Man's Bastle agains the forces The lovers, therefore, enter a place where all these mediations of Intelligence no longer exist, but they are brought into direct contact with the mediations of Nature, which determine them from without. Such a place is, hence, represented by the Poet as a wood dark and wild, foreign to man and unknown in the world of Reason. The lovers are, therefore, at once exposed to all sorts of external influences. They have now no State above them whose action is their own highest rational principlehence clear to their minds; but the world which is here at work is beyond them, outside of their Intelligence the world of Nature, of Accident, of Externality. Now, it was seen to be the great funetion of the State to subordinate these elements hostile to freedom, and to protect man against them; but, when the former is wiped out, or has been abandoned, the latter must have full sway. Therefore the one fundamental property of the "Wood near Athens" must be that it exhibits a world of unfree Ex Lenkeslive pure product of Nature, inhabited by a race of beings dom — of external determination.] But how is such a world to be represented by the Poet? Here, too, there need be no doubt, for an adequate statement of this phase of consciousness has frequently been given in the course of human history. In certain stages of culture man's profoundest convictions repose upon a system of external determination; it is his deepest belief i) that he is the sport and the victim of extraneous powers, and, consequently, he must elaborate a corresponding expression of his faith. While he has not yet freed himself from the trammels of Nature by means of institutions and thought, what else can he do but portray himself as he really is? Such is the character of all Mytholo gies. The activities of Nature, and of man in relation to the same, are conceived to take place by the instrumentality of supernatural agents; the most common phenomena have behind them the demon, angel, fairy, god, as producing cause. Man is not seized in his freedom, nor is Nature subjected to Law, but all mediations are performed by a power superior to both. Mythology is, therefore, the adequate expression of this world of external determination. wJbut The mythopoeic epoch of nations, hence, will furnish the Poet numerous examples for his purpose. Which of the many Mythologies will he then take? Evidently the one which has been elaborated by the nation which he is addressing. It is known as an historical fact that the belief in fairies was common, at the time of the writing of the play, throughout England. To this consciousness already existent the Poet appeals, and at the same time portrays it to itself. read waste of Bard's TaleDegina's But there are two more characteristics which follow from this one fundamental principle. In the first place, the Fairy World is not the product of Reason, which is here the State and has been left behind, but of the Imagination, which objectifies the processes of Nature and Spirit in the form of images and external activities. It projects some personality behind every kind of mediation. Hence, when it takes complete possession of the mind, all occurrences are transferred to the realm of the Supernatural. But the content of the Imagination is, nevertheless, the genuine expression of the consciousness of a nation-its statement and solution of the profoundest problems of existence. But, in the second place, this is also the world of poetry, since everything is transfused into images and external influences; the prose of real life, Versamilitude Eliz reality and to whom with its means and ends, its wants and utilities, is banished -man seems to live in a perpetual dream. The abstract Understanding, with its categories of cause and effect, laws of Nature, etc., has no validity here; all is pictured - abstract terms are quite unknown. Whole nations, like the ancient Hindoos, seem to have lived in this dreamy, sensuous state. The Fairy World is a phase of this consciousness, and, hence, the ethereal poetical existences which flit through it are not merely the capricious products of the Poet's fancy, but strictly necessary. These are the essential qualities with which the Poet has endowed his "Wood near Athens." It is a world of external determination; it has a Mythology, which is the product of Imagination, and thus resembles dream-land, where all rushes in without cause; it is poetic, as contradistinguished from the prosaic life in society. 3.[Such is the second thread of the drama—the lovecollision and that which springs from it, namely, the poetic Fairy-land. The third thread is the learning and representation of the theatrical piece by the clowns. This is motived on the first page of the play, in an external manner, by Theseus calling upon his Master of Revels to stir up the Athenian youth to merriments-to produce something for the entertainment of the court- that is, a demand for Art has arisen. For man's highest want is, after all, to know himself; he desires to behold his own countenance, as it were, in a mirror, which Art holds up before him. Moreover, there is an official attached to the court, and generally to all courts, whose duty it is to provide for the above-mentioned want. The theme will, therefore, be that which gives a picture of the court - of its chief thought and business at this time, which is love. The content of the drama of Pyramus and Thisbe is thus a love-collision. Now, to exhibit such a work adequately demands the highest skill, both in actor and poet. They must be gifted by nature with true artistic conception; they must polish nature by culture; Art must be their life and living; they must be professional. Such at least is the general rule; dilettanteism beyond the private circle is intolerable, and never was it more happily ridiculed than just in these clowns. Shakespeare has, therefore, chosen not to give a poetic, ideal picture in this part, but a prosaic one; and necessarily so, for what would the second picture otherwise have been but a repetition of the first? In fact, this play of the clowns is the contrast to his own true play; he has exhibited thus in the one and the same totality the negative - that is, humorous side of his own work. The idea of the third thread now before us may, therefore, be given in the statement - Prose is trying to be Poetry. The result is a burlesque of the legitimate kind, for it is not Poetry, or any other high and holy thing, which is wantonly caricatured, but the prosaic conception of Poetry. The contradiction is real—inherent; the Prosaic attempts to be what it is not, and can never be the Poetic: its efforts to put on such ethereal robes are simply ludicrous. But we have also the True alongside of the Burlesque; genuine Poetry is to be found just here in the same piece. Thus the Poet does not leave us with a negative result; after his wit has ceased to sparkle there is not left merely a handful of ashes, but the positive side is present also. In this connection another distinction must be noticed which the Poet has carefully elaborated. It is not the ) cultivated, refined, prosaic Understanding which is here represented; that will be shown hereafter, and has quite a different manifestation. But it is the dull, uneducated, prosaic consciousness of low life, of mechanical employments, with a feeling for only the most gross sensuous effects, without even cultivated taste, not to speak of artistic conception. The lowest form of prosaic life thus proposes to undertake to represent the very highest form of the highest art, namely, Dramatic Poetry; hence the clowns, too, must go to the poetic Fairy-land- the mystic wood of the Imagination II. These are the three threads which the Poet has unfolded in the First Act. They embrace the Real World, from which the play suddenly leaps into the Ideal Realm. The logic of this transition has been already given the lovers flee from civil society, with its manifold mediations, whose object is to secure freedom and enter a Wood whose characteristic was defined to be external determination. That is, man acts there through influences. from without, and not through the mediations of his own Intelligence-through institutions. The reader will note, therefore, that Theseus and his world here disappear, and their place is taken by the fairies; the former cannot consist with the latter, Moreover, when Theseus reappears the sway of these supernatural beings at once vanishes. If we now examine the nature and attributes of the fairies as here represented, it will be easy to discern their common characteristic. They work upon man-deceive him lead him about by appearances, victimize his senses; in. general, manifest external determination. But it must not be forgotten that they exhibit only man himself; they are simply a portraiture of his own unfree stage of con |