEN

(1843-)

"We are all hunters, skillful or skilless, in literature--hunters for our spiritual good or for our pleasure," says Edward Dowden; and to his earnest research and careful exposition many readers owe a more thorough appreciation of literature. He was educated at Queen's College, Cork (his birthplace), and then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received the Vice-Chancellor's prize in both English verse and English prose, and also the first English Moderatorship in logic and ethics. For two years he studied divinity. Then he obtained by examination a professorship of oratory at the University of Dublin, where he was afterwards elected professor of English literature. The scholarship of his literary work has won him many honors. In 1888 he was chosen president of the English Goethe Society, to succeed Professor Müller. The following year he was appointed first Taylorian lecturer in the Taylor Institute, Oxford. The Royal Irish Academy has bestowed the Cunningham gold medal upon him, and he has also received the honorary degree LL. D. of the University of Edinburgh, and from Princeton University.

Very early in life Professor Dowden began to express his feeling for literature, and the instinct which leads him to account for a work by study of its author's personality. For more than twenty years English readers have known him as a frequent contributor of critical essays to the leading reviews. These have been collected into the delightful volumes 'Studies in Literature' and 'Transcripts and Studies.' His has been called "an honest method, wholesome as sweet." He would offer more than a mere résumé of what his author expresses. He would be one of the interpreters and transmitters of new forms of thought to the masses of readers who lack time or ability to discover values for themselves. Very widely read himself, he is fitted for just comparisons and comprehensive views. As has been pointed out, he is fond of working from a general consideration of a period with its formative influences, to the particular care of the author with whom he is dealing. Saintsbury tells us that Mr. Dowden's procedure is to ask his author a series of questions which seem to him of vital importance, and find out how he would answer them.

Dowden's style is careful, clear, and thorough, showing his scholarship and incisive thought. His form of expression is strongly picturesque. It is nowhere more so than in 'Shakespeare: a Study of His Mind and Art.' This, his most noteworthy work, has been very widely read and admired. His intimate acquaintance with German criticism upon the great Elizabethan especially fitted him to present fresh considerations to the public.

He has also written a brilliant 'Life of Shelley' (bitterly criticized by Mark Twain in the North American Review, 'A Defense of Harriet Shelley'), and a 'Life of Southey' in the English Men of Letters Series; and edited most capably 'Southey's Correspondence with Caroline Bowles,' 'The Correspondence of Sir Henry Taylor,' 'Shakespeare's Sonnets,' 'The Passionate Pilgrim,' and a collection of 'Lyrical Ballads.'

THE HUMOR OF SHAKESPEARE

From 'Shakespeare: a Critical Study of His Mind and Art'

A study of Shakespeare which fails to take account of Shakespeare's humor must remain essentially incomplete. The character and spiritual history of a man who is endowed with a capacity for humorous appreciation of the world must differ throughout, and in every particular, from that of the man whose moral nature has never rippled over with genial laughter. At whatever final issue Shakespeare arrived after long spiritual travail as to the attainment of his life, that precise issue, rather than another, was arrived at in part by virtue of the fact of Shakespeare's humor. In the composition of forces which determined the orbit traversed by the mind of the poet, this must be allowed for as a force among others, in importance not the least, and efficient at all times even when little apparent. A man whose visage "holds one stern intent" from day to day, and whose joy becomes at times almost a supernatural rapture, may descend through circles of hell to the narrowest and the lowest; he may mount from sphere to sphere of Paradise until he stands within the light of the Divine Majesty; but he will hardly succeed in presenting us with an adequate image of life as it is on this earth of ours, in its oceanic amplitude and variety. A few men of genius there have been, who with vision penetrative as lightning have gazed as it were _through_ life, at some eternal significances of which life is the symbol. Intent upon its sacred meaning, they have had no eye to note the forms of the grotesque hieroglyph of human existence. Such men are not framed for laughter. To this little group the creator of Falstaff, of Bottom, and of Touchstone does not belong.

Shakespeare, who saw life more widely and wisely than any other of the seers, could laugh. That is a comfortable fact to bear in mind; a fact which serves to rescue us from the domination of intense and narrow natures, who claim authority by virtue of their grasp of one-half of the realities of our existence and their denial of the rest. Shakespeare could laugh. But we must go on to ask, "What did he laugh at? and what was the manner of his laughter?" There are as many modes of laughter as there are facets of the common soul of humanity, to reflect the humorous appearances of the world. Hogarth, in one of his pieces of coarse yet subtile engraving, has presented a group of occupants of the pit of a theatre, sketched during the performance of some broad comedy or farce. What proceeds upon the stage is invisible and undiscoverable, save as we catch its reflection on the faces of the spectators, in the same way that we infer a sunset from the evening flame upon windows that front the west. Each laughing face in Hogarth's print exhibits a different mode or a different stage of the risible paroxysm. There is the habitual enjoyer of the broad comic, abandoned to his mirth, which is open and unashamed; mirth which he is evidently a match for, and able to sustain. By his side is a companion female portrait--a woman with head thrown back to ease the violence of the guffaw; all her loose redundant flesh is tickled into an orgasm of merriment; she is fairly overcome. On the other side sits the spectator who has passed the climax of his laughter; he wipes the tears from his eyes, and is on the way to regain an insecure and temporary composure. Below appears a girl of eighteen or twenty, whose vacancy of intellect is captured and occupied by the innocuous folly still in progress; she gazes on expectantly, assured that a new blossom of the wonder of absurdity is about to display itself. Her father, a man who does not often surrender himself to an indecent convulsion, leans his face upon his hand, and with the other steadies himself by grasping one of the iron spikes that inclose the orchestra. In the right corner sits the humorist, whose eyes, around which the wrinkles gather, are half closed, while he already goes over the jest a second time in his imagination. At the opposite side an elderly woman is seen, past the period when animal violences are possible, laughing because she knows there is something to laugh at, though she is too dull-witted to know precisely what. One spectator, as we guess from his introverted air, is laughing to think what somebody else would think of this. Finally, the thin-lipped, perk-nosed person of refinement looks aside, and by his critical indifference condemns the broad, injudicious mirth of the company.

All these laughers of Hogarth are very commonplace, and some are very vulgar persons; one trivial, ludicrous spectacle is the occasion of their mirth. When from such laughter as this we turn to the laughter of men of genius, who gaze at the total play of the world's life; and when we listen to this, as with the ages it goes on gathering and swelling, our sense of hearing is enveloped and almost annihilated by the chorus of mock and jest, of antic and buffoonery, of tender mirth and indignant satire, of monstrous burlesque and sly absurdity, of desperate misanthropic derision and genial affectionate caressing of human imperfection and human folly. We hear from behind the mask the enormous laughter of Aristophanes, ascending peal above peal until it passes into jubilant ecstasy, or from the uproar springs some exquisite lyric strain. We hear laughter of passionate indignation from Juvenal, the indignation of "the ancient and free soul of the dead republics." And there is Rabelais, with his huge buffoonery, and the earnest eyes intent on freedom, which look out at us in the midst of the zany's tumblings and indecencies. And Cervantes, with his refined Castilian air and deep melancholy mirth, at odds with the enthusiasm which is dearest to his soul. And Molière, with his laughter of unerring good sense, undeluded by fashion or vanity or folly or hypocrisy, and brightly mocking these into modesty. And Milton, with his fierce objurgatory laughter,--Elijah-like insult against the enemies of freedom and of England. And Voltaire, with his quick intellectual scorn and eager malice of the brain. And there is the urbane and amiable play of Addison's invention, not capable of large achievement, but stirring the corners of the mouth with a humane smile,--gracious gayety for the breakfast-tables of England. And Fielding's careless mastery of the whole broad common field of mirth. And Sterne's exquisite curiosity of oddness, his subtile extravagances and humors prepense. And there is the tragic laughter of Swift, which announces the extinction of reason, and loss beyond recovery of human faith and charity and hope. How in this chorus of laughters, joyous and terrible, is the laughter of Shakespeare distinguishable?

In the first place, the humor of Shakespeare, like his total genius, is many-sided. He does not pledge himself as dramatist to any one view of human life. If we open a novel by Charles Dickens, we feel assured beforehand that we are condemned to an exuberance of philanthropy; we know how the writer will insist that we must all be good friends, all be men and brothers, intoxicated with the delight of one another's presence; we expect him to hold out the right hand of fellowship to man, woman, and child; we are prepared for the bacchanalia of benevolence. The lesson we have to learn from this teacher is, that with the exception of a few inevitable and incredible monsters of cruelty, every man naturally engendered of the offspring of Adam is of his own nature inclined to every amiable virtue, Shakespeare abounds in kindly mirth: he receives an exquisite pleasure from the alert wit and bright good sense of a Rosalind; he can dandle a fool as tenderly as any nurse qualified to take a baby from the birth can deal with her charge. But Shakespeare is not pledged to deep-dyed ultra-amiability. With Jacques, he can rail at the world while remaining curiously aloof from all deep concern about its interests, this way or that. With Timon he can turn upon the world with a rage no less than that of Swift, and discover in man and woman a creature as abominable as the Yahoo. In other words, the humor of Shakespeare, like his total genius, is dramatic.

Then again, although Shakespeare laughs incomparably, mere laughter wearies him. The only play of Shakespeare's, out of nearly forty, which is farcical,--'The Comedy of Errors,'--was written in the poet's earliest period of authorship, and was formed upon the suggestion of a preceding piece. It has been observed with truth by Gervinus that the farcical incidents of this play have been connected by Shakespeare with a tragic background, which is probably his own invention. With beauty, or with pathos, or with thought, Shakespeare can mingle his mirth; and then he is happy, and knows how to deal with play of wit or humorous characterization; but an entirely comic subject somewhat disconcerts the poet. On this ground, if no other were forthcoming, it might be suspected that 'The Taming of the Shrew' was not altogether the work of Shakespeare's hand. The secondary intrigues and minor incidents were of little interest to the poet. But in the buoyant force of Petruchio's character, in his subduing tempest of high spirits, and in the person of the foiled revoltress against the law of sex, who carries into her wifely loyalty the same energy which she had shown in her virgin _sauvagerie_, there were elements of human character in which the imagination of the poet took delight.

Unless it be its own excess, however, Shakespeare's laughter seems to fear nothing. It does not, when it has once arrived at its full development, fear enthusiasm, or passion, or tragic intensity; nor do these fear it. The traditions of the English drama had favored the juxtaposition of the serious and comic: but it was reserved for Shakespeare to make each a part of the other; to interpenetrate tragedy with comedy, and comedy with tragic earnestness.

SHAKESPEARE'S PORTRAITURE OF WOMEN

From 'Transcripts and Studies'

Of all the daughters of his imagination, which did Shakespeare love the best? Perhaps we shall not err if we say one of the latest born of them all,--our English Imogen. And what most clearly shows us how Shakespeare loved Imogen is this--he has given her faults, and has made them exquisite, so that we love her better for their sake. No one has so quick and keen a sensibility to whatever pains and to whatever gladdens as she. To her a word is a blow; and as she is quick in her sensibility, so she is quick in her perceptions, piercing at once through the Queen's false show of friendship; quick in her contempt for what is unworthy, as for all professions of love from the clown-prince, Cloten; quick in her resentment, as when she discovers the unjust suspicions of Posthumus. Wronged she is indeed by her husband, but in her haste she too grows unjust; yet she is dearer to us for the sake of this injustice, proceeding as it does from the sensitiveness of her love. It is she, to whom a word is a blow, who actually receives a buffet from her husband's hand; but for Imogen it is a blessed stroke, since it is the evidence of his loyalty and zeal on her behalf. In a moment he is forgiven, and her arms are round his neck.

Shakespeare made so many perfect women unhappy that he owed us some _amende_. And he has made that _amende_ by letting us see one perfect woman supremely happy. Shall our last glance at Shakespeare's plays show us Florizel at the rustic merry-making, receiving blossoms from the hands of Perdita? or Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess in Prospero's cave, and winning one a king and one a queen, while the happy fathers gaze in from the entrance of the cave? We can see a more delightful sight than these--Imogen with her arms around the neck of Posthumus, while she puts an edge upon her joy by the playful challenge and mock reproach--

"Why did you throw your wedded lady from you? Think that you are upon a rock, and now Throw me again;"

and he responds--

"Hang there like a fruit, my soul, Till the tree die."

We shall find in all Shakespeare no more blissful creatures than these two.

THE INTERPRETATION OF LITERATURE

From 'Transcripts and Studies'

The happiest moment in a critic's hours of study is when, seemingly by some divination, but really as the result of patient observation and thought, he lights upon the central motive of a great work. Then, of a sudden, order begins to form itself from the crowd and chaos of his impressions and ideas. There is a moving hither and thither, a grouping or coordinating of all his recent experiences, which goes on of its own accord; and every instant his vision becomes clearer, and new meanings disclose themselves in what had been lifeless and unilluminated. It seems as if he could even stand by the artist's side and co-operate with him in the process of creating. With such a sense of joy upon him, the critic will think it no hard task to follow the artist to the sources from whence he drew his material,--it may be some dull chapter in an ancient chronicle, or some gross tale of passion by an Italian novelist,--and he will stand by and watch with exquisite pleasure the artist handling that crude material, and refashioning and refining it, and breathing into it the breath of a higher life. Even the minutest difference of text between an author's earlier and later draft, or a first and second edition, has now become a point not for dull commentatorship, but a point of life, at which he may touch with his finger the pulse of the creator in his fervor of creation.

From each single work of a great author we advance to his total work, and thence to the man himself,--to the heart and brain from which all this manifold world of wisdom and wit and passion and beauty has proceeded. Here again, before we address ourselves to the interpretation of the author's mind, we patiently submit ourselves to a vast series of impressions. And in accordance with Bacon's maxim that a prudent interrogation is the half of knowledge, it is right to provide ourselves with a number of well-considered questions which we may address to our author. Let us cross-examine him as students of mental and moral science, and find replies in his written words. Are his senses vigorous and fine? Does he see color as well as form? Does he delight in all that appeals to the sense of hearing--the voices of nature, and the melody and harmonies of the art of man? Thus Wordsworth, exquisitely organized for enjoying and interpreting all natural, and if we may so say, homeless and primitive sounds, had but little feeling for the delights of music. Can he enrich his poetry by gifts from the sense of smell, as did Keats; or is his nose like Wordsworth's, an idle promontory projecting into a desert air? Has he like Browning a vigorous pleasure in all strenuous muscular movements; or does he like Shelley live rapturously in the finest nervous thrills? How does he experience and interpret the feeling of sex, and in what parts of his entire nature does that feeling find its elevating connections and associations? What are his special intellectual powers? Is his intellect combative or contemplative? What are the laws which chiefly preside over the associations of his ideas? What are the emotions which he feels most strongly? and how do his emotions coalesce with one another? Wonder, terror, awe, love, grief, hope, despondency, the benevolent affections, admiration, the religious sentiment, the moral sentiment, the emotion of power, irascible emotion, ideal emotion--how do these make themselves felt in and through his writings? What is his feeling for the beautiful, the sublime, the ludicrous? Is he of weak or vigorous will? In the conflict of motives, which class of motives with him is likely to predominate? Is he framed to believe or framed to doubt? Is he prudent, just, temperate, or the reverse of these? These and such-like questions are not to be crudely and formally proposed, but are to be used with tact; nor should the critic press for hard and definite answers, but know how skillfully to glean its meaning from an evasion. He is a dull cross-examiner who will invariably follow the scheme which he has thought out and prepared beforehand, and who cannot vary his questions to surprise or beguile the truth from an unwilling witness. But the tact which comes from natural gift and from experience may be well supported by something of method,--method well hidden away from the surface and from sight.