1 a mingled yarn, good and ill together." His genius was dramatic, as Chaucer's was historical. He saw both sides of a question, the different views taken of it according to the different interests of the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and spectator in the scene. If anything, he is too various and flexible: too full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points. If Chaucer followed up his subject too doggedly, perhaps Shakespear was too volatile and heedless. The Muse's wing too often lifted him from off his feet. He made infinite excursions to the right and the left: "Who hath done to-day Mad and fantastic execution; With such a careless force and forceless care, As if that luck, in very spite of cunning Bade him win all." 2 Chaucer attended chiefly to the real and natural, that is, to the involuntary and inevitable impressions on the mind in given circumstances; Shakespear exhibited also the possible and the fantastical,-not only what things are in themselves, but whatever they might seem to be, their different reflections, their endless combinations. He lent his fancy, wit, invention, to others, and borrowed their feelings in return. Chaucer excelled in the force of habitual sentiment; Shakespear added to it every variety of passion, every suggestion of thought or accident. Chaucer described external objects with the eye of a painter, or he might be said to have embodied them with the hand of a sculptor, every part is so thoroughly made out and tangible :-Shakespear's imagination threw over them a lustre "Prouder than blue Iris bends." Everything in Chaucer has a downright reality. A simile or a sentiment is as if it were given in upon evi[''All's Well that ends Well'iv 3.] [2 Act v., sc. 5.] dence. In Shakespear the commonest matter-of-fact has a romantic grace about it; or seems to float with the breath of imagination in a freer element. No one could have more depth of feeling or observation than Chaucer but he wanted resources of invention to lay open the stores of nature or the human heart with the same radiant light that Shakespear has done. However fine or profound the thought, we know what is coming, whereas the effect of reading Shakespear is "like vassalage at unawares encountering the eye of majesty." Chaucer's mind was consecutive, rather than discursive. He arrived at truth through a certain process; Shakespear saw everything by intuition. Chaucer had a great variety of power, but he could do only one thing at once. He set himself to work on a particular subject. His ideas were kept separate, labelled, ticketed, and parcelled out in a set form, in pews and compartments by themselves. They did not play into one another's hands. They did not react upon one another, as the blower's breath moulds the yielding glass. There is something hard and dry in them. What is the most wonderful thing in Shakespear's faculties is their excessive sociability, and how they gossiped and compared notes together. We must conclude this criticism; and we will do it with a quotation or two. One of the most beautiful passages in Chaucer's tale is the description of Cresseide's first avowal of her love. "And as the newe abasehed nightyngale, That stynteth firste whanne sche begynneth singe, And aftir, siker, doth her vois out ring; Right so Cryseide, whanne hir drede stint, Opened hir herte, and tolde him hir entent." 2 See also the two next stanzas, and particularly that divine one beginning— Act iii., sc. 2.] [2 Bell's 'Chaucer,' v., 158.] "Her armes small, her back both straight and soft," &c. Compare this with the following speech of Troilus to Cressida in the play : "O, that I thought it could be in a woman- To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love, Might be affronted with the match and weight How were I then uplifted! But alas ! I am as true as Truth's simplicity, And simpler than the infancy of Truth.” These passages may not seem very characteristic at first sight, though we think they are so. We will give two, that cannot be mistaken. Patroclus says to Achilles, "Sweet, rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane, Be shook to air." Troilus, addressing the God of Day on the approach of the morning that parts him from Cressida, says with much scorn, "What! profrist thou thi light here for to selle? Go selle it hem that smale seelis grave." 2 If nobody but Shakespear could have written the former, nobody but Chaucer would have thought of the latter. Chaucer was the most literal of poets, as Richardson was of prose-writers. [Act iii., sc. 2.] I' Chaucer, ubi supra, p. 167.] ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.' THIS is a very noble play. Though not in the first class of Shakespear's productions, it stands next to them, and is, we think, the finest of his historical plays, that is, of those in which he made poetry the organ of history, and assumed a certain tone of character and sentiment, in conformity to known facts, instead of trusting to his observations of general nature or to the unlimited indulgence of his own fancy. What he has added to the actual story is upon a par with it. His genius was, as it were, a match for history as well as nature, and could grapple at will with either. The play is full of that pervading comprehensive power by which the poet could always make himself master of time and circumstances. It presents a fine picture of Roman pride and Eastern magnificence: and in the struggle between the two, the empire of the world seems suspended, like "The swan's down-feather, That stands upon the swell at full of tide, The characters breathe, move, and live. Shakespear does not stand reasoning on what his characters would do or say, but at once becomes them, and speaks and acts for them. He does not present us with groups of stage 1 First printed, so far as is at present known, in the folio of 1623; but in 1608, May 20, a play with this title, and almost unquestionably the same, was entered at Stationers' Hall. Shakespear has derived his material from North's translation of Amiot's French version of Plutarch.-ED. [Act iii., sc. 2.] puppets, of poetical machines making set speeches on human life, and acting from a calculation of problematical motives, but he brings living men and women on the scene, who speak and act from real feelings, according to the ebbs and flows of passion, without the least tincture of pedantry of logic or rhetoric. Nothing is made out by inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis, but everything takes place just as it would have done in reality, according to the occasion. The character of Cleopatra is a master-piece. What an extreme contrast it affords to Imogen! One would think it almost impossible for the same person to have drawn both. She is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, fickle. The luxurious pomp and gorgeous extravagance of the Egyptian queen are displayed in all their force and lustre, as well as the irregular grandeur of the soul of Mark Antony. Take only the first four lines that they speak as an example of the regal style of love-making: "Cleopatra. If it be love indeed, tell me how much? Antony. There's beggary in the love that can be reckon❜d. Antony. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new The rich and poetical description of her person beginning "The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold, The winds were love-sick with them ". seems to prepare the way for, and almost to justify the subsequent infatuation of Antony when in the sea-fight at Actium he leaves the battle, and "like a doating mallard” follows her flying sails. Few things in Shakespear (and we know of nothing in [1 Act i., sc. 1.] |