A Bag of Rocks for $400,000?
On a social media site the other day, someone posted a single sentence to the effect that he’d tried once to read Shakespeare and didn’t like it, so he had to conclude that everybody who says he likes Shakespeare must be a lying hypocrite. He didn’t seem to mean it as a joke.
I replied, in jest of, that I had once tried to listen to the music of Brahms and couldn’t make much of it, so I had to conclude… and so forth. We might say similarly stupid things about any field of fascination: topology, chess, military strategy, the sculptures of Michelangelo, Renaissance motets, Pascal’s Pensées, baseball, or John Muir’s accounts of exploring the glaciers of Alaska. Someone else replied, simply, that different people like different things.
That answer might suffice, except that we are talking about Shakespeare, not your taste in fast food; and Shakespeare is acknowledged throughout the world as a giant, perhaps the greatest author of imaginative literature ever. Your opponents include people with names like Goethe, Nietzsche, Verdi, Chekhov, Kurosawa, Lincoln, and Sarah Bernhardt; a thousand years from now, it will be the same, so long as people still know how to read, and the bad habits instilled by online skitters have not fried their brains like eggs.
Besides, the man who made that obtuse comment was himself a tenured and promoted professor of English literature.
Let that sink in. It was not just that the snide despiser of Shakespeare was an ordinary ignoramus. If you ask Hans his opinion about Schiller, and if he were so foolhardy as to say he tried to read him once (note well) and didn’t care for him, you might shrug and conclude that it was a missed connection. If Hans volunteers the opinion without being asked, and if he adds that people who say they love Schiller must be liars, you wouldn’t shrug. You would say Hans was both ignorant and proud. But if you then find out that Hans is a tenured professor of German literature, you wouldn’t know what to make of it. Hans might as well be a nurse in a maternity ward who hates babies. To say it publicly, knowing that he risks nothing in saying it? What does that suggest about the others in his field?
English professors now are not likely to be masters of English literature.
I do not mean to pick on one despiser of Shakespeare. It wouldn’t be worth the trouble. But in the academy now, he is the rule, not the exception. I do not mean that most professors of English literature specifically despise Shakespeare. Most do not. But most do not know his works very well. The same might be said about Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Melville, Yeats, and any other master of English literature, taken one by one. To be sure, it would be hard to find an English professor ignorant of the works of all those people. But if you were to choose an English professor at random and one of those authors at random, ignorance, total or nearly so, would be the most likely condition. English professors now are not likely to be masters of English literature. From what I have witnessed, something analogous might be said about every field of arts and letters, including politics and history.
Many are the causes of this dilapidation. I will set forth four of them.
First, we have the pressures of the modern academy, which privileges production — mainly, articles no one will read — over wisdom. It does not pay the young scholar to learn. It pays to pretend to learn, which you can do well if you narrow your focus either to some object of current fashion or to something obscure enough to allow you to say what you will without challenge. Someone of capacious mind, in love with literature, would thirst to know more about it; would be like Keats when he first looked into Chapman’s Homer. But nothing in the academy rewards that thirst or even acknowledges that it ought to exist. An English professor who says, “I have never read Paradise Lost, nor do I intend to read it,” will not embarrass himself. The shame is that there is no shame.
Second, the spread of college education into areas where it did not belong before, and thus the practical necessity of a college degree where once a high school diploma was commendable but not required (journalism, for example), has impoverished middle-class families, set a clamp on how many children people think they can afford to raise, and degraded education itself. It was never going to be possible to keep the quality high if you admitted a great number of people uninterested in the heights. I am speaking not only of intelligence here, but of interests, passions, the scholarly mind. I do not say that the scholar’s mind is better than the soldier’s or the craftsman’s or the businessman’s mind. They are different.
I do want knowledge to be disseminated broadly. I support public libraries that really are libraries; I think we have much to learn from such bygone educational movements as the Lyceum and Chautauqua. But turning colleges into credentialing agencies for work that does not require scholarship is another matter. The colleges have become turnpike-holders, with all the consequent incentives for extortion. Because they can extort, they do; and the quality of what they provide sags, since it must be doled out to so many people disinclined to the scholarly life. Yet the keepers pay no price for their slovenliness.
Third, you cannot read Shakespeare well without instruction, formal or otherwise, in the kind of art he produced. If you enter the Sistine Chapel to look at the paintings, unless you are steeped in Scripture and Renaissance art, you will soon see you are ill-equipped to understand them. Why are there paintings of scenes from the life of Moses on the left, with paintings of scenes from the life of Christ on the right? Why do the inscriptions mirror one another? Of all the prophets, why is Jonah the one painted so dramatically above the apse? What are the Sibyls doing? Who are those men with names like Naason and Boaz? You must be well-versed not only in what the figures portray, but how they signify, what they have to do with one another, viewed both simultaneously, as a vast constellation of meaning, and in hierarchical order.
Consider the opening main clause of Paradise Lost:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse.
Every noun, verb, and adjective in those few lines is weighted with significance which, as we read, grows greater and more manifold and comprehensive, if we know how to read a work of Baroque Christian art. Milton is signaling to us that the poem will be about Man and Man; the first Man, Adam, who is also mankind and each man, each one of us and all of us in our incorporate lives, lost in the mire of sin and error, until one greater Man, who is Christ, shall regain for us what we have lost — and, as we will see, infinitely more than that. He will restore us, and the verb is not merely abstract. It has to do with nourishment, with life imparted. So the Father will say to the Son, the second Adam, foretelling the redemption he shall purchase with his blood:
As in him all men perish, so in thee
As from a second root shall be restored
As many as are restored, without thee none.
Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and we are much deceived if we think the word refers only to that apple dangling from the Tree of Knowledge. All kinds of fruit will be the consequence of that sin; but greater and sweeter fruit will spring up by the re-creating action of God in man’s heart. So says the Son, after Adam and Eve repent and pray:
See, Father, what first fruits on earth are sprung
From thy ingrafted grace in Man, these sighs
And prayers, which in this golden censer, clad
With incense, I thy priest before thee bring;
Fruits of more pleasing savor from thy seed
Sown with contrition in his heart, than those
Which his own hands manuring all the trees
Of Paradise could have produced, ere fallen
From innocence.
Nor should we suppose that Milton wants us simply to toss the literal rind away and chew the savory pulp of theology. For the fruits of Paradise are real, and even the angels in heaven enjoy the fruit of the trees of God.
I could go on for a long time, but merely to discuss the single motif of “fruit” in Paradise Lost would call for a substantial monograph. The point is that Milton, like the composer of a polyphonic motet, expects of his readers or hearers (Milton was blind when he composed the poem) a sophisticated habit of recalling, reviewing, re-hearing, and reintegrating, as if the world of the poem were open at one sweeping view, both in sequence and in an artistically eternal present. And we are simply not taught to read that way. The habit must be learned.
But why bother? Here I come to the fourth and most important consideration. Great artists open us to the truth, at least what portion of it they can grasp, and so we honor them and are grateful to them for opening our eyes to what does not change what is good, what is evil; what man is, and where his blessedness lies; what it means to live and to die; where we came from, and where we are going. I can be grateful for what the troubled unbeliever Jack London saw of the truth, because it is still precious and because he presents it with honesty and artistic power; as I am grateful for Joseph Conrad, and more grateful still for Dostoyevsky, who saw more deeply than London and Conrad did.
If, however, you do not believe that such moral, anthropological, cosmic, and theological truth exists, then why sweat to understand a difficult artist who assumes that it does, and whose methods require you at least to pretend that it does, or to take that leap of imagination that can bring the unbeliever into the company of the believer? Why bother to understand Shakespeare? We call him great because he saw so deeply into the soul of man, but if there is no soul to see into, and if you think people choose their philosophy or their faith for baldly political reasons, you have no reason to honor Shakespeare other than for some artistic cleverness, unless you dragoon him into political service. But is that worth the toil and the money?
So parents mortgage their home over the chimney-top, for what? So their child will be taught by blockheads and political hacks? Can’t they get that for nothing on social media? What’s the point?
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