Reading the papers, with their unremitting tales of human depravity and cruelty, I sometimes feel that the human race is a failed experiment which ought to be brought to an end as expeditiously as possible. We learn from the Book of Genesis that God had the same idea. He ‘saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repenteth the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.’
Philosophers have often reached similarly gloomy conclusions. Immanuel Kant, a righteous person in his thunderously inarticulate way, thought man was radically evil and observed, ‘Out of the crooked timbers of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.’ This radical fault, which goes to the fundamentals of man’s being and has been present since his earliest origins, is called Original Sin. It expresses itself in countless different ways, man knowing full well the difference between good and evil, but choosing evil.
St Augustine, who had lived a harrowing early life hovering between wickedness and altruism, and truth and falsehood, and in his maturity watched the tottering Roman civilisation collapse about him, had no doubt that man’s predicament was beyond human remedy. He argued that the catastrophic consequences of man’s weakness led to endemic and ubiquitous corruption, eating away successfully at the quite genuine desire to behave well, which was also characteristically human. He instanced the public shows at which gladiators killed each other for entertainment, the general use of torture and mass executions, wars of aggression and the selfish quest for power, wealth and sexual gratification. Humanity ignored what he called the Golden Rule, first expressed in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ This thoughtful and agonised man, most powerful of all the Christian philosophers, believed man alone could not improve himself by instruction and example. What was required was the grace of God, poured into the passive and suffering human heart. With this grace humanity is enabled to do right, for graceful human beings find they want to do righteous things and love goodness for its own sake. Augustine argued that for man to deny his impotence in the face of evil and rely on his own efforts merely made his predicament worse.
His warning was amply justified when, following the teaching of the Enlightenment that Original Sin was a fantasy and mankind was perfectible, the fanatics of the French Revolution set about making man perfect by force, and plunged him into the bloodbath of the Terror. This was the first crucial step towards the horrific 20th century in which world wars and godless utopian ideologies killed countless millions. These trends continue and in some respects show signs of intensifying as more and more nations seek nuclear weapons and threaten genocide. There are signs too of a general callousness and coarsening of the human spirit, barely concealed behind a veneer of spurious liberalism, while caricature bodies of comedians like the United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights enact their farcical rituals. I am not surprised to hear that the last Pope often prayed for strength to save himself from despair at the self-destruction of humanity.
I would love to know what Shakespeare thought about Original Sin and the state of the human race. Did he regard mankind as a failure and think the time had come to wind up the whole disastrous spectacle? He seemed, all his writing life, to be weighing mankind in the just, objective scales of his judgment. In Hamlet, he has his hero put the case for man: ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’ Yet we have to remember he is speaking to the slimy and treacherous agents of ‘the bloat king’, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and his tone is ironic perhaps. To underline his mood he adds, ‘And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?’
Most of Shakespeare’s drama illustrates the failings and weakness even of great or noble men and women, and the fearful destruction they bring down on themselves. He seems to be saying: men and women are often capable of the highest achievements, materially and morally, but this capacity is marred by terrible faults: vanity and rage (Lear); distrust and jealousy (Othello); ambition (Macbeth); pride (Caesar and Coriolanus); or even the helpless indecision and procrastination that dooms Hamlet. It is part of Shakespeare’s art, which reflects (I suppose) his nature, that he always puts the case for his fragile heroes and even his villains.
Shakespeare looked for redeeming features not because he was primarily a moralist, let alone an evangelist, but because he was interested in portraying truth to life in his plays. He knew the spark of virtue was there even in wicked creatures, just as he knew the godly and the wise had their moments of depravity or folly. What he did not express, even by implication, was any judgment on human affairs as a moral undertaking. He preferred to present existence as an inexplicable mystery. Towards the end of Macbeth, he has his doomed hero, stricken by the death of his wife, express an undiluted spasm of nihilism:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow: a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Did Shakespeare really believe this? Was it his final summation of humanity? How one would welcome an hour’s conversation with him — the most imaginative and perceptive creature who ever lived — to discover what he actually thought about our common plight, or opportunity, on earth. It is a curious fact that this man, who seemed to understand everything about human beings, never really reveals himself, perhaps because he did not really know his inner nature and was too scared to probe deeply into it (common enough among theatre people).
Books continue to be written about him, a dozen at least in the last year, but the man himself remains remote and impenetrable, veiled by his genius. I have an uneasy suspicion that if one did manage, per impossibile, to corner him in a quiet tavern, and put to him these tremendous questions, he would take refuge in a joke, being (like Yorick) ‘a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy’. He would put up a tremendous performance, and be vastly entertaining, and in the end tell us nothing about what he felt or was. Similarly put to the question, Carlyle would give us polysyllabic tirading, Hugo sublime nonsense, Dante a rhetorical bella figura and Goethe a low-key apophthegm: all would provide an answer, however. Shakespeare, I fancy, would find it easier to put up a display of smoke and mirrors. The truth is too painful, as only God knows.
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