The lily I condemned for thy hand, But sweet or colour it had stol'n from thee.' 1 Passionate trifles, delicious affectations, worthy of Heine and the contemporaries of Dante, which tell us of long rapturous dreams centred around one object. Under a domination so imperious and sustained, what sentiment could maintain its ground? That of family? He was married and had children,—a family which he went to see once a year;' and it was probably on his return from one of these journeys that he used the words above quoted. Conscience? Love is too young to know what conscience is.' Jealousy and anger? 6 Repulses ? 'He is contented thy poor drudge to be, To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.' 3 He is no longer young; she loves another, a handsome, young, lighthaired fellow, his own dearest friend, whom he has presented to her, and whom she wishes to seduce: 'Two loves I have of comfort and despair, To win me soon to hell, my female evil And when she has succeeded in this," he dares not confess it to himself, but suffers all, like Molière. What wretchedness there is in these trifles of every-day life! How man's thoughts instinctively place by Shakspeare's side the great unhappy French poet (Molière), also a philosopher by nature, but more of a professional laugher, a mocker of passionate old men, a bitter railer at deceived husbands, who, after having played one of his most approved comedies, said aloud to a companion, My dear friend, I am in despair; my wife does not love me!' Neither glory, nor work, nor invention satisfy these vehement 1 Sonnet 99. 2 Sonnet 141. 4 Sonnet 144; also the Passionate Pilgrim, 2. 3 Ibid. This new interpretation of the Sonnets is due to the ingenious and learned conjectures of M. Ph. Chasles.-For a short history of these Sonnets, see Dyce's Shakspeare, i. pp. 96-102. This learned editor says: 'I contend that allusions scattered through the whole series are not to be hastily referred to the personal circumstances of Shakspeare.'-TR. souls; love alone can fill them, because, with their senses and heart, it contents also their brain; and all the powers of man, imagination like the rest, find in it their concentration and their employment. 'Love is my sin,' he said, as did Musset and Heine; and in the Sonnets we find traces of yet other passions, equally abandoned; one in particular, seemingly for a great lady. The first half of his dramas, Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, preserve the warm imprint more completely; and we have only to consider his latest women's character,1 to see with what exquisite tenderness, what full adoration, he loved them to the end. In this is all his genius; his was one of those delicate souls which, like a perfect instrument of music, vibrate of themselves at the slightest touch. This fine sensibility was the first thing observed in him. My darling Shakspeare,' 'Sweet Swan of Avon :' these words of Ben Jonson only confirm what his contemporaries reiterate. He was affectionate and kind, civil in demeanour, and excellent in the qualitie he professes; if he had the transports, he had also the effusion of true artists; he was loved, men were delighted in his company; nothing is more sweet or engaging than this charm, this half-feminine abandonment in a man. His wit in conversation was ready, ingenious, nimble; his gaiety brilliant; his imagination easy, and so copious, that, as his comrades tell us, he never erased what he had written-at least when he wrote out a scene for the second time: it was the idea which he would change, not the words, by an after-glow of poetic thought, not with a painful tinkering of the verse. All these characteristics are combined in a single one: he had a sympathetic genius; I mean that naturally he knew how to forget himself and become transfused into all the objects which he conceived. Look around you at the great authors of your time, try to approach them, to become acquainted with 1 Miranda, Desdemona, Viola. The following are the first words of the Duke in Twelfth Night: If music be the food of love, play on ; O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more: O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe'er, But falls into abatement and low price, Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high-fantastical.' "H. Chettle, in repudiating Greene's sarcasm, attributed to him. them, to see them as they think, and you will observe the full force of this word. By an extraordinary instinct, they put themselves at once in the position of existences: men, animals, flowers, plants, landscapes, whatever the objects are, living or not, they feel by intuition the forces and tendencies which produce the visible external; and their soul, infinitely complex, becomes by its ceaseless metamorphoses, a sort of abstract of the universe. This is why they seem to live more than other men; they have no need to be taught, they divine. I have seen such a man, apropos of a piece of armour, a costume, a collection of furniture, enter into the middle-age more deeply than three savants together. They reconstruct, as they build, naturally, surely, by an inspiration which is a winged chain of reasoning. Shakspeare had only an imperfect education, 'small Latin and less Greek,' barely French and Italian, nothing else; he had not travelled, he had only read the current literature, he had picked up a few law words in the court of his little town; reckon up, if you can, all that he knew of man and of history. These men see more objects at a time; they grasp them more closely than other men, more quickly and thoroughly; their mind is full, and runs over. They do not rest in simple reasoning; at every idea their whole being, reflections, images, emotions, are set aquiver. See them at it; they gesticulate, mimic their thought, brim over with comparisons; even in their talk they are imaginative and original, with familiarity and boldness of speech, now happily, always irregularly, according to the whims and starts of the adventurous improvisation. The sway, the brilliancy of their language is marvellous; so are their fits, the wide leaps with which they couple widelyremoved ideas, annihilating distance, passing from pathos to humour, from vehemence to gentleness. This extraordinary rapture is the last thing to quit them. If perchance ideas fail, or if their melancholy is too harsh, they still speak and produce, even if it be buffooneries; they become clowns, though at their own expense, and to their own hurt. I know one who will mutter bad puns when he thinks he is dying, or has a mind to kill himself; the inner wheel continues to turn, even upon nothing, that wheel which man must needs see ever turning, even though it tear him as it turns; his clown-tricks are an outlet; you will find him, this inextinguishable fellow, this ironical puppet, at Ophelia's tomb, at Cleopatra's death-bed, at Juliet's funeral. High or low, these men must always be at some extreme. They feel their good and their ill too deeply; they expand the state of their soul too widely, by a sort of involuntary novel. After the scandals and the disgusts by which they debase themselves beyond measure, they rise and become exalted in a marvellous fashion, even trembling with pride and joy. 'Haply,' says Shakspeare, after one of these dull moods: 1 Dyce, Shakspeare, i. 27: 'Of French and Italian, I apprehend, he knew but little.'-TR. Then all fades away, as in a grate where a stronger flame than usual has left no substantial fuel behind it. 'That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell: If thinking on me then should make you woe.' '3 These sudden alternations of joy and sadness, divine transports and deep melancholies, exquisite tenderness and womanly depressions, depict the poet, extreme in emotions, ceaselessly troubled with grief or merriment, sensible of the slightest shock, more strong, more dainty in enjoyment and suffering than other men, capable of more intense and sweeter dreams, within whom is stirred an imaginary world of graceful or terrible beings, all impassioned like their author. Such as I have described him, however, he found his resting-place. Early, at least from an external point, he settled down to an orderly, sensible, citizen-like existence, engaged in business, provident of the future. He remained on the stage for at least seventeen years, though taking secondary parts; he sets his wits at the same time to the touching up of plays with so much activity, that Greene called him an upstart crow beautified with our feathers; . . . an absolute 'Johannes factotum, in his owne conceyt the onely shake-scene in a countrey.' 5 At the age of thirty-three he had amassed enough to buy at Stratford a house with two barns and two gardens, and he went on steadier and steadier in the same course. A man attains only to easy circumstances by his own labour; if he gains wealth, it is by making others labour for him. This is why, to the trades of actor and author, Shakspeare added those of manager and director of a theatre. He acquired a partial proprietorship in the Blackfriars and Globe theatres, farmed 1 Sonnet 29. 2 Sonnet 73. 3 Sonnet 71. 4 The part in which he excelled was that of the ghost in Hamlet. U tithes, bought large pieces of land, more houses, gave a dowry to his daughter Susanna, and finally retired to his native town on his property, in his own house, like a good landlord, an honest citizen, who manages his fortune fitly, and takes his share of municipal work. He had an income of two or three hundred pounds, which would be equivalent to about eight or twelve hundred at the present time, and according to tradition, lived cheerfully and on good terms with his neighbours; at all events, it does not seem that he thought much about his literary glory, for he did not even take the trouble to collect and publish his works. One of his daughters married a physician, the other a wine merchant; the last did not even know how to sign her name. He lent money, and cut a good figure in this little world. Strange close; one which at first sight resembles more that of a shopkeeper than of a poet. Must we attribute it to that English instinct which places happiness in the life of a country gentleman and a landlord with a good rent-roll, well connected, surrounded by comforts, who quietly rejoices in his settled respectability,' his domestic authority, and his county standing? Or rather, was Shakspeare, like Voltaire, a common-sense man, though of an imaginative brain, keeping a sound judgment under the sparkling of his genius, prudent from scepticism, economical through lack of independence, and capable, after going the round of human ideas, of deciding with Candide, that the best thing one can do is to cultivate one's garden?' I had rather think, as his full and solid head suggests, that by the mere force of his overflowing imagination he escaped, like Goethe, the perils of an overflowing imagination; that in depicting passion, he succeeded, like Goethe, in quelling passion in his own case; that the lava did not break out in his conduct, because it found issue in his poetry; that his theatre redeemed his life; and that, having passed, by sympathy, through every kind of folly and wretchedness that is incident to human existence, he was able to settle down amidst them with a calm and melancholy smile, listening, for distraction, to the aerial music of the fancies in which he revelled. I am willing to believe, lastly, that in frame as in the rest, he belonged to his great generation and his great age; that with him, as with Rabelais, Titian, Michael Angelo, and Rubens, the solidity of his muscles balanced the sensibility of his nerves; that in those days the human machine, more severely tried and more firmly constructed, could withstand the storms of passion and the fire of inspiration; that soul and body were still at equilibrium; that genius was then a blossom, and not, as now, a disease. Of all this we can but conjecture: if we would see the man more closely, we must seek him in his works. 1 'He was a respectable man.' 'A good word; what does it mean?' 'He kept a gig.'-(From Thurtell's trial for the murder of Weare.) 2 The model of an optimist, the hero of one of Voltaire's tales.-TR. 3 See his portraits, and in particular his bust. Especially in his later plays: Tempest, Twelfth Night. |