exquisite tenderness, what full adoration, he loved them to the end.

comes by its ceaseless metamorphoses, a sort of abstract of the univers. 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 armor, a costume, a collection of furniture, enter into the middle age more fully than three savants together. They recon struct, as they build, naturally, surely by an inspiration which is a winged chain of reasoning. Shakspeare had

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 Shakpeare," "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 qual-only an imperfect education, tie he professes; "if he had the impuise, he had also the effusion of true artists; he was loved, men were delighted in his company; nothing is more sweet or winning than this charm, this half-feminine abandonment in a man. His wit in conversation was ready, ingenious, nimble; his gayety briliant; his imagination fluent, and so copious, that, as his friends 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 into 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 artists of your time, try to approach them, to become acquainted with 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 a 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, beStealing and giving odour! Enough; no

more:

'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

"

Latin and less Greek," barely I rench and Italian, nothing else; he had not travelled, he had only read the current literature of his day, 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, sometimes happily, always irregularly, according to the whims and starts of the adventurous improvisation. The animation, the brilliancy of their language is marvellous; so are their fits, the wide leaps with which they couple widely. removed ideas, annihilating distance passing from pathos to humor, from vehemence to gentleness. This extraordinary rapture is the last thing to quit them. If perchance ideas fail, or if their melancholy is too violent, they still speak and produce, even if it e nonsense: they become clowns, tho agh at their own expense, and to their own hurt. I know one of these men who will talk nonsense when he thinks he is dying, or has a mind to kill himself;

O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art the inner wheel continues to turn. even

thou,

That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soever,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high-fantastical."

upon nothing, that wheel which man must needs see ever turning, even though it tear him as it turns; his buffoonery is an outlet: you will find him, Dyce, Shakspeare, i 27: "Of French H. Chettle, in repudiating Greene's sar- and Italian, I apprehend, he knew but little.' casm, attributed to him.

-TR.

this inextinguishable urchin, this iron- | ever, he found his resting-place. Early ical puppet, at Ophelia's tomb, at Cle- at least what regards outward appear opatra's death-bed, at Juliet's funeral. ances, he settled down to an orderly, High or low, these men must always sensible, almost humdrum existence, be at some extreme. They feel their engaged in business, provident of the good and their ill too deeply; they ex-fiture. He remained on the stage for patiate too abundantly on each condition of their soul, by a sort of involuntary novel. After the traducings 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 :

A

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." + At the age of thirty-three he had amassed money enough to buy at Stratford a house with two barns and two gardens, and he went on steadier and steadier in the same course. man attains only to easy circumstances by his own labor; if he gains weaith, it is by making others labor 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 share in the Blackfriars and Globe theatres, farmed 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 hun Idred pounds, which would be equiva lent to about eight or twelve hundred at the present time, and according to tradition, lived cheerfully and on good terms with his neighbors; at all events about his literary glory, for he did not it does not seem that he thought much even take the trouble to collect and publish his works. One of his daugh. ters 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, sur

The part in which he excelled was that of the ghost in Hamlet.

+ Greene's A Greatsworth of Wit, ©

II.

Let us then look for the zaan, and is

When

Shakspeare imagines with copious. profusely over all he writes; every ness and excess; he scatters metaphors instant abstract ideas are changed into which is unfolded in his mind. He images; it is a series of pairings does not seek them, they come of them selves; they crowd within him, covering brightness the pure light of logic. He his arguments; they dim with their does not labor to explain or prove; picture on picture, image on image, he is for ever copying the strange and splendid visions which are engendered one after another, and are heaped writers this passage, which I take at up within him. Compare to our dull hazard from a tranquil dialogue :

rounded by comforts, who quietly enjoys his undoubted respectability, his domestic authority, and his county his style. The style explains the work; standing? Or rather, was Shakspeare, whilst showing the principal features like Voltaire. a common-sense man, of the genius, it infers the rest. though of an imaginative brain, keeping a sound judgment under the sparkwe have nce grasped the dominant ling of his genius, prudent from skepti-faculty, we see the whole artist devel cism, saving through a desire for in- oped like a flower. dependence, and capable, after going the round of human ideas, of deciding with Candide,t that the best thing one can do in this world is "to cultivate one's garden?" I had rather think, as his full and solid head suggests, that by the mere force of his overflow ing imagination he escaped, like Goethe, the perils of an overflowing imagination; that in depicting passion, he succeeded, like Goethe, in deadening passion; that the fire did not break out in his conduct, because it found issue in his poetry; that his theatre kept pure 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 melancholic smile, listening, for the sake of relaxation, to the aerial music of the fancies in which he revelled. § I am willing to believe, lastly, that in frame as in other things, he belonged to his great generation and his great age; that with him, as with Rabelais, Titian, Michel Angelo, and Rubens, the solidity of the muscles was a counterpoise to the sensibility of the nerves; that in those days he 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. We can but make conjectures about all this; if we would become acquainted more closely with the man, we must seek him in his works.

99

"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.)

tThe model of an optimist, the hero of one of Voltaire's tales--TR.

pust.

See his portraits, and in particular his

Especially in his later plays: Tempest, Twelfth Night.

"The single and peculiar life is bound,

With all the strength and armour of the
mind,

To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and

rest

The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser
things

Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it
falls,

Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a genera
groan." *

Here we have three successive im

ages to express the same thought. It is a whole blossoming; a bough grows from the trunk, from that another, which is multiplied into numerous fresh branches. Instead of a smooth roa traced by a regular line of dry and cun. ningly fixed landmarks, you enter a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which conceal and prevent your progress, which de light and dazzle your eyes by the mag. nificence of the.r verdure and the wealth of their bloom. You are astonished at first, modern mind that you * Hamlet, iii. 3.

are, business man, used to the clear | dissertations of classical poetry; you become cross; you think the author is amusing himself, and that through conceit and bad taste he is misleading you and himself in his garden thickets. By no means; if he speaks thus, it is not from choice, but of necessity; metaphor is not his whim, but the form of is thought. In the height of passion, imagines still. When Hamlet, in despair, remembers his father's noble form, he sees the mythological pictures with which the taste of the age filled the very streets :

"A station like the herald Mercury

New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.” * This charming vision, in the midst of a bloody invective proves that there lurks a painter underneath the poet. Involuntarily and out of season, he tears off the tragic mask which covered his face; and the reader discovers, behind the contracted features of this terrible mask, a graceful and inspired smile which he did not expect to see.

Such an imagination must needs be
vehement. Every metaphor is a con-
vulsion. Whosoever involuntarily and
naturally transforms a dry idea into an
image, has his brain on fire; true
metaphors are flaming apparitions,
which are like a picture in a flash of
lightning. Never, I think, in any nation
of Europe, or in any age of history,
has so grand a passion been seen.
Shakspeare's style is a compound of
frenzied expressions. No man has
sul.mitted words to such a contortion.
Mingled contrasts, tremendous exag-
gerations, apostrophes, exclamations,
the whole fury of the ode, confusion of
ideas, accumulation of images, the
horrible and the divine, jumbled into
the same line; it seems to my fancy as
though he never writes a word without
shouting it.
'What have I done?' the
green asks Hamlet. He answers :

"Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there, makes marriage-vows
As false as dicers' oaths: O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words: Heaven's face doth glow;

Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
Is thought-sick at the act."*
With tristful visage, as against the doom,

It is the style of phrensy. Yet I have
not given all. The metaphors are ali
exaggerated, the ideas all verge on the
absurd. All is transformed and dis-
figured by the whirlwind of passion
The contagion of the crime, which he
denounces, has marred all nature. He
no longer sees any thing in the world
but corruption and lying. To vilify the
virtuous were little; he vilifies virtue
herself. Inanimate things are sucked
into this whirlpool of grief. The sky's
red tint at sunset, the pallid darkness
spread by night over the landscape,
become the blush and the pallor of
shame, and the wretched man who
speaks and weeps sees the whole world
totter with him in the dimness of de-
spair.

Hamlet, it will be said, is half-mad; this explains the vehemence of his expressions. The truth is that Hamlet, here, is Shakspeare. Be the situation. terrible or peaceful, whether he is engaged on an invective or a conversation, the style is excessive throughout Shakspeare never sees things tranquilly. All the powers of his mind are concentrated in the present image or idea. He is buried and absorbed in it. With such a genius, we are on the brink of an abyss; the eddying water dashes in headlong, swallowing up whatever objects it meets, and only bringing them to light transformed and mutilated. We pause stupefied before these convulsive metaphors, which might have been written by a fevered hand in a night's delirium, which gather a pageful of ideas and pictures in half a sentence, which scorch the eyes they would enlighten. Words lose their meaning constructions are put out of joint; para doxes of style, apparently false expres sions, which a man might occasionally venture upon with diffidence in the transport of his rapture, become the ordinary language. Shakspeare laz zles, repels, terrifies, disgusts, oppres ses; his verses are a piercing and sub lime song, pitched in too high a key above the reach of our organs, which alone can divine the justice and beauty offends our ears, of which our mine

• Ibid.

Yet this is little; for that singular theatre. Lear's curses, or Queen Mar force of concentration is redoubled by garet's, would suffice for all the mad. the suddenness of the dash which calls mer. in an asylum, or all the oppressed it into existence. In Shakspeare there of the earth. The sonnets are a deliris no preparation, no adaptation, no ium of ideas and images, labored at uevelopment, no care to make himself with an obstinacy enough to make a understood. Like a too fiery and man giddy. His first poem, Venus and powerful horse, he bounds, but cannot Adonis, is the sensual ecstasy of a Corrun. He bridges in a couple of words reggio, insatiable and excited. This an enormous interval; is at the two exuberant fecundity intensifies qualities poles in a single instant. The reader already in excess, and multiplies a vainly looks for the intermediate track; hundred-fold the luxuriance of metalazed by these prodigious leaps, he phor, the incoherence of style, and the wonders by what miracle the poet has unbridled vehemence of expression.* entered upon a new idea the very mo- All that I have said may be com ment when he quitted the last, seeing pressed into a few words. Objects perhaps between the two images a long were taken into his mind organized and scale of transitions, which we mount complete; they pass into ours disjointwith difficulty step by step, but which ed, decomposed, fragmentarily. he has spanned in a stride. Shak- thought in the lump, we think piece speare flies, we creep. Hence comes a meal; hence his style and our style-style made up of conceits, bold images two languages not to be reconciled shattered in an instant by others still We, for our part, writers and reasonbolder, barely indicated ideas com- ers, can note precisely by a word each pleted by others far removed, no visi-isolated fraction of an idea, and repreble connection, but a visible incoherence; at every step we halt, the track failing; and there, far above us, lo, stands the poet, and we find that we have ventured in his footsteps, through a craggy land, full of precipices, which he threads, as if it were a straightforward road, but on which our greatest efforts barely carry us along.

He

sent the due order of its parts by the due order of our expressions. We advance gradually; we follow the filia. tions, refer continually to the roots, try and treat our words as numbers, our sentences as equations; we employ bu general terms, which every mind ca.. understand, and regular constructions, into which any mind can enter; we at What will you think, further, if we tain justness and clearness, not life. observe that these vehement expres- Shakspeare lets justness and clearness sions, so natural in their upwelling, look out for themselves, and attains instead of following one after the other life. From amidst his complex conslowly and with effort, are hurled out ception and his colored semi-vision he by hundreds, with an impetuous ease grasps a fragment, a quivering fibre, and at undance, like the bubbling waves and shows it; it is for you, from this from a welling spring, which are fragment, to divine the rest. He, beheaped together, rise one above an-hind the word, has a whole picture, an other, and find nowhere room enough to attitude, a long argument abridged, a spread and exhaust themselves? You mass of swarming ideas; you know may find in Romeo and Juliet a score them, these abbreviative, contensive of examples of this inexhaustible in-words: these are they which we launch spiration. The two lovers pile up an out amidst the fire of invention, in a fit Infinite mass of metaphors, impas- of passion-words of slang or of fashion sioned exaggerations, clenches con- which appeal to local memory or indi torted phrases, amorous extravagances. vidual experience; t little des tory Their language is like the trill of night- and incorrect phrases, which, by then Ingales. Shakspeare's wits, Mercutio, Beatrice, Rosalind, his clowns, buffoons, sparkle with far-fetched jokes, which rattle out like a volley of musketry. There is none of them but provides enough play on words to stock a whole

*This is why, in the eyes of a writer of the seventeenth century, Shakspeare's style is the most obscure, pretentious, painful, bartarous, and absurd, that could be imagined. of all. It comprises about 15,000 T t Shakspeare's vocabulary is the most copiou r; Mil ton's only 8000.