THE LONG POEM
IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH

THE LONG POEM
IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH1

The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the glories of our literature. It is surpassed, many would add, by the poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal accomplishment?

1.

Matthew Arnold, in his essay on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, gave an answer to this question. ‘It has long seemed to me,’ he wrote, ‘that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact, something premature.... And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and in variety.’ The statement that this poetry ‘did not know enough’ means, of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of a kind, but that it lacked ‘criticism.’ And this means that it did not live and move freely in an atmosphere of the best available ideas, of ideas gained by a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology, philosophy, history, science, to see things as they are. In such an atmosphere Goethe lived. There was not indeed in Goethe’s Germany, nor was there in the England of our poets, the ‘national glow of life and thought’ that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth. That happiest atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both countries. But there was for Goethe ‘a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans,’ a culture produced by a many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.

Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it may not have had all the importance he ascribes to it, but considerable importance it must have had. And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt. One of the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth’s age is the very unusual superiority of the imaginative literature to the scientific. I mean by the ‘scientific’ literature that of philosophy, theology, history, politics, economics, not only that of the sciences of Nature, which for our present purpose are perhaps the least important. In this kind of literature Wordsworth’s age has hardly an author to show who could for a moment be placed on a level with some five of the poets, with the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the poetic critics Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It has no writers to compare with Bacon, Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the time of Paley, Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford, Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher and theologian. These are names worthy of all respect, but they represent a literature quite definitely of the second rank. And this great disproportion between the two kinds of literature, we must observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was doubtless superior to the other in Shakespeare’s time, possibly even in Milton’s; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and Clarendon and Hobbes are not separated from the best poets of their day by any startling difference of quality;2 while in the later periods, right down to the age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say no more, with the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth’s own time is there that gap between the two that we find in England. In respect of genius the philosophers, for example, though none of them was the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all inferior to the poets. The case of England in Wordsworth’s age is anomalous.

This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must have been influential. It confirms Arnold’s view that the intellectual atmosphere of the time was not of the best. If we think of the periodical literature—of the Quarterly and Edinburgh and Blackwood—we shall be still more inclined to assent to that view. And when we turn to the poets themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lamb, and of Coleridge, we cannot reject it. Assuredly we read with admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance—in greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany, if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin? Could any of them have seen in the French Revolution no more significance than Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are the attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets towards the Christian religion! Could anything be more bornÉ than Coleridge’s professed reason for not translating Faust?3 Is it possible that a German poet with the genius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited a mental world so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened to us by the brilliant letters of the former, or could have sunk, like the latter, to suggesting that the cholera was a divine condemnation of Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill?

But if we accept Arnold’s statement as to the intellectual atmosphere of the poetry of Wordsworth’s time, a question will remain. Was he right in regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even as the chief, cause of the fact (if it is one) that the poetry does not fully correspond in greatness with the genius of the poets? And before we come to this question we must put another. Is the fact really as it has just been stated? I do not think so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems. Reviewing these in memory, and asking ourselves how many we can unreservedly call ‘great,’ we hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in some of them, fine poetry in many; but that does not make a great whole. Which of them is great as a whole? Not the Prelude or the Excursion, still less Endymion or The Revolt of Islam or Childe Harold, which hardly pretends to unity. Christabel, the wonderful fragment, is a fragment; so is Hyperion; Don Juan, also unfinished, becomes more discursive the further it proceeds, and in spirit is nowhere great. All the principal poets wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and some readers think that in Manfred, and still more certainly in Cain, we have great poems, while others think this of Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our judgment quite confident, and can we say that any of them satisfy us, like some works of earlier times? We are thus satisfied, it seems to me, only when we come to poems of smaller dimensions, like The Ancient Mariner, or The Eve of Saint Agnes, or AdonaÏs, or The Vision of Judgment, or when we read the lyrics. To save time I will confine myself to the latter.

Within this sphere we have no longer that impression of genius which fails to reach full accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of course, of Wordsworth’s age is the equal of Shakespeare or of Milton; and there are certain qualities, too, of lyrical verse in which the times of Shakespeare and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth. But if we take the better part of the lyrical poetry of these three periods in the mass, or again in a representative selection, it will not be the latest period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In the original edition of the Golden Treasury, Book I. (Wyatt to Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book II. (the rest of the seventeenth century) sixty-five; Book IV., which covers the very much shorter period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a hundred and forty. ‘Book I.,’ perhaps most of us would say, ‘should be longer, and Book IV. a good deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in it, and Wordsworth is over-represented. And the Elizabethan poems are mostly quite short, while the Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but admitted poems like Coleridge’s Love and Wordsworth’s Ruth (seven whole pages). And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.’ No; but still quantity must count for something, and the Golden Treasury is a volume excellent in selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think, leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth was our greatest period in lyrical poetry. And if Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book IV., this impression would not be materially altered; it might even be deepened. For the change would force into notice the comparative monotony of the themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely wider range of the thought and emotion that attain expression in the later. It might also convince us that, on the whole, this more varied material is treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is difficult to be sure, since we recognise what may be called the conventions of an earlier age, and are perhaps a little blind to those of a time near our own.

Now the eminence of Wordsworth’s age in lyrical poetry, even if it is not also a pre-eminence, is a significant fact. It may mean that the whole poetic spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this may indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment which mingles with our admiration of the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of Campbell are already dead; he survives only in lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite of fine passages (and the battle in Marmion is in certain qualities superior to anything else of the time) Scott’s longer poems cannot be classed with the best contemporary poetry; but in some of his ballads and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again, much of the most famous narrative poetry is semi-lyrical in form, as a moment’s thought of Scott, Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for instance, several of Byron’s tales, or Wordsworth’s White Doe of Rylstone) is strongly tinged with the lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It is an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than in scenes, events, actions, which express and re-act on emotions, thoughts, will. It would hardly be going too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained.4 (3) The same tendencies are visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron’s regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived, are almost forgotten; but Heaven and Earth, which is still alive, is largely composed of lyrics, and the first two acts of Manfred are full of them. Prometheus Unbound is called ‘a lyrical drama.’ Though it has some very fine and some very beautiful blank verse passages (usually undramatic), its lyrics are its glory; and this is even more the case with Hellas. It would be untrue to say that the comparative failure of most of the dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical spirit, but many of them show it. (4) The strength of this spirit may be illustrated lastly by a curious fact. The ode is one of the longest and most ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most famous poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are odes. But the greatest of the lyrists, who wrote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind, found the limits even of the ode too narrow for his ‘flight of fire.’ If Lycidas and L’Allegro and Spenser’s Epithalamion are lyrical poems, and if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing shall be called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, AdonaÏs will be a lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the Lines written among the Euganean Hills and Epipsychidion will be lyrics consisting respectively of 370 and 600 lines.

It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical poem may be called short as compared with a narrative or drama. It is usual, further, to say that lyrical poetry is ‘subjective,’ since, instead of telling or representing a story of people, actions, and events, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous and in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to have a basis in fact. It may be suggested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical poetry of Wordsworth’s time, and the imperfection of the long narratives and dramas, may have a common origin. Just as it was most natural to Homer or to Shakespeare to express the imaginative substance of his mind in the ‘objective’ shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly severed from his own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some reason or reasons, it was most natural to the best poets of this later time to express that substance in the shape of impassioned reflections, aspirations, prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of peace. The matter of these might, in another sense of the word, be ‘objective’ enough, a matter of general human interest, not personal in any exclusive way; but it appeared in the form of the poet’s thought and feeling. Just because he most easily expressed it thus, he succeeded less completely when he attempted the more objective form of utterance; and for the same reason it was especially important that he should be surrounded and penetrated by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal ‘criticism.’ For he not only lived among ideas; he expressed ideas, and expressed them as ideas.

These suggestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry. The ‘subjective’ spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer poems. This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron’s case, that the poet’s one hero is himself. It appears in another way when the poem, through its story or stories, displays the poet’s favourite ideas and beliefs. The Excursion does this; most of Shelley’s longer poems do it. And the strength of this tendency may be seen in an apparent contradiction. One of the marks of the Romantic Revival is a disposition to substitute the more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and drama for the eighteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse; Coleridge, for example, in Religious Musings, Byron in the first two cantos of Childe Harold, Shelley in Queen Mab, and Keats in Sleep and Poetry. These are not, like the Pleasures of Memory and Pleasures of Hope, continuations of the traditional style; they are thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective. Scott, indeed, goes straight to the objective forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time. Those who were deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had their minds full of theoretic ideas. They were groping after, or were already inflamed by, some explicit view of life, and of life seen in relation to an ideal which it revealed or contradicted. And this view of life, at least at first, pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract shape, or became a sort of soul or second meaning within those appearances of nature, or actions of men, or figures and fantasies of youthful imagination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry.

Considered in this light, the following facts become very significant. Wordsworth, now about thirty, and the author of many characteristic lyrics, on returning from Germany and settling at Grasmere, begins to meditate a long poem. He tells us in the Prelude of the subjects he thought of. They are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories of action, not at all theoretical.5 But it will not do: his mind ‘turns recreant to her task.’ He has another hope, a ‘favourite aspiration’ towards ‘a philosophic song of Truth.’ But even this will not do; it is premature; even Truth (I venture to suggest) is not inward enough. He must first tell the story of his own mind: the subject of his long poem must be Poetry itself. He tells this story, to our great gain, in the Prelude; and it is the story of the steps by which he came to see reality, Nature and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of an all-embracing and perfect spiritual life or Being. Not till this is done can he proceed to the Excursion, which, together with much reflection and even argumentation, contains pictures of particular men.

‘This for our greatest’; but it is not his history alone. The first longer poem of Shelley which can be called mature was Alastor. And what is its subject? The subject of the Prelude; the story of a Poet’s soul, and of the effect on it of the revelation of its ideal. The first long poem of Keats was Endymion. The tendency to the concrete was strong in Keats; he has been called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of due time; and Endymion, like Venus and Adonis, is a mythological story. But it is by no means that alone. The infection of his time was in him. The further subject of Endymion is again the subject of the Prelude, the story of a poet’s soul smitten by love of its ideal, the Principle of Beauty, and striving for union with it, for the ‘wedding’ of the mind of man ‘with this goodly universe in love and holy passion.’ What, again, is the subject of Epipsychidion? The same.

The poem is all about the search of the poet’s soul for this ideal Being. And the Sensitive Plant is this soul, and the Lady of the Garden this Being, And Prince Athanase is the same soul, and if the poem had been continued the Being would soon have appeared. Is it not an astonishing proof of Shelley’s powers that the Cenci was ever written? Shelley, when he died, had half escaped—Keats, some time before he died, had quite escaped—from that bewitching inward world of the poet’s soul and its shadowy adventures. Could that well be the world of what we call emphatically a ‘great poem’?

2.

Let us review for a moment the course of our discussion. I have been suggesting that, if our pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth’s age is tinged with disappointment, this does not extend to the lyrical poetry; that the lyrical spirit, or, more generally, an inward or subjective tendency, shows itself in many of the longer works; and that their imperfection is partly due to it. Now, let me suggest that the atmosphere of adequate ‘criticism’ which Arnold misses in the age and its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced favourably even the lyrics, and much more the larger works, could hardly have diminished the force of that tendency, and that the main difficulty lay there. But, before developing this idea further, I propose to leave for a time the English poetry of Wordsworth’s age, to look beyond it, and to ask certain questions.

First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of ‘criticism’ was more favourable in Germany than in England, how many long poems were produced in Germany that we can call without hesitation or qualification ‘great’? Were any produced except by Goethe? And, if we admit (as I gladly do) that he produced several, was not the main reason simply that he was born with more poetic genius than any of his contemporaries, just as Dante and Shakespeare and Milton were? And again, with this native genius and his long laborious life, did he produce anything like as many great poems as might have been expected? And, if not, why not? I do not suggest that his general culture, so superior to that of his English contemporaries, did not help him; but are we sure that it did not also hinder him? And is it not also significant that, in spite of his love of new ideas, he felt an instinctive dread of the influence of philosophy, in the strict sense, as of something dangerous to the poetic modes of vision and creation?

Secondly, if we look beyond the first quarter of the century to the second and third, do we find in Europe a large number of those emphatically great poems, solid coherent structures of concrete imagination? It seems more than doubtful. To confine ourselves to English examples, is it not the case that Tennyson is primarily a lyrical poet, that the best of his longer poems, Maud and In Memoriam, are lyrical, and that the most ambitious, the narrative Idylls of the King, is, as a whole, not great? Is the Ring and the Book, however fine in parts, a great whole, or comparable as a whole with Andrea del Sarto or Rabbi ben Ezra? And is any one of Browning’s dramas a great play? What these questions suggest is that, while the difficulty about the long poem affects in an extreme degree the age of Wordsworth, it affects in some degree the time that follows. Its beginnings, too, are traceable before the nineteenth century. In fact it is connected with essential characteristics of modern poetry and art; and these characteristics are connected with the nature of modern life, and the position of the artist within that life. I wish to touch on this huge subject before returning to the age of Wordsworth.

Art, we may say, has become free, and, in a sense, universal. The poet is no longer the minstrel of king or nobles, nor even of a city or country. Literature, as Goethe foretold, becomes increasingly European, and more than European; and the poet, however national, is a citizen of the Republic of Letters. No class of subject, again, has any prerogative claim on him. Whatever, in any time or place, is human, whatever has been conceived as divine, whatever belongs even to external nature, he may choose, as it suits his bent or offers a promising material. The world is all before him; and it is a world which the increase of knowledge has made immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has asserted its independence. Its public exhibition must conform to the law; but otherwise it neither asks the approval nor submits to the control of any outward authority; and it is the handmaid of nothing. It claims a value for itself, as an expression of mind co-ordinate with other expressions, theoretic and practical; satisfying a need and serving a purpose that none of them can fulfil; subject only, as they too are subject, to the unity of human nature and human good. Finally, in respect of the methods of his art the poet claims and enjoys the same freedom. The practice of the past, the ‘rules’ of the past (if they existed or exist), are without authority for him. It is improbable beforehand that a violent breach with them will lead him to a real advance, just as it is improbable that such a breach with the morals or the science of his day will do so. But there is no certainty beforehand; and if he fails, he expects blame not because he innovates, but because he has failed by innovating.

The freedom of modern art, and the universality of its field, are great things, and the value of the second is easily seen in the extraordinary variety of subject-matter in the longer poems of the nineteenth century. But in candid minds most recitals of our modern advantages are followed by a melancholy sense of our feebleness in using them. And so in some degree it is here. The unrivalled opportunities fail to produce unrivalled works. And we can see that the deepest cause of this is not a want of native genius or of acquired skill or even of conscientious labour, but the fact that the opportunities themselves bring danger and difficulty. The poet who knows everything and may write about anything has, after all, a hard task. Things must have been easier, it seems to us, for an artist whose choice, if his aim was high, was restricted to a cycle of ideas and stories, mythological, legendary, or historical, or all together, concerning beings divine, daemonic, angelic, or heroic. His matter, as it existed in the general imagination, was already highly poetical. If not created by imagination, it was shaped or coloured by it; a world not of bodiless thoughts and emotions, but of scenes, figures, actions, and events. For the most part he lived in unity with it; it appealed to his own religious and moral feelings and beliefs, sometimes to his patriotic feelings; and he wrote, painted, or carved, for people who shared with him both his material and his attitude towards it. It belonged usually to the past, but he did not view it over a great gulf of time with the eye of a scientific historian. If he wished to robe it in the vesture of the life around him, he was checked by no scruples as to truth; and the life around him can seldom, we think, have appeared to him repulsively prosaic. Broad statements like these require much qualification; but, when it is supplied, they may still describe periods in which perhaps most of the greatest architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry has come into being.

How different the position of the artist has now become we see at a glance, and I confine myself to some points which specially concern the difficulty of the long poem. If a poem is to be anything like great it must, in one sense, be concerned with the present. Whatever its ‘subject’ may be, it must express something living in the mind from which it comes and the minds to which it goes. Wherever its body is, its soul must be here and now. What subject, then, in the measureless field of choice, is the poet to select and fashion into a body? The outward life around him, as he and his critics so often lament, appears uniform, ugly, and rationally regulated, a world of trousers, machinery and policemen. Law—the rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable will—is a vast achievement and priceless possession; but it is not favourable to striking events or individual actions on the grand scale. Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there is doubtless an infinity of poetic matter; but this is inward, or it fails to appear in impressive forms; and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel, but hardly the long poem or high tragedy. Even war, for reasons not hard to find, is no longer the subject that it was.

But when the poet turns to a subject distant in place or time or both, new troubles await him. If he aims at complete truth to time and place the soul of the present will hardly come into his work. Yet he lives in an age of history and science, and these hamper as well as help him. The difficulty is not that he is bound to historical or scientific truth, for in principle, I venture to say, he is free. If he can satisfy imagination by violating them he is justified. It is no function of his to attain or propagate them; and a critic who objected, say, to the First Part of Faust on the ground that it puts a modern spirit into the legend, would rightly be laughed at. It is its triumph to do so and yet to succeed. But then success is exceedingly difficult. For the poet lives in a time when the violation of truth is prima facie felt to be a fault, something that does require justification by the result. Further, he has himself to start from a clear consciousness of difference between the present and the past, the spirit and the story, and has to produce on this basis a harmony of spirit and story. And again, living in an age of analytical thought, he is likely—all the more likely, if he has much greatness of mind—to be keenly interested in ideas; and so he is exposed to the temptation of using as the spirit of the old story some highly reflective idea—an idea not only historically alien to his material, but perhaps not very poetical, or again not very deep, because it belongs to him rather as philosopher than poet, while his genius is that of a poet.

The influence of some of these difficulties might readily be shown in the Second Part of Faust or in Prometheus Unbound, especially where we perceive in a figure or action some symbolical meaning, but find this meaning deficient in interest or poetic truth, or are vexed by the doubt how far it ought to be pursued.6 But the matter is more easily illustrated by the partial failure of the Idylls of the King. We have no right to condemn beforehand an attempt to modernise the Arthurian legends. Tennyson’s treatment of them, even his outrage on the story of Tristram, might conceivably have been justified by the result. And, indeed, in the Holy Grail and the Passing of Arthur his treatment, to my mind, was more than justified. But, in spite of countless beauties, the total result of the Idylls was disappointing, not merely from the defects of this or that poem, but because the old unity of spirit and story was broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old nor complete in itself. For the main semi-allegorical idea, having already the disadvantage of not being poetic in its origin, was, as a reflective idea, by no means profound, and it led to such inconsistency in the very centre of the story as the imagination refuses to accept. Tennyson’s Lancelot might have wronged the Arthur who is merely a blameless king and represents Conscience; but Tennyson’s Lancelot would much rather have killed himself than be systematically treacherous to the friend and lover-husband who appears in Guinevere.7

These difficulties belong in some measure to the whole modern time—the whole time that begins with the Renaissance; but they become so much clearer and so much more serious with the advance of knowledge and criticism, that in speaking of them I have been referring specially to the last century. There are other difficulties not so closely connected with that advance, and I will venture some very tentative remarks on one of these, which also has increased with time. It has to do with the kind of life commonly lived by our poets. Is there not some significance in the fact that the most famous of our narrative poets were all three, in their various ways and degrees, public men, or in contact with great affairs; and that poets in earlier times no less must usually have seen something at first hand of adventure, political struggles, or war; whereas poets now, for the most part, live wholly private lives, and, like the majority of their readers, are acquainted only by report with anything of the kind? If Chaucer had never been at Court, or seen service in the French war, or gone on embassies abroad; if Spenser had not known Sidney and Raleigh and been secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland; if Milton had spent his whole life at Horton; would it have made no difference to their poetry? Again, if we turn to the drama and ask why the numerous tragedies of the nineteenth century poets so rarely satisfy, what is the answer? There are many reasons, and among them the poet’s ignorance of the stage will doubtless count for much; but must we not also consider that he scarcely ever saw anything resembling the things he tried to portray? When we study the history of the time in which the Elizabethan dramas were composed, when we examine the portraits of the famous men, or read such a book as the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we realise that the violent actions and passions which the dramatist depicted were like the things he saw. Whatever Shakespeare’s own disposition was, he lived among these men, jested with the fellow-actor who had borne arms abroad and killed his man in a duel at home, conversed with nobles whose heads perhaps were no great way from the block. But the poet who strolls about the lanes or plods the London streets with an umbrella for a sword, and who has probably never seen a violent deed in his life, or for a moment really longed to kill so much as a critic, how is he to paint the vengeance of Hamlet or the frenzy of Macbeth, and not merely to thrill you with the emotions of his actors but to make them do things that take your imagination by the throat?

3.

Assuming, now, that (even if this last idea is doubtful or unimportant) there is some truth in the suggestion that the difficulties of the long poem arise largely from the conditions described, and especially from the nature of the intellectual atmosphere which the modern poet breathes, let us return to Wordsworth’s age in particular. In that age these difficulties were aggravated in a quite exceptional way by special causes, causes responsible also in part for the unusual originality and intensity of the poetry. In it we find conditions removed to the extremest distance from those of the poet who wrote, in the midst of a generally accepted social order, for an audience with which he shared traditional ideas and beliefs and a more or less traditional imaginative material. It was, in a word, a revolutionary age, in the electric atmosphere of which the most potent intellectual influences were those of Rousseau and (for the English poets) of Godwin. Milton’s time was not in the same sense revolutionary, much less Shakespeare’s. The forces of the great movement of mind in Shakespeare’s day we may formulate as ‘ideas,’ but they were not the abstractly conceived ideas of Wordsworth’s day. Such theoretical ideas were potent in Milton’s time, but they were not ideas that made a total breach with the past, rejecting as worthless, or worse, the institutions, beliefs, and modes of life in which human nature had endeavoured to realise itself, and drawing airy pictures of a different human nature on a new earth. Nor was the poetic mind of those ages enraptured or dejected by the haunting many-featured contrast of real and ideal. But the poetic mind in Wordsworth’s age breathed this atmosphere of revolution, though it was not always sensitive to the influence. Nor is it a question of the acceptance or rejection of the ‘ideas of the Revolution.’ That influence is clearly traceable in all the greater writers except Scott and Jane Austen. It is equally obvious in Wordsworth, who hungered for realities, recovered from his theoretic malady, sought for good in life’s familiar face, yet remained a preacher; in Byron, who was too shrewd, sceptical, and selfish to contract that particular malady, but who suffered from the sickness from which Goethe freed himself by writing Werther,8 and who punctuates his story in Don Juan with bursts of laughter and tears; and in Shelley, whose ‘rapid spirit’ was quickened, and then clogged, by the abstractions of revolutionary theory.

But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical example of this influence and of its effects. From the world of his imagination the shapes of the old world had disappeared, and their place was taken by a stream of radiant vapours, incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving in the ‘clear golden dawn,’ and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to the music of the stars and the ‘singing rain,’ the sublime ridiculous formulas of Godwin. In his heart were emotions that responded to the vision,—an aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like those of spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over its ruin. And he wrote, not, like Shakespeare or Pope, for Londoners sitting in a theatre or a coffee-house, intelligences vivid enough but definitely embodied in a definite society; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to other spirit-sparks of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark earth, to spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or Freedom or Love, his one place of rest and the one source of his vision, ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang to this, and he sang of it, and of the emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest with such shapes of darkness as Faith and Custom. And he made immortal music; now in melodies as exquisite and varied as the songs of Schubert, and now in symphonies where the crudest of Philosophies of History melted into golden harmony. But the songs were more perfect than the symphonies; and they could hardly fail to be so. For a single thought and mood, expressive of one aspect of things, suffices, with its melody, for a lyric, but not for a long poem. That requires a substance which implicitly contains a whole ‘criticism’ or interpretation of life. And although there was something always working in Shelley’s mind, and issuing in those radiant vapours, that was far deeper and truer than his philosophic creed, its expression and even its development were constantly checked or distorted by the hard and narrow framework of that creed. And it was one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of the human nature that has formed the material of the world’s great poems.9

The second and third quarters of the century were not in the same degree as the first a revolutionary time, and we feel this change in the poetry. The fever-heat is gone, the rapture and the dejection moderate, the culture is wider, the thought more staid and considerate, the fascination of abstractions less potent, and the formative or plastic impulse, if not stronger, less impeded. Late in the period, with Morris, the born teller of tales re-appears. If, as we saw, the lyrical spirit continues to prevail, no one would deny to Browning the full and robust sympathy of the dramatist with all the variety of character and passion. Yet these changes and others are far from obliterating those features of the earlier generation on which we have dwelt. To describe the atmosphere of ‘criticism’ as that of a common faith or view of the world would be laughable. If not revolutionary, it was agitated, restless, and distressed by the conflict of theoretic ideas. To Arnold’s mind it was indeed a most unhappy time for poetry, though the poetic impulse remained as yet, and even later, powerful. The past was dead, but he could share neither the soaring hope nor the passionate melancholy of the opening century. He was

And the two greatest poets, as well as he, still offer not only, as poets always must, an interpretation, but a definite theory of life, and, more insistently than ever before, of death. Confidence in the detail, at least, of such theories has diminished, and with the rapid advance of the critical sciences the poets may prophesy less than their predecessors; but they probe, and weigh, and deliberate more. And the strength of the ‘inward’ tendency, obvious in Tennyson and Arnold, may be clearly seen even in Browning, and not alone in such works as Christmas Eve and Easter Day or La Saisiaz.

Objective and dramatic as Browning is called and by comparison is, he is surely most at home, and succeeds most completely, in lyrics, and in monologues divested of action and merely suggestive of a story or suggested by one. He too must begin, in Pauline, with the picture of a youthful poet’s soul. Dramatic the drama of Paracelsus neither is nor tries to be: it consists of scenes in the history of souls. Of the narrative Sordello its author wrote: ‘The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.’ Even if that is so, great narrative poems are not written thus. And what Browning says here applies more or less fully to most of his works. In the end, if we set aside the short lyrics, his best poems are all ‘studies’ of souls. ‘Well,’ it may be answered, ‘so are Shakespeare’s tragedies and tragi-comedies.’ But the difference is great. Shakespeare, doubtless, is little concerned with the accuracy of the historical background,—much less concerned than Browning. But his subject is not a soul, nor even souls: it is the actions of souls, or souls coming into action. It is more. It is that clash of souls which exhibits not them alone, but a whole of spiritual forces, appearing in them, but spreading beyond them into the visible society to which they essentially belong, and into invisible regions which enclose it. The thing shown, therefore, is huge, multiform, ponderous, yet quivering with an inward agitation which explodes into violent bodily expression and speaks to the eye of imagination. What specially interests Browning is not this. It is the soul moving in itself, often in its most secret windings and recesses; before action or after it, where there is action at all; and this soul not essentially as in its society (that is ‘background’ or ‘decoration’), but alone, or in relation to another soul, or to God. He exhibits it best, therefore, in monologue, musing, explaining, debating, pleading, overflowing into the expression of feeling or passion, but not acting. The ‘men and women’ that haunt the reader’s imagination are not so much men of action as lovers, artists, men of religion. And when they act (as for example in The Ring and the Book, or the dramas) what rivets attention, and is first recalled to memory by their names, is not the action, but its reflection in the soul of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my experience; and in the end a critic can only offer to others his considered experience. But with Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise. Even with Dante it is otherwise. I see not souls alone, but souls in visible attitudes, in outward movement, often in action. I see Paolo and Francesca drifting on the wind: I see them sitting and reading: I see them kiss: I see Dante’s pity:

4.

I spoke of Tennyson and Browning in order to point out that, although in their day the intellectual atmosphere was no longer ‘revolutionary,’ it remained an atmosphere of highly reflective ideas representing no common ‘faith’ or way of envisaging the world, and that the inward tendency still asserts itself in their poetry. We cannot pursue the history further, but it does not appear that in the last forty years culture has advanced much, or at all, towards such a faith or way, or shows the working of new semi-conscious creative ideas beneath the surface of warring theories and opinions. Only the younger among us can hope to see what Arnold descried in the distance,

And even when, for them or their descendants, that hope is realised, and with it the hope of a new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly still be one of ‘criticism,’ and Arnold’s insistence on the necessity of the best criticism will still be as urgently required. It must indeed be more and more needed as the power of half-educated journalism grows. How poetry then will overcome the obstacles which, therefore, must in some measure still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable not by the reflections of critics, but by the creative deeds of poets themselves. Accordingly, while one may safely prophesy that their long poems will differ from those of any past age, I have no idea of predicting the nature of this difference, and will refer in conclusion only to certain views which seem to me delusive.

It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern difficulties by any attempt to withdraw himself from the atmosphere of free and scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity of view and concreteness of imagination, to live in a past century or a sanctuary of esoteric art, whether secular or religious. Whatever of value such an attempt may yield—and that it may yield much I do not deny—it will never yield poems at once long and great.

Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will sometimes deal with much of the common and painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that sense more ‘democratic’ or universal than any poetry of the past. But it is vain to imagine that this can be done by a refusal to ‘interpret’ and an endeavour to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going prose ‘realism’ there is selection; and, to go no further, selection itself is interpretation. And, as for poetry, the mirror which the least theoretical of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And that, whether he likes it or not, is an activity which divides, and sifts, and recombines into a unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the crude material which experience thrusts upon it. This must be so; the only question is of the choice of matter and the method of treatment. Nor can the end to be achieved be anything but beauty, though the meaning of that word may be extended and deepened. And beauty in its essence is something that gives satisfaction, however much of pain, repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and overcome.

‘But, even so,’ it may be said, ‘why should the poet trouble himself about figures, events, and actions? That inward tendency in which you see danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply and solely what on one side you admit it to be, the sign of our advance. What we really need is to make our long poems entirely interior. We only want to know how Dante felt; we do not wish to see his pity felling him to the ground; and much less do we wish to hear Othello say “and smote him thus,” or even to imagine the blow. We are not children or savages.’ We do not want, I agree, attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how many kinds of poem this inward tendency can display its power without any injury or drawback. They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a long poem so entirely ‘interior’ can possibly have the clearness, variety, and solidity of effect that the best long poems have possessed; whether it can produce the same impression of a massive, building, organising, ‘architectonic’ power of imagination; and whether all this and much else is of little value. They can hardly have realised, one must suspect, how much of life they wish to leave unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at once to satisfy and to purify, the primitive instincts from which it arises; and that, in the case of poetic art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures, scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts, and one that in the immense majority of men shows no sign of decay. And finally, if they suppose that the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is a symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of semi-barbarism, I am sure they are woefully mistaken. There is more virtue than their philosophy dreams of in deeds, in ‘the motion of a muscle this way or that.’ Doubtless it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains interior is not the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny can show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds, good and evil, will undeceive me.

A last delusion remains. ‘There is,’ we may be told, ‘a simple, final, and comfortable answer to all these doubts and fears. The long poem is not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and should be publicly buried, and there is not the least occasion to mourn it. It has become impossible not because we cannot write it, but because we see that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was written. The thing called a long poem was really, as any long poem must be, a number of short ones, linked together by passages of prose. And these passages could be nothing except prose; for poetry is the language of a state of crisis, and a crisis is brief. The long poem is an offence to art.’ I believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was, unless I mistake, the invention of Poe, and it is about as true as I conceive his story of the composition of The Raven to be. It became a gospel with some representatives of the Symbolist movement in France; and in fact it would condemn not only the long poem, but the middle-sized one, and indeed all sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to imply no want of gratitude for the lyrics of some of its adherents; but the theory itself seems strangely thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as we have seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one; and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes. That the long poem is doomed is a possible, however groundless, belief; but it is futile to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable worth will perish.10

1 The material of these pages belongs in part to the course mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905. They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the false impression that the writer’s admiration for those poems is lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the Romantic Revival of Wordsworth’s time.

2 This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is the point.

3 Table-talk, Feb. 16, 1833.

4 The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this balance. Such, for instance, are The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, Michael, The Vision of Judgment, some of Crabbe’s tales. It does not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the time.

5 See p. 110.

6 Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.

7 This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur’s speech in that Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of Conscience, the attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is appropriate, and, again, Lancelot’s treachery to him is intelligible and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of the Idylls could not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson’s design requires Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this is not imaginable.

Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I think the depreciation of Tennyson’s genius now somewhat prevalent a mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.

8 It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge, and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.

9 The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the poetry of the time, and of Shelley’s poetry in particular, and must supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him to observe that Godwin’s formulas are called sublime as well as ridiculous. Political Justice would never have fascinated such young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a great truth had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its misapprehension.

10 The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it is not so in a narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole poetic content of the Divine Comedy in a form not its own than you can the content of a song.

The theory is connected in some minds with the view that ‘music is the true type or measure of perfected art.’ That view again rests on the idea that ‘it is the art of music which most completely realises [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and matter,’ and that accordingly ‘the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises’ (Pater, The Renaissance, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what follows is that poetry should endeavour in its own way to achieve that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply it. But others have.

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THE LETTERS OF KEATS

THE LETTERS OF KEATS

There is no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations; by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr. Bridges. Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters and Mr. Colvin’s biography both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de SÉlincourt in a volume invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he has contributed so much. My principal object is to consider Keats’s attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas set forth in previous lectures on Shelley’s views and on the age of Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to listen to quotations from them.1

The best of Keats’s poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost necessary to the understanding of Endymion and of some of the earlier or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the fictions once current of a puny Keats who was ‘snuffed out by an article,’ a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and ‘slippery blisses,’ and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic genius.

Of Keats’s character, as the letters manifest it, Arnold has written. While speaking plainly and decidedly of the weakness visible in those to Miss Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which proves that Keats ‘had flint and iron in him,’ ‘had virtue in the true and large sense of the word.’ And he selected passages, too, which illustrate the ‘admirable wisdom and temper’ and the ‘strength and clearness of judgment’ shown by Keats, alike in matters of friendship and in his criticisms of his own productions, of the public, and of the literary circles,—the ‘jabberers about pictures and books,’ as Keats in a bitter mood once called them. We may notice, in addition, two characteristics. In spite of occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at the magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably plain from these letters, had a clear and habitual consciousness of his genius. He never dreamed of being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet; sometimes he hoped to be a great one. I remember no sign that he felt himself the inferior of any living poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of Byron, whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious. When Shelley wrote, hinting a criticism, but referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius, he returned the criticism without the compliment. His few references to Coleridge are critical, and his amusing description of Coleridge’s talk is not more reverential than Carlyle’s. Something, indeed, of the native pugnacity which his friends ascribe to him seems to show itself in his allusions to contemporaries, including even Wordsworth. Yet with all this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame, no letters extant breathe a more simple and natural modesty than these; and from end to end they exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the irritable vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime egotism of Milton and Wordsworth. He was of Shakespeare’s tribe.

The other trait that I wish to refer to appears in a particular series of letters—sometimes mere notes—scattered through the collection. They are addressed to Keats’s school-girl sister Fanny, who was eight years younger than he, and who died in the same year as Browning.2 Keats, as we see him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr. Colvin’s collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm and ambition which his sister was too young to understand. During his last two years he was, besides, passionately and miserably in love, and, latterly, ill and threatened with death. His soul was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself, avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate friends. Yet, until he left England, he never ceased to visit his sister when he could; and, when he could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of amusing nonsense, full of brotherly care for her, and of excellent advice offered as by an equal who happened to be her senior; letters quite free from thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and the resentment against fate which in parts of his later correspondence with others betray his suffering. These letters to his sister are, in one sense, the least remarkable in the collection, yet it would lose much by their omission. They tell us next to nothing of his genius, but as we come upon them the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a moment hard or troubled, becomes once more soft and bright.

To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from the character to the mind of Keats, if the reader has formed a notion of him as a youth with a genius for poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise not intellectually remarkable, this error will soon be dispelled by the letters. With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were passions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his contemporaries at the same time of life.3 The letters remind us also that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the University wits. They show, too—the earlier far more than the later—in certain literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence of Leigh Hunt and his circle. But everywhere we feel in them the presence of an intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open, daring, rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic, yet observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense without narrowness, and quite as various both in its interests and its capacities as the mind of Wordsworth or of Shelley. Fundamentally, and in spite of abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense, the mind of Keats was very serious and thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative than an original mind should be in youth; an intelligence which now startles by flashes of sudden beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and deep thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty aid from theories, out of personal experience. In quality—and I speak of nothing else—the mind of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have been very different.

Short extracts can give but little idea of all this; but they may at least illustrate the variety of Keats’s mind, and the passages I am about to read have been chosen mainly with this intention, and not because the majority are among the most striking that might be found. The earliest belong to the September of 1817, and I take them partly for their local interest. Keats spent most of that month here in Oxford, staying in the Magdalen Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly admired. ‘We lead,’ he writes to his sister, ‘very industrious lives—he in general studies, and I in proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.’ It was Endymion: he wrote, it seems, the whole of the Third Book in Bailey’s rooms. Unluckily the hero in that Book is wandering at the bottom of the sea; but even in those regions, as Keats imagined them, a diligent student may perhaps find some traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers and quadrangles, cloisters and groves; of the deer in Magdalen Park; and how

(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear streams—‘more clear streams than ever I saw together.’ ‘I take a walk by the side of one of them every evening.’ ‘For these last five or six days,’ he writes to Reynolds, ‘we have had regularly a boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eyelashes. We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become naturalised river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened “Reynolds’s Cove,” in which we have read Wordsworth and talked as may be.’ Of those talks over Wordsworth with the grave religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the best-known of all the letters (it is too well known to quote), thoughts which take their origin from the Lines written near Tintern Abbey.4

About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a walking-tour to the Highlands; and I will quote two passages from the letters written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast they exhibit between the two strains in Keats’s mind. The first is the later. The letter is dated ‘Cairn-something July 17th’:

Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was written a fortnight earlier from Carlisle:

There is little enough here of the young poet who believes himself to care for nothing but ‘Art’; and as little of the theoretic cosmopolitanism of some of Keats’s friends.

Some three months later we find Keats writing from London to his brother and his sister-in-law in America; and he tells them of a young lady from India whom he has just met:

I do not read this passage merely for its biographical interest, but a word may be ventured on that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he immediately became her slave. When we observe the fact, and consider how very unlike the words I have quoted are to anything in Keats’s previous letters, we can hardly help suspecting that he was at this time in a peculiar condition and ripe for his fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned from his Scotch tour, which was broken off because the Inverness doctor used the most menacing language about the state of his throat; and further, that he was now, in the late autumn, nursing his brother Tom, who died of consumption before the year was out. And an idea suggests itself which, if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some comfort in it. How often have readers of Keats’s life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does it not seem at least as probable that, if Miss Brawne had never existed, what happened would still have happened, and even that the fever of passion which helped to destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?

I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a passage on politics. The friends of Keats were, for the most part, advanced liberals. His own sympathies went that way. A number of lines in the poems of his boyhood show this, and so do many remarks in the letters. And his sympathies were not mere sentiments. ‘I hope sincerely,’ he wrote in September, 1819, ‘I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the question before I die’; and a few days later, when he tells Brown of his wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work for his livelihood, composing deliberate poems only when he can afford to, he says that he will write as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he makes it a condition that he is to write ‘on the liberal side of the question.’ It is a mistake to suppose that he had no political interests. But he cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and Tory; a ‘Radical’ was for him the type of an ‘obstinate and heady’ man; and the perfectibility theories of friends like Shelley and Dilke slipped from his mind like water from a duck’s back. We have seen the concrete shape his patriotism took. He always saw ideas embodied, and was ‘convinced that small causes make great alterations.’ I could easily find passages more characteristic than the following; but it is short, it shows that Keats thought for himself, and it has a curious interest just now (1905):8

Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is in these letters, I may take next one or two passages which have an interest also from their bearing on Keats’s poems. Here we have, for example, the unmistakable origin of the Ode on Indolence:

‘This is the only happiness’—the sentence will surprise no one who has even dipped into Keats’s letters. It expresses a settled conviction. Happiness, he feels, belongs only to childhood and early youth. A young man thinks he can keep it, but a little experience shows him he must do without it. The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is fatal to it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because it is to realise the sorrow of the world and to feel the burden of the mystery. ‘Health and spirits,’ he says, ‘can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man.’11 Shelley might be speaking. ‘To see an entirely disinterested girl quite happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary. Women must want Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and so may we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of crime.’12 These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such ‘dreaming’ poets as himself) to men of action.

In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several recently written poems, and among them the ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say, ‘Here is the record of my love and my despair,’ for on this one subject he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):

‘Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said “score” without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three and a half apiece—a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.’ This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best poems, but I dare say the author of Hamlet made such jests about it. Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.

I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in different ways Keats’s insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of ‘nonsense,’ rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing ‘three witty people, all distinct in their excellence’; and he goes on:

C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much out of the tune of Falstaff: ‘C, they say, is not his mother’s true child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to sell.’13

In the second passage Keats is describing one of his friends:

These lines illustrate the instinctive feeling of Keats that it is essential to the growth of the poetic mind to preserve its natural receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it. They illustrate also his dislike of the fixed theories held and preached by some members of his circle. We shall have to consider later the meaning of his occasional outbreaks against ‘thought,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘philosophy.’ It is important not to be misled by them, and not to forget the frequent expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and must strive to gain is this very ‘knowledge’ and ‘philosophy.’ Here I will only observe that his polemics against them, though coloured by his temperament, coincide to a large extent with Wordsworth’s dislike of ‘a reasoning self-sufficing thing,’ his depreciation of mere book-knowledge, and his praise of a wise passiveness. And, further, what he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is the ‘Methodism,’ the stubborn argument, and the habit of bringing to the argument and maintaining throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his own thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his brother—men willing to probe with him any serious idea—but not to Dilke. It is clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident assertions and negations of Shelley and his other Godwinian friends and acquaintances. Probably from his ignorance of theories he felt at a disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not dismiss their theories as something of no interest to a poet. He thought about them, convinced himself that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself philosophises in criticising them. The following passage, from a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his writings to a theory of the world, a theology as he jestingly calls it; and although it is long, I make no apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he says, Robertson’s History of America and Voltaire’s SiÈcle de Louis XIV., and he observes that, though the two civilisations described are so different, the case of the great body of the people is equally lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:

Surely, when Keats’s education is considered, this, with all its crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find anything written at the same age by another poet of the time which shows more openness of mind, more knowledge of human nature, or more original power of thought.

About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description of A, B, and C, he received what he recognised at once for his death-warrant. He had yet fourteen months to endure, but at this point the development of his mind was arrested. During the three preceding years it had been very rapid, and is easy to trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided difference between the Keats of the earlier letters and the Keats of the later. The tour in Scotland in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient accuracy as a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is the youth who had written the Sonnet on first looking into Chapman’s Homer, and Sleep and Poetry, and who was writing Endymion. He is thoughtful, often grave, sometimes despondent; but he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of the joy and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied the sense of poetic power. He is the poet who looked, we are told, as though he had been gazing on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose face worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields about Hampstead; who is described watching with rapture the billowing of the wind through the trees and over meadow-grasses and corn, and looking sometimes like a young eagle and sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths. This is the Keats who wrote ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’; who found ‘the Religion of Joy’ in the monuments of the Greek spirit, in sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere handbooks of mythology; who never ceased, he said, to wonder at all that incarnate delight, and would point out to Severn how essentially modern, how imperishable, the Greek spirit is—a joy for ever.

Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware, and we find him becoming more and more aware, that joy is not the only word. He had not read for nothing Wordsworth’s great Ode, and Tintern Abbey, and the Excursion. We know it from Endymion, and the letter about the ‘burden of the mystery’ was written before the tour in Scotland. But after this we feel a more decided change, doubtless hastened by outward events. The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews of Endymion appeared—reviews not less inexcusable because we understand their origin. Then came his brother’s death. A few weeks later he met Miss Brawne. Henceforth his youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are connected, I think, solely with his passion. His brother’s death deepened his sympathies. The reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him nothing but good. He rated them at their true value, but they gave him a salutary shock. They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt’s verse and his own. Through them he saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into self-worship by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns against his old self harshly. Some of his friends, he says, think he has lost his old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He speaks slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the human heart is something finer,—not its dreams, but its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as intent as ever,—more intent; but the glory he would see walks in a fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and learn. He is young, he says, writing at random, straining his eyes at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness. He knows at times the ‘agony’ of ignorance. In one year he writes six or seven of the best poems in the language, but he is little satisfied. ‘Thus far,’ he says, ‘I have a consciousness of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase.’ Two months later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, ‘I am afraid I shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.’ And so it was.

It is important to remember this change in Keats in considering his ideas about poetry; but we have first to look at them in a more general way. Many of the most interesting occur in detached remarks or aphorisms, and these I must pass by. The others I intended at first to deal with in connection with Shelley’s view of poetry; and, although that plan proved to be too large for a single lecture, I do not wish altogether to abandon it, because in the extracts which I have been reading the difference between the minds of the two poets has already appeared, and because it re-appears both in their poetic practice and in their opinions about their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it might be thought unlikely that these opinions would show also a marked resemblance. For Keats, it may be said, was of all the great poets then alive the one least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that ‘revolutionary’ atmosphere of which I spoke in a previous lecture. He did not concern himself, we may be told, with the progress of humanity, or with Manchester Massacres or risings in Naples. He cared nothing for theories, abstractions, or ideals. He worshipped Beauty, not Liberty; and the beauty he worshipped was not ‘intellectual,’ but visible, audible, tangible. ‘O for a life of sensations,’ he cried, ‘rather than of thoughts.’ He was an artist, intent upon fashioning his material until the outward sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful. In all this he was at the opposite pole to Shelley; and he himself felt it. He refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might keep his own unfettered scope; and he never speaks of Shelley cordially. He told him, too, that he might be more of an artist and load every rift of his subject with ore; and that, while many people regard the purpose of a work as the God, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist must serve Mammon. And his practice, like his opinions, proves that, both in his strength and his limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.

In such a plea there would certainly be much truth; and yet it is not the truth, for it ignores other truths which must somehow be combined with it. There are great differences between the two poets, but then in Keats himself there are contending strains. Along with the differences, too, we find very close affinities. And these affinities with Shelley also show that Keats was deeply influenced by the spirit of his time. Let me illustrate these statements.

The poet who cried, ‘O for a life of sensations,’ was consoled, as his life withered away, by the remembrance that he ‘had loved the principle of beauty in all things.’ And this is not a chance expression; it repeats, for instance, a phrase used two years before, ‘the mighty abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things.’ If Shelley had used this language, it would be taken to prove his love of abstractions. How does it differ from the language of the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty?17

Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness between Alastor and Endymion, each the first poem of any length in which the writer’s genius decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a young poet; of a dream in which his ideal appears in human form, and he knows the rapture of union with it; of the passion thus enkindled, and the search for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer to read Endymion simply as we read Isabella; but the question here is not of our preferences. If we examine the poem without regard to them, we shall be unable to doubt that to some extent the story symbolises or allegorises this pursuit of the principle of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of the causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not in himself the experience required by parts of his design, and hence in them he had to write from mere imagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a flagrant degree the defect felt here and there in Prometheus Unbound. If we wish to read it as the author meant it, we must ask for the significance of the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear that not all of them are intended to have this further significance, and we are perplexed by the question where, and how far, we are to look for it.18

Take, again, some of the most famous of the lyrical poems. Is it true that Keats was untroubled by that sense of contrast between ideal and real which haunted Shelley and was so characteristic of the time? So far is this from being the case that a critic might more plausibly object to his monotonous insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known lyrics of the two poets are the stanzas To a Skylark and the Ode to a Nightingale. Well, if we summarise prosaically the subject of the one poem we have summarised that of the other. ‘Our human life is all unrest and sorrow, an oscillation between longing and satiety, a looking before and after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot attain, and that leaves us dissatisfied by everything attainable. And we die, and do not understand death. But the bird is beyond this division and dissonance; it attains the ideal;

This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre, tone, atmosphere, they are far apart; the ‘idea’ is identical. And what else is the idea of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, where a moment, arrested in its ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the change and decay of reality? And what else is the idea of the playful lines To Fancy,—Fancy who brings together the joys which in life are parted by distances of time and place, and who holds in sure possession what life wins only to lose? Even a poem so pictorial and narrative and free from symbolism as the The Eve of St. Agnes rests on the same feeling. The contrast, so exquisitely imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy enmity of the world outside Madeline’s chamber, and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy bliss within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired the Ode to a Nightingale.

It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would be easy, too, to show that Keats was far from indifferent to the ‘progress of humanity.’ He conceived it in his own way, but it is as much the theme of Hyperion as of Prometheus Unbound. We are concerned however here not with the interpretation of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and especially with certain real or apparent inconsistencies in it. For in the letters he now praises ‘sensation’ and decries thought or knowledge, and now cries out for ‘knowledge’ as his greatest need; in one place declares that an artist must have self-concentration, perhaps selfishness, and in others insists that what he desires is to be of use to his fellow-men. We shall gain light on these matters and on his relation to Shelley if I try to reduce his general view to a precise and prosaic form.

That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is a ‘principle’; it is One. All things beautiful manifest it, and so far therefore are one and the same. This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in many crucial passages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The goddess Cynthia in Endymion is the Principle of Beauty. In this story she is also identified with the Moon. Accordingly the hero, gazing at the moon, declares that in all that he ever loved he loved her:

When he says this he does not yet understand that the Moon and his strange visitant are one; he thinks they are rivals. So later, when he loves the Indian maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself therefore false to his goddess, he is in error; for she is only his goddess veiled, the shaded half of the moon.

Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends differ. Indeed, the one Beauty is infinitely various. But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to fall into two main classes. On the one hand there is the kind of beauty that comes easily and is all sweetness and pleasure. In receiving it we seem to suppress nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it speaks to sense and delights us. It is ‘luxury.’ But the other kind is won through thought, and also through pain. And this second and more difficult kind is also the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the Principle. That it is won through pain is doubly true. First, because the poet cannot reach it unless he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which disturb his enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter beauty, and may even seem to lead him away from beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain union with his goddess only by leaving the green hill-sides where he met her first, and by wandering unhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth and under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of other lovers, and to help them undertakes tasks which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia. Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a maiden devoted to sorrow, and gains his goddess just when he thinks he has resigned her. The highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet’s pain; and, in the second place, it has pain in itself, or at least appears in objects that are painful. In his early poem Sleep and Poetry Keats asks himself the question,

And he answers:

He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He never became equal to it, but the idea was realised to some extent in Isabella and Lamia and Hyperion. The first two of these are tales of passion, ‘agony,’ and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a story of ‘strife.’

Such, in its bare outline, is Keats’s habitual view of poetry. What, then, are the points where, in spite of its evident resemblance to Shelley’s, we feel a marked difference? The most important seem to be two. In the first place Keats lays far the heavier stress on the idea that beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is to be found in Shelley, but (as we saw in another lecture) it is not congenial to him; it appears almost incidentally and is stated half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested most fully, we find, I believe, no trace. And this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of Shelley’s mind was to regard suffering and conflict with mere distress and horror as something senseless and purely evil, and to look on the world as naturally a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this world of woe his Intellectual Beauty does not really belong; it appears there only in flashes; its true home is a place where no contradictions, not even reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of Keats is much more concrete. He has no belief either in this natural paradise or in ‘Godwinian perfectibility.’ Pain and conflict have a meaning to him. Without them souls could not be made; and the business of the world, he conjectures, is the making of souls. They are not therefore simply obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this world it manifests itself most fully in and through them. For ‘scenery is fine, but human nature is finer’;19 and the passions and actions of man are finer than his enjoyments and dreams. In the same way, the conflict in Hyperion is not one between light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as in Prometheus Unbound. The Titans must yield to the Olympians because, in a word, they are less beautiful, and

But the Titans, though less beautiful, are beautiful; it is one and the same ‘principle’ that manifests itself in them and more fully in their victors. Their defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but the completion of their own being. This, it seems probable, the hero in Hyperion would have come to recognise, so that the poem, at least so far as he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation born of strife.

Man is ‘finer,’ Keats says, and the Titans must submit because they are less ‘beautiful.’ The second point of difference between him and Shelley lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with Shelley has many names, and one of them is beauty, but we hardly feel it to be the name nearest to his heart. The spirit of his worship is rather

and ‘love’ is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the term must be used, than ‘beauty.’ But the ideal for Keats is always and emphatically beauty or the ‘principle of beauty.’ When he sets the agonies and strifes of human hearts above a painless or luxurious loveliness, it is because they are the more beautiful. He would not have said that the Midsummer Night’s Dream is superior to King Lear in beauty, but inferior to it in some other respect; it is inferior in beauty to King Lear. Let art only be ‘intense’ enough, let the poet only look hard enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain in his object is seen truly as the vesture of great passion and action, and all ‘disagreeables’ will ‘evaporate,’ and nothing will remain but beauty.20 Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the great poet’s power of vision, he is still content when he can feel that a poem of his has intensity, has (as he says of Lamia) ‘that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people some way.’21 And an earlier and inferior poem, Isabella, may show his mind. The mere subject is exceedingly painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the painful incidents and details; but the poem can hardly be called painful at all; for the final impression is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as the final impression left by the blissful story of St. Agnes’ Eve. And this is most characteristic of Keats. If the word beauty is used in his sense, and not in the common contracted sense, we may truly say that he was, and must have remained, more than any other poet of his time, a worshipper of Beauty.

When, then—to come to his apparent inconsistencies—he exalts sensation and decries thought or knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty. The word ‘sensation,’ as a comparison of passages would readily show, has not in his letters its usual meaning. It stands for poetic sensation, and, indeed, for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name for all poetic or imaginative experience; and the contents of the speech of Oceanus are, in kind, just as much ‘sensation’ as the eating of nectarines (which may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I repeat, to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes in the earlier letters we find Keats false to his better mind. Knowing that the more difficult beauty is the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that he rebels against everything that would disturb its magic or trouble his ‘exquisite sense of the luxurious.’ And then he is tempted to see in thought only that vexatious questioning that ‘spoils the singing of the nightingale,’ and to forget that it is necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew that there was something wilful and weak about them; and they gradually disappear. On the whole, the gist of his attitude to ‘thought’ or ‘philosophy’ may be stated as follows.

He was far from being indifferent to truth, or from considering it unimportant for poetry. In an early letter, when he criticises a poem of Wordsworth’s, he ventures to say that ‘if Wordsworth had thought a little deeper at that moment he would not have written it,’ and that ‘it is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after truth.’22 He writes of a passage in Endymion: ‘The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that, when I wrote it, it was the regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.’23 And many passages show his conviction that for his progress towards this truth ‘thought,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘philosophy,’ are indispensable;24 that he must submit to the toil and the solitude that they involve, just as he must undergo the pains of sympathy; that ‘there is but one way for him,’ and that this one ‘road lies through application, study, and thought.’25 On the other hand he had, in the first place, as we saw, a strong feeling that a man, and especially a poet, must not be in a hurry to arrive at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box of his supposed results, but must be content with half-knowledge, and capable of ‘living in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ And, in the second place, a poet, he felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasonings which do not also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also beauty; and in so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are mere thoughts and reasonings, they are no more than a means, though a necessary means, to an end, which end is beauty,—that beauty which is also truth. This alone is the poet’s end, and therefore his law. ‘With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.’26 Thought, knowledge, philosophy, if they fall short of this, are nothing but a ‘road’ to his goal. They bring matter for him to mould to his purpose of beauty; but he must not allow them to impose their purpose on him, or to ask that it shall appear in his product. These statements formulate Keats’s position more than he formulates it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or because, while his mind had much general power, he was, more than Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.27

We can now deal more briefly with another apparent inconsistency. Keats says again and again that the poet must not live for himself, but must feel for others and try to help them; that ‘there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world’; that he is ambitious to do some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes to Shelley about the Cenci: ‘There is only one part of it I am judge of—the poetry and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An artist must serve Mammon; he must have “self-concentration”—selfishness, perhaps.’28 These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious too to criticise the irritability of a man condemned to death; and in any case these sentences are perfectly consistent with Keats’s expressed desire to do good. The poet is to do good; yes, but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not to obtrude it in his poetry, or to show that he has a design upon us.29 To make beauty is his philanthropy. He will not succeed in it best by making what is only in part beauty,—something like the Excursion, half poem and half lecture. He must be unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish; by refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of helping by the desire to help in another way. This is the drift of Keats’s thought. If we remember what he means by ‘beauty’ and ‘poet,’ and how he distinguishes the poet from the ‘dreamer,’30 we shall think it sound doctrine.

Keats was by nature both dreamer and poet, and his ambition was to become poet pure and simple. There was, in a further sense, a double strain in his nature. He had in him the poetic temper of his time, the ever-present sense of an infinite, the tendency to think of this as an ideal perfection manifesting itself in reality, and yet surpassing reality, and so capable of being contrasted with it. He was allied here especially to Wordsworth and to Shelley, by the former of whom he was greatly influenced. But there was also in him another tendency; and this, it would seem, was strengthening at the expense of the first, and would in time have dominated it. It was perhaps the deeper and more individual. It may be called the Shakespearean strain, and it works against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real, or to magnify differences of grade into oppositions of kind. Keats had the impulse to interest himself in everything he saw or heard of, to be curious about a thing, accept it, identify himself with it, without first asking whether it is better or worse than another, or how far it is from the ideal principle. It is this impulse that speaks in the words, ‘If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel’;31 and in the words, ‘When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess’; and in the feeling that she is fine, though Bishop Hooker is finer. It too is the source of his complaint that he has no personal identity, and of his description of the poetical character; ‘It has no self; it is everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation.32 A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity. He is continually in, for, and filling some other body.’33 That is not a description of Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley; neither does it apply very fully to Keats; but it describes something at least of the spirit of Shakespeare.

Now this spirit, it is obvious, tends in poetry, I do not say to a realistic, but to what may be called a concrete method of treatment; to the vivid presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in preference to the expression of unembodied thoughts and feelings. The atmosphere of Wordsworth’s age, as we have seen, was not, on the whole, favourable to it, and in various degrees it failed in strength, or it suffered, in all the greater poets. Scott had it in splendid abundance and vigour; but he had too little of the idealism or the metaphysical imagination which was common to those poets, and which Shakespeare united with his universal comprehension; nor was he, like Shakespeare and like some of them, a master of magic in language. But Keats had that magic in fuller measure, perhaps, than any of our poets since Milton; and, sharing the idealism of Wordsworth and Shelley, he possessed also wider sympathies, and, if not a more plastic or pictorial imagination than the latter, at least a greater freedom from the attraction of theoretic ideas. To what results might not this combination have led if his life had been as long as Wordsworth’s or even as Byron’s? It would be more than hazardous, I think, to say that he was the most highly endowed of all our poets in the nineteenth century, but he might well have written its greatest long poems.

1905.

NOTE

I have pointed out certain marked resemblances between Alastor and Endymion, and it would be easy to extend the list. These resemblances are largely due to similarities in the minds of the two poets, and to the action of a common influence on both. But I believe that, in addition, Keats was affected by the reading of Alastor, which appeared in 1816, while his own poem was begun in the spring of 1817.

The common influence to which I refer was that of Wordsworth, and especially of the Excursion, published in 1814. There is a quotation, or rather a misquotation, from it in the Preface to Alastor. The Excursion is concerned in part with the danger of inactive and unsympathetic solitude; and this, treated of course in Shelley’s own way, is the subject of Alastor, which also contains phrases reminiscent of Wordsworth’s poem. Its Preface too reminds one immediately of the Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peele Castle; of the main idea, and of the lines,

As for Keats, the reader of his letters knows how much he was occupied in 1817 and 1818 with thoughts due to the reading of Wordsworth, and how great, though qualified, was his admiration of the Excursion. These thoughts concerned chiefly the poetic nature, its tendency to ‘dream,’ and the necessity that it should go beyond itself and feel for the sorrows of others. They may have been suggested only by Wordsworth; but we must remember that Alastor had been published, and that Keats would naturally read it. In comparing that poem with Endymion I am obliged to repeat remarks already made in the lecture.

Alastor, composed under the influence described, tells of the fate of a young poet, who is ‘pure and tender-hearted,’ but who, in his search for communion with the ideal influences of nature and of knowledge, keeps aloof from sympathies with his kind. ‘So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed.’ But a time comes when he thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence like himself. His ideal requirements are embodied in the form of a being who appears to him in a dream, and to whom he is united in passionate love. But his ‘self-centred seclusion’ now avenges itself. The ‘spirit of sweet human love’ vanishes as he wakes, and he wanders over the earth, vainly seeking the ‘prototype’ of the vision until he dies.

In Endymion the story of a dream-vision, of rapturous union with it, and of the consequent pursuit of it, re-appears, though the beginning and the end are different. The hero, before the coming of the vision, has of course a poetic soul, but he is not self-secluded, or inactive, or fragile, or philosophic; and his pursuit of the goddess leads not to extinction but to immortal union with her. It does lead, however, to adventures of which the main idea evidently is that the poetic soul can only reach complete union with the ideal (which union is immortality) by wandering in a world which seems to deprive him of it; by trying to mitigate the woes of others instead of seeking the ideal for himself; and by giving himself up to love for what seems to be a mere woman, but is found to be the goddess herself. It seems almost beyond doubt that the story of Cynthia and Endymion would not have taken this shape but for Alastor.

The reader will find this impression confirmed if he compares the descriptions in Alastor and Endymion, Book I., of the dreamer’s feelings on awakening from his dream, of the disenchantment that has fallen on the landscape, and of his ‘eager’ pursuit of the lost vision. Everything is, in one sense, different, for the two poets differ greatly, and Keats, of course, was writing without any conscious recollection of the passage in Alastor; but the conception is the same.34

Consider, again, the passage (near the beginning of Endymion, Book III.) quoted on p. 230 of the lecture. The hero is addressing the moon; and he says, to put it baldly, that from his boyhood everything that was beautiful to him was associated with his love of the moon’s beauty. The passage continues thus:

In spite of the dissimilarities, surely the ‘wakeful rest’ here corresponds to the condition of the poet in Alastor prior to the dream. ‘So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed’; but when his ‘strange love’ comes these objects, like the objects of Endymion’s earlier desires, no longer suffice him.

There is, however, further evidence, indeed positive proof, of the effect of Alastor, and especially of its Preface, on Keats’s mind. In the revised version of Hyperion, Book I., the dreamer in the Temple wonders why he has been preserved from death. The Prophetess tells him the reason (I italicise certain words):

If the reader compares with this the following passage from the Preface to Alastor, and if he observes the words I have italicised in it, he will hardly doubt that some unconscious recollection of the Preface was at work in Keats’s mind. Shelley is distinguishing the self-centred seclusion of his poet from that of common selfish souls:

‘The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet’s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.’35

I have still a passage to refer to. Let the reader turn to the quotation on p. 236 from Keats’s reply to Shelley’s letter of invitation to his home in Italy; and let him ask himself why Keats puts the word “self-concentration” in inverted commas. He is not referring to anything in Shelley’s letter, and he is not in the habit in the letters of using inverted commas except to mark a quotation. Without doubt, I think, he is referring from memory to the Preface to Alastor and the phrase ‘self-centred seclusion.’ He has come to feel that this self-centred seclusion is right for a poet like himself, and that the direct pursuit of philanthropy in poetry (which he supposes Shelley to advocate) is wrong. But this is another proof how much he had been influenced by Shelley’s poem; and it is perhaps not too rash to conjecture that his consciousness of this influence was one reason why he had earlier refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might ‘have his own unfettered scope.’36

If it seems to anyone that these conclusions are derogatory to Keats, either as a man or a poet, I can only say that I differ from him entirely. But I will add that there seems to me some reason to conjecture that Shelley had read the Ode to a Nightingale before he wrote the stanzas To a Skylark.

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF1

Of the two persons principally concerned in the rejection of Falstaff, Henry, both as Prince and as King, has received, on the whole, full justice from readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare’s famous characters. All of them, in passing from the mind of their creator into other minds, suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony through the disproportionate attention bestowed on some one feature, or to lose their uniqueness by being conventionalised into types already familiar. But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself. The original character is to be found alive in the two parts of Henry IV., dead in Henry V., and nowhere else. But not very long after these plays were composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very entertaining piece called The Merry Wives of Windsor. Perhaps his company wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as one would rather believe, the tradition may be true that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with the Falstaff scenes of Henry IV., expressed a wish to see the hero of them again, and to see him in love. Now it was no more possible for Shakespeare to show his own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two into five. But he could write in haste—the tradition says, in a fortnight—a comedy or farce differing from all his other plays in this, that its scene is laid in English middle-class life, and that it is prosaic almost to the end. And among the characters he could introduce a disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and could call them Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. And he could represent this knight assailing, for financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in the event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the Two Noble Kinsmen. But it no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the Merry Wives is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky Sharp the dupe of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served the least of these tricks he would have had his brains taken out and buttered, and have given them to a dog for a New Year’s gift. I quote the words of the impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him and gave to him a few sentences worthy of Falstaff himself. But they are only a few—one side of a sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet critics have solemnly debated at what period in his life Sir John endured the gibes of Master Ford, and whether we should put this comedy between the two parts of Henry IV., or between the second of them and Henry V. And the Falstaff of the general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the Falstaff of the mere play-goer is certainly much more like the impostor than the true man.

The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and is insisted on in almost all competent estimates of the character of Falstaff. I do not propose to attempt a full account either of this character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall connect the remarks I have to make on them with a question which does not appear to have been satisfactorily discussed—the question of the rejection of Falstaff by the Prince on his accession to the throne. What do we feel, and what are we meant to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what does our feeling imply as to the characters of Falstaff and the new King?

1.

Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire, engaged in borrowing a thousand pounds from Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding helter-skelter from London, brings him the great news that the old King is as dead as nail in door, and that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir John, in wild excitement, taking any man’s horses, rushes to London; and he carries Shallow with him, for he longs to reward all his friends. We find him standing with his companions just outside Westminster Abbey, in the crowd that is waiting for the King to come out after his coronation. He himself is stained with travel, and has had no time to spend any of the thousand pounds in buying new liveries for his men. But what of that? This poor show only proves his earnestness of affection, his devotion, how he could not deliberate or remember or have patience to shift himself, but rode day and night, thought of nothing else but to see Henry, and put all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him. And now he stands sweating with desire to see him, and repeating and repeating this one desire of his heart—‘to see him.’ The moment comes. There is a shout within the Abbey like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour of trumpets, and the doors open and the procession streams out.

The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff and his friends remain. He shows no resentment. He comforts himself, or tries to comfort himself—first, with the thought that he has Shallow’s thousand pounds, and then, more seriously, I believe, with another thought. The King, he sees, must look thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes of his friends. But even as he speaks, the Chief Justice, accompanied by Prince John, returns, and gives the order to his officers:

Falstaff breaks out, ‘My lord, my lord,’ but he is cut short and hurried away; and after a few words between the Prince and the Chief Justice the scene closes, and with it the drama.

What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our feelings about Falstaff. If we have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff scenes of the two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward, but a cruel and dangerous ruffian, I suppose we enjoy his discomfiture and consider that the King has behaved magnificently. But if we have keenly enjoyed the Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed them as Shakespeare surely meant them to be enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us solely or even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we feel, I think, during the King’s speech, a good deal of pain and some resentment; and when, without any further offence on Sir John’s part, the Chief Justice returns and sends him to prison, we stare in astonishment. These, I believe, are, in greater or less degree, the feelings of most of those who really enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not). Nor are these feelings diminished when we remember the end of the whole story, as we find it in Henry V., where we learn that Falstaff quickly died, and, according to the testimony of persons not very sentimental, died of a broken heart.2 Suppose this merely to mean that he sank under the shame of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but the words of Mrs. Quickly, ‘The king has killed his heart’; of Nym, ‘The king hath run bad humours on the knight; that’s the even of it’; of Pistol,

assuredly point to something more than wounded pride; they point to wounded affection, and remind us of Falstaff’s own answer to Prince Hal’s question, ‘Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?’ ‘A thousand pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth a million: thou owest me thy love.’

Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though undoubtedly striking, leaves an impression so unpleasant? I will venture to put aside without discussion the idea that he meant us throughout the two plays to regard Falstaff with disgust or indignation, so that we naturally feel nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare with which it is idle to argue. And there is another and a much more ingenious suggestion which must equally be rejected as impossible. According to it, Falstaff, having listened to the King’s speech, did not seriously hope to be sent for by him in private; he fully realised the situation at once, and was only making game of Shallow; and in his immediate turn upon Shallow when the King goes out, ‘Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,’ we are meant to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that we end the play with the delightful feeling that, while Henry has done the right thing, Falstaff, in his outward overthrow, has still proved himself inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a critic who understands Falstaff, and in the suggestion itself shows that he understands him.3 But it provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and could not account for, that which follows the short conversation with Shallow. Falstaff’s dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount.

Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise admissible, would still leave our problem only partly solved. For what troubles us is not only the disappointment of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry. It was inevitable that on his accession he should separate himself from Sir John, and we wish nothing else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should have a competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly improbable case of his reforming himself. And if Henry could not trust himself within ten miles of so fascinating a companion, by all means let him be banished that distance: we do not complain. These arrangements would not have prevented a satisfactory ending: the King could have communicated his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in a private interview rich in humour and merely touched with pathos. But Shakespeare has so contrived matters that Henry could not send a private warning to Falstaff even if he wished to, and in their public meeting Falstaff is made to behave in so infatuated and outrageous a manner that great sternness on the King’s part was unavoidable. And the curious thing is that Shakespeare did not stop here. If this had been all we should have felt pain for Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against Henry. But two things we do resent. Why, when this painful incident seems to be over, should the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison? Can this possibly be meant for an act of private vengeance on the part of the Chief Justice, unknown to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare would have shown at once that the King disapproved and cancelled it. It must have been the King’s own act. This is one thing we resent; the other is the King’s sermon. He had a right to turn away his former self, and his old companions with it, but he had no right to talk all of a sudden like a clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and insincere to speak of them as his ‘misleaders,’ as though in the days of Eastcheap and Gadshill he had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen his former self, and we know that it was nothing of the kind. He had shown himself, for all his follies, a very strong and independent young man, deliberately amusing himself among men over whom he had just as much ascendency as he chose to exert. Nay, he amused himself not only among them, but at their expense. In his first soliloquy—and first soliloquies are usually significant—he declares that he associates with them in order that, when at some future time he shows his true character, he may be the more wondered at for his previous aberrations. You may think he deceives himself here; you may believe that he frequented Sir John’s company out of delight in it and not merely with this cold-blooded design; but at any rate he thought the design was his one motive. And, that being so, two results follow. He ought in honour long ago to have given Sir John clearly to understand that they must say good-bye on the day of his accession. And, having neglected to do this, he ought not to have lectured him as his misleader. It was not only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably like an attempt to buy the praise of the respectable at the cost of honour and truth. And it succeeded. Henry always succeeded.

You will see what I am suggesting, for the moment, as a solution of our problem. I am suggesting that our fault lies not in our resentment at Henry’s conduct, but in our surprise at it; that if we had read his character truly in the light that Shakespeare gave us, we should have been prepared for a display both of hardness and of policy at this point in his career, And although this suggestion does not suffice to solve the problem before us, I am convinced that in itself it is true. Nor is it rendered at all improbable by the fact that Shakespeare has made Henry, on the whole, a fine and very attractive character, and that here he makes no one express any disapprobation of the treatment of Falstaff. For in similar cases Shakespeare is constantly misunderstood. His readers expect him to mark in some distinct way his approval or disapproval of that which he represents; and hence where they disapprove and he says nothing, they fancy that he does not disapprove, and they blame his indifference, like Dr. Johnson, or at the least are puzzled. But the truth is that he shows the fact and leaves the judgment to them. And again, when he makes us like a character we expect the character to have no faults that are not expressly pointed out, and when other faults appear we either ignore them or try to explain them away. This is one of our methods of conventionalising Shakespeare. We want the world’s population to be neatly divided into sheep and goats, and we want an angel by us to say, ‘Look, that is a goat and this is a sheep,’ and we try to turn Shakespeare into this angel. His impartiality makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear to see him, like the sun, lighting up everything and judging nothing. And this is perhaps especially the case in his historical plays, where we are always trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us that Richard II. was unworthy to be king, and we at once conclude that he thought Bolingbroke’s usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely, what under the conditions was bound to exist, an inextricable tangle of right and unright. Or, Bolingbroke being evidently wronged, we suppose Bolingbroke’s statements to be true, and are quite surprised when, after attaining his end through them, he mentions casually on his death-bed that they were lies. Shakespeare makes us admire Hotspur heartily; and accordingly, when we see Hotspur discussing with others how large his particular slice of his mother-country is to be, we either fail to recognise the monstrosity of the proceeding, or, recognising it, we complain that Shakespeare is inconsistent. Prince John breaks a tottering rebellion by practising a detestable fraud on the rebels. We are against the rebels, and have heard high praise of Prince John, but we cannot help seeing that his fraud is detestable; so we say indignantly to Shakespeare, ‘Why, you told us he was a sheep’; whereas, in fact, if we had used our eyes we should have known beforehand that he was the brave, determined, loyal, cold-blooded, pitiless, unscrupulous son of a usurper whose throne was in danger.

To come, then, to Henry. Both as prince and as king he is deservedly a favourite, and particularly so with English readers, being, as he is, perhaps the most distinctively English of all Shakespeare’s men. In Henry V. he is treated as a national hero. In this play he has lost much of the wit which in him seems to have depended on contact with Falstaff, but he has also laid aside the most serious faults of his youth. He inspires in a high degree fear, enthusiasm, and affection; thanks to his beautiful modesty he has the charm which is lacking to another mighty warrior, Coriolanus; his youthful escapades have given him an understanding of simple folk, and sympathy with them; he is the author of the saying, ‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil’; and he is much more obviously religious than most of Shakespeare’s heroes. Having these and other fine qualities, and being without certain dangerous tendencies which mark the tragic heroes, he is, perhaps, the most efficient character drawn by Shakespeare, unless Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, is his equal. And so he has been described as Shakespeare’s ideal man of action; nay, it has even been declared that here for once Shakespeare plainly disclosed his own ethical creed, and showed us his ideal, not simply of a man of action, but of a man.

But Henry is neither of these. The poet who drew Hamlet and Othello can never have thought that even the ideal man of action would lack that light upon the brow which at once transfigures them and marks their doom. It is as easy to believe that, because the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are not far apart, Shakespeare would have chosen never to have loved and sung. Even poor Timon, the most inefficient of the tragic heroes, has something in him that Henry never shows. Nor is it merely that his nature is limited: if we follow Shakespeare and look closely at Henry, we shall discover with the many fine traits a few less pleasing. Henry IV. describes him as the noble image of his own youth; and, for all his superiority to his father, he is still his father’s son, the son of the man whom Hotspur called a ‘vile politician.’ Henry’s religion, for example, is genuine, it is rooted in his modesty; but it is also superstitious—an attempt to buy off supernatural vengeance for Richard’s blood; and it is also in part political, like his father’s projected crusade. Just as he went to war chiefly because, as his father told him, it was the way to keep factious nobles quiet and unite the nation, so when he adjures the Archbishop to satisfy him as to his right to the French throne, he knows very well that the Archbishop wants the war, because it will defer and perhaps prevent what he considers the spoliation of the Church. This same strain of policy is what Shakespeare marks in the first soliloquy in Henry IV., where the prince describes his riotous life as a mere scheme to win him glory later. It implies that readiness to use other people as means to his own ends which is a conspicuous feature in his father; and it reminds us of his father’s plan of keeping himself out of the people’s sight while Richard was making himself cheap by his incessant public appearances. And if I am not mistaken there is a further likeness. Henry is kindly and pleasant to every one as Prince, to every one deserving as King; and he is so not merely out of policy: but there is no sign in him of a strong affection for any one, such an affection as we recognise at a glance in Hamlet and Horatio, Brutus and Cassius, and many more. We do not find this in Henry V., not even in the noble address to Lord Scroop, and in Henry IV. we find, I think, a liking for Falstaff and Poins, but no more: there is no more than a liking, for instance, in his soliloquy over the supposed corpse of his fat friend, and he never speaks of Falstaff to Poins with any affection. The truth is, that the members of the family of Henry IV. have love for one another, but they cannot spare love for any one outside their family, which stands firmly united, defending its royal position against attack and instinctively isolating itself from outside influence.

Thus I would suggest that Henry’s conduct in his rejection of Falstaff is in perfect keeping with his character on its unpleasant side as well as on its finer; and that, so far as Henry is concerned, we ought not to feel surprise at it. And on this view we may even explain the strange incident of the Chief Justice being sent back to order Falstaff to prison (for there is no sign of any such uncertainty in the text as might suggest an interpolation by the players). Remembering his father’s words about Henry, ‘Being incensed, he’s flint,’ and remembering in Henry V. his ruthlessness about killing the prisoners when he is incensed, we may imagine that, after he had left Falstaff and was no longer influenced by the face of his old companion, he gave way to anger at the indecent familiarity which had provoked a compromising scene on the most ceremonial of occasions and in the presence alike of court and crowd, and that he sent the Chief Justice back to take vengeance. And this is consistent with the fact that in the next play we find Falstaff shortly afterwards not only freed from prison, but unmolested in his old haunt in Eastcheap, well within ten miles of Henry’s person. His anger had soon passed, and he knew that the requisite effect had been produced both on Falstaff and on the world.

But all this, however true, will not solve our problem. It seems, on the contrary, to increase its difficulty. For the natural conclusion is that Shakespeare intended us to feel resentment against Henry. And yet that cannot be, for it implies that he meant the play to end disagreeably; and no one who understands Shakespeare at all will consider that supposition for a moment credible. No; he must have meant the play to end pleasantly, although he made Henry’s action consistent. And hence it follows that he must have intended our sympathy with Falstaff to be so far weakened when the rejection-scene arrives that his discomfiture should be satisfactory to us; that we should enjoy this sudden reverse of enormous hopes (a thing always ludicrous if sympathy is absent); that we should approve the moral judgment that falls on him; and so should pass lightly over that disclosure of unpleasant traits in the King’s character which Shakespeare was too true an artist to suppress. Thus our pain and resentment, if we feel them, are wrong, in the sense that they do not answer to the dramatist’s intention. But it does not follow that they are wrong in a further sense. They may be right, because the dramatist has missed what he aimed at. And this, though the dramatist was Shakespeare, is what I would suggest. In the Falstaff scenes he overshot his mark. He created so extraordinary a being, and fixed him so firmly on his intellectual throne, that when he sought to dethrone him he could not. The moment comes when we are to look at Falstaff in a serious light, and the comic hero is to figure as a baffled schemer; but we cannot make the required change, either in our attitude or in our sympathies. We wish Henry a glorious reign and much joy of his crew of hypocritical politicians, lay and clerical; but our hearts go with Falstaff to the Fleet, or, if necessary, to Arthur’s bosom or wheresomever he is.4

In the remainder of the lecture I will try to make this view clear. And to that end we must go back to the Falstaff of the body of the two plays, the immortal Falstaff, a character almost purely humorous, and therefore no subject for moral judgments. I can but draw an outline, and in describing one aspect of this character must be content to hold another in reserve.

2.

Up to a certain point Falstaff is ludicrous in the same way as many other figures, his distinction lying, so far, chiefly in the mere abundance of ludicrous traits. Why we should laugh at a man with a huge belly and corresponding appetites; at the inconveniences he suffers on a hot day, or in playing the footpad, or when he falls down and there are no levers at hand to lift him up again; at the incongruity of his unwieldy bulk and the nimbleness of his spirit, the infirmities of his age and his youthful lightness of heart; at the enormity of his lies and wiles, and the suddenness of their exposure and frustration; at the contrast between his reputation and his real character, seen most absurdly when, at the mere mention of his name, a redoubted rebel surrenders to him—why, I say, we should laugh at these and many such things, this is no place to inquire; but unquestionably we do. Here we have them poured out in endless profusion and with that air of careless ease which is so fascinating in Shakespeare; and with the enjoyment of them I believe many readers stop. But while they are quite essential to the character, there is in it much more. For these things by themselves do not explain why, beside laughing at Falstaff, we are made happy by him and laugh with him. He is not, like Parolles, a mere object of mirth.

The main reason why he makes us so happy and puts us so entirely at our ease is that he himself is happy and entirely at his ease. ‘Happy’ is too weak a word; he is in bliss, and we share his glory. Enjoyment—no fitful pleasure crossing a dull life, nor any vacant convulsive mirth—but a rich deep-toned chuckling enjoyment circulates continually through all his being. If you ask what he enjoys, no doubt the answer is, in the first place, eating and drinking, taking his ease at his inn, and the company of other merry souls. Compared with these things, what we count the graver interests of life are nothing to him. But then, while we are under his spell, it is impossible to consider these graver interests; gravity is to us, as to him, inferior to gravy; and what he does enjoy he enjoys with such a luscious and good-humoured zest that we sympathise and he makes us happy. And if any one objected, we should answer with Sir Toby Belch, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’

But this, again, is far from all. Falstaff’s ease and enjoyment are not simply those of the happy man of appetite;5 they are those of the humorist, and the humorist of genius. Instead of being comic to you and serious to himself, he is more ludicrous to himself than to you; and he makes himself out more ludicrous than he is, in order that he and others may laugh. Prince Hal never made such sport of Falstaff’s person as he himself did. It is he who says that his skin hangs about him like an old lady’s loose gown, and that he walks before his page like a sow that hath o’erwhelmed all her litter but one. And he jests at himself when he is alone just as much as when others are by. It is the same with his appetites. The direct enjoyment they bring him is scarcely so great as the enjoyment of laughing at this enjoyment; and for all his addiction to sack you never see him for an instant with a brain dulled by it, or a temper turned solemn, silly, quarrelsome, or pious. The virtue it instils into him, of filling his brain with nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes—this, and his humorous attitude towards it, free him, in a manner, from slavery to it; and it is this freedom, and no secret longing for better things (those who attribute such a longing to him are far astray), that makes his enjoyment contagious and prevents our sympathy with it from being disturbed.

The bliss of freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff. His humour is not directed only or chiefly against obvious absurdities; he is the enemy of everything that would interfere with his ease, and therefore of anything serious, and especially of everything respectable and moral. For these things impose limits and obligations, and make us the subjects of old father antic the law, and the categorical imperative, and our station and its duties, and conscience, and reputation, and other people’s opinions, and all sorts of nuisances. I say he is therefore their enemy; but I do him wrong; to say that he is their enemy implies that he regards them as serious and recognises their power, when in truth he refuses to recognise them at all. They are to him absurd; and to reduce a thing ad absurdum is to reduce it to nothing and to walk about free and rejoicing. This is what Falstaff does with all the would-be serious things of life, sometimes only by his words, sometimes by his actions too. He will make truth appear absurd by solemn statements, which he utters with perfect gravity and which he expects nobody to believe; and honour, by demonstrating that it cannot set a leg, and that neither the living nor the dead can possess it; and law, by evading all the attacks of its highest representative and almost forcing him to laugh at his own defeat; and patriotism, by filling his pockets with the bribes offered by competent soldiers who want to escape service, while he takes in their stead the halt and maimed and the gaol-birds; and duty, by showing how he labours in his vocation—of thieving; and courage, alike by mocking at his own capture of Colvile and gravely claiming to have killed Hotspur; and war, by offering the Prince his bottle of sack when he is asked for a sword; and religion, by amusing himself with remorse at odd times when he has nothing else to do; and the fear of death, by maintaining perfectly untouched, in the face of imminent peril and even while he feels the fear of death, the very same power of dissolving it in persiflage that he shows when he sits at ease in his inn. These are the wonderful achievements which he performs, not with the sourness of a cynic, but with the gaiety of a boy. And, therefore, we praise him, we laud him, for he offends none but the virtuous, and denies that life is real or life is earnest, and delivers us from the oppression of such nightmares, and lifts us into the atmosphere of perfect freedom.

No one in the play understands Falstaff fully, any more than Hamlet was understood by the persons round him. They are both men of genius. Mrs. Quickly and Bardolph are his slaves, but they know not why. ‘Well, fare thee well,’ says the hostess whom he has pillaged and forgiven; ‘I have known thee these twenty-nine years, come peas-cod time, but an honester and truer-hearted man—well, fare thee well.’ Poins and the Prince delight in him; they get him into corners for the pleasure of seeing him escape in ways they cannot imagine; but they often take him much too seriously. Poins, for instance, rarely sees, the Prince does not always see, and moralising critics never see, that when Falstaff speaks ill of a companion behind his back, or writes to the Prince that Poins spreads it abroad that the Prince is to marry his sister, he knows quite well that what he says will be repeated, or rather, perhaps, is absolutely indifferent whether it be repeated or not, being certain that it can only give him an opportunity for humour. It is the same with his lying, and almost the same with his cowardice, the two main vices laid to his charge even by sympathisers. Falstaff is neither a liar nor a coward in the usual sense, like the typical cowardly boaster of comedy. He tells his lies either for their own humour, or on purpose to get himself into a difficulty. He rarely expects to be believed, perhaps never. He abandons a statement or contradicts it the moment it is made. There is scarcely more intent in his lying than in the humorous exaggerations which he pours out in soliloquy just as much as when others are by. Poins and the Prince understand this in part. You see them waiting eagerly to convict him, not that they may really put him to shame, but in order to enjoy the greater lie that will swallow up the less. But their sense of humour lags behind his. Even the Prince seems to accept as half-serious that remorse of his which passes so suddenly into glee at the idea of taking a purse, and his request to his friend to bestride him if he should see him down in the battle. Bestride Falstaff! ‘Hence! Wilt thou lift up Olympus?’

Again, the attack of the Prince and Poins on Falstaff and the other thieves on Gadshill is contrived, we know, with a view to the incomprehensible lies it will induce him to tell. But when, more than rising to the occasion, he turns two men in buckram into four, and then seven, and then nine, and then eleven, almost in a breath, I believe they partly misunderstand his intention, and too many of his critics misunderstand it altogether. Shakespeare was not writing a mere farce. It is preposterous to suppose that a man of Falstaff’s intelligence would utter these gross, palpable, open lies with the serious intention to deceive, or forget that, if it was too dark for him to see his own hand, he could hardly see that the three misbegotten knaves were wearing Kendal green. No doubt, if he had been believed, he would have been hugely tickled at it, but he no more expected to be believed than when he claimed to have killed Hotspur. Yet he is supposed to be serious even then. Such interpretations would destroy the poet’s whole conception; and of those who adopt them one might ask this out of some twenty similar questions:—When Falstaff, in the men in buckram scene, begins by calling twice at short intervals for sack, and then a little later calls for more and says, ‘I am a rogue if I drunk to-day,’ and the Prince answers, ‘O villain, thy lips are scarce wiped since thou drunk’st last,’ do they think that that lie was meant to deceive? And if not, why do they take it for granted that the others were? I suppose they consider that Falstaff was in earnest when, wanting to get twenty-two yards of satin on trust from Master Dombledon the silk-mercer, he offered Bardolph as security; or when he said to the Chief Justice about Mrs. Quickly, who accused him of breaking his promise to marry her, ‘My lord, this is a poor mad soul, and she says up and down the town that her eldest son is like you’; or when he explained his enormous bulk by exclaiming, ‘A plague of sighing and grief! It blows a man up like a bladder’; or when he accounted for his voice being cracked by declaring that he had ‘lost it with singing of anthems’; or even when he sold his soul on Good-Friday to the devil for a cup of Madeira and a cold capon’s leg. Falstaff’s lies about Hotspur and the men in buckram do not essentially differ from these statements. There is nothing serious in any of them except the refusal to take anything seriously.

This is also the explanation of Falstaff’s cowardice, a subject on which I should say nothing if Maurice Morgann’s essay,6 now more than a century old, were better known. That Falstaff sometimes behaves in what we should generally call a cowardly way is certain; but that does not show that he was a coward; and if the word means a person who feels painful fear in the presence of danger, and yields to that fear in spite of his better feelings and convictions, then assuredly Falstaff was no coward. The stock bully and boaster of comedy is one, but not Falstaff. It is perfectly clear in the first place that, though he had unfortunately a reputation for stabbing and caring not what mischief he did if his weapon were out, he had not a reputation for cowardice. Shallow remembered him five-and-fifty years ago breaking Scogan’s head at the court-gate when he was a crack not thus high; and Shallow knew him later a good back-swordsman. Then we lose sight of him till about twenty years after, when his association with Bardolph began; and that association implies that by the time he was thirty-five or forty he had sunk into the mode of life we witness in the plays. Yet, even as we see him there, he remains a person of consideration in the army. Twelve captains hurry about London searching for him. He is present at the Council of War in the King’s tent at Shrewsbury, where the only other persons are the King, the two princes, a nobleman and Sir Walter Blunt. The messenger who brings the false report of the battle to Northumberland mentions, as one of the important incidents, the death of Sir John Falstaff. Colvile, expressly described as a famous rebel, surrenders to him as soon as he hears his name. And if his own wish that his name were not so terrible to the enemy, and his own boast of his European reputation, are not evidence of the first rank, they must not be entirely ignored in presence of these other facts. What do these facts mean? Does Shakespeare put them all in with no purpose at all, or in defiance of his own intentions? It is not credible.

And when, in the second place, we look at Falstaff’s actions, what do we find? He boldly confronted Colvile, he was quite ready to fight with him, however pleased that Colvile, like a kind fellow, gave himself away. When he saw Henry and Hotspur fighting, Falstaff, instead of making off in a panic, stayed to take his chance if Hotspur should be the victor. He led his hundred and fifty ragamuffins where they were peppered, he did not send them. To draw upon Pistol and force him downstairs and wound him in the shoulder was no great feat, perhaps, but the stock coward would have shrunk from it. When the Sheriff came to the inn to arrest him for an offence whose penalty was death, Falstaff, who was hidden behind the arras, did not stand there quaking for fear, he immediately fell asleep and snored. When he stood in the battle reflecting on what would happen if the weight of his paunch should be increased by that of a bullet, he cannot have been in a tremor of craven fear. He never shows such fear; and surely the man who, in danger of his life, and with no one by to hear him, meditates thus: ‘I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life: which if I can save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked-for, and there’s an end,’ is not what we commonly call a coward.

‘Well,’ it will be answered, ‘but he ran away on Gadshill; and when Douglas attacked him he fell down and shammed dead.’ Yes, I am thankful to say, he did. For of course he did not want to be dead. He wanted to live and be merry. And as he had reduced the idea of honour ad absurdum, had scarcely any self-respect, and only a respect for reputation as a means of life, naturally he avoided death when he could do so without a ruinous loss of reputation, and (observe) with the satisfaction of playing a colossal practical joke. For that after all was his first object. If his one thought had been to avoid death he would not have faced Douglas at all, but would have run away as fast as his legs could carry him; and unless Douglas had been one of those exceptional Scotchmen who have no sense of humour, he would never have thought of pursuing so ridiculous an object as Falstaff running. So that, as Mr. Swinburne remarks, Poins is right when he thus distinguishes Falstaff from his companions in robbery: ‘For two of them, I know them to be as true-bred cowards as ever turned back; and for the third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I’ll forswear arms.’ And the event justifies this distinction. For it is exactly thus that, according to the original stage-direction, Falstaff behaves when Henry and Poins attack him and the others. The rest run away at once; Falstaff, here as afterwards with Douglas, fights for a blow or two, but, finding himself deserted and outmatched, runs away also. Of course. He saw no reason to stay. Any man who had risen superior to all serious motives would have run away. But it does not follow that he would run from mere fear, or be, in the ordinary sense, a coward.7

3.

The main source, then, of our sympathetic delight in Falstaff is his humorous superiority to everything serious, and the freedom of soul enjoyed in it. But, of course, this is not the whole of his character. Shakespeare knew well enough that perfect freedom is not to be gained in this manner; we are ourselves aware of it even while we are sympathising with Falstaff; and as soon as we regard him seriously it becomes obvious. His freedom is limited in two main ways. For one thing he cannot rid himself entirely of respect for all that he professes to ridicule. He shows a certain pride in his rank: unlike the Prince, he is haughty to the drawers, who call him a proud Jack. He is not really quite indifferent to reputation. When the Chief Justice bids him pay his debt to Mrs. Quickly for his reputation’s sake, I think he feels a twinge, though to be sure he proceeds to pay her by borrowing from her. He is also stung by any thoroughly serious imputation on his courage, and winces at the recollection of his running away on Gadshill; he knows that his behaviour there certainly looked cowardly, and perhaps he remembers that he would not have behaved so once. It is, further, very significant that, for all his dissolute talk, he has never yet allowed the Prince and Poins to see him as they saw him afterwards with Doll Tearsheet; not, of course, that he has any moral shame in the matter, but he knows that in such a situation he, in his old age, must appear contemptible—not a humorist but a mere object of mirth. And, finally, he has affection in him—affection, I think, for Poins and Bardolph, and certainly for the Prince; and that is a thing which he cannot jest out of existence. Hence, as the effect of his rejection shows, he is not really invulnerable. And then, in the second place, since he is in the flesh, his godlike freedom has consequences and conditions; consequences, for there is something painfully wrong with his great toe; conditions, for he cannot eat and drink for ever without money, and his purse suffers from consumption, a disease for which he can find no remedy.8 As the Chief Justice tells him, his means are very slender and his waste great; and his answer, ‘I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater and my waist slenderer,’ though worth much money, brings none in. And so he is driven to evil deeds; not only to cheating his tailor like a gentleman, but to fleecing Justice Shallow, and to highway robbery, and to cruel depredations on the poor woman whose affection he has secured. All this is perfectly consistent with the other side of his character, but by itself it makes an ugly picture.

Yes, it makes an ugly picture when you look at it seriously. But then, surely, so long as the humorous atmosphere is preserved and the humorous attitude maintained, you do not look at it so. You no more regard Falstaff’s misdeeds morally than you do the much more atrocious misdeeds of Punch or Reynard the Fox. You do not exactly ignore them, but you attend only to their comic aspect. This is the very spirit of comedy, and certainly of Shakespeare’s comic world, which is one of make-believe, not merely as his tragic world is, but in a further sense—a world in which gross improbabilities are accepted with a smile, and many things are welcomed as merely laughable which, regarded gravely, would excite anger and disgust. The intervention of a serious spirit breaks up such a world, and would destroy our pleasure in Falstaff’s company. Accordingly through the greater part of these dramas Shakespeare carefully confines this spirit to the scenes of war and policy, and dismisses it entirely in the humorous parts. Hence, if Henry IV. had been a comedy like Twelfth Night, I am sure that he would no more have ended it with the painful disgrace of Falstaff than he ended Twelfth Night by disgracing Sir Toby Belch.9

But Henry IV. was to be in the main a historical play, and its chief hero Prince Henry. In the course of it his greater and finer qualities were to be gradually revealed, and it was to end with beautiful scenes of reconciliation and affection between his father and him, and a final emergence of the wild Prince as a just, wise, stern, and glorious King. Hence, no doubt, it seemed to Shakespeare that Falstaff at last must be disgraced, and must therefore appear no longer as the invincible humorist, but as an object of ridicule and even of aversion. And probably also his poet’s insight showed him that Henry, as he conceived him, would behave harshly to Falstaff in order to impress the world, especially when his mind had been wrought to a high pitch by the scene with his dying father and the impression of his own solemn consecration to great duties.

This conception was a natural and a fine one; and if the execution was not an entire success, it is yet full of interest. Shakespeare’s purpose being to work a gradual change in our feelings towards Falstaff, and to tinge the humorous atmosphere more and more deeply with seriousness, we see him carrying out this purpose in the Second Part of Henry IV. Here he separates the Prince from Falstaff as much as he can, thus withdrawing him from Falstaff’s influence, and weakening in our minds the connection between the two. In the First Part we constantly see them together; in the Second (it is a remarkable fact) only once before the rejection. Further, in the scenes where Henry appears apart from Falstaff, we watch him growing more and more grave, and awakening more and more poetic interest; while Falstaff, though his humour scarcely flags to the end, exhibits more and more of his seamy side. This is nowhere turned to the full light in Part I.; but in Part II. we see him as the heartless destroyer of Mrs. Quickly, as a ruffian seriously defying the Chief Justice because his position as an officer on service gives him power to do wrong, as the pike preparing to snap up the poor old dace Shallow, and (this is the one scene where Henry and he meet) as the worn-out lecher, not laughing at his servitude to the flesh but sunk in it. Finally, immediately before the rejection, the world where he is king is exposed in all its sordid criminality when we find Mrs. Quickly and Doll arrested for being concerned in the death of one man, if not more, beaten to death by their bullies; and the dangerousness of Falstaff is emphasised in his last words as he hurries from Shallow’s house to London, words at first touched with humour but at bottom only too seriously meant: ‘Let us take any man’s horses; the laws of England are at my commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends, and woe unto my Lord Chief Justice.’ His dismissal to the Fleet by the Chief Justice is the dramatic vengeance for that threat.

Yet all these excellent devices fail. They cause us momentary embarrassment at times when repellent traits in Falstaff’s character are disclosed; but they fail to change our attitude of humour into one of seriousness, and our sympathy into repulsion. And they were bound to fail, because Shakespeare shrank from adding to them the one device which would have ensured success. If, as the Second Part of Henry IV. advanced, he had clouded over Falstaff’s humour so heavily that the man of genius turned into the Falstaff of the Merry Wives, we should have witnessed his rejection without a pang. This Shakespeare was too much of an artist to do—though even in this way he did something—and without this device he could not succeed. As I said, in the creation of Falstaff he overreached himself. He was caught up on the wind of his own genius, and carried so far that he could not descend to earth at the selected spot. It is not a misfortune that happens to many authors, nor is it one we can regret, for it costs us but a trifling inconvenience in one scene, while we owe to it perhaps the greatest comic character in literature. For it is in this character, and not in the judgment he brings upon Falstaff’s head, that Shakespeare asserts his supremacy. To show that Falstaff’s freedom of soul was in part illusory, and that the realities of life refused to be conjured away by his humour—this was what we might expect from Shakespeare’s unfailing sanity, but it was surely no achievement beyond the power of lesser men. The achievement was Falstaff himself, and the conception of that freedom of soul, a freedom illusory only in part, and attainable only by a mind which had received from Shakespeare’s own the inexplicable touch of infinity which he bestowed on Hamlet and Macbeth and Cleopatra, but denied to Henry the Fifth.

1902.

NOTE

For the benefit of readers unacquainted with Morgann’s Essay I reproduce here, with additions, some remarks omitted from the lecture for want of time. ‘Maurice Morgann, Esq. the ingenious writer of this work, descended from an antient and respectable family in Wales; he filled the office of under Secretary of State to the late Marquis of Lansdown, during his first administration; and was afterwards Secretary to the Embassy for ratifying the peace with America, in 1783. He died at his house in Knightsbridge, in the seventy-seventh year of his age, on the 28th March, 1802’ (Preface to the edition of 1825). He was a remarkable and original man, who seems to have written a good deal, but, beyond this essay and some pamphlets on public affairs, all or nearly all anonymous, he published nothing, and at his death he left orders that all his papers should be destroyed. The Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff was first published in 1777. It arose out of a conversation in which Morgann expressed his belief that Shakespeare never meant Falstaff for a coward. He was challenged to explain and support in print what was considered an extraordinary paradox, and his essay bears on its title-page the quotation, ‘I am not John of Gaunt, your grandfather: but yet no coward, Hal’—one of Falstaff’s few serious sentences. But Morgann did not confine himself to the question of Falstaff’s cowardice; he analysed the whole character, and incidentally touched on many points in Shakespearean criticism. ‘The reader,’ he observes, ‘will not need to be told that this inquiry will resolve itself of course into a critique on the genius, the arts, and the conduct, of Shakespeare: for what is Falstaff, what Lear, what Hamlet, or Othello, but different modifications of Shakespeare’s thought? It is true that this inquiry is narrowed almost to a single point; but general criticism is as uninstructive as it is easy: Shakespeare deserves to be considered in detail;—a task hitherto unattempted.’

The last words are significant. Morgann was conscious that he was striking out a new line. The Eighteenth Century critics had done much for Shakespeare in the way of scholarship; some of them had praised him well and blamed him well; but they had done little to interpret the process of his imagination from within. This was what Morgann attempted. His attitude towards Shakespeare is that of Goethe, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt. The dangers of his method might be illustrated from the Essay, but in his hands it yielded most valuable results. And though he did not attempt the eloquence of some of his successors, but wrote like a cultivated ironical man of the world, he wrote delightfully; so that in all respects his Essay, which has long been out of print, deserves to be republished and better known. [It was republished in Mr. Nichol Smith’s excellent Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 1903; and, in 1912, by itself, with an introduction by W. A. Gill.]

Readers of Boswell (under the year 1783) will remember that Morgann, who once met Johnson, favoured his biographer with two most characteristic anecdotes. Boswell also records Johnson’s judgment of Morgann’s Essay, which, says Mr. Swinburne, elicited from him ‘as good a jest and as bad a criticism as might have been expected.’ Johnson, we are told, being asked his opinion of the Essay, answered: ‘Why, Sir, we shall have the man come forth again; and as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he may prove Iago to be a very good character.’ The following passage from Morgann’s Essay (p. 66 of the 1825 edition, p. 248 of Mr. Nichol Smith’s book) gives, I presume, his opinion of Johnson. Having referred to Warburton, he adds: ‘Another has since undertaken the custody of our author, whom he seems to consider as a sort of wild Proteus or madman, and accordingly knocks him down with the butt-end of his critical staff, as often as he exceeds that line of sober discretion, which this learned Editor appears to have chalked out for him: yet is this Editor, notwithstanding, “a man, take him for all in all,” very highly respectable for his genius and his learning.’

SHAKESPEARE’S ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

SHAKESPEARE’S ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA1

Coleridge’s one page of general criticism on Antony and Cleopatra contains some notable remarks. ‘Of all Shakespeare’s historical plays,’ he writes, ‘Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much—perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained throughout.’ In a later sentence he refers to the play as ‘this astonishing drama.’ In another he describes the style: ‘feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakespeare’s other works.’ And he translates this motto in the phrase ‘happy valiancy of style.’

Coleridge’s assertion that in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare followed history more minutely than in any other play might well be disputed; and his statement about the style of this drama requires some qualification in view of the results of later criticism as to the order of Shakespeare’s works. The style is less individual than he imagined. On the whole it is common to the six or seven dramas subsequent to Macbeth, though in Antony and Cleopatra, probably the earliest of them, its development is not yet complete. And we must add that this style has certain special defects, unmentioned by Coleridge, as well as the quality which he points out in it. But it is true that here that quality is almost continuously present; and in the phrase by which he describes it, as in his other phrases, he has signalised once for all some of the most salient features of the drama.

It is curious to notice, for example, alike in books and in conversation, how often the first epithets used in reference to Antony and Cleopatra are ‘wonderful’ and ‘astonishing.’ And the main source of the feeling thus expressed seems to be the ‘angelic strength’ or ‘fiery force’ of which Coleridge wrote. The first of these two phrases is, I think, the more entirely happy. Except perhaps towards the close, one is not so conscious of fiery force as in certain other tragedies; but one is astonished at the apparent ease with which extraordinary effects are produced, the ease, if I may paraphrase Coleridge, of an angel moving with a wave of the hand that heavy matter which men find so intractable. We feel this sovereign ease in contemplating Shakespeare’s picture of the world—a vast canvas, crowded with figures, glowing with colour and a superb animation, reminding one spectator of Paul Veronese and another of Rubens. We feel it again when we observe (as we can even without consulting Plutarch) the nature of the material; how bulky it was, and, in some respects, how undramatic; and how the artist, though he could not treat history like legend or fiction, seems to push whole masses aside, and to shift and refashion the remainder, almost with the air of an architect playing (at times rather carelessly) with a child’s bricks.

Something similar is felt even in the portrait of Cleopatra. Marvellous as it is, the drawing of it suggests not so much the passionate concentration or fiery force of Macbeth, as that sense of effortless and exultant mastery which we feel in the portraits of Mercutio and Falstaff. And surely it is a total mistake to find in this portrait any trace of the distempered mood which disturbs our pleasure in Troilus and Cressida. If the sonnets about the dark lady were, as need not be doubted, in some degree autobiographical, Shakespeare may well have used his personal experience both when he drew Cressida and when he drew Cleopatra. And, if he did, the story in the later play was the nearer to his own; for Antony might well have said what Troilus could never say,

But in the later play, not only is the poet’s vision unclouded, but his whole nature, emotional as well as intellectual, is free. The subject no more embitters or seduces him than the ambition of Macbeth. So that here too we feel the angelic strength of which Coleridge speaks. If we quarrelled with the phrase at all, it would be because we fancied we could trace in Shakespeare’s attitude something of the irony of superiority; and this may not altogether suit our conception of an angel.

I have still another sentence to quote from Coleridge: ‘The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether the “Antony and Cleopatra” is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of “Macbeth,” “Lear,” “Hamlet,” and “Othello.”’ Now, unless the clause here about the ‘giant power’ may be taken to restrict the rivalry to the quality of angelic strength, Coleridge’s doubt seems to show a lapse in critical judgment. To regard this tragedy as a rival of the famous four, whether on the stage or in the study, is surely an error. The world certainly has not so regarded it; and, though the world’s reasons for its verdicts on works of art may be worth little, its mere verdict is worth much. Here, it seems to me, that verdict must be accepted. One may notice that, in calling Antony and Cleopatra wonderful or astonishing, we appear to be thinking first of the artist and his activity, while in the case of the four famous tragedies it is the product of this activity, the thing presented, that first engrosses us. I know that I am stating this difference too sharply, but I believe that it is often felt; and, if this is so, the fact is significant. It implies that, although Antony and Cleopatra may be for us as wonderful an achievement as the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, it has not an equal value. Besides, in the attempt to rank it with them there is involved something more, and more important, than an error in valuation. There is a failure to discriminate the peculiar marks of Antony and Cleopatra itself, marks which, whether or no it be the equal of the earlier tragedies, make it decidedly different. If I speak first of some of these differences it is because they thus contribute to the individuality of the play, and because they seem often not to be distinctly apprehended in criticism.

1.

Why, let us begin by asking, is Antony and Cleopatra, though so wonderful an achievement, a play rarely acted? For a tragedy, it is not painful. Though unfit for children, it cannot be called indecent; some slight omissions, and such a flattening of the heroine’s part as might confidently be expected, would leave it perfectly presentable. It is, no doubt, in the third and fourth Acts, very defective in construction. Even on the Elizabethan stage, where scene followed scene without a pause, this must have been felt; and in our theatres it would be felt much more. There, in fact, these two and forty scenes could not possibly be acted as they stand. But defective construction would not distress the bulk of an audience, if the matter presented were that of Hamlet or Othello, of Lear or Macbeth. The matter, then, must lack something which is present in those tragedies; and it is mainly owing to this difference in substance that Antony and Cleopatra has never attained their popularity either on the stage or off it.

Most of Shakespeare’s tragedies are dramatic, in a special sense of the word as well as in its general sense, from beginning to end. The story is not merely exciting and impressive from the movement of conflicting forces towards a terrible issue, but from time to time there come situations and events which, even apart from their bearing on this issue, appeal most powerfully to the dramatic feelings—scenes of action or passion which agitate the audience with alarm, horror, painful expectation, or absorbing sympathies and antipathies. Think of the street fights in Romeo and Juliet, the killing of Mercutio and Tybalt, the rapture of the lovers, and their despair when Romeo is banished. Think of the ghost-scenes in the first Act of Hamlet, the passion of the early soliloquies, the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, the play-scene, the sparing of the King at prayer, the killing of Polonius. Is not Hamlet, if you choose so to regard it, the best melodrama in the world? Think at your leisure of Othello, Lear, and Macbeth from the same point of view; but consider here and now even the two tragedies which, as dealing with Roman history, are companions of Antony and Cleopatra. Recall in Julius CÆsar the first suggestion of the murder, the preparation for it in a ‘tempest dropping fire,’ the murder itself, the speech of Antony over the corpse, and the tumult of the furious crowd; in Coriolanus the bloody battles on the stage, the scene in which the hero attains the consulship, the scene of rage in which he is banished. And remember that in each of these seven tragedies the matter referred to is contained in the first three Acts.

In the first three Acts of our play what is there resembling this? Almost nothing. People converse, discuss, accuse one another, excuse themselves, mock, describe, drink together, arrange a marriage, meet and part; but they do not kill, do not even tremble or weep. We see hardly one violent movement; until the battle of Actium is over we witness scarcely any vehement passion; and that battle, as it is a naval action, we do not see. Even later, Enobarbus, when he dies, simply dies; he does not kill himself.2 We hear wonderful talk; but it is not talk, like that of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, or that of Othello and Iago, at which we hold our breath. The scenes that we remember first are those that portray Cleopatra; Cleopatra coquetting, tormenting, beguiling her lover to stay; Cleopatra left with her women and longing for him; Cleopatra receiving the news of his marriage; Cleopatra questioning the messenger about Octavia’s personal appearance. But this is to say that the scenes we remember first are the least indispensable to the plot. One at least is not essential to it at all. And this, the astonishing scene where she storms at the messenger, strikes him, and draws her dagger on him, is the one passage in the first half of the drama that contains either an explosion of passion or an exciting bodily action. Nor is this all. The first half of the play, though it forebodes tragedy, is not decisively tragic in tone. Certainly the Cleopatra scenes are not so. We read them, and we should witness them, in delighted wonder and even with amusement. The only scene that can vie with them, that of the revel on Pompey’s ship, though full of menace, is in great part humorous. Enobarbus, in this part of the play, is always humorous. Even later, when the tragic tone is deepening, the whipping of Thyreus, in spite of Antony’s rage, moves mirth. A play of which all this can truly be said may well be as masterly as Othello or Macbeth, and more delightful; but, in the greater part of its course, it cannot possibly excite the same emotions. It makes no attempt to do so; and to regard it as though it made this attempt is to miss its specific character and the intention of its author.

That character depends only in part on Shakespeare’s fidelity to his historical authority, a fidelity which, I may remark, is often greatly exaggerated. For Shakespeare did not merely present the story of ten years as though it occupied perhaps one fifth of that time, nor did he merely invent freely, but in critical places he effected startling changes in the order and combination of events. Still it may be said that, dealing with a history so famous, he could not well make the first half of his play very exciting, moving, or tragic. And this is true so far as mere situations and events are concerned. But, if he had chosen, he might easily have heightened the tone and tension in another way. He might have made the story of Antony’s attempt to break his bondage, and the story of his relapse, extremely exciting, by portraying with all his force the severity of the struggle and the magnitude of the fatal step.

And the structure of the play might seem at first to suggest this intention. At the opening, Antony is shown almost in the beginning of his infatuation; for Cleopatra is not sure of her power over him, exerts all her fascination to detain him, and plays the part of the innocent victim who has yielded to passion and must now expect to be deserted by her seducer. Alarmed and ashamed at the news of the results of his inaction, he rouses himself, tears himself away, and speeds to Italy. His very coming is enough to frighten Pompey into peace. He reconciles himself with Octavius, and, by his marriage with the good and beautiful Octavia, seems to have knit a bond of lasting amity with her brother, and to have guarded himself against the passion that threatened him with ruin. At this point his power, the world’s peace, and his own peace, appear to be secured; his fortune has mounted to its apex. But soon (very much sooner than in Plutarch’s story) comes the downward turn or counter-stroke. New causes of offence arise between the brothers-in-law. To remove them Octavia leaves her husband in Athens and hurries to Rome. Immediately Antony returns to Cleopatra and, surrendering himself at once and wholly to her enchantment is quickly driven to his doom.

Now Shakespeare, I say, with his matchless power of depicting an inward struggle, might have made this story, even where it could not furnish him with thrilling incidents, the source of powerful tragic emotions; and, in doing so, he would have departed from his authority merely in his conception of the hero’s character. But he does no such thing till the catastrophe is near. Antony breaks away from Cleopatra without any strenuous conflict. No serious doubt of his return is permitted to agitate us. We are almost assured of it through the impression made on us by Octavius, through occasional glimpses into Antony’s mind, through the absence of any doubt in Enobarbus, through scenes in Alexandria which display Cleopatra and display her irresistible. And, finally, the downward turn itself, the fatal step of Antony’s return, is shown without the slightest emphasis. Nay, it is not shown, it is only reported; and not a line portrays any inward struggle preceding it. On this side also, then, the drama makes no attempt to rival the other tragedies; and it was essential to its own peculiar character and its most transcendent effects that this attempt should not be made, but that Antony’s passion should be represented as a force which he could hardly even desire to resist. By the very scheme of the work, therefore, tragic impressions of any great volume or depth were reserved for the last stage of the conflict; while the main interest, down to the battle of Actium, was directed to matters exceedingly interesting and even, in the wider sense, dramatic, but not overtly either terrible or piteous: on the one hand, to the political aspect of the story; on the other, to the personal causes which helped to make the issue inevitable.

2.

The political situation and its development are simple. The story is taken up almost where it was left, years before, in Julius CÆsar. There Brutus and Cassius, to prevent the rule of one man, assassinate CÆsar. Their purpose is condemned to failure, not merely because they make mistakes, but because that political necessity which Napoleon identified with destiny requires the rule of one man. They spill CÆsar’s blood, but his spirit walks abroad and turns their swords against their own breasts; and the world is left divided among three men, his friends and his heir. Here Antony and Cleopatra takes up the tale; and its business, from this point of view, is to show the reduction of these three to one. That Lepidus will not be this one was clear already in Julius CÆsar; it must be Octavius or Antony. Both ambitious, they are also men of such opposite tempers that they would scarcely long agree even if they wished to, and even if destiny were not stronger than they. As it is, one of them has fixed his eyes on the end, sacrifices everything for it, uses everything as a means to it. The other, though far the greater soldier and worshipped by his followers, has no such singleness of aim; nor yet is power, however desirable to him, the most desirable thing in the world. At the beginning he is risking it for love; at the end he has lost his half of the world, and lost his life, and Octavius rules alone. Whether Shakespeare had this clearly in his mind is a question neither answerable nor important; this is what came out of his mind.

Shakespeare, I think, took little interest in the character of Octavius, and he has not made it wholly clear. It is not distinct in Plutarch’s ‘Life of Antony’; and I have not found traces that the poet studied closely the ‘Life of Octavius’ included in North’s volume. To Shakespeare he is one of those men, like Bolingbroke and Ulysses, who have plenty of ‘judgment’ and not much ‘blood.’ Victory in the world, according to the poet, almost always goes to such men; and he makes us respect, fear, and dislike them. His Octavius is very formidable. His cold determination half paralyses Antony; it is so even in Julius CÆsar. In Antony and Cleopatra Octavius is more than once in the wrong; but he never admits it; he silently pushes his rival a step backward; and, when he ceases to fear, he shows contempt. He neither enjoys war nor is great in it; at first, therefore, he is anxious about the power of Pompey, and stands in need of Antony. As soon as Antony’s presence has served his turn, and he has patched up a union with him and seen him safely off to Athens, he destroys first Pompey and next Lepidus. Then, dexterously using Antony’s faithlessness to Octavia and excesses in the East in order to put himself in the right, he makes for his victim with admirable celerity while he is still drunk with the joy of reunion with Cleopatra. For his ends Octavius is perfectly efficient, but he is so partly from his limitations. One phrase of his is exceedingly characteristic. When Antony in rage and desperation challenges him to single combat, Octavius calls him ‘the old ruffian.’ There is a horrid aptness in the phrase, but it disgusts us. It is shameful in this boy, as hard and smooth as polished steel, to feel at such a time nothing of the greatness of his victim and the tragedy of his victim’s fall. Though the challenge of Antony is absurd, we would give much to see them sword to sword. And when Cleopatra by her death cheats the conqueror of his prize, we feel unmixed delight.

The doubtful point in the character is this. Plutarch says that Octavius was reported to love his sister dearly; and Shakespeare’s Octavius several times expresses such love. When, then, he proposed the marriage with Antony (for of course it was he who spoke through Agrippa), was he honest, or was he laying a trap and, in doing so, sacrificing his sister? Did he hope the marriage would really unite him with his brother-in-law; or did he merely mean it to be a source of future differences; or did he calculate that, whether it secured peace or dissension, it would in either case bring him great advantage? Shakespeare, who was quite as intelligent as his readers, must have asked himself some such question; but he may not have cared to answer it even to himself; and, in any case, he has left the actor (at least the actor in days later than his own) to choose an answer. If I were forced to choose, I should take the view that Octavius was, at any rate, not wholly honest; partly because I think it best suits Shakespeare’s usual way of conceiving a character of the kind; partly because Plutarch construed in this manner Octavius’s behaviour in regard to his sister at a later time, and this hint might naturally influence the poet’s way of imagining his earlier action.3

Though the character of Octavius is neither attractive nor wholly clear, his figure is invested with a certain tragic dignity, because he is felt to be the Man of Destiny, the agent of forces against which the intentions of an individual would avail nothing. He is represented as having himself some feeling of this sort. His lament over Antony, his grief that their stars were irreconcilable, may well be genuine, though we should be surer if it were uttered in soliloquy. His austere words to Octavia again probably speak his true mind:

In any case the feeling of fate comes through to us. It is aided by slight touches of supernatural effect; first in the Soothsayer’s warning to Antony that his genius or angel is overpowered whenever he is near Octavius; then in the strangely effective scene where Antony’s soldiers, in the night before his last battle, hear music in the air or under the earth:

And to the influence of this feeling in giving impressiveness to the story is added that of the immense scale and world-wide issue of the conflict. Even the distances traversed by fleets and armies enhance this effect.

And yet there seems to be something half-hearted in Shakespeare’s appeal here, something even ironical in his presentation of this conflict. Its external magnitude, like Antony’s magnificence in lavishing realms and gathering the kings of the East in his support, fails to uplift or dilate the imagination. The struggle in Lear’s little island seems to us to have an infinitely wider scope. It is here that we are sometimes reminded of Troilus and Cressida, and the cold and disenchanting light that is there cast on the Trojan War. The spectacle which he portrays leaves Shakespeare quite undazzled; he even makes it appear inwardly small. The lordship of the world, we ask ourselves, what is it worth, and in what spirit do these ‘world-sharers’ contend for it? They are no champions of their country like Henry V. The conqueror knows not even the glory of battle. Their aims, for all we see, are as personal as if they were captains of banditti; and they are followed merely from self-interest or private attachment. The scene on Pompey’s galley is full of this irony. One ‘third part of the world’ is carried drunk to bed. In the midst of this mock boon-companionship the pirate whispers to his leader to cut first the cable of his ship and then the throats of the two other Emperors; and at the moment we should not greatly care if Pompey took the advice. Later, a short scene, totally useless to the plot and purely satiric in its purport, is slipped in to show how Ventidius fears to pursue his Parthian conquests because it is not safe for Antony’s lieutenant to outdo his master.4 A painful sense of hollowness oppresses us. We know too well what must happen in a world so splendid, so false, and so petty. We turn for relief from the political game to those who are sure to lose it; to those who love some human being better than a prize, to Eros and Charmian and Iras; to Enobarbus, whom the world corrupts, but who has a heart that can break with shame; to the lovers, who seem to us to find in death something better than their victor’s life.

This presentation of the outward conflict has two results. First, it blunts our feeling of the greatness of Antony’s fall from prosperity. Indeed this feeling, which we might expect to be unusually acute, is hardly so; it is less acute, for example, than the like feeling in the case of Richard II., who loses so much smaller a realm. Our deeper sympathies are focussed rather on Antony’s heart, on the inward fall to which the enchantment of passion leads him, and the inward recovery which succeeds it. And the second result is this. The greatness of Antony and Cleopatra in their fall is so much heightened by contrast with the world they lose and the conqueror who wins it, that the positive element in the final tragic impression, the element of reconciliation, is strongly emphasised. The peculiar effect of the drama depends partly, as we have seen, on the absence of decidedly tragic scenes and events in its first half; but it depends quite as much on this emphasis. In any Shakespearean tragedy we watch some elect spirit colliding, partly through its error and defect, with a superhuman power which bears it down; and yet we feel that this spirit, even in the error and defect, rises by its greatness into ideal union with the power that overwhelms it. In some tragedies this latter feeling is relatively weak. In Antony and Cleopatra it is unusually strong; stronger, with some readers at least, than the fear and grief and pity with which they contemplate the tragic error and the advance of doom.

3.

The two aspects of the tragedy are presented together in the opening scene. Here is the first. In Cleopatra’s palace one friend of Antony is describing to another, just arrived from Rome, the dotage of their great general; and, as the lovers enter, he exclaims:

With the next words the other aspect appears:

And directly after, when he is provoked by reminders of the news from Rome:

Here is the tragic excess, but with it the tragic greatness, the capacity of finding in something the infinite, and of pursuing it into the jaws of death.

The two aspects are shown here with the exaggeration proper in dramatic characters. Neither the phrase ‘a strumpet’s fool,’ nor the assertion ‘the nobleness of life is to do thus,’ answers to the total effect of the play. But the truths they exaggerate are equally essential; and the commoner mistake in criticism is to understate the second. It is plain that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is destructive; that in some way it clashes with the nature of things; that, while they are sitting in their paradise like gods, its walls move inward and crush them at last to death. This is no invention of moralising critics; it is in the play; and any one familiar with Shakespeare would expect beforehand to find it there. But then to forget because of it the other side, to deny the name of love to this ruinous passion, to speak as though the lovers had utterly missed the good of life, is to mutilate the tragedy and to ignore a great part of its effect upon us. For we sympathise with them in their passion; we feel in it the infinity there is in man; even while we acquiesce in their defeat we are exulting in their victory; and when they have vanished we say,

Though we hear nothing from Shakespeare of the cruelty of Plutarch’s Antony, or of the misery caused by his boundless profusion, we do not feel the hero of the tragedy to be a man of the noblest type, like Brutus, Hamlet, or Othello. He seeks power merely for himself, and uses it for his own pleasure. He is in some respects unscrupulous; and, while it would be unjust to regard his marriage exactly as if it were one in private life, we resent his treatment of Octavia, whose character Shakespeare was obliged to leave a mere sketch, lest our feeling for the hero and heroine should be too much chilled. Yet, for all this, we sympathise warmly with Antony, are greatly drawn to him, and are inclined to regard him as a noble nature half spoiled by his time.

It is a large, open, generous, expansive nature, quite free from envy, capable of great magnanimity, even of entire devotion. Antony is unreserved, naturally straightforward, we may almost say simple. He can admit faults, accept advice and even reproof, take a jest against himself with good-humour. He is courteous (to Lepidus, for example, whom Octavius treats with cold contempt); and, though he can be exceedingly dignified, he seems to prefer a blunt though sympathetic plainness, which is one cause of the attachment of his soldiers. He has none of the faults of the brooder, the sentimentalist, or the man of principle; his nature tends to splendid action and lusty enjoyment. But he is neither a mere soldier nor a mere sensualist. He has imagination, the temper of an artist who revels in abundant and rejoicing appetites, feasts his senses on the glow and richness of life, flings himself into its mirth and revelry, yet feels the poetry in all this, and is able also to put it by and be more than content with the hardships of adventure. Such a man could never have sought a crown by a murder like Macbeth’s, or, like Brutus, have killed on principle the man who loved him, or have lost the world for a Cressida.

Beside this strain of poetry he has a keen intellect, a swift perception of the lie of things, and much quickness in shaping a course to suit them. In Julius CÆsar he shows this after the assassination, when he appears as a dexterous politician as well as a warm-hearted friend. He admires what is fine, and can fully appreciate the nobility of Brutus; but he is sure that Brutus’s ideas are moonshine, that (as he says in our play) Brutus is mad; and, since his mighty friend, who was incomparably the finest thing in the world, has perished, he sees no reason why the inheritance should not be his own. Full of sorrow, he yet uses his sorrow like an artist to work on others, and greets his success with the glee of a successful adventurer. In the earlier play he proves himself a master of eloquence, and especially of pathos; and he does so again in the later. With a few words about his fall he draws tears from his followers and even from the caustic humorist Enobarbus. Like Richard II., he sees his own fall with the eyes of a poet, but a poet much greater than the young Shakespeare, who could never have written Antony’s marvellous speech about the sunset clouds. But we listen to Antony, as we do not to Richard, with entire sympathy, partly because he is never unmanly, partly because he himself is sympathetic and longs for sympathy.

The first of living soldiers, an able politician, a most persuasive orator, Antony nevertheless was not born to rule the world. He enjoys being a great man, but he has not the love of rule for rule’s sake. Power for him is chiefly a means to pleasure. The pleasure he wants is so huge that he needs a huge power; but half the world, even a third of it, would suffice. He will not pocket wrongs, but he shows not the slightest wish to get rid of his fellow Triumvirs and reign alone. He never minded being subordinate to Julius CÆsar. By women he is not only attracted but governed; from the effect of Cleopatra’s taunts we can see that he had been governed by Fulvia. Nor has he either the patience or the steadfastness of a born ruler. He contends fitfully, and is prone to take the step that is easiest at the moment. This is the reason why he consents to marry Octavia. It seems the shortest way out of an awkward situation. He does not intend even to try to be true to her. He will not think of the distant consequences.

A man who loved power as much as thousands of insignificant people love it, would have made a sterner struggle than Antony’s against his enchantment. He can hardly be said to struggle at all. He brings himself to leave Cleopatra only because he knows he will return. In every moment of his absence, whether he wake or sleep, a siren music in his blood is singing him back to her; and to this music, however he may be occupied, the soul within his soul leans and listens. The joy of life had always culminated for him in the love of women: he could say ‘no’ to none of them: of Octavia herself he speaks like a poet. When he meets Cleopatra he finds his Absolute. She satisfies, nay glorifies, his whole being. She intoxicates his senses. Her wiles, her taunts, her furies and meltings, her laughter and tears, bewitch him all alike. She loves what he loves, and she surpasses him. She can drink him to his bed, out-jest his practical jokes, out-act the best actress who ever amused him, out-dazzle his own magnificence. She is his play-fellow, and yet a great queen. Angling in the river, playing billiards, flourishing the sword he used at Philippi, hopping forty paces in a public street, she remains an enchantress. Her spirit is made of wind and flame, and the poet in him worships her no less than the man. He is under no illusion about her, knows all her faults, sees through her wiles, believes her capable of betraying him. It makes no difference. She is his heart’s desire made perfect. To love her is what he was born for. What have the gods in heaven to say against it? To imagine heaven is to imagine her; to die is to rejoin her. To deny that this is love is the madness of morality. He gives her every atom of his heart.

She destroys him. Shakespeare, availing himself of the historic fact, portrays, on Antony’s return to her, the suddenness and the depth of his descent. In spite of his own knowledge, the protests of his captains, the entreaties even of a private soldier, he fights by sea simply and solely because she wishes it. Then in mid-battle, when she flies, he deserts navy and army and his faithful thousands and follows her. ‘I never saw an action of such shame,’ cries Scarus; and we feel the dishonour of the hero keenly. Then Shakespeare begins to raise him again. First, his own overwhelming sense of shame redeems him. Next, we watch the rage of the dying lion. Then the mere sally before the final defeat—a sally dismissed by Plutarch in three lines—is magnified into a battle, in which Antony displays to us, and himself feels for the last time, the glory of his soldiership. And, throughout, the magnanimity and gentleness which shine through his desperation endear him to us. How beautiful is his affection for his followers and even for his servants, and the devotion they return! How noble his reception of the news that Enobarbus has deserted him! How touchingly significant the refusal of Eros either to kill him or survive him! How pathetic and even sublime the completeness of his love for Cleopatra! His anger is born and dies in an hour. One tear, one kiss, outweighs his ruin. He believes she has sold him to his enemy, yet he kills himself because he hears that she is dead. When, dying, he learns that she has deceived him once more, no thought of reproach crosses his mind: he simply asks to be carried to her. He knows well that she is not capable of dying because he dies, but that does not sting him; when, in his last agony, he calls for wine that he may gain a moment’s strength to speak, it is to advise her for the days to come. Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch the final speech of Antony. It is fine, but it is not miraculous. The miraculous speeches belong only to his own hero:

or the first words he utters when he hears of Cleopatra’s death:

If he meant the task of statesman and warrior, that is not what his words mean to us. They remind us of words more familiar and less great—

And he is more than love’s pilgrim; he is love’s martyr.

4.

To reserve a fragment of an hour for Cleopatra, if it were not palpably absurd, would seem an insult. If only one could hear her own remarks upon it! But I had to choose between this absurdity and the plan of giving her the whole hour; and to that plan there was one fatal objection. She has been described (by Ten Brink) as a courtesan of genius. So brief a description must needs be incomplete, and Cleopatra never forgets, nor, if we read aright, do we forget, that she is a great queen. Still the phrase is excellent; only a public lecture is no occasion for the full analysis and illustration of the character it describes.

Shakespeare has paid Cleopatra a unique compliment. The hero dies in the fourth Act, and the whole of the fifth is devoted to the heroine.5 In that Act she becomes unquestionably a tragic character, but, it appears to me, not till then. This, no doubt, is a heresy; but as I cannot help holding it, and as it is connected with the remarks already made on the first half of the play, I will state it more fully. Cleopatra stands in a group with Hamlet and Falstaff. We might join with them Iago if he were not decidedly their inferior in one particular quality. They are inexhaustible. You feel that, if they were alive and you spent your whole life with them, their infinite variety could never be staled by custom; they would continue every day to surprise, perplex, and delight you. Shakespeare has bestowed on each of them, though they differ so much, his own originality, his genius. He has given it most fully to Hamlet, to whom none of the chambers of experience is shut, and perhaps more of it to Cleopatra than to Falstaff. Nevertheless, if we ask whether Cleopatra, in the first four Acts, is a tragic figure like Hamlet, we surely cannot answer ‘yes.’ Naturally it does not follow that she is a comic figure like Falstaff. This would be absurd; for, even if she were ridiculous like Falstaff, she is not ridiculous to herself; she is no humorist. And yet there is a certain likeness. She shares a weakness with Falstaff—vanity; and when she displays it, as she does quite naively (for instance, in the second interview with the Messenger), she does become comic. Again, though like Falstaff she is irresistible and carries us away no less than the people around her, we are secretly aware, in the midst of our delight, that her empire is built on sand. And finally, as his love for the Prince gives dignity and pathos to Falstaff in his overthrow, so what raises Cleopatra at last into pure tragedy is, in part, that which some critics have denied her, her love for Antony.

Many unpleasant things can be said of Cleopatra; and the more that are said the more wonderful she appears. The exercise of sexual attraction is the element of her life; and she has developed nature into a consummate art. When she cannot exert it on the present lover she imagines its effects on him in absence. Longing for the living, she remembers with pride and joy the dead; and the past which the furious Antony holds up to her as a picture of shame is, for her, glory. She cannot see an ambassador, scarcely even a messenger, without desiring to bewitch him. Her mind is saturated with this element. If she is dark, it is because the sun himself has been amorous of her. Even when death is close at hand she imagines his touch as a lover’s. She embraces him that she may overtake Iras and gain Antony’s first kiss in the other world.

She lives for feeling. Her feelings are, so to speak, sacred, and pain must not come near her. She has tried numberless experiments to discover the easiest way to die. Her body is exquisitely sensitive, and her emotions marvellously swift. They are really so; but she exaggerates them so much, and exhibits them so continually for effect, that some readers fancy them merely feigned. They are all-important, and everybody must attend to them. She announces to her women that she is pale, or sick and sullen; they must lead her to her chamber but must not speak to her. She is as strong and supple as a leopard, can drink down a master of revelry, can raise her lover’s helpless heavy body from the ground into her tower with the aid only of two women; yet, when he is sitting apart sunk in shame, she must be supported into his presence, she cannot stand, her head droops, she will die (it is the opinion of Eros) unless he comforts her. When she hears of his marriage and has discharged her rage, she bids her women bear her away; she faints; at least she would faint, but that she remembers various questions she wants put to the Messenger about Octavia. Enobarbus has seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment than the news that Antony is going to Rome.

Some of her feelings are violent, and, unless for a purpose, she does not dream of restraining them; her sighs and tears are winds and waters, storms and tempests. At times, as when she threatens to give Charmian bloody teeth, or hales the luckless Messenger up and down by the hair, strikes him and draws her knife on him, she resembles (if I dare say it) Doll Tearsheet sublimated. She is a mother; but the threat of Octavius to destroy her children if she takes her own life passes by her like the wind (a point where Shakespeare contradicts Plutarch). She ruins a great man, but shows no sense of the tragedy of his ruin. The anguish of spirit that appears in his language to his servants is beyond her; she has to ask Enobarbus what he means. Can we feel sure that she would not have sacrificed him if she could have saved herself by doing so? It is not even certain that she did not attempt it. Antony himself believes that she did—that the fleet went over to Octavius by her orders. That she and her people deny the charge proves nothing. The best we can say is that, if it were true, Shakespeare would have made that clear. She is willing also to survive her lover. Her first thought, to follow him after the high Roman fashion, is too great for her. She would live on if she could, and would cheat her victor too of the best part of her fortune. The thing that drives her to die is the certainty that she will be carried to Rome to grace his triumph. That alone decides her.6

The marvellous thing is that the knowledge of all this makes hardly more difference to us than it did to Antony. It seems to us perfectly natural, nay, in a sense perfectly right, that her lover should be her slave; that her women should adore her and die with her; that Enobarbus, who foresaw what must happen, and who opposes her wishes and braves her anger, should talk of her with rapture and feel no bitterness against her; that Dolabella, after a minute’s conversation, should betray to her his master’s intention and enable her to frustrate it. And when Octavius shows himself proof against her fascination, instead of admiring him we turn from him with disgust and think him a disgrace to his species. Why? It is not that we consider him bound to fall in love with her. Enobarbus did not; Dolabella did not; we ourselves do not. The feeling she inspires was felt then, and is felt now, by women no less than men, and would have been shared by Octavia herself. Doubtless she wrought magic on the senses, but she had not extraordinary beauty, like Helen’s, such beauty as seems divine.7 Plutarch says so. The man who wrote the sonnets to the dark lady would have known it for himself. He goes out of his way to add to her age, and tells us of her wrinkles and the waning of her lip. But Enobarbus, in his very mockery, calls her a wonderful piece of work. Dolabella interrupts her with the cry, ‘Most sovereign creature,’ and we echo it. And yet Octavius, face to face with her and listening to her voice, can think only how best to trap her and drag her to public dishonour in the streets of Rome. We forgive him only for his words when he sees her dead:

And the words, I confess, sound to me more like Shakespeare’s than his.

That which makes her wonderful and sovereign laughs at definition, but she herself came nearest naming it when, in the final speech (a passage surpassed in poetry, if at all, only by the final speech of Othello), she cries,

The fire and air which at death break from union with those other elements, transfigured them during her life, and still convert into engines of enchantment the very things for which she is condemned. I can refer only to one. She loves Antony. We should marvel at her less and love her more if she loved him more—loved him well enough to follow him at once to death; but it is to blunder strangely to doubt that she loved him, or that her glorious description of him (though it was also meant to work on Dolabella) came from her heart. Only the spirit of fire and air within her refuses to be trammelled or extinguished; burns its way through the obstacles of fortune and even through the resistance of her love and grief; and would lead her undaunted to fresh life and the conquest of new worlds. It is this which makes her ‘strong toil of grace’ unbreakable; speaks in her brows’ bent and every tone and movement; glorifies the arts and the rages which in another would merely disgust or amuse us; and, in the final scenes of her life, flames into such brilliance that we watch her entranced as she struggles for freedom, and thrilled with triumph as, conquered, she puts her conqueror to scorn and goes to meet her lover in the splendour that crowned and robed her long ago, when her barge burnt on the water like a burnished throne, and she floated to Cydnus on the enamoured stream to take him captive for ever.8

Why is it that, although we close the book in a triumph which is more than reconciliation, this is mingled, as we look back on the story, with a sadness so peculiar, almost the sadness of disenchantment? Is it that, when the glow has faded, Cleopatra’s ecstasy comes to appear, I would not say factitious, but an effort strained and prodigious as well as glorious, not, like Othello’s last speech, the final expression of character, of thoughts and emotions which have dominated a whole life? Perhaps this is so, but there is something more, something that sounds paradoxical: we are saddened by the very fact that the catastrophe saddens us so little; it pains us that we should feel so much triumph and pleasure. In Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, though in a sense we accept the deaths of hero and heroine, we feel a keen sorrow. We look back, think how noble or beautiful they were, wish that fate had opposed to them a weaker enemy, dream possibly of the life they might then have led. Here we can hardly do this. With all our admiration and sympathy for the lovers we do not wish them to gain the world. It is better for the world’s sake, and not less for their own, that they should fail and die. At the very first they came before us, unlike those others, unlike Coriolanus and even Macbeth, in a glory already tarnished, half-ruined by their past. Indeed one source of strange and most unusual effect in their story is that this marvellous passion comes to adepts in the experience and art of passion, who might be expected to have worn its charm away. Its splendour dazzles us; but, when the splendour vanishes, we do not mourn, as we mourn for the love of Romeo or Othello, that a thing so bright and good should die. And the fact that we mourn so little saddens us.

A comparison of Shakespearean tragedies seems to prove that the tragic emotions are stirred in the fullest possible measure only when such beauty or nobility of character is displayed as commands unreserved admiration or love; or when, in default of this, the forces which move the agents, and the conflict which results from these forces, attain a terrifying and overwhelming power. The four most famous tragedies satisfy one or both of these conditions; Antony and Cleopatra, though a great tragedy, satisfies neither of them completely. But to say this is not to criticise it. It does not attempt to satisfy these conditions, and then fail in the attempt. It attempts something different, and succeeds as triumphantly as Othello itself. In doing so it gives us what no other tragedy can give, and it leaves us, no less than any other, lost in astonishment at the powers which created it.

1905

NOTE A

We are to understand, surely, that Enobarbus dies of ‘thought’ (melancholy or grief), and has no need to seek a ‘swifter mean.’ Cf. IV. vi. 34 seq., with the death-scene and his address there to the moon as the ‘sovereign mistress of true melancholy’ (IV. ix.). Cf. also III. xiii., where, to Cleopatra’s question after Actium, ‘What shall we do, Enobarbus?’ he answers, ‘Think, and die.’

The character of Enobarbus is practically an invention of Shakespeare’s. The death-scene, I may add, is one of the many passages which prove that he often wrote what pleased his imagination but would lose half its effect in the theatre. The darkness and moonlight could not be represented on a public stage in his time.

NOTE B

The scene is the first of the third Act. Here Ventidius says:

Plutarch (North, sec. 19) says that ‘Sossius, one of Antonius’ lieutenants in Syria, did notable good service,’ but I cannot find in him the further statement that Sossius lost Antony’s favour. I presume it is Shakespeare’s invention, but I call attention to it on the bare chance that it may be found elsewhere than in Plutarch, when it would point to Shakespeare’s use of a second authority.

NOTE C

Since this lecture was published (Quarterly Review, April, 1906) two notable editions of Antony and Cleopatra have been produced. Nothing recently written on Shakespeare, I venture to say, shows more thorough scholarship or better judgment than Mr. Case’s edition in the Arden series; and Dr. Furness has added to the immense debt which students of Shakespeare owe to him, and (if that is possible) to the admiration and respect with which they regard him, by the appearance of Antony and Cleopatra in his New Variorum edition.

On one question about Cleopatra both editors, Mr. Case more tentatively and Dr. Furness very decidedly, dissent from the interpretation given in the last pages of my lecture. The question is how we are to understand the fact that, although on Antony’s death Cleopatra expresses her intention of following him, she does not carry out this intention until she has satisfied herself that Octavius means to carry her to Rome to grace his triumph. Though I do not profess to feel certain that my interpretation is right, it still seems to me a good deal the most probable, and therefore I have not altered what I wrote. But my object here is not to defend my view or to criticise other views, but merely to call attention to the discussion of the subject in Mr. Case’s Introduction and Dr. Furness’s Preface.

NOTE D

Shakespeare, it seems clear, imagined Cleopatra as a gipsy. And this, I would suggest, may be the explanation of a word which has caused much difficulty. Antony, when ‘all is lost,’ exclaims (IV. x. 38):

Pope changed ‘grave’ in the first line into ‘gay.’ Others conjecture ‘great’ and ‘grand.’ Steevens says that ‘grave’ means ‘deadly,’ and that the word ‘is often used by Chapman’ thus; and one of his two quotations supports his statement; but certainly in Shakespeare the word does not elsewhere bear this sense. It could mean ‘majestic,’ as Johnson takes it here. But why should it not have its usual meaning? Cleopatra, we know, was a being of ‘infinite variety,’ and her eyes may sometimes have had, like those of some gipsies, a mysterious gravity or solemnity which would exert a spell more potent than her gaiety. Their colour, presumably, was what is called ‘black’; but surely they were not, like those of Tennyson’s Cleopatra, ‘bold black eyes.’ Readers interested in seeing what criticism is capable of may like to know that it has been proposed to read, for the first line of the quotation above, ‘O this false fowl of Egypt! haggard charmer.’ [Though I have not cancelled this note I have modified some phrases in it, as I have not much confidence in my suggestion, and am inclined to think that Steevens was right.]

SHAKESPEARE THE MAN

SHAKESPEARE THE MAN

Such phrases as ‘Shakespeare the man’ or ‘Shakespeare’s personality’ are, no doubt, open to objection. They seem to suggest that, if we could subtract from Shakespeare the mind that produced his works, the residue would be the man himself; and that his mind was some pure impersonal essence unaffected by the accidents of physique, temperament, and character. If this were so, one could but echo Tennyson’s thanksgiving that we know so little of Shakespeare. But as it is assuredly not so, and as ‘Shakespeare the man’ really means the one indivisible Shakespeare, regarded for the time from a particular point of view, the natural desire to know whatever can be known of him is not to be repressed merely because there are people so foolish as to be careless about his works and yet curious about his private life. For my own part I confess that, though I should care nothing about the man if he had not written the works, yet, since we possess them, I would rather see and hear him for five minutes in his proper person than discover a new one. And though we may be content to die without knowing his income or even the surname of Mr. W. H., we cannot so easily resign the wish to find the man in his writings, and to form some idea of the disposition, the likes and dislikes, the character and the attitude towards life, of the human being who seems to us to have understood best our common human nature.

The answer of course will be that our biographical knowledge of Shakespeare is so small, and his writings are so completely dramatic, that this wish, however natural, is idle. But I cannot think so. Doubtless, in trying to form an idea of Shakespeare, we soon reach the limits of reasonable certainty; and it is also true that the idea we can form without exceeding them is far from being as individual as we could desire. But it is more distinct than is often supposed, and it is reasonably certain; and although we can add to its distinctness only by more or less probable conjectures, they are not mere guesses, they really have probability in various degrees. On this whole subject there is a tendency at the present time to an extreme scepticism, which appears to me to be justified neither by the circumstances of the particular case nor by our knowledge of human nature in general.

This scepticism is due in part to the interest excited by Mr. Lee’s discussion of the Sonnets in his Life of Shakespeare, and to the importance rightly attached to that discussion. The Sonnets are lyrical poems of friendship and love. In them the poet ostensibly speaks in his own person and expresses his own feelings. Many critics, no doubt, had denied that he really did so; but they had not Mr. Lee’s knowledge, nor had they examined the matter so narrowly as he; and therefore they had not much weakened the general belief that the Sonnets, however conventional or exaggerated their language may sometimes be, do tell us a good deal about their author. Mr. Lee, however, showed far more fully than any previous writer that many of the themes, many even of the ideas, of these poems are commonplaces of Renaissance sonnet-writing; and he came to the conclusion that in the Sonnets Shakespeare ‘unlocked,’ not ‘his heart,’ but a very different kind of armoury, and that the sole biographical inference deducible from them is that ‘at one time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank.’ Now, if that inference is correct, it certainly tells us something about Shakespeare the man; but it also forbids us to take seriously what the Sonnets profess to tell us of his passionate affection, with its hopes and fears, its pain and joy; of his pride and his humility, his self-reproach and self-defence, his weariness of life and his consciousness of immortal genius. And as, according to Mr. Lee’s statement, the Sonnets alone of Shakespeare’s works ‘can be held to throw any illumination on a personal trait,’ it seems to follow that, so far as the works are concerned (for Mr. Lee is not specially sceptical as to the external testimony), the only idea we can form of the man is contained in that single inference.

Now, I venture to surmise that Mr. Lee’s words go rather beyond his meaning. But that is not our business here, nor could a brief discussion do justice to a theory to which those who disagree with it are still greatly indebted. What I wish to deny is the presupposition which seems to be frequently accepted as an obvious truth. Even if Mr. Lee’s view of the Sonnets were indisputably correct, nay, if even, to go much further, the persons and the story in the Sonnets were as purely fictitious as those of Twelfth Night, they might and would still tell us something of the personality of their author. For however free a poet may be from the emotions which he simulates, and however little involved in the conditions which he imagines, he cannot (unless he is a mere copyist) write a hundred and fifty lyrics expressive of those simulated emotions without disclosing something of himself, something of the way in which he in particular would feel and behave under the imagined conditions. And the same thing holds in principle of the dramas. Is it really conceivable that a man can write some five and thirty dramas, and portray in them an enormous amount and variety of human nature, without betraying anything whatever of his own disposition and preferences? I do not believe that he could do this, even if he deliberately set himself to the task. The only question is how much of himself he would betray.

One is entitled to say this, I think, on general grounds; but we may appeal further to specific experience. Of many poets and novelists we know a good deal from external sources. And in these cases we find that the man so known to us appears also in his works, and that these by themselves would have left on us a personal impression which, though imperfect and perhaps in this or that point even false, would have been broadly true. Of course this holds of some writers much more fully than of others; but, except where the work is very scanty in amount, it seems to hold in some degree of all.1 If so, there is an antecedent probability that it will apply to Shakespeare too. After all, he was human. We may exclaim in our astonishment that he was as universal and impartial as nature herself; but this is the language of religious rapture. If we assume that he was six times as universal as Sir Walter Scott, which is praise enough for a mortal, we may hope to form an idea of him from his plays only six times as dim as the idea of Scott that we should derive from the Waverley Novels.

And this is not all. As a matter of fact, the great majority of Shakespeare’s readers—lovers of poetry untroubled by theories and questions—do form from the plays some idea of the man. Knowingly or not, they possess such an idea; and up to a certain point the idea is the same. Ask such a man whether he thinks Shakespeare was at all like Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Milton, and it will not occur to him to answer ‘I have not the faintest notion’; he will answer unhesitatingly No. Ask him whether he supposes that Shakespeare was at all like Fielding or Scott, and he will probably be found to imagine that, while differing greatly from both, he did belong to the same type or class. And such answers unquestionably imply an idea which, however deficient in detail, is definite.

Again, to go a little further in the same direction, take this fact. After I had put together my notes for the present lecture, I re-read Bagehot’s essay on Shakespeare the Man, and I read a book by Goldwin Smith and an essay by Leslie Stephen (who, I found, had anticipated a good deal that I meant to say).2 These three writers, with all their variety, have still substantially the same idea of Shakespeare; and it is the idea of the competent ‘general reader’ more fully developed. Nor is the value of their agreement in the least diminished by the fact that they make no claim to be Shakespeare scholars. They show themselves much abler than most scholars, and if they lack the scholar’s knowledge they are free from his defects. When they wrote their essays they had not wearied themselves with rival hypotheses, or pored over minutiae until they lost the broad and deep impressions which vivid reading leaves. Ultra-scepticism in this matter does not arise merely or mainly from the humility which every man of sense must feel as he creeps to and fro in Shakespeare’s prodigious mind. It belongs either to the clever faddist who can see nothing straight, or it proceeds from those dangers and infirmities which the expert in any subject knows too well.

The remarks I am going to make can have an interest only for those who share the position I have tried to indicate; who believe that the most dramatic of writers must reveal in his writings something of himself, but who recognise that in Shakespeare’s case we can expect a reasonable certainty only within narrow limits, while beyond them we have to trust to impressions, the value of which must depend on familiarity with his writings, on freedom from prejudice and the desire to reach any particular result, and on the amount of perception we may happen to possess. I offer my own impressions, insecure and utterly unprovable as I know them to be, simply because those of other readers have an interest for me; and I offer them for the most part without argument, because even where argument might be useful it requires more time than a lecture can afford. For the same reason I shall assume, without attempting to define it further, and without dilating on its implications, the truth of that general feeling about Shakespeare and Fielding and Scott.

But, before we come to impressions at all, we must look at the scanty store of external evidence: for we may lay down at once the canon that impressions derived from the works must supplement and not contradict this evidence, so far as it appears trustworthy. It is scanty, but it yields a decided outline.

—so Jonson writes of the portrait in the Folio, and the same adjective ‘gentle’ is used elsewhere of Shakespeare. It had not in Elizabethan English so confined a meaning as it has now; but it meant something, and I do not remember that their contemporaries called Marlowe or Jonson or Marston ‘gentle.’ Next, in the earliest extant reference that we have to Shakespeare, the writer says that he himself has seen his ‘demeanour’ to be ‘civil.’3 It is not saying much; but it is not the first remark an acquaintance would probably have made about Ben Jonson or Samuel Johnson. The same witness adds about Shakespeare that ‘divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty.’ ‘Honesty’ and ‘honest’ in an Elizabethan passage like this mean more than they would now; they answer rather to our ‘honourable’ or ‘honour.’ Lastly we have the witness borne by Jonson in the words: ‘I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature.’ With this notable phrase, to which I shall have to return, we come to an end of the testimony of eye-witnesses to Shakespeare the Man (for we have nothing to do with references to the mere actor or author). It is scanty, and insufficient to discriminate him from other persons who were gentle, civil, upright in their dealings, honourable, open, and free: but I submit that there have been not a few writers to whom all these qualities could not be truly ascribed, and that the testimony therefore does tell us something definite. To which must be added that we have absolutely no evidence which conflicts with it. Whatever Greene in his jealous embitterment might have said would carry little weight, but in fact, apart from general abuse of actors, he only says that the upstart had an over-weening opinion of his own capacities.

There remain certain traditions and certain facts; and without discussing them I will mention what seems to me to have a more or less probable significance. Stratford stories of drinking bouts may go for nothing, but not the consensus of tradition to the effect that Shakespeare was a pleasant and convivial person, ‘very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit.’4 That after his retirement to Stratford he spent at the rate of £1000 a year is incredible, but that he spent freely seems likely enough. The tradition that as a young man he got into trouble with Sir Thomas Lucy for deer-stealing (which would probably be an escapade rather than an essay in serious poaching) is supported by his unsavoury jest about the ‘luces’ in Sir Robert Shallow’s coat. The more general statement that in youth he was wild does not sound improbable; and, obscure as the matter is, I cannot regard as comfortable the little we know of the circumstances of his very early marriage. A contemporary story of an amorous adventure in London may well be pure invention, but we have no reason to reject it peremptorily as we should any similar gossip about Milton. Lastly, certain inferences may safely be drawn from the facts that, once securely started in London, Shakespeare soon began to prosper, and acquired, for an actor and playwright, considerable wealth; that he bought property in his native town, and was consulted sometimes by fellow-townsmen on matters of business; that he enforced the payment of certain debts; and that he took the trouble to get a coat of arms. But what cannot with any logic or any safety be inferred is that he, any more than Scott, was impelled to write simply and solely by the desire to make money and improve his social position; and the comparative abundance of business records will mislead only those who are thoughtless enough to forget that, if they buy a house or sue a debtor, the fact will be handed down, while their kind or generous deeds may be recorded, if at all, only in the statement that they were ‘of an open and free nature.’

That Shakespeare was a good and perhaps keen man of business, or that he set store by a coat of arms, we could not have inferred from his writings. But we could have judged from them that he worked hard, and have guessed with some probability that he would rather have been a ‘gentleman’ than an actor. And most of the other characteristics that appear from the external evidence would, I think, have seemed probable from a study of the works. This should encourage us to hope that we may be right in other impressions which we receive from them. And we may begin with one on which the external evidence has a certain bearing.

Readers of Shakespeare, I believe, imagine him to have been not only sweet-tempered but modest and unassuming. I do not doubt that they are right; and, vague as the Folio portrait and the Stratford bust are, it would be difficult to believe that their subject was an irritable, boastful, or pushing person. But if we confine ourselves to the works, it is not easy to give reasons for the idea that their author was modest and unassuming; and a man is not necessarily so because he is open, free, and very good company. Perhaps we feel that a man who was not so would have allowed much more of himself to appear in his works than Shakespeare does. Perhaps again we think that anything like presumption or self-importance was incompatible with Shakespeare’s sense of the ridiculous, his sublime common-sense, and his feeling of man’s insignificance. And, lastly, it seems to us clear that the playwright admires and likes people who are modest, unassuming, and plain; while it may perhaps safely be said that those who lack these qualities rarely admire them in others and not seldom despise them. But, however we may justify our impression that Shakespeare possessed them, we certainly receive it; and assuming it to be as correct as the similar impression left by the Waverley Novels indubitably is, I go on to observe that the possession of them does not of necessity imply a want of spirit, or of proper self-assertion or insistence on rights.5 It did not in Scott, and we have ground for saying that it did not in Shakespeare. If it had, he could not, being of an open and free nature, have prospered as he prospered. He took offence at Greene’s attack on him, and showed that he took it. He was ‘gentle,’ but he liked his debts to be paid. However his attitude as to the enclosure at Welcombe may be construed, it is clear that he had to be reckoned with. It appears probable that he held himself wronged by Sir Thomas Lucy, and, pocketing up the injury because he could not resent it, gave him tit for tat after some fifteen years. The man in the Sonnets forgives his friend easily, but it is not from humility; and towards the world he is very far from humble. Of the dedication of The Rape of Lucrece we cannot judge, for we do not know Shakespeare’s relations with Lord Southampton at that date; but, as for the dedication of Venus and Adonis, could modesty and dignity be better mingled in a letter from a young poet to a great noble than they are there?

Some of Shakespeare’s writings point to a strain of deep reflection and of quasi-metaphysical imagination in his nature; and a few of them seem to reveal a melancholy, at times merely sad, at times embittered or profound, if never hopeless. It is on this side mainly that we feel a decided difference between him and Fielding, and even between him and Scott. Yet nothing in the contemporary allusions or in the traditions would suggest that he was notably thoughtful or serious, and much less that he was melancholy. And although we could lay no stress on this fact if it stood alone, it is probably significant. Shakespeare’s writings, on the whole, leave a strong impression that his native disposition was much more gay than grave. They seem always to have made this impression. Fuller tells us that ‘though his genius generally was jocular and inclining him to festivity, yet he could, when so disposed, be solemn and serious, as appears by his tragedies.’6 Johnson agreed with Rymer that his ‘natural disposition’ led him to comedy; and, although Johnson after his manner distorts a true idea by wilful exaggeration and by perverting distinctions into antitheses, there is truth in his development of Rymer’s remark. It would be easy to quote nineteenth century critics to the same effect; and the study of Shakespeare’s early works leads to a similar result. It has been truly said that we feel ourselves in much closer contact with his personality in the early comedies and in Romeo and Juliet than in Henry VI. and Richard III. and Titus Andronicus. In the latter, so far as we suppose them to be his own, he seems on the whole to be following, and then improving on, an existing style, and to be dealing with subjects which engage him as a playwright without much appealing to him personally. With Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand, and with Richard II. (which seems clearly to be his first attempt to write historical tragedy in a manner entirely his own), it is different, and we feel the presence of the whole man. The stories are tragic, but it is not precisely the tragic aspect of them that attracts him most; and even Johnson’s statement, grotesquely false of the later tragedies, that ‘in tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be comic,’ is no more than an exaggeration in respect to Romeo and Juliet.7 From these tragedies, as from Love’s Labour’s Lost and the other early comedies, we should guess that the author was a young man, happy, alert, light-hearted, full of romance and poetry, but full also of fun; blessed with a keen enjoyment of absurdities, but, for all his intellectual subtlety and power, not markedly reflective, and certainly not particularly grave or much inclined to dejection. One might even suspect, I venture to think, that with such a flow of spirits and such exceeding alacrity of mind he might at present be a trifle wanting in feeling and disposed to levity. In any case, if our general impression is correct, we shall not find it hard to believe that the author of these plays and the creator of Falstaff was ‘very good company’ and a convivial good-fellow; and it might easily happen that he was tempted at times to ‘go here and there’ in society, and ‘make himself a motley to the view’ in a fashion that left some qualms behind.8

There is a tradition that Shakespeare was ‘a handsome well-shaped man.’ If the Stratford monument does not lie, he was not in later life a meagre man. And if our notion of his temperament has any truth, he can hardly have been physically feeble, bloodless, or inactive. Most readers probably imagine him the reverse. Even sceptical critics tell us that he was fond of field-sports; and of his familiar knowledge of them there can be no question. Yet—I can but record the impression without trying to justify it—his writings do not at all suggest to me that he was a splendidly powerful creature like Fielding, or that he greatly enjoyed bodily exertion, or was not easily tired. He says much of horses, but he does not make one think, as Scott does, that a gallop was a great delight to him. Nor again do I feel after reading him that he had a strong natural love of adventurous deeds, or longed to be an explorer or a soldier. The island of his boyish dreams—if he heard much of voyages as a boy—was, I fancy, the haunt of marmosets and hedgehogs, quaint moon-calves and flitting sprites, lovely colours, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not, less like Treasure Island than the Coral Island of Ballantyne in the original illustrations, and more full of wonders than of dangers. He would have liked the Arabian Nights better than Dumas. Of course he admired men of action, understood them, and could express their feelings; but we do not feel particularly close to his personality as we read the warrior speeches of Hotspur, Henry, Othello, Coriolanus, as we do when we read of Romeo or Hamlet, or when we feel the attraction of Henry’s modesty. In the same way, I suppose nobody feels Shakespeare’s personal presence in the ambition of Macbeth or the pride of Coriolanus; many feel it in Macbeth’s imaginative terrors, and in the disgust of Coriolanus at the idea of recounting his exploits in order to win votes. When we seem to hear Shakespeare’s voice—and we hear it from many mouths besides Romeo’s or Hamlet’s—it is the voice of a man with a happy, enjoying, but still contemplative and even dreamy nature, not of a man richly endowed with the impulses and feelings either of strenuous action or of self-assertion. If he had drawn a Satan, we should not have felt his personality, as we do Milton’s, in Satan’s pride and indomitable courage and intolerance of rule.

We know how often Shakespeare uses the antithesis of blood or passion, and judgment or reason; how he praises the due commingling of the two, or the control of the first by the second; how frequently it is the want of such control that exposes his heroes to the attack of Fortune or Fate. What, then, were the passions or the ‘affections of the blood’ most dangerous to himself? Not, if we have been right, those of pride or ambition; nor yet those of envy, hatred, or revenge; and still less that of avarice. But, in the first place, let us remember Jonson’s words, ‘he was honest and of an open and free nature,’ and let me repeat an observation, made elsewhere in passing, that these words are true also of the great majority of Shakespeare’s heroes, and not least of his tragic heroes. Jonson almost quotes Iago:

The king says that Hamlet,

The words ‘open and free’ apply no less eminently to Brutus, Lear, and Timon. Antony and Coriolanus are men naturally frank, liberal, and large. Prospero lost his dukedom through his trustfulness. Romeo and Troilus and Orlando, and many slighter characters, are so far of the same type. Now such a free and open nature, obviously, is specially exposed to the risks of deception, perfidy, and ingratitude. If it is also a nature sensitive and intense, but not particularly active or (if the word may be excused) volitional, such experiences will tempt it to melancholy, embitterment, anger, possibly even misanthropy. If it is thus active or volitional, it may become the prey of violent and destructive passion, such as that of Othello and of Coriolanus, and such as Lear’s would be if he were not so old. These affections, passions, and sufferings of free and open natures are Shakespeare’s favourite tragic subject; and his favouritism, surely, goes so far as to constitute a decided peculiarity, not found thus in other tragic poets. Here he painted most, one cannot but think, what his own nature was most inclined to feel. But it would rather be melancholy, embitterment, an inactive rage or misanthropy, than any destructive passion; and it would be a further question whether, and how far, he may at any time have experienced what he depicts. I am speaking here only of his disposition.9

That Shakespeare was as much inclined to be a lover as most poets we may perhaps safely assume; but can we conjecture anything further on this subject? I will confine myself to two points. He treats of love romantically, and tragically, and humorously. In the earlier plays especially the humorous aspect of the matter, the aspect so prominent in the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, the changefulness, brevity, irrationality, of the feeling, is at least as much dwelt on as the romantic, and with at least as much relish:

Now, if there is anything peculiar in the pictures here, it is, perhaps, the special interest that Shakespeare seems to take in what we may call the unreality of the feeling of love in an imaginative nature. Romeo as he first appears, and, in a later play, Orsino, are examples of this. They are perfectly sincere, of course, but neither of them is really in love with a woman; each is in love with the state of being in love. This state is able to attach itself to a particular object, but it is not induced by the particular qualities of that object; it is more a dream than a passion, and can melt away without carrying any of the lover’s heart with it; and in that sense it is unreal. This weakness, no doubt, is not confined to imaginative natures, but they may well be specially disposed to it (as Shelley was), and Shakespeare may have drawn it from his own experience. The suspicion is strengthened when we think of Richard II. In Richard this imaginative weakness is exhibited again, though not in relation to love. He luxuriates in images of his royal majesty, of the angels who guard his divine right, and of his own pathetic and almost sacred sufferings. The images are not insincere, and yet they are like dreams, for they refuse to touch earth and to connect themselves either with his past misdeeds or with the actions he ought now to perform. A strain of a similar weakness appears again in Hamlet, though only as one strain in a much more deep and complex nature. But this is not a common theme in poetry, much less in dramatic poetry.10

To come to our second question. When Shakespeare painted Cressida or described her through the mouth of Ulysses (‘O these encounterers,’ etc.), or, again, when he portrayed the love of Antony for Cleopatra, was he using his personal experience? To answer that he must have done so would be as ridiculous as to argue that Iago must be a portrait of himself; and the two plays contain nothing which, by itself, would justify us even in thinking that he probably did so. But we have the series of sonnets about the dark lady; and if we accept the sonnets to the friend as to some considerable extent based on fact and expressive of personal feelings, how can we refuse to take the others on the same footing? Even if the stories of the two series were not intertwined, we should have no ground for treating the two in different ways, unless we could say that external evidence, or the general impression we derive from Shakespeare’s works, forbids us to believe that he could ever have been entangled in an intrigue like that implied in the second series, or have felt and thought in the manner there portrayed. Being unable to say this, I am compelled, most regretfully, to hold it probable that this series is, in the main, based on personal experience. And I say ‘most regretfully,’ not merely because one would regret to think that Shakespeare was the victim of a Cressida or even the lover of a Cleopatra, but because the story implied in these sonnets is of quite another kind. They leave, on the whole, a very disagreeable impression. We cannot compare it with the impressions produced, for example, by the ‘heathen’ spirit of Goethe’s Roman Elegies, or by the passion of Shakespeare’s Antony. In these two cases, widely dissimilar of course, we may speak of ‘immorality,’ but we are not discomfited, much less disgusted. The feeling and the attitude are poetic, whole-hearted, and in one case passionate in the extreme. But the state of mind expressed in the sonnets about the dark lady is half-hearted, often prosaic, and never worthy of the name of passion. It is uneasy, dissatisfied, distempered, the state of mind of a man who despises his ‘passion’ and its object and himself, but, standing intellectually far above it, still has not resolution to end it, and only pains us by his gross and joyless jests. In Troilus and Cressida—not at all in the portrayal of Troilus’s love, but in the atmosphere of the drama—we seem to trace a similar mood of dissatisfaction, and of intellectual but practically impotent contempt.

In this connection it is natural to think of the ‘unhappy period’ which has so often been surmised in Shakespeare’s life. There is not time here to expand the summary remarks made elsewhere on this subject; but I may refer a little more fully to a persistent impression left on my mind by writings which we have reason to assign to the years 1602-6.11 There is surely something unusual in their tone regarding certain ‘vices of the blood,’ regarding drunkenness and sexual corruption. It does not lie in Shakespeare’s view of these vices, but in an undertone of disgust. Read Hamlet’s language about the habitual drunkenness of his uncle, or even Cassio’s words about his casual excess; then think of the tone of Henry IV. or Twelfth Night or the Tempest; and ask if the difference is not striking. And if you are inclined to ascribe it wholly to the fact that Hamlet and Othello are tragedies, compare the passages in them with the scene on Pompey’s galley in Antony and Cleopatra. The intent of that scene is terrible enough, but in the tone there is no more trace of disgust than in Twelfth Night. As to the other matter, what I refer to is not the transgression of lovers like Claudio and Juliet, nor even light-hearted irregularities like those of Cassio: here Shakespeare’s speech has its habitual tone. But, when he is dealing with lechery and corruption, the undercurrent of disgust seems to become audible. Is it not true that in the plays from Hamlet to Timon that subject, in one shape or another, is continually before us; that the intensity of loathing in Hamlet’s language about his mother’s lust is unexampled in Shakespeare; that the treatment of the subject in Measure for Measure, though occasionally purely humorous, is on the whole quite unlike the treatment in Henry IV. or even in the brothel scenes of Pericles;12 that while Troilus and Cressida is full of disgust and contempt, there is not a trace of either in Antony and Cleopatra, though some of the jesting there is obscene enough; that this same tone is as plainly heard in the unquestioned parts of Timon; and that, while it is natural in Timon to inveigh against female lechery when he speaks to Alcibiades and his harlots, there is no apparent reason why Lear in his exalted madness should choose this subject for similar invectives? ‘Pah! give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination’—it is a fainter echo of this exclamation that one seems to hear in the plays of those years. Of course I am not suggesting that it is mainly due, or as regards drunkenness due in the least, to any private experience of Shakespeare’s. It may have no connection whatever with that experience. It might well be connected with it only in so far as a man frequently wearied and depressed might be unusually sensitive to the ugly aspects of life. But, if we do not take the second series of sonnets to be purely fanciful, we shall think it probable that to some undefined extent it owed its origin to the experience depicted in them.13

There remain the sonnets addressed to the friend. Even if it were possible to discuss the general question about them here, it would be needless; for I accept almost wholly, and in some points am greatly indebted to, the views put forward by Mr. Beeching in his admirable edition, to which I may therefore refer my hearers.14 I intend only to state the main reason why I believe the sonnets to be, substantially, what they purport to be, and then to touch upon one or two of the points where they seem to throw light on Shakespeare’s personality.

The sonnets to the friend are, so far as we know, unique in Renaissance sonnet literature in being a prolonged and varied record of the intense affection of an older friend for a younger, and of other feelings arising from their relations. They have no real parallel in any series imitative of Virgil’s second Eclogue, or in occasional sonnets to patrons or patron-friends couched in the high-flown language of the time. The intensity of the feelings expressed, however, ought not, by itself, to convince us that they are personal. The author of the plays could, I make no doubt, have written the most intimate of these poems to a mere creature of his imagination and without ever having felt them except in imagination. Nor is there any but an aesthetic reason why he should not have done so if he had wished. But an aesthetic reason there is; and this is the decisive point. No capable poet, much less a Shakespeare, intending to produce a merely ‘dramatic’ series of poems, would dream of inventing a story like that of these sonnets, or, even if he did, of treating it as they treat it. The story is very odd and unattractive. Such capacities as it has are but slightly developed. It is left obscure, and some of the poems are unintelligible to us because they contain allusions of which we can make nothing. Now all this is perfectly natural if the story is substantially a real story of Shakespeare himself and of certain other persons; if the sonnets were written from time to time as the relations of the persons changed, and sometimes in reference to particular incidents; and if they were written for one or more of these persons (far the greater number for only one), and perhaps in a few cases for other friends,—written, that is to say, for people who knew the details and incidents of which we are ignorant. But it is all unnatural, well-nigh incredibly unnatural, if, with the most sceptical critics, we regard the sonnets as a free product of mere imagination.15

Assuming, then, that the persons of the story, with their relations, are real, I would add only two remarks about the friend. In the first place, Mr. Beeching seems to me right in denying that there is sufficient evidence of his standing to Shakespeare and the ‘rival’ poet or poets in the position of a literary patron; while, even if he did, it appears to me quite impossible to take the language of many of the sonnets as that of interested flattery. And in the second place I should be inclined to push even further Mr. Beeching’s view on another point. It is clear that the young man was considerably superior to the actor-dramatist in social position; but any gentleman would be so, and there is nothing to prove that he was more than a gentleman of some note, more than plain ‘Mr. W. H.’ (for these, on the obvious though not compulsory interpretation of the dedication, seem to have been his initials). It is remarkable besides that, while the earlier sonnets show much deference, the later show very little, so little that, when the writer, finding that he has pained his young friend by neglecting him, begs to be forgiven, he writes almost, if not quite, as an equal. Read, for example, sonnets 109, 110, 120, and ask whether it is probable that Shakespeare is addressing here a great nobleman. It seems therefore most likely (though the question is not of much importance) that the sonnets are, to quote Meres’s phrase,16 his ‘sonnets among his private friends.’

If then there is, as it appears, no obstacle of any magnitude to our taking the sonnets as substantially what they purport to be, we may naturally look in them for personal traits (and, indeed, to repeat a remark made earlier, we might still expect to find such traits even if we knew the sonnets to be purely dramatic). But in drawing inferences we have to bear in mind what is implied by the qualification ‘substantially.’ We have to remember that some of these poems may be mere exercises of art; that all of them are poems, and not letters, much less affidavits; that they are Elizabethan poems; that the Elizabethan language of deference, and also of affection, is to our minds habitually extravagant and fantastic;17 and that in Elizabethan plays friends openly express their love for one another as Englishmen now rarely do. Allowance being made, however, on account of these facts, the sonnets will still leave two strong impressions—that the poet was exceedingly sensitive to the charm of beauty, and that his love for his friend was, at least at one time, a feeling amounting almost to adoration, and so intense as to be absorbing. Those who are surprised by the first of these traits must have read Shakespeare’s dramas with very inactive minds, and I must add that they seem to be somewhat ignorant of human nature. We do not necessarily love best those of our relatives, friends, and acquaintances who please our eyes most; and we should look askance on anyone who regulated his behaviour chiefly by the standard of beauty; but most of us, I suppose, love any human being, of either sex and of any age, the better for being beautiful, and are not the least ashamed of the fact. It is further the case that men who are beginning, like the writer of the sonnets, to feel tired and old, are apt to feel an increased and special pleasure in the beauty of the young.18 If we remember, in addition, what some critics appear constantly to forget, that Shakespeare was a particularly poetical being, we shall hardly be surprised that the beginning of this friendship seems to have been something like a falling in love; and, if we must needs praise and blame, we should also remember that it became a ‘marriage of true minds.’19 And as to the intensity of the feeling expressed in the sonnets, we can easily believe it to be characteristic of the man who made Valentine and Proteus, Brutus and Cassius, Horatio and Hamlet; who painted that strangely moving portrait of Antonio, middle-aged, sad, and almost indifferent between life and death, but devoted to the young, brilliant spendthrift Bassanio; and who portrayed the sudden compelling enchantment exercised by the young Sebastian over the Antonio of Twelfth Night. ‘If you will not murder me for your love, let me be your servant.’ Antonio is accused of piracy: he may lose his life if he is identified:

The adoration, the ‘prostration,’ of the writer of the sonnets is of one kind with this.

I do not remember what critic uses the word ‘prostration.’ It applies to Shakespeare’s attitude only in some of the sonnets, but there it does apply, unless it is taken to suggest humiliation. That is the term used by Hallam, but chiefly in view of a particular point, namely the failure of the poet to ‘resent,’ though he ‘felt and bewailed,’ the injury done him in ‘the seduction of his mistress.’ Though I think we should substitute ‘resent more strongly’ for the mere ‘resent,’ I do not deny that the poet’s attitude in this matter strikes us at first as surprising as well as unpleasant to contemplate. But Hallam’s explanation of it as perhaps due to the exalted position of the friend, would make it much more than unpleasant; and his language seems to show that he, like many critics, did not fully imagine the situation. It is not easy to speak of it in public with the requisite frankness; but it is necessary to realise that, whatever the friend’s rank might be, he and the poet were intimate friends; that, manifestly, it was rather the mistress who seduced the friend than the friend the mistress; and that she was apparently a woman not merely of no reputation, but of such a nature that she might readily be expected to be mistress to two men at one and the same time. Anyone who realises this may call the situation ‘humiliating’ in one sense, and I cannot quarrel with him; but he will not call it ‘humiliating’ in respect of Shakespeare’s relation to his friend; nor will he wonder much that the poet felt more pain than resentment at his friend’s treatment of him. There is something infinitely stranger in a play of Shakespeare’s, and it may be symptomatic. Ten Brink called attention to it. Proteus actually offers violence to Sylvia, a spotless lady and the true love of his friend Valentine; and Valentine not only forgives him at once when he professes repentance, but offers to resign Sylvia to him! The incident is to us so utterly preposterous that we find it hard to imagine how the audience stood it; but, even if we conjecture that Shakespeare adopted it from the story he was using, we can hardly suppose that it was so absurd to him as it is to us.20 And it is not the Sonnets alone which lead us to surmise that forgiveness was particularly attractive to him, and the forgiveness of a friend much easier than resentment. From the Sonnets we gather—and there is nothing in the plays or elsewhere to contradict the impression—that he would not be slow to resent the criticisms, slanders, or injuries of strangers or the world, and that he bore himself towards them with a proud, if silent, self-sufficiency. But, we surmise, for anyone whom he loved

and towards anyone so fondly loved as the friend of the Sonnets he was probably incapable of fierce or prolonged resentment.

The Sonnets must not occupy us further; and I will not dwell on the indications they afford that Shakespeare sometimes felt bitterly both the social inferiority of his position as an actor,21 and its influence on his own character; or that (as we have already conjectured) he may sometimes have played the fool in society, sometimes felt weary of life, and often was over-tired by work. It is time to pass on to a few hesitating conjectures about what may be called his tastes.

Some passages of his about music have become household words. It is not downright impossible that, like Bottom, having only a reasonable good ear, he liked best the tongs and the bones; that he wondered, with Benedick, how sheeps-guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies; and that he wrote the famous lines in the Merchant of Venice and in Twelfth Night from mere observation and imagination. But it is futile to deal with scepticism run well-nigh mad, and certainly inaccessible to argument from the cases of poets whose tastes are matter of knowledge. Assuming therefore that Shakespeare was fond of music, I may draw attention to two points. Almost always he speaks of music as having a softening, tranquillising, or pensive influence. It lulls killing care and grief of heart to sleep. It soothes the sick and weary, and even makes them drowsy. Hamlet calls for it in his hysterical excitement after the success of the play scene. When it is hoped that Lear’s long sleep will have carried his madness away, music is played as he awakes, apparently to increase the desired ‘temperance.’ It harmonises with the still and moon-lit night, and the dreamy happiness of newly-wedded lovers. Almost all the rare allusions to lively or exciting music, apart from dancing, refer, I believe, to ‘the lofty instruments of war.’ These facts would almost certainly have a personal significance if Shakespeare were a more modern poet. Whether they have any, or have much, in an Elizabethan I do not venture to judge.

The second point is diminutive, but it may be connected with the first. The Duke in Measure for Measure observes that music often has

If we ask how it should provoke good to harm, we may recall what was said (p. 326) of the weaknesses of some poetic natures, and that no one speaks more feelingly of music than Orsino; further, how he refers to music as ‘the food of love,’ and who it is that almost repeats the phrase.

—the words are Cleopatra’s.22 Did Shakespeare as he wrote them remember, I wonder, the dark lady to whose music he had listened (Sonnet 128)?

We should be greatly surprised to find in Shakespeare signs of the nineteenth century feeling for mountain scenery, but we can no more doubt that within certain limits he was sensitive to the beauty of nature than that he was fond of music.23 The only question is whether we can guess at any preferences here. It is probably inevitable that the flowers most often mentioned should be the rose and the lily;24 but hardly that the violet should come next and not far behind, and that the fragrance of the violet should be spoken of more often even than that of the rose, and, it seems, with special affection. This may be a fancy, and it will be thought a sentimental fancy too; but poets, like other people, may have favourite flowers; that of Keats, we happen to know, was the violet.

Again, if we may draw any conclusion from the frequency and the character of the allusions, the lark held for Shakespeare the place of honour among birds; and the lines,

may suggest one reason for this. The lark, as several other collocations show, was to him the bird of joy that welcomes the sun; and it can hardly be doubted that dawn and early morning was the time of day that most appealed to him. That he felt the beauty of night and of moonlight is obvious; but we find very little to match the lines in Richard II.,

and still less to prove that he felt the magic of evening twilight, the ‘heavenliest hour’ of a famous passage in Don Juan. There is a wonderful line in Sonnet 132,

but I remember little else of the same kind. Shakespeare, as it happens, uses the word ‘twilight’ only once, and in an unforgetable passage:

And this feeling, though not often so solemn, is on the whole the prevailing sentiment in the references to sunset and evening twilight. It corresponds with the analogy between the times of the day and the periods of human life. The sun sets from the weariness of age; but he rises in the strength and freshness of youth, firing the proud tops of the eastern pines, and turning the hills and the sea into burnished gold, while jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops, and the lark sings at the gate of heaven. In almost all the familiar lines about dawn one seems to catch that ‘indescribable gusto’ which Keats heard in Kean’s delivery of the words:

Two suggestions may be ventured as to Shakespeare’s feelings towards four-footed animals. The first must be very tentative. We do not expect in a writer of that age the sympathy with animals which is so beautiful a trait in much of the poetry of the last hundred and fifty years. And I can remember in Shakespeare scarcely any sign of fondness for an animal,—not even for a horse, though he wrote so often of horses. But there are rather frequent, if casual, expressions of pity, in references, for example, to the hunted hare or stag, or to the spurred horse:25 and it may be questioned whether the passage in As You Like It about the wounded deer is quite devoid of personal significance. No doubt Shakespeare thought the tears of Jaques sentimental; but he put a piece of himself into Jaques. And, besides, it is not Jaques alone who dislikes the killing of the deer, but the Duke; and we may surely hear some tone of Shakespeare’s voice in the Duke’s speech about the life in the forest. Perhaps we may surmise that, while he enjoyed field-sports, he felt them at times to be out of tune with the harmony of nature.

On the second point, I regret to say, I can feel no doubt. Shakespeare did not care for dogs, as Homer did; he even disliked them, as Goethe did. Of course he can write eloquently about the points of hounds and the music of their voices in the chase, and humorously about Launce’s love for his cur and even about the cur himself; but this is no more significant on the one side than is his conventional use of ‘dog’ as a term of abuse on the other. What is significant is the absence of allusion, or (to be perfectly accurate) of sympathetic allusion, to the characteristic virtues of dogs, and the abundance of allusions of an insulting kind. Shakespeare has observed and recorded, in some instances profusely, every vice that I can think of in an ill-conditioned dog. He fawns and cringes and flatters, and then bites the hand that caressed him; he is a coward who attacks you from behind, and barks at you the more the farther off you go; he knows neither charity, humanity, nor gratitude; as he flatters power and wealth, so he takes part against the poor and unfashionable, and if fortune turns against you so does he.26 The plays swarm with these charges. Whately’s exclamation—uttered after a College meeting or a meeting of Chapter, I forget which—‘The more I see of men, the more I like dogs,’ would never have been echoed by Shakespeare. The things he most loathed in men he found in dogs too. And yet all this might go for nothing if we could set anything of weight against it. But what can we set? Nothing whatever, so far as I remember, except a recognition of courage in bear-baiting, bull-baiting mastiffs. For I cannot quote as favourable to the spaniel the appeal of Helena:

This may show that Shakespeare was alive to the baseness of a spaniel-owner, but not that he appreciated that self-less affection which he describes. It is more probable that it irritated him, as it does many men still; and, as for its implying fidelity, there is no reference, I believe, to the fidelity of the dog in the whole of his works, and he chooses the spaniel himself as a symbol of flattery and ingratitude: his CÆsar talks of

his Antony exclaims:

To all that he loved most in men he was blind in dogs. And then we call him universal!

This line of research into Shakespeare’s tastes might be pursued a good deal further, but we must return to weightier matters. We saw that he could sympathise with anyone who erred and suffered from impulse, affections of the blood, or even such passions as were probably no danger to himself,—ambition, for instance, and pride. Can we learn anything more about him by observing virtues or types of character with which he appears to feel little sympathy, though he may approve them? He certainly does not show this imperfect sympathy towards self-control; we seem to feel even a special liking for Brutus, and again for Horatio, who has suffered much, is quietly patient, and has mastered both himself and fortune. But, not to speak of coldly selfish natures, he seems averse to bloodless people, those who lack, or those who have deadened, the natural desires for joy and sympathy, and those who tend to be precise.27 Nor does he appear to be drawn to men who, as we say, try to live or to act on principle; nor to those who aim habitually at self-improvement; nor yet to the saintly type of character. I mean, not that he could not sympathise with them, but that they did not attract him. Isabella, in Measure for Measure, is drawn, of course, with understanding, but, it seems to me, with little sympathy. Her readiness to abandon her pleading for Claudio, out of horror at his sin and a sense of the justice of Angelo’s reasons for refusing his pardon, is doubtless in character; but if Shakespeare had sympathised more with her at this point, so should we; while, as it is, we are tempted to exclaim,

and perhaps if Shakespeare had liked her better and had not regarded her with some irony, he would not have allowed himself, for mere convenience, to degrade her by marrying her to the Duke. Brutus and Cordelia, on the other hand, are drawn with the fullest imaginative sympathy, and they, it may be said, are characters of principle; but then (even if Cordelia could be truly so described) they are also intensely affectionate, and by no means inhumanly self-controlled.

The mention of Brutus may carry us somewhat farther. Shakespeare’s Brutus kills CÆsar, not because CÆsar aims at absolute power, but because Brutus fears that absolute power may make him cruel. That is not Plutarch’s idea, it is Shakespeare’s. He could fully sympathise with the gentleness of Brutus, with his entire superiority to private aims and almost entire freedom from personal susceptibilities, and even with his resolution to sacrifice his friend; but he could not so sympathise with mere horror of monarchy or absolute power. And now extend this a little. Can you imagine Shakespeare an enthusiast for an ‘idea’; a devotee of divine right, or the rights of Parliament, or any particular form of government in Church or State; a Fifth Monarchy man, or a Quaker, or a thick-and-thin adherent of any compact, exclusive, abstract creed, even if it were as rational and noble as Mazzini’s? This type of mind, even at its best, is alien from his. Scott is said, rightly or wrongly, to have portrayed the Covenanters without any deep understanding of them; it would have been the same with Shakespeare. I am not praising him, or at least not merely praising him. One may even suggest that on this side he was limited. In any age he would have been safe against fanaticism and one-sided ideas; but perhaps in no age would he have been the man to insist with the necessary emphasis on those one-sided ideas which the moment may need, or even to give his whole heart to men who join a forlorn hope or are martyred for a faith. And though it is rash to suggest that anything in the way of imagination was beyond his reach, perhaps the legend of Faust, with his longings for infinite power and knowledge and enjoyment of beauty, would have suited him less well than Marlowe; and if he had written on the subject that Cervantes took, his Don Quixote would have been at least as laughable as the hero we know, but would he have been a soul so ideally noble and a figure so profoundly pathetic?

This would be the natural place to discuss Shakespeare’s politics if we were to discuss them at all. But even if the question whether he shows any interest in the political differences of his time, or any sympathies or antipathies in regard to them, admits of an answer, it could be answered only by an examination of details; and I must pass it by, and offer only the briefest remarks on a wider question. Shakespeare, as we might expect, shows no sign of believing in what is sometimes called a political ‘principle.’ The main ideas which, consciously or unconsciously, seem to govern or emerge from his presentation of state affairs, might perhaps be put thus. National welfare is the end of politics, and the criterion by which political actions are to be judged. It implies of necessity ‘degree’; that is, differences of position and function in the members of the body politic.28 And the first requisites of national welfare are the observance of this degree, and the concordant performance of these functions in the general interest. But there appear to be no further absolute principles than these: beyond them all is relative to the particular case and its particular conditions. We find no hint, for example, in Julius CÆsar that Shakespeare regarded a monarchical form of government as intrinsically better than a republican, or vice versa; no trace in Richard II. that the author shares the king’s belief in his inviolable right, or regards Bolingbroke’s usurpation as justifiable. We perceive, again, pretty clearly in several plays a dislike and contempt of demagogues, and an opinion that mobs are foolish, fickle, and ungrateful. But these are sentiments which the most determined of believers in democracy, if he has sense, may share; and if he thinks that the attitude of aristocrats like Volumnia and Coriolanus is inhuman and as inexcusable as that of the mob, and that a mob is as easily led right as wrong and has plenty of good nature in it, he has abundant ground for holding that Shakespeare thought so too. That Shakespeare greatly liked and admired the typical qualities of the best kind of aristocrat seems highly probable; but then this taste has always been compatible with a great variety of political opinions. It is interesting but useless to wonder what his own opinions would have been at various periods of English history: perhaps the only thing we can be pretty sure of in regard to them is that they would never have been extreme, and that he would never have supposed his opponents to be entirely wrong.

We have tried to conjecture the impulses, passions, and errors with which Shakespeare could easily sympathise, and the virtues and types of character which he may have approved without much sympathy. It remains to ask whether we can notice tendencies and vices to which he felt any special antipathy; and it is obvious and safe to point to those most alien to a gentle, open, and free nature, the vices of a cold and hard disposition, self-centred and incapable of fusion with others. Passing over, again, the plainly hideous forms or extremes of such vice, as we see them in characters like Richard III., Iago, Goneril and Regan, or the Queen in Cymbeline, we seem to detect a particular aversion to certain vices which have the common mark of baseness; for instance, servility and flattery (especially when deliberate and practised with a view to self-advancement), feigning in friendship, and ingratitude. Shakespeare’s animus against the dog arises from the attribution of these vices to him, and against them in men are directed the invectives which seem to have a personal ring. There appears to be traceable also a feeling of a special, though less painful, kind against unmercifulness. I do not mean, of course, cruelty, but unforgivingness, and even the tendency to prefer justice to mercy. From no other dramatic author, probably, could there be collected such prolonged and heart-felt praises of mercy as from Shakespeare. He had not at all strongly, I think, that instinct and love of justice and retribution which in many men are so powerful; but Prospero’s words,

came from his heart. He perceived with extreme clearness the connection of acts with their consequences; but his belief that in this sense ‘the gods are just’ was accompanied by the strongest feeling that forgiveness ought to follow repentance, and (if I may so put it) his favourite petition was the one that begins ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ To conclude, I have fancied that he shows an unusual degree of disgust at slander and dislike of censoriousness; and where he speaks in the Sonnets of those who censured him he betrays an exceptionally decided feeling that a man’s offences are his own affair and not the world’s.29

Some of the vices which seem to have been particularly odious to Shakespeare have, we may notice, a special connection with prosperity and power. Men feign and creep and flatter to please the powerful and to win their own way to ease or power; and they envy and censure and slander their competitors in the race; and when they succeed, they are ungrateful to their friends and helpers and patrons; and they become hard and unmerciful, and despise and bully those who are now below them. So, perhaps, Shakespeare said to himself in those years when, as we imagine, melancholy and embitterment often overclouded his sky, though they did not obscure his faith in goodness and much less his intellectual vision. And prosperity and power, he may have added, come less frequently by merit than by those base arts or by mere fortune. The divorce of goodness and power was, to Shelley, the ‘woe of the world’; if we substitute for ‘goodness’ the wider word ‘merit,’ we may say that this divorce, with the evil bred by power, is to Shakespeare also the root of bitterness. This fact, presented in its extreme form of the appalling cruelty of the prosperous, and the heart-rending suffering of the defenceless, forms the problem of his most tremendous drama. We have no reason to surmise that his own sufferings were calamitous; and the period which seems to be marked by melancholy and embitterment was one of outward, or at least financial, prosperity; but nevertheless we can hardly doubt that he felt on the small scale of his own life the influence of that divorce of power and merit. His complaint against Fortune, who had so ill provided for his life, runs through the Sonnets. Even if we could regard as purely conventional the declarations that his verses would make his friend immortal, it is totally impossible that he can have been unaware of the gulf between his own gifts and those of others, or can have failed to feel the disproportion between his position and his mind. Hamlet had never experienced

and that make the patient soul weary of life; the man who had experienced them was the writer of Sonnet 66, who cried for death because he was tired with beholding

—a beggarly soul flaunting in brave array. Neither had Hamlet felt in his own person ‘the insolence of office’; but the actor had doubtless felt it often enough, and we can hardly err in hearing his own voice in dramatic expressions of wonder and contempt at the stupid pride of mere authority and at men’s slavish respect for it. Two examples will suffice. ‘Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar, and the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog’s obeyed in office’: so says Lear, when madness has cleared his vision, and indignation makes the Timon-like verses that follow. The other example is almost too famous for quotation but I have a reason for quoting it:

It is Isabella who says that; but it is scarcely in character; Shakespeare himself is speaking.30

It is with great hesitation that I hazard a few words on Shakespeare’s religion. Any attempt to penetrate his reserve on this subject may appear a crowning impertinence; and, since his dramas are almost exclusively secular, any impressions we may form must here be even more speculative than usual. Yet it is scarcely possible to read him much without such speculations; and there are at least some theories which may confidently be dismissed. It cannot be called absolutely impossible that Shakespeare was indifferent to music and to the beauty of Nature, and yet the idea is absurd; and in the same way it is barely possible, and yet it is preposterous, to suppose that he was an ardent and devoted atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic, and that all the indications to the contrary are due to his artfulness and determination not to get into trouble. There is no absurdity, on the other hand, nor of necessity anything hopeless, in the question whether there are signs that he belonged to this or that church, and was inclined to one mode of thought within it rather than to another. Only the question is scarcely worth asking for our present purpose, unless there is some reason to believe that he took a keen interest in these matters. Suppose, for example, that we had ground to accept a tradition that he ‘died a papist,’ this would not tell us much about him unless we had also ground to think that he lived a papist, and that his faith went far into his personality. But in fact we receive from his writings, it appears to me, a rather strong impression that he concerned himself little, if at all, with differences of doctrine or church government.31 And we may go further. Have we not reason to surmise that he was not, in the distinctive sense of the word, a religious man—a man, that is to say, whose feelings and actions are constantly and strongly influenced by thoughts of his relation to an object of worship? If Shakespeare had been such a man, is it credible that we should find nothing in tradition or in his works to indicate the fact; and is it likely that we should find in his works some things that we do find there?32

Venturing with much doubt a little farther I will put together certain facts and impressions without at once drawing any conclusion from them. Almost all the speeches that can be called pronouncedly religious and Christian in phraseology and spirit are placed in the mouths of persons to whom they are obviously appropriate, either from their position (e.g. bishops, friars, nuns), or from what Shakespeare found in histories (e.g. Henry IV., V., and VI.), or for some other plain reason. We cannot build, therefore, on these speeches in the least. On the other hand (except, of course, where they are hypocritical or politic), we perceive in Shakespeare’s tone in regard to them not the faintest trace of dislike or contempt; nor can we find a trace anywhere of such feelings, or of irreverence, towards Christian ideas, institutions, or customs (mere humorous irreverence is not relevant here); and in the case of ‘sympathetic’ characters, living in Christian times but not in any decided sense religious, no disposition is visible to suppress or ignore their belief in, and use of, religious ideas. Some characters, again, Christian or heathen, who appear to be drawn with rather marked sympathy, have strong, if simple, religious convictions (e.g. Horatio, Edgar, Hermione); and in others, of whom so much can hardly be said, but who strike many readers, rightly or wrongly, as having a good deal of Shakespeare in them (e.g. Romeo and Hamlet), we observe a quiet but deep sense that they and other men are neither their own masters nor responsible only to themselves and other men, but are in the hands of ‘Providence’ or guiding powers ‘above.’33

To this I will add two remarks. To every one, I suppose, certain speeches sound peculiarly personal. Perhaps others may share my feeling about Hamlet’s words:

and about those other words of his:

and about the speech of Prospero ending, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’34 On the other hand, we observe that Hamlet seems to have arrived at that conviction as to the ‘divinity’ after reflection, and that, while he usually speaks as one who accepts the received Christian ideas, yet, when meditating profoundly, he appears to ignore them.35 In the same way the Duke in Measure for Measure is for the most part, and necessarily, a Christian; yet nobody would guess it from the great speech, ‘Be absolute for death,’ addressed by a supposed friar to a youth under sentence to die, yet containing not a syllable about a future life.36

Without adducing more of the endless but baffling material for a conclusion, I will offer the result left on my mind, and, merely for the sake of brevity, will state it with hardly any of the qualifications it doubtless needs. Shakespeare, I imagine, was not, in the sense assigned to the word some minutes ago, a religious man. Nor was it natural to him to regard good and evil, better and worse, habitually from a theological point of view. But (this appears certain) he had a lively and serious sense of ‘conscience,’ of the pain of self-reproach and self-condemnation, and of the torment to which this pain might rise.37 He was not in the least disposed to regard conscience as somehow illusory or a human invention, but on the contrary thought of it (I use the most non-committal phrase I can find) as connected with the power that rules the world and is not escapable by man. He realised very fully and felt very keenly, after his youth was past and at certain times of stress, the sufferings and wrongs of men, the strength of evil, the hideousness of certain forms of it, and its apparent incurability in certain cases. And he must sometimes have felt all this as a terrible problem. But, however he may have been tempted, and may have yielded, to exasperation and even despair, he never doubted that it is best to be good; felt more and more that one must be patient and must forgive;38 and probably maintained unbroken a conviction, practical if not formulated, that to be good is to be at peace with that unescapable power. But it is unlikely that he attempted to theorise further on the nature of the power. All was for him, in the end, mystery; and, while we have no reason whatever to attribute to him a belief in the ghosts and oracles he used in his dramas, he had no inclination to play the spy on God or to limit his power by our notions of it. That he had dreams and ponderings about the mystery such as he never put into the mouths of actors I do not doubt; but I imagine they were no more than dreams and ponderings and movings about in worlds unrealised.

Whether to this ‘religion’ he joined a more or less conventional acceptance of some or all of the usual Christian ideas, it is impossible to tell. There is no great improbability to me in the idea that he did not, but it is more probable to me that he did,—that, in fact, though he was never so tormented as Hamlet, his position in this matter was, at least in middle life (and he never reached old age), much like Hamlet’s. If this were so it might naturally happen that, as he grew older and wearier of labour, and perhaps of the tumult of pleasure and thought and pain, his more personal religion, the natural piety which seems to gain in weight and serenity in the latest plays, came to be more closely joined with Christian ideas. But I can find no clear indications that this did happen; and though some have believed that they discovered these ideas displayed in full, though not explicitly, in the Tempest, I am not able to hear there more than the stream of Shakespeare’s own ‘religion’ moving with its fullest volume and making its deepest and most harmonious music.39

This lecture must end, though its subject is endless, and I will touch on only one point more,—one that may to some extent recall and connect the scattered suggestions I have offered.

If we were obliged to answer the question which of Shakespeare’s plays contains, not indeed the fullest picture of his mind, but the truest expression of his nature and habitual temper, unaffected by special causes of exhilaration or gloom, I should be disposed to choose As You Like It. It wants, to go no further, the addition of a touch of Sir Toby or Falstaff, and the ejection of its miraculous conversions of ill-disposed characters. But the misbehaviour of Fortune, and the hardness and ingratitude of men, form the basis of its plot, and are a frequent topic of complaint. And, on the other hand, he who is reading it has a smooth brow and smiling lips, and a heart that murmurs,

And it is full not only of sweetness, but of romance, fun, humour of various kinds, delight in the oddities of human nature, love of modesty and fidelity and high spirit and patience, dislike of scandal and censure, contemplative curiosity, the feeling that in the end we are all merely players, together with a touch of the feeling that

And, finally, it breathes the serene holiday mood of escape from the toil, competition, and corruption of city and court into the sun and shadow and peace of the country, where one can be idle and dream and meditate and sing, and pursue or watch the deer as the fancy takes one, and make love or smile at lovers according to one’s age.40

If, again, the question were put to us, which of Shakespeare’s characters reveals most of his personality, the majority of those who consented to give an answer would answer ‘Hamlet.’ This impression may be fanciful, but it is difficult to think it wholly so, and, speaking for those who share it, I will try to trace some of its sources. There is a good deal of Shakespeare that is not in Hamlet. But Hamlet, we think, is the only character in Shakespeare who could possibly have composed his plays (though it appears unlikely, from his verses to Ophelia, that he could have written the best songs). Into Hamlet’s mouth are put what are evidently Shakespeare’s own views on drama and acting. Hamlet alone, among the great serious characters, can be called a humorist. When in some trait of another character we seem to touch Shakespeare’s personality, we are frequently reminded of Hamlet.41 When in a profound reflective speech we hear Shakespeare’s voice, we usually hear Hamlet’s too, and his peculiar humour and turns of phrase appear unexpectedly in persons otherwise unlike him and unlike one another. The most melancholy group of Sonnets (71-74) recalls Hamlet at once, here and there recalls even his words; and he and the writer of Sonnet 66 both recount in a list the ills that make men long for death. And then Hamlet ‘was indeed honest and of an open and free nature’; sweet-tempered and modest, yet not slow to resent calumny or injury; of a serious but not a melancholy disposition; and the lover of his friend. And, with these traits, we remember his poet ecstasy at the glory of earth and sky and the marvellous endowments of man; his eager affectionate response to everything noble or sweet in human nature; his tendency to dream and to live in the world of his own mind; his liability to sudden vehement emotion, and his admiration for men whose blood and judgment are better commingled; the overwhelming effect of disillusionment upon him; his sadness, fierceness, bitterness and cynicism. All this, and more: his sensitiveness to the call of duty; his longing to answer to it, and his anguish over his strange delay; the conviction gathering in his tortured soul that man’s purposes and failures are divinely shaped to ends beyond his vision; his incessant meditation, and his sense that there are mysteries which no meditation can fathom; nay, even little traits like his recourse to music to calm his excitement, or his feeling on the one hand that the peasant should not tread on the courtier’s heels, and on the other that the mere courtier is spacious in the possession of dirt—all this, I say, corresponds with our impression of Shakespeare, or rather of characteristic traits in Shakespeare, probably here and there a good deal heightened, and mingled with others not characteristic of Shakespeare at all. And if this is more than fancy, it may explain to us why Hamlet is the most fascinating character, and the most inexhaustible, in all imaginative literature. What else should he be, if the world’s greatest poet, who was able to give almost the reality of nature to creations totally unlike himself, put his own soul straight into this creation, and when he wrote Hamlet’s speeches wrote down his own heart?42

1904.