THE OBSCURITY OF THE POET
67
If
we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not
matter; and once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.
Matthew Arnold said, with plaintive respect, that there was hardly a
sentence in
L ear
that he hadn't needed to read two or three times; and
three other appreciable Victorian minds, Beetle, Stalky, and McTurk,
were even harder on it. They are in their study; Stalky reads:
"Never any.
It pleased the king his master, very late,
To strike at me, upon his misconstruction,
W hen he, conjunct, and flatt ering in his displeasure,
Tripp ed me behind: being down, insulted, railed,
And put upon him such a deal of man
That wort hid him, got praises of the King
For him attemjJting who was self-subdued;
And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit,
Drew me on here."
Stalky says : "Now, then, my impassioned bard,
construez!
That's
Shakespeare"; and Beetle answers, "at the end of a blank half minute":
"Give it up! He's drunk."
If
schoolboys were forced to read "The
Phoepix and the Turtle," what
would
Beetle have said of these two
stanzas?
Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
N either two nor one was called,
R eason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either-neither,
Simple were so well compounded.
...
You and I can afford to look at Stalky and Company, at Arnold,
with dignified superiority: we know what those passages mean; we
know that Shakespeare is never
obscure,
as if he were some moderni.it
poet gleefully pasting puzzles together in his garret. Yet when we look
at a variorum Shakespeare- with its line or two of text at the top of
the page, its forty or fifty lines of wild surmise and quarrelsome con–
jecture at the bottom-we are troubled. When the Alexandrian poet
Lycophron refers-and he is rarely any simpler-to the
centipede, fair–
faced, stork-hued daught ers of Phalacra,
and they turn out to be boats,
one ascribes this to Alexandrian decadence; but then one remembers that
