Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness/Our great Shakspere critic
OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC
THE LATE HORACE HOWARD FURNESS
NOVEMBER 2, 1833—AUGUST 13, 1912
OUR GREAT
SHAKSPERE CRITIC
BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS
NLY a great man can accomplish a great task. For fifteen of Shakspere's most familiar plays, Horace Howard Furness condensed the criticism of three centuries for each play in a single volume, save Hamlet, which has two.[1] From 6000 to 8000 works have been published on Shakspere. All on each play is brought within the compass of its volume. Who holds this volume holds the fruits of all past criticism and comment on the play.
Mere industry can do much, but mere industry could never build the monument of these volumes. I confess I never look at the impressive row without amazement at the labor for which they stand. It would be much, if this were all. Long labor of this order grinds like a glacier over a writer's style and individuality. Textual criticism saps men. There is a certain form of stupidity never found except in 'notes.'
Small have continual plodders ever won
Save bare authority, from others' books.
Nothing saves a man from this but personality. The first great tonic is humor. Dr. Furness, man and work together, brim with it. Who else would have made a merry mark of the one word in Shakspere—in The Tempest, 'young scamels from the rock'—for which no one has ever suggested a convincing or even plausible meaning? The humor needed to salt these barrels and barrels of Shaksperian pemmican is much more than the capacity to see a joke. This is to humor what a pocket-dictionary is to an encylopedia. What is needed for adequate comment on Shakspere, the most English of all figures in the world of letters, is that numberless capacity to see the broad laugh in all things which lies so near to tears that when the coin of fate is flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. This gives sanity. It enables the editor of a Variorum to know from time to time what a fool a German scholar can make of himself and his author. I suppose no man could see Horace Howard Furness, that solid figure, that sturdy step, that firm face of roomy planes and liberal modeling, those twinkling eyes, that air of benignant wisdom and general good-nature, without seeing that the worst joke of all, life itself, could not daunt this resolution or dull this humor.
There is a look we all know on the face of the judge—a detached habit of thought. It comes on the bench, and it comes, too, let me assure you, if a man has had before his bar for forty years all the culprits who for two centuries have been writing about Shakspere. His beam will stand sure and he will 'poise the cause in justice' equal scales.' There are scholars whose lives are given to the great in letters who become surfeited with honey and 'in the taste confound the appetite.' Nothing saves from this but the incommunicable capacity for the perception of the best. This capacity grows by what it feeds upon. Through these volumes there has grown certainty of touch and serenity of judgment, but from the first issue there was apparent, as in the man, the norm which is not to be corrupted even by the Elizabethan extravagance of the greatest of Elizabethans.
Dr. Furness came to his life task through the Kemble tradition. The Kembles, who succeeded Garrick, first gave dignity to Shakspere. Three critics of the contemporary stage, dramatic critics all, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, two of them working journalists, began the present attitude. It has since been impossible for any scholar to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that a passage in a third-rate play, Congreve's 'Mourning Bride,' was better than anything in Shakspere.
The stage was dear to him, and he believed that no play could be adequately understood unless it was heard. The foremost players of his day he knew, and each had counseled with him, and he had gladly learned from them. With Fanny Kemble and her light touch and perspicuous, penetrating interpretation as a model, he read the familiar plays himself to many audiences, interspersing comment. To all who read or act he was a living proof that lines are 'read' by the mind and that he or she who fully understands will fully express, and he or she alone. Deaf as he was, stress, cadence, emphasis, intonation, and expression were as manifold, accurate, and illuminating as his comment. All was suffused with the cheer and glow of strength, and had behind that incomparable organ of interpretation, a mind that knew, loved, and voiced the inner meaning of the uttered word.
It is now sixty-five years since Dr. Furness, a boy of fourteen, received from Fanny Kemble a season ticket for her readings. In her readings she sat at a green baize-covered table still cherished in his library. She made him a Shaksperian for life. He was living in a city which, until Boston took its place a little over twenty years ago, as Chicago is doing to-day, gave the stage a more serious, steady, intelligent, and consistent support than any other.
To a local stage possessing this tradition the Philadelphia of threescore years ago added through his father, William Henry Furness, for fifty years head of the Unitarian Church founded by Joseph Priestley, a more intimate contact with the romantic movement in England than fell to other young Americans of the period. It was in Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first appreciated at his full value by an American. It was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, in a commonwealth for two centuries nearer Germany than any other American state, German translation began. William Henry Furness early addressed himself to this field. His daughter, Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued the task through thirty years, her last work appearing in a volume of her brother's Variorum series. Where other commentators in our tongue, in either home of our race, have looked to English comment, Dr. Furness from the first significant dedication of his Hamlet (1877), written in personal exultation over German triumph as proving Germany no longer the 'Hamlet of Nations,' has seen Shakspere as a world poet, has come close to German authority and research, and equaled its thorough and exact character without falling into its pedantry or its far-fetched gloss.
From many causes he knew all it is to be a gentleman, and when every year he rose as dean of the Shakspere Society on St. George's day to give the solitary toast, 'William Shakspere, gentleman,' it was on the last word that his sturdy accent fell. Beyond all the other great voices of our tongue, Shakspere was 'gentle.' The author of Coriolanus loathed the general mass. He scarce mentions it without touching on its evil smell. Its sweaty nightcap ever stank in his nostrils. Certain sympathies are needed for full critical appreciation of the poet who was the last word of the feudalism of the past to the democracy of the future, and these sympathies Dr. Furness had.
The Shakspere Society first began his study. For sixty-one years its fortnightly meetings have gathered a group of men foremost in Philadelphia. One has read Shakspere there with a cabinet-minister, a chancellor of the bar association, a judge of the first rank, a great physician as well known in the art of letters as in the letters of his art, and a novelist whose best seller has not had its total exceeded. It was in a like practical atmosphere that, a young man not yet thirty, Dr. Furness was stirred half a century ago to try to compare texts by the aid of a scrapbook. Out of this grew the Variorum, first with the first folio for a basis and later the Cambridge text. He had leisure, a perilous gift. He early collected, until 7000 volumes were at hand in a building for their use; but most collectors are swamped by their apparatus. 'A Concordance of Shaksperian Poems,' 1874, by Mrs. Furness, bespoke a common bond in a perfect union. In 1883 she was taken. After a generation, those who then saw his grief from without will not adventure to speak of it. A sense of loss was never absent from him. It drove him to arduous labors, which the years made a habit of life. Save a single volume of his father's intimate friendship with Emerson, he wrote nothing but the Variorum. His prefaces, his addresses, and his letters should, now that he is gone, make a volume. He preserved the epistolary gift, lost in our day. His simplest note had style, charm, and weight.
In his research he was to the end a firm believer in the study of the plays and the plays alone. The order in which the plays were written did not interest him. For 'weak endings,' 'incomplete lines,' and all the newer apparatus of Shakspere study, he had an unconcealed disregard. It was not for him. He would have questioned his personal identity as soon as question the personal authorship of Shakspere's plays.
The happy fortune befell me once at his side and over his ear-trumpet to say of him that which greatly pleased. It was at the luncheon when the New Theatre gave him a gold medal and he monopolized the affectionate attention of every woman in the room. His appreciation gave whatever value there was to my words, in which I said that it was not as a scholar unrivaled and a critical authority unequaled that he would be most loved and remembered, but because his work had made accurate study possible to the wandering player, given the solitary teacher on the frontier the best of past criticism, and armed the smallest village club with a library of learning, making the best of Shakspere the general possession of all. It was for this he labored. It was this American ideal that inspired him. It was in the service of this ideal that he renounced all royalties.
It is only as a friend I write of Horace Howard Furness, as one of those that loved and knew. It is ever ill writing of one's friends when they are gone, but his going changed the very horizon of life for us all, robbed of its landmark the landscape of the years, and left a gap where once we all looked up and learned and had new sense of the fashion in which long purpose, fulfilled and never forgotten, shapes character and carves cliffs from which men see afar.
For forty years he sat at a desk and worked to make books from books on a book. In all our American life there is no other, few in any land, who so encysted himself in a task wholly of letters. There goes with this for most, as all know, the bent figure, the absent-minded or the self-conscious gaze, aloofness from the actual. Not he. To the last there was the sturdy, erect figure, the ruddy, full face, shaped and blocked as of a man of many tasks, the resolute mustache, the solid chin, the stiff, short, aggressive hair, early whitened by tears and tasks—'your white-haired son,' as he wrote in an inimitable acknowledgment to his father in one of his volumes. Even a year from eighty his very step was decision. He bore down Chestnut Street in his weekly visit from his country home like 'a royal, good, and gallant ship, freshly beheld in all her trim.'
There is in Philadelphia a little group which has dined together just short of four decades every three weeks for eight months of each year. He was of the first that met, and the last of the first to go. To one who began thirty years ago as the youngest of those who sat at this board, and now, alas! finds himself among the elder at a table peopled with the past, nothing so bulks in all the round of a manifold social contact as this dominant figure, alert, awake, clear-visioned, felt through all this gathered group of men. Each of them was himself felt in all the various walks of life, on the bench, in law, in medicine, in letters, in art, in journalism, and in affairs; yet he the center, stone-deaf. How did he do it? I do not know. I only saw. He alone had the secret. Gay, responsive, indomitable, flashing sheer personality, and with a big silver ear-trumpet moving here and there, into which some one at his side poured a reversion of the passing talk, who is there whom you know, or whom you have known, who could have done it? None other that I know. Yet he so did it that one felt that the best recipe and assurance of unflagging talk, of explosive, masculine laughter, of a perpetual source of the dearest and most precious thing on earth, the easy interchange, conflict, and contact of friends with friends—the best recipe for all this was to have there a great scholar, unable to hear a word until it was dropped into the silver trumpet, yet giving edge, guidance, direction, and inspiration to all the flow of mutual utterance that has run in this well-worn channel for twoscore years.
To do this was more like his very self than all his throned volumes; and I am not sure but that, in the great chancery of existence, it is better worth while to have made friends gay, high-spirited, and ready to give a frolic welcome to all the years as they came than to be known ever after, as he will be, as foremost in his great field. It was like him to concentrate all his social life on this one group. Elsewhere he was always sought and scarcely seen, though his house was graced by an open hospitality the loss of which in time he made up by night work. How wise to know your friends in your forties, and to gather them and to be with them to the very threshold of the eighties! How far wiser than the wandering way in which, like children, we fill our hands so full that we can neither use, nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! It was like him resolutely to keep this dinner of high talk and plain fare, with men who dined much and well elsewhere, to a dollar apiece, as a constant protest against a lavish age which kills all by gilding it, as with the luckless boy in the Medicean festival.
Life was compounded by him of simples; but they were 'collected from all simples that have virtue under the moon.' He lived in one city and loved it. Two homes housed all his years.
He sprang of a goodly ancestry and was justly and openly proud of it. He held high the long descent of men given to the works of the mind. His father was known before him, and his sons were known with him and will be known after him.
His heart visibly and frankly warmed, though without word or bruit, when in a narrow span of years he and his son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., published each his volume which garner the comment of all the years on a play of Shakspere. Another son, Dr. W. H. Furness, in the same span, wrote an authoritative volume on the Dyaks of Borneo, placing in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania the best existing monographic collection on the region he studied. A daughter, Mrs. Horace Jayne (Caroline Furness Jayne), issued the one most important book ever published on the perplexing, fascinating, and almost unknown field of cat's-cradles, a mine of patient research and accurate, skilful description. His sister, Mrs. Caspar Wister, published the long series of translations from German novels the success of which, among a score of failures in this field, was wholly due to the skill with which the 'translator' adapted this fiction 'made in Germany' to the English-speaking world. Five years ago this brother and sister were at work side by side, Mrs. Wister on the proof-sheets of her fortieth German translation, 'The Lonely House,' by Adolph Streckfuss, and he on the proof-sheets of Antony and Cleopatra, the twelfth in his monumental march. Her first translation, 'Seaside and Fireside Fairies,' from George Blum and Louis Wahl, had appeared forty-three years, and his Romeo and Juliet thirty-six years, before. His brother, Frank Furness, whose death preceded his by so short a span, was, when a mere lad, in Rush's Lancers, and all his life looked the cavalryman, with his drooping, yellow mustache and his seamed face. He retained to the end the walk of a man who, for years together in his youth, has felt the saddle-leathers between his legs. Like Lever's hero, he once escaped capture by taking a barnyard fence no other man would have dared or persuaded his cavalry mount to venture. By carrying powder to a battery not only under fire, but through burning woods, he won a medal of honor. At Cold Harbor he risked life openly and flagrantly by walking out between two firing-lines a few rods apart to give a wounded Confederate a drink of water. Years later, when there came to this dauntless soul heartbreaking grief, he solaced himself by finding through a newspaper friend, who sowed the strange and moving tale broadcast in Southern papers, the man whose life he had saved, bringing him to Philadelphia and filling a month with mutual memories for both. To the world Frank Furness was known as an architect, a pupil of Richard Morris Hunt.
It could be only in such a family that, as a family lark at a family dinner, a novel was written, the first chapter by Horace Howard Furness, the others in turn by the rest, three sons, a daughter, a son-in-law, and a daughter in-law, no author to kill a character without the consent of its creator, and all printed in seven copies as 'Grace Auchester.' I foresee a pretty penny for this volume in catalogues of Shaksperiana a century hence.
It is the odd blunder of a dull world that social buoyancy and the notable mind seldom march together; but, as an acute thinker has said, a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east as easily as he walks west, and our great Shaksperian had all the mirth that rang under the rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. He was the dancer of his year and led in the play of more than sixty years ago. I like it that after his death there were found, preserved through all the half century, the pink tights and the spangled skirt which the toil-worn commentator had worn in glad youth as Mlle. Furnessina. In the world of …lence in which he lived so long he seemed to know laughter by instinct. His speech on the 'Miseries of Old Age' at a Harvard dinner four years ago swept the tables. He presided over a dinner or a meeting marvelously. His instinct, his attention, his capacity to interpret a look as easily as a word, carried him through all. Nor was humor ever far from the ceremonial surface of things. For example, at the lunch given at the opening of the Bryn Mawr College library—it was on the hottest of June days, and he was sweltering under the crimson trappings and beef-eater hat of his Cambridge degree of Litt.Doc. (1899), when a young friend spoke a consoling word to him. He replied, 'Ah, Mademoiselle, il faut souffrir pour être swell.'
The world narrowly missed in him a great Arabic scholar. His trip abroad after his graduation at Harvard carried him far afield. He was in Damascus when the Crimean War set the East ablaze. He saw Richard Burton, imperious-souled, a vision of masterful will, holding his consular court; and to the vision he recurred again and again. He had a week or two in the desert. He became enamoured of Arabic and its study, of which relics exist in a grammar and reader that he owned. But his brief days over Semitics had this strange by-product. In the polychrome Bible, projected by Professor Haupt of Johns Hopkins, and halted midway for lack of support, Dr. Furness, perhaps the only man alive so versed in Elizabethan English that it was as the tongue to which he was born, and knowing enough of Hebrew, furnished the translation of the revised text. In the Hebrew lyrics and psalms translated for this edition of the Old Testament he reached the summit of his style, an incomparable mingling of nice scholarship and exalted utterance. How fit it was that the Bible and Shakspere should attract the same critical capacity!
If I were to sum by a single inanimate object the temper and tradition of Dr. Furness, I would turn to the gloves, in his unrivaled collection, which one is glad to believe were Shakspere's. They are manifestly the gloves of an Elizabethan gentleman not too large in build, gold-embroidered, and shapely. They were treasured as genuine by the descendants of Shakspere's son-in-law, the physician who attended him in his last illness, and were handed down in that family. They passed to Garrick, who gave them to Philip Kemble, and so by descent again they passed from Fanny Kemble to their recent owner. There again is the double line of grace, the descent both of line and of genius, to make precious the gloves that rested on Shakspere's hand, took its shape and knew its strength and beauty.
- ↑ The plays edited by Dr. Furness are Romeo and Juliet, 1871; Macbeth, 1873; Hamlet, two volumes, 1877; King Lear, 1880; Othello, 1886; The Merchant of Venice, 1888; As You Like It, 1890; The Tempest, 1892; Midsummer-Night's Dream, 1895; The Winter's Tale, 1898; Much Ado about Nothing, 1899; Twelfth Night, 1901; Love's Labour's Lost, 1904; Antony and Cleopatra, 1909, and Cymbeline, completed and to appear. His son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., will complete his father's task, and has already published Richard III, 1911, and revised Macbeth.