Act IV; Webster, passim.

[Footnote 380: "Anatomy of Melancholy," 12th ed. 1821, 2 vols; Democritus to the Reader, I. 4.]

[Footnote 381: "Anatomy of Melancholy," I. part 2, sec. 2, Mem. 4, p. 420 et passim.]

[Footnote 382: "The Works of Sir Thomas Browne," ed. Wilkin, 1852, 3 vols. "Hydriotaphia," III. ch. V. 14 et passim.]

[Footnote 383: See Milsand, Étude sur Sir Thomas Browne, in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," 1858.]

[Footnote 384: Bacon's Works. Translation of the "De Augmentis Scientiarum," Book II; To the King.]

[Footnote 385: Ibid. Book I. The true end of learning mistaken.]

[Footnote 386: Especially in the Essays.]

[Footnote 387: See also "Novum Organum," Books I and II; the twenty-seven kinds of examples, with their metaphorical names: Instantiæ crucis, divortii januæ, Instantiæ innuentes, polychrestæ, magicæ, etc.]

[Footnote 388: "The Works of Francis Bacon," London, 1824, vol. VII. p. 2. "Latin Biography," by Rawley.]

[Footnote 389: This point is brought out by the review of Lord Macaulay. "Critical and Historical Essays," vol. III.]

[Footnote 390: "Novum Organum," II. 15 and 16.]

[Footnote 391: Ibid. I. I. 3.]

[Footnote 392: "Natural History," 800, 24, etc. "De Augmentis," III. 1.]

CHAPTER SECOND

The Theatre

We must look at this world more closely, and beneath the ideas which are developed seek for the living men; it is the theatre especially which is the original product of the English Renaissance, and it is the theatre especially which will exhibit the men of the English Renaissance. Forty poets, amongst them ten of superior rank, as well as one, the greatest of all artists who have represented the soul in words; many hundreds of pieces, and nearly fifty masterpieces; the drama extended over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy--expanded so as to embrace comedy, tragedy, pastoral and fanciful literature--to represent all degrees of human condition, and all the caprices of human invention--to express all the perceptible details of actual truth, and all the philosophic grandeur of general reflection; the stage disencumbered of all precept and freed from all imitation, given up and appropriated in the minutest particulars to the reigning taste and public intelligence; all this was a vast and manifold work, capable by its flexibility, its greatness, and its form, of receiving and preserving the exact imprint of the age and of the nation.[393]

SECTION I.--The Public and the Stage

Let us try, then, to set before our eyes this public, this audience, and this stage--all connected with one another, as in every natural and living work; and if ever there was a living and natural work, it is here. There were already seven theatres in London, in Shakespeare's time, so brisk and universal was the taste for dramatic representations. Great and rude contrivances, awkward in their construction, barbarous in their appointments; but a fervid imagination readily supplied all that they lacked, and hardy bodies endured all inconveniences without difficulty. On a dirty site, on the banks of the Thames, rose the principal theatre, the Globe, a sort of hexagonal tower, surrounded by a muddy ditch, on which was hoisted a red flag. The common people could enter as well as the rich: there were sixpenny, twopenny, even penny seats; but they could not see it without money. If it rained, and it often rains in London, the people in the pit, butchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices, receive the streaming rain upon their heads. I suppose they did not trouble themselves about it; it was not so long since they began to pave the streets of London; and when men, like these, have had experience of sewers and puddles, they are not afraid of catching cold. While waiting for the piece, they amuse themselves after their fashion, drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then resort to their lists; they have been known to fall upon the actors, and turn the theatre upside down. At other times they were dissatisfied and went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding, or toss him in a blanket; they were coarse fellows, and there was no month when the cry of "Clubs" did not call them out of their shops to exercise their brawny arms. When the beer took effect, there was a great upturned barrel in the pit, a peculiar receptacle for general use. The smell rises, and then comes the cry, "Burn the juniper!" They burn some in a plate on the stage, and the heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there assembled could scarcely get disgusted at anything, and cannot have had sensitive noses. In the time of Rabelais there was not much cleanliness to speak of. Remember that they were hardly out of the Middle Ages and that in the Middle Ages man lived on a dunghill.

Above them, on the stage, were the spectators able to pay a shilling, the elegant people, the gentlefolk. These were sheltered from the rain, and if they chose to pay an extra shilling, could have a stool. To this were reduced the prerogatives of rank and the devices of comfort: it often happened that there were not stools enough; then they lie down on the ground: this was not a time to be dainty. They play cards, smoke, insult the pit, who gave it them back without stinting, and throw apples at them into the bargain. They also gesticulate, swear in Italian, French, English;[394] crack aloud jokes in dainty, composite, high-colored words: in short, they have the energetic, original, gay manners of artists, the same humor, the same absence of constraint, and, to complete the resemblance, the same desire to make themselves singular, the same imaginative cravings, the same absurd and picturesque devices, beards cut to a point, into the shape of a fan, a spade, the letter T, gaudy and expensive dresses, copied from five or six neighboring nations, embroidered, laced with gold, motley, continually heightened in effect or changed for others: there was, as it were, a carnival in their brains as well as on their backs.

With such spectators illusions could be produced without much trouble: there were no preparations or perspectives; few or no movable scenes: their imaginations took all this upon them. A scroll in big letters announced to the public that they were in London or Constantinople; and that was enough to carry the public to the desired place. There was no trouble about probability. Sir Philip Sidney writes:

"You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africke of the other, and so many other under-kingdomes, that the Plaier when hee comes in, must ever begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now shall you have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then wee must beleeve the stage to be a garden. By and by wee heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, then wee are to blame if we accept it not for a rocke;... while in the meane time two armies flie in, represented with foure swordes and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field? Now of time they are much more liberall. For ordinary it is, that two young Princes fall in love, after many traverses, shee is got with childe, delivered of a faire boy, hee is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is readie to get another childe; and all this in two hours space."[395]

Doubtless these enormities were somewhat reduced under Shakespeare; with a few hangings, crude representations of animals, towers, forests, they assisted somewhat the public imagination. But after all, in Shakespeare's plays, as in all others, the imagination from within is chiefly drawn upon for the machinery; it must lend itself to all, substitute all, accept for a queen a young man who has just been shaved, endure in one act ten changes of place, leap suddenly over twenty years or five hundred miles,[396] take half a dozen supernumeraries for forty thousand men, and to have represented by the rolling of the drums all the battles of Caesar, Henry V, Coriolanus, Richard III. And imagination, being so overflowing and so young, accepts all this. Recall your own youth; for my part, the deepest emotions I have ever felt at a theatre were given to me by a strolling bevy of four young girls, playing comedy and tragedy on a stage in a coffee-house; true, I was eleven years old. So in this theatre, at this moment, their souls were fresh, as ready to feel everything as the poet was to dare everything.

SECTION II.--Manners of the Sixteenth Century

These are but externals; let us try to advance further, to observe the passions, the bent of mind, the inner man: it is this inner state which raised and modelled the drama, as everything else; invisible inclinations are everywhere the cause of visible works, and the interior shapes the exterior. What are these townspeople, courtiers, this public, whose taste fashions the theatre? what is there peculiar in the structure and condition of their minds? The condition must needs be peculiar; for the drama flourishes all of a sudden, and for sixty years together, with marvellous luxuriance, and at the end of this time is arrested so that no effort could ever revive it. The structure must be peculiar; for of all theatres, old and new, this is distinct in form, and displays a style, action, characters, an idea of life, which are not found in any age or any country beside. This particular feature is the free and complete expansion of nature.

What we call nature in men is, man such as he was before culture and civilization had deformed and reformed him. Almost always, when a new generation arrives at manhood and consciousness, it finds a code of precepts impose on it with all the weight and authority of antiquity. A hundred kinds of chains, a hundred thousand kinds of ties, religion, morality, good breeding, every legislation which regulates sentiments, morals, manners, fetter and tame the creature of impulse and passion which breathes and frets within each of us. There is nothing like that here. It is a regeneration, and the curb of the past is wanting to the present. Catholicism, reduced to external ceremony and clerical chicanery, had just ended; Protestantism, arrested in its first gropings after truth, or straying into sects, had not yet gained the mastery; the religion of discipline was grown feeble, and the religion of morals was not yet established; men ceased to listen to the directions of the clergy, and has not yet spelled out the law of conscience. The church was turned into an assembly-room, as in Italy; the young fellows came to St. Paul's to walk, laugh, chatter, display their new cloaks; the thing had even passed into a custom. They paid for the noise they made with their spurs, and this tax was a source of income to the canons;[397] pickpockets, loose girls, came there by crowds; these latter struck their bargains while service was going on. Imagine, in short, that the scruples of conscience and the severity of the Puritans were at that time odious and ridiculed on the stage, and judge of the difference between this sensual, unbridled England, and the correct, disciplined, stiff England of our own time. Ecclesiastical or secular, we find no signs of rule. In the failure of faith, reason had not gained sway, and opinion is as void of authority as tradition. The imbecile age, which has just ended, continues buried in scorn, with its ravings, its verse-makers, and its pedantic text-books; and out of the liberal opinions derived from antiquity, from Italy, France, and Spain, everyone could pick and choose as it pleased him, without stooping to restraint or acknowledging a superiority. There was no model imposed on them, as nowadays; instead of affecting imitation, they affected originality.[398] Each strove to be himself, with his own oaths, peculiar ways, costumes, his specialties of conduct and humor, and to be unlike everyone else. They said not, "So and so is done," but "I do so and so." Instead of restraining, they gave free vent to themselves. There was no etiquette of society; save for an exaggerated jargon of chivalresque courtesy, they are masters of speech and action on the impulse of the moment. You will find them free from decorum, as of all else. In this outbreak and absence of fetters, they resemble fine strong horses let loose in the meadow. Their inborn instincts have not been tamed, nor muzzled, nor diminished.

On the contrary, they have been preserved intact by bodily and military training; and escaping as they were from barbarism, not from civilization, they had not been acted upon by the innate softening and hereditary tempering which are new transmitted with the blood, and civilize a man from the moment of his birth. This is why man, who for three centuries has been a domestic animal, was still almost a savage beast, and the force of his muscles and the strength of his nerves increased the boldness and energy of his passions. Look at these uncultivated men, men of the people, how suddenly the blood warms and rises to their face; their fists double, their lips press together, and those vigorous bodies rush at once into action. The courtiers of that age were like our men of the people. They had the same taste for the exercise of their limbs, the same indifference toward the inclemencies of the weather, the same coarseness of language, the same undisguised sensuality. They were carmen in body and gentlemen in sentiment, with the dress of actors and the tastes of artists. "At fourtene," says John Hardyng, "a lordes sonnes shalle to felde hunte the dere, and catch an hardynesse. For dere to hunte and slea, and see them blede, ane hardyment gyffith to his courage.... At sextene yere, to werray and to wage, to juste and ryde, and castels to assayle... and every day his armure to assay in fete of armes with some of his meyne."[399] When ripened to manhood, he is employed with the bow, in wrestling, leaping, vaulting. Henry VII's court, in its noisy merriment, was like a village fair. The king, says Holinshed, exercised himself "dailie in shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the barre, plaieing at the recorders, flute, virginals, in setting of songs, and making of ballads." He leaps the moats with a pole, and was once within an ace of being killed. He is so fond of wrestling, that publicly, on the field of the Cloth of Gold, he seized Francis I in his arms to try a throw with him. This is how a common soldier or a bricklayer nowadays tries a new comrade. In fact, they regarded gross jests and brutal buffooneries as amusements, as soldiers and bricklayers do now. In every nobleman's house there was a fool, whose business it was to utter pointed jests, to make eccentric gestures, horrible faces, to sing licentious songs, as we might hear now in a beer-house. They thought insults and obscenity a joke. They were foul-mouthed, they listened to Rabelais's words undiluted, and delighted in conversation which would revolt us. They had no respect for humanity; the rules of proprieties and the habits of good breeding began only under Louis XIV, and by imitation of the French; at this time they all blurted out the word that fitted in, and that was most frequently a coarse word. You will see on the stage, in Shakespeare's "Pericles," the filth of a haunt of vice.[400] The great lords, the well-dressed ladies, speak billingsgate. When Henry V pays his court to Catherine of France, it is with the coarse bearing of a sailor who may have taken a fancy to a sutler; and like the tars who tattoo a heart on their arms to prove their love for the girls they left behind them, there were men who "devoured sulphur and drank urine"[401] to win their mistress by a proof of affection. Humanity is as much lacking as decency.[402] Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court frequents bear and bull baitings, where dogs are ripped up and chained beasts are sometimes beaten to death, and it was, says an officer of the palace, "a charming entertainment."[403] No wonder they used their arms like clodhoppers and gossips. Elizabeth used to beat her maids of honor, "so that these beautiful girls could often be heard crying and lamenting in a piteous manner." One day she spat upon Sir Mathew's fringed coat; at another time, when Essex, whom she was scolding, turned his back, she gave him a box on the ear. It was then the practice of great ladies to beat their children and their servants. Poor Jane Grey was sometimes so wretchedly "boxed, struck, pinched, and ill-treated in other manners which she dare not relate," that she used to wish herself dead. Their first idea is to come to words, to blows, to have satisfaction. As in feudal times, they appeal at once to arms, and retain the habit of taking the law in their own hands, and without delay. "On Thursday laste," writes Gilbert Talbot to the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury, "as my Lorde Rytche was rydynge in the streates, there was one Wyndam that stode in a dore, and shotte a dagge at him, thynkynge to have slayne him. ... The same daye, also, as Sr John Conway was goynge in the streetes, Mr. Lodovyke Grevell came sodenly upon him, and stroke him on the hedd wth a sworde.... I am forced to trouble yor Honors wth thes tryflynge matters, for I know no greater."[404] No one, not even the queen, is safe among these violent dispositions.[405] Again, when one man struck another in the precincts of the court, his hand was cut off, and the arteries stopped with a red-hot iron. Only such atrocious imitations of their own crimes, and the painful image of bleeding and suffering flesh, could tame their vehemence and restrain the uprising of their instincts. Judge now what materials they furnish to the theatre, and what characters they look for at the theatre. To please the public, the stage cannot deal too much in open lust and the strongest passions; it must depict man attaining the limit of his desires, unchecked, almost mad, now trembling and rooted before the white palpitating flesh which his eyes devour, now haggard and grinding his teeth before the enemy whom he wishes to tear to pieces, now carried beyond himself and overwhelmed at the sight of the honors and wealth which he covets, always raging and enveloped in a tempest of eddying ideas, sometimes shaken by impetuous joy, more often on the verge of fury and madness, stronger, more ardent, more daringly let loose to infringe on reason and law than ever. We hear from the stage as from the history of the time, these fierce murmurs: the sixteenth century is like a den of lions.

Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking. Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fulness. If nothing had been weakened, nothing had been mutilated. It is the entire man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant circumstance to cast him altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid, as he will be under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned as in the Restoration. After the hollowness and weariness of the fifteenth century, he rose up by a second birth, as before in Greece man had risen by a first birth; and now, as then, the temptations of the outer world came combined to raise his faculties from their sloth and torpor. A sort of generous warmth spread over them to ripen and make them flourish. Peace, prosperity, comfort began; new industries and increasing activity suddenly multiplied objects of utility and luxury tenfold. America and India, by their discovery, caused the treasures and prodigies heaped up afar over distant seas to shine before their eyes; antiquity rediscovered, sciences mapped out, the Reformation begun, books multiplied by printing, ideas by books, doubled the means of enjoyment, imagination, and thought. People wanted to enjoy, to imagine, and to think; for the desire grows with the attraction, and here all attractions were combined. There were attractions for the senses, in the chambers which they began to warm, in the beds newly furnished with pillows, in the coaches which they began to use for the first time. There were attractions for the senses, in the chambers which they began to warm, in the beds newly furnished with pillows, in the coaches which they began to use for the first time. There were attractions for the imagination in the new palaces, arranged after the Italian manner; in the variegated hangings from Flanders; in the rich garments, gold-embroidered, which, being continually changed, combined the fancies and the splendors of all Europe. There were attractions for the mind, in the noble and beautiful writings which, spread abroad, translated, explained, brought in philosophy, eloquence, and poetry, from restored antiquity, and from the surrounding renaissances. Under this appeal all aptitudes and instincts at once started up; the low and the lofty, ideal and sensual love, gross cupidity and pure generosity. Recall what you yourself experienced, when from being a child you became a man: what wishes for happiness, what breadth of anticipation, what intoxication of heart wafted you towards all joys; with what impulse your hands seized involuntarily and all at once every branch of the tree, and would not let a single fruit escape. At sixteen years, like Chérubin,[406] we wish for a servant girl while we adore a Madonna; we are capable of every species of covetousness, and also of every species of self-denial; we find virtue more lovely, our meals more enjoyable; pleasure has more zest, heroism more worth: there is no allurement which is not keen; the sweetness and novelty of things are too strong; and in the hive of passions which buzzes within us, and stings us like the sting of a bee, we can do nothing but plunge, one after another, in all directions. Such were the men of this time, Raleigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII himself, excessive and inconstant, ready for devotion and for crime, violent in good and evil, heroic with strange weaknesses, humble with sudden changes of mood, never vile with premeditation like the roisterers of the Restoration, never rigid on principle like the Puritans of the Revolution, capable of weeping like children,[407] and of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once true knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only the fulness of their characters. Thus prepared, they could take in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters, prostitutes and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama even, in order to imitate and satisfy the fertility of their nature, must talk all tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side with this, vulgar prose: more, it must distort its natural style and limits; put songs, poetical devices, into the discourse of courtiers and the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of the opera, as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with their groves and their meadows; compel the gods to descend upon the stage, and hell itself to furnish its world of marvels. No other theatre is so complicated; for nowhere else do we find men so complete.

SECTION III.--Some Aspects of the English Mind

In this free and universal expansion, the passions had their special bent withal, which was an English one, inasmuch as they were English. After all, in every age, under every civilization, a people is always itself. Whatever be its dress, goat-skin blouse, gold-laced doublet, black dress-coat, the five or six great instincts which it possessed in its forests, follow it in its palaces and offices. To this day, warlike passions, a gloomy humor, subsist under the regularity and propriety of modern manners.[408] Their native energy and harshness pierce through the perfection of culture and the habits of comfort. Rich young men, on leaving Oxford, go to hunt bears on the Rocky Mountains, the elephant in South Africa, live under canvas, box, jump hedges on horseback, sail their yachts on dangerous coasts, delight in solitude and peril. The ancient Saxon, the old rover of the Scandinavian seas, has not perished. Even at school the children roughly treat one another, withstand one another, fight like men; and their character is so indomitable that they need the birch and blows to reduce them to the discipline of law. Judge what they were in the sixteenth century; the English race passed then for the most warlike of Europe, the most redoubtable in battle, the most impatient of anything like slavery.[409] "English savages" is what Cellini calls them; and the "great shins of beef" with which they fill themselves, keep up the force and ferocity of their instincts. To harden them thoroughly, institutions work in the same groove with nature. The nation is armed, every man is brought up like a soldier, bound to have arms according to his condition, to exercise himself on Sundays or holidays; from the yeoman to the lord, the old military constitution keeps them enrolled and ready for action.[410] In a state which resembles an army it is necessary that punishments, as in an army, shall inspire terror; and to make them worse, the hideous Wars of the Roses, which on every flaw of the succession to the throne are ready to break out again, are ever present in their recollection. Such instincts, such a constitution, such a history, raise before them, with tragic severity, an idea of life: death is at hand, as well as wounds, the block, tortures. The fine cloaks of purple which the renaissances of the South displayed joyfully in the sun, to wear like a holiday garment, are here stained with blood, and edged with black. Throughout,[411] a stern discipline, and the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king's relatives, queens, a protector, all kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, Mary Stuart, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest rank of honors, beauty, youth, and genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner. Shall I count the funeral pyres, the hangings, living men cut down from the gibbet, disembowelled, quartered,[412] their limbs cast into the fire, their heads exposed on the walls? There is a page in Holinshed which reads like a death register:

"The five and twentith daie of Maie (1535), was in saint Paules church at London examined nineteene men and six women born in Holland, whose opinions were (heretical). Fourteene of them were condemned, a man and a woman of them were burned in Smithfield, the other twelve were sent to other townes, there to be burnt. On the nineteenth of June were three moonkes of the Charterhouse hanged, drawne, and quartered at Tiburne, and their heads and quarters set up about London, for denieng the king to be supreme head of the church. Also the one and twentith of the same moneth, and for the same cause, doctor John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, was beheaded for denieng of the supremacie, and his head set upon London bridge, but his bodie buried within Barking churchyard. The pope had elected him a cardinall, and sent his hat as far as Calais, but his head was off before his hat was on: so that they met not. On the sixt of Julie, was Sir Thomas Moore beheaded for the like crime, that is to wit, for denieng the king to be supreme head."[413]

None of these murders seem extraordinary; the chroniclers mention them without growing indignant; the condemned go quietly to the block, as if the thing were perfectly natural. Anne Boleyn said seriously, before giving up her head to the executioner: "I praie God save the king, and send him long to reigne over you, for a gentler, nor a more merciful prince was there never."[414] Society is, as it were, in a state of siege, so incited that beneath the idea of order everyone entertained the idea of the scaffold. They saw it, the terrible machine, planted on all the highways of human life; and the byways as well as the highways led to it. A sort of martial law, introduced by conquests into civil affairs, entered thence into ecclesiastical matters,[415] and social economy ended by being enslaved by it. As in a camp,[416] expenditure, dress, the food of each class, are fixed and restricted; no one might stray out of his district, be idle, live after his own devices. Every stranger was seized, interrogated; if he could not give a good account of himself, the parish-stocks bruised his limbs; as in time of war he would have passed for a spy and an enemy, if caught amidst the army. Any person, says the law,[417] found living idly or loiteringly for the space of three days, shall be marked with a hot iron on his breast, and adjudged as a slave to the man who shall inform against him. This one "shall take the same slave, and give him bread, water, or small drink, and refuse meat, and cause him to work, by beating, chaining, or otherwise, in such work and labour as he shall put him to, be it never so vile." He may sell him, bequeath him, let him out for hire, or trade upon him "after the like sort as they may do of any other their moveable goods or chattels," put a ring of iron about his neck or leg; if he runs away and absents himself for fourteen days, he is branded on the forehead with a hot iron, and remains a slave for the whole of his life; if he runs away a second time, he is put to death. Sometimes, says More, you might see a score of thieves hung on the same gibbet. In one year[418] forty persons were put to death in the county of Somerset alone, and in each county there were three or four hundred vagabonds who would sometimes gather together and rob in armed bands of sixty at a time. Follow the whole of this history closely, the fires of Mary, the pillories of Elizabeth, and it is plain that the moral tone of the land, like its physical condition, is harsh by comparison with other countries. They have no relish in their enjoyments, as in Italy; what is called Merry England is England given up to animal spirits, a coarse animation, produced by abundant feeding, continued prosperity, courage, and self-reliance; voluptuousness does not exist in this climate and this race. Mingled with the beautiful popular beliefs, the lugubrious dreams and the cruel nightmare of witchcraft make their appearance. Bishop Jewell, preaching before the queen, tells her that witches and sorcerers within these last few years are marvellously increased. Some ministers assert

"That they have had in their parish at one instant xvij or xviij witches; meaning such as could worke miracles supernaturallie; that they work spells by which men pine away even unto death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft; that instructed by the devil, they make ointments of the bowels and members of children, whereby they ride in the aire, and accomplish all their desires. When a child is not baptized, or defended by the sign of the cross, then the witches catch them from their mothers sides in the night,... kill them... or after buriall steale them out of their graves, and seeth them in a caldron, untill their flesh be made potable.... It is an infallible rule, that everie fortnight, or at the least everie moneth, each witch must kill one child at the least for hir part."

Here was something to make the teeth chatter with fright. Add to this revolting and absurd descriptions, wretched tomfooleries, details about the infernal caldron, all the nastinesses which could haunt the trite imagination of a hideous and drivelling old woman, and you have the spectacles, provided by Middleton and Shakespeare, and which suit the sentiments of the age and the national humor. The fundamental gloom pierces through the glow and rapture of poetry. Mournful legends have multiplied; every churchyard has its ghost; wherever a man has been murdered his spirit appears. Many people dare not leave their village after sunset. In the evening, before bed-time, men talk of the coach which is seen drawn by headless horses, with headless postilions and coachmen, or of unhappy spirits who, compelled to inhabit the plain, under the sharp northeast wind, pray for the shelter of a hedge or a valley. They dream terribly of death:

"To die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!"[419]

The greatest speak with a sad resignation of the infinite obscurity which embraces our poor, short, glimmering life, our life, which is but a troubled dream;[420] the sad state of humanity, which is but passion, madness, and sorrow; the human being who is himself, perhaps, but a vain phantom, a grievous sick man's dream. In their eyes we roll down a fatal slope, where chance dashes us one against the other, and the inner destiny which urges us onward, only shatters after it has blinded us. And at the end of all is "the silent grave, no conversation, no joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers, no careful father's counsel; nothing's heard, nor nothing is, but all oblivion, dust, and endless darkness."[421] If yet there were nothing. "To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream." To dream sadly, to fall into a nightmare like the nightmare of life, like that in which we are struggling and crying to-day, gasping with hoarse throat!--this is their idea of man and of existence, the national idea, which fills the stage with calamities and despair, which makes a display of tortures and massacres, which abounds in madness and crime, which holds up death as the issue throughout. A threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their sky, and joy, like the sun, only appears in its full force now and then. They are different from the Latin race, and in the common Renaissance they are regenerated otherwise than the Latin races. The free and full development of pure nature which, in Greece and Italy, ends in the painting of beauty and happy energy, ends here in the painting of ferocious energy, agony, and death.

SECTION IV.--The Poets of the Period

Thus was this theatre produced; a theatre unique in history, like the admirable and fleeting epoch from which it sprang, the work and the picture of this young world, as natural, as unshackled, and as tragic as itself. When an original and national drama springs up, the poets who establish it carry in themselves the sentiments which it represents. They display better than other men the feelings of the public, because those feelings arc stronger in them than in other men. The passions which surround them, break forth in their heart with a harsher or a juster cry, and hence their voices become the voices of all. Chivalric and Catholic Spain had her interpreters in her enthusiasts and her Don Quixotes: in Calderon, first a soldier, afterwards a priest; in Lope de Vega, a volunteer at fifteen, a passionate lover, a wandering duelist, a soldier of the Armada, finally, a priest and familiar of the Holy Office; so full of fervor that he fasts till he is exhausted, faints with emotion while singing mass, and in his flagellations stains the walls of his cell with blood. Calm and noble Greece had in her principal tragic poet one of the most accomplished and fortunate of her sons:[422] Sophocles, first in song and palaestra; who at fifteen sang, unclad, the pæan before the trophy of Salamis, and who afterwards, as ambassador, general, ever loving the gods and impassioned for his state, presented, in his life as in his works, the spectacle of the incomparable harmony which made the beauty of the ancient world, and which the modern world will never more attain to. Eloquent and worldly France, in the age which carried the art of good manners and conversation to its highest pitch, finds, to write her oratorical tragedies and to paint her drawing-room passions, the most able craftsman of words, Racine, a courtier, a man of the world; the most capable, by the delicacy of his tact and the adaptation of his style, of making men of the world and courtiers speak. So in England the poets are in harmony with their works. Almost all are Bohemians; they sprang from the people,[423] were educated, and usually studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but they were poor, so that their education contrasts with their condition. Ben Jonson is the step-son of a bricklayer, and himself a bricklayer; Marlowe is the son of a shoemaker; Shakespeare of a wool merchant; Massinger of a servant of a noble family.[424] They live as they can, get into debt, write for their bread, go on the stage. Peele, Lodge, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, are actors; most of the details which we have of their lives are taken from the journal of Henslowe, a retired pawnbroker, later a money-lender and manager of a theatre, who gives them work, advances money to them, receives their manuscripts or their wardrobes as security. For a play he gives seven or eight pounds; after the year 1600 prices rise, and reach as high as twenty or twenty-five pounds. It is clear that, even after this increase, the trade of author scarcely brings in bread. In order to earn money, it was necessary, like Shakespeare, to become a manager, to try to have a share in the property of a theatre; but such success is rare, and the life which they lead, a life of actors and artists, improvident, full of excess, lost amid debauchery and acts of violence, amidst women of evil fame, in contact with young profligates, among the temptations of misery, imagination and license, generally leads them to exhaustion, poverty, and death. Men received enjoyment from them, but neglected and despised them. One actor, for a political allusion, was sent to prison, and only just escaped losing his ears; great men, men in office, abused them like servants. Heywood, who played almost every day, bound himself, in addition, to write a sheet daily, for several years composes at haphazard in taverns, labors and sweats like a true literary hack, and dies leaving two hundred and twenty pieces, of which most are lost. Kyd, one of the earliest in date, died in misery. Shirley, one of the last, at the end of his career, was obliged to become once more a schoolmaster. Massinger dies unknown; and in the parish register we find only this sad mention of him: "Philip Massinger, a stranger." A few months after the death of Middleton, his widow was obliged to ask alms of the City, because he had left nothing. Imagination, as Drummond said of Ben Jonson, oppressed their reason; it is the common failing of poets. They wish to enjoy, and give themselves wholly up to enjoyment; their mood, their heart governs them; in their life, as in their works, impulses are irresistible; desire comes suddenly, like a wave, drowning reason, resistance--often even giving neither reason nor resistance time to show themselves.[425] Many are roisterers, sad roisterers of the same sort, such as Musset and Murger, who give themselves up to every passion, and "drown their sorrows in the bowl"; capable of the purest and most poetic dreams, of the most delicate and touching tenderness, and who yet can only undermine their health and mar their fame. Such are Nash, Decker, and Greene; Nash, a fantastic satirist, who abused his talent, and conspired like a prodigal against good fortune; Decker, who passed three years in the King's Bench prison; Greene, above all, a pleasing wit, copious, graceful, who took a delight in destroying himself, publicly with tears confessing his vices,[426] and the next moment plunging into them again. These are mere androgynes, true courtesans, in manners, body, and heart. Quitting Cambridge, "with good fellows as free-living as himself," Greene had travelled over Spain, Italy, "in which places he sawe and practizde such villainie as is abhominable to declare." You see the poor man is candid, not sparing himself; he is natural; passionate in everything, repentance or otherwise; above all of ever-varying mood; made for self-contradiction; not self-correction. On his return he became, in London, a supporter of taverns, a haunter of evil places. In his "Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance" he says:

"I was dround in pride, whoredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my onely delight.... After I had wholly betaken me to the penning of plaies (which was my continuall exercise) I was so far from calling upon God that I sildome thought on God, but tooke such delight in swearing and blaspheming the name of God that none could thinke otherwise of me than that I was the child of perdition. These vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vaine fantasies was my chiefest stay of living; and for those my vaine discourses I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continuall companions, came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long.... If I may have my disire while I live I am satisfied; let me shift after death as I may.... 'Hell!' quoth I; 'what talke you of hell to me? I know if I once come there I shall have the company of better men than myselfe; I shall also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and so long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse.... If I feared the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of God I would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other, and make merrie with the shelles I found in them so long as they would last.'"

A little later he is seized with remorse, marries, depicts in delicious verse the regularity and calm of an upright life; then returns to London, spends his property and his wife's fortune with "a sorry ragged queane," in the company of ruffians, pimps, sharpers, courtesans; drinking, blaspheming, wearing himself out by sleepless nights and orgies; writing for bread, sometimes amid the brawling and effluvia of his wretched lodging, lighting upon thoughts of adoration and love, worthy of Rolla;[427] very often disgusted with himself, seized with a fit of weeping between two merry bouts, and writing little pieces to accuse himself, to regret his wife, to convert his comrades, or to warn young people against the tricks of prostitutes and swindlers. He was soon worn out by this kind of life; six years were enough to exhaust him. An indigestion arising from Rhenish wine and pickled herrings finished him. If it had not been for his landlady, who succored him, he "would have perished in the streets." He lasted a little longer, and then his light went out; now and then he begged her "pittifully for a penny pott of malmesie"; he was covered with lice, he had but one shirt, and when his own was "awashing," he was obliged to borrow her husband's. "His doublet and hose and sword were sold for three shillinges," and the poor folks paid the cost of his burial, four shillings for the winding sheet, and six and fourpence for the burial.

In such low places, on such dunghills, amid such excesses and violence, dramatic genius forced its way, and amongst others, that of the first, of the most powerful, of the true founder of the dramatic school, Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement and audacious spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic frenzy; pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed. In this universal return to the senses, and in this impulse of natural forces which brought on the Renaissance, the corporeal instincts and the ideas which hallow them, break forth impetuously. Marlowe, like Greene, like Kett,[428] is a sceptic, denies God and Christ, blasphemes the Trinity, declares Moses "a juggler," Christ more worthy of death than Barabas, says that "yf he wer to write a new religion, he wolde undertake both a more excellent and more admirable methode," and "almost in every company he commeth, perswadeth men to Athiesme."[429] Such were the rages, the rashnesses, the excesses which liberty of thought gave rise to in these new minds, who for the first time, after so many centuries, dared to walk unfettered. From his father's shop, crowded with children, from the straps and awls, he found himself studying at Cambridge, probably through the patronage of a great man, and on his return to London, in want, amid the license of the green-room, the low houses and taverns, his head was in a ferment, and his passions became excited. He turned actor; but having broken his leg in a scene of debauchery, he remained lame, and could no longer appear on the boards. He openly avowed his infidelity, and a prosecution was begun, which, if time had not failed, would probably have brought him to the stake. He made love to a drab, and in trying to stab his rival, his hand was turned, so that his own blade entered his eye and his brain, and he died, cursing and blaspheming. He was only thirty years old.

Think what poetry could emanate from a life so passionate, and occupied in such a manner! First, exaggerated declamation, heaps of murder, atrocities, a pompous and furious display of tragedy bespattered with blood, and passions raised to a pitch of madness. All the foundations of the English stage, "Ferrex and Porrex, Cambyses, Hieronymo," even the "Pericles" of Shakespeare, reach the same height of extravagance, magniloquence and horror.[430] It is the first outbreak of youth. Recall Schiller's "Robbers," and how modern democracy has recognized for the first time its picture in the metaphors and cries of Charles Moor.[431] So here the characters struggle and roar, stamp on the earth, gnash their teeth, shake their fists against heaven. The trumpets sound, the drums beat, coats of mail file past armies clash, men stab each other, or themselves; speeches are full of gigantic threats and lyrical figures;[432] kings die, straining a bass voice; "now doth ghastly death with greedy talons gripe my bleeding heart, and like a harpy tires on my life." The hero in "Tamburlaine the Great"[433] is seated on a chariot drawn by chained kings; he burns towns, drowns women and children, puts men to the sword, and finally, seized with an inscrutable sickness, raves in monstrous outcries against the gods, whose hands afflict his soul, and whom he would fain dethrone. There already is the picture of senseless pride, of blind and murderous rage, which passing through many devastations, at last arms against heaven itself. The overflowing of savage and immoderate instinct produces this mighty sounding verse, this prodigality of carnage, this display of splendors and exaggerated colors, this railing of demoniacal passions, this audacity of grand impiety. If in the dramas which succeed it, "The Massacre at Paris," "The Jew of Malta," the bombast decreases, the violence remains. Barabas the Jew maddened with hate, is henceforth no longer human; he has been treated by the Christians like a beast, and he hates them like a beast. He advises his servant Ithamore in the following words:

"Hast thou no trade? then listen to my words, And I will teach thee that shall stick by thee: First, be thou void of these affections, Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear; Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none, But to thyself smile when the Christians moan. ... I walk abroad a-nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls; Sometimes I go about and poison wells.... Being young, I studied physic, and began To practice first upon the Italian; There I enrich'd the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells.... I fill'd the jails with bankrouts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals; And every moon made some or other mad, And now and then one hang himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll How I with interest tormented him."[434]

All these cruelties he boasts of and chuckles over, like a demon who rejoices in being a good executioner, and plunges his victims in the very extremity of anguish. His daughter has two Christian suitors; and by forged letters he causes them to slay each other. In despair she takes the veil, and to avenge himself he poisons his daughter and the whole convent. Two friars wish to denounce him, then to convert him; he strangles the first, and jokes with his slave Ithamore, a cut-throat by profession, who loves his trade, rubs his hands with joy, and says:

"Pull amain, 'Tis neatly done, sir; here's no print at all. So, let him lean upon his staff; excellent! he stands as if he were begging of bacon."[435] "O mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottlenosed knave to my master, that ever gentleman had."[436]

The second friar comes up, and they accuse him of the murder.

"_Barabas._ Heaven bless me! what, a friar a murderer! When shall you see a Jew commit the like? _Ithamore._ Why, a Turk could ha' done no more. _Bar._ To-morrow is the sessions; you shall do it-- Come Ithamore, let's help to take him hence. _Friar._ Villains, I am a sacred person; touch me not. _Bar._ The law shall touch you; we'll but lead you, we: 'Las, I could weep at your calamity!"[437]

We have also two other poisonings, an infernal machine to blow up the Turkish garrison, a plot to cast the Turkish commander into a well. Barabas falls into it himself, and dies in the hot caldron,[438] howling, hardened, remorseless, having but one regret, that he had not done evil enough. These are the ferocities of the Middle Ages; we might find them to this day among the companions of Ali Pacha, among the pirates of the Archipelago; we retain pictures of them in the paintings of the fifteenth century, which represent a king with his court, seated calmly round a living man who is being flayed; in the midst the flayer on his knees is working conscientiously, very careful not to spoil the skin.[439]

All this is pretty strong, you will say; these people kill too readily, and too quickly. It is on this very account that the painting is a true one. For the specialty of the men of the time, as of Marlowe's characters, is the abrupt commission of a deed; they are children, robust children. As a horse kicks out instead of speaking, so they pull out their knives instead of asking an explanation. Nowadays we hardly know what nature is; instead of observing it we still retain the benevolent prejudices of the eighteenth century; we only see it humanized by two centuries of culture, and we take its acquired calm for an innate moderation. The foundations of the natural man are irresistible impulses, passions, desires, greeds; all blind. He sees a woman,[440] thinks her beautiful; suddenly he rushes towards her; people try to restrain him, he kills these people, gluts his passion, then thinks no more of it, save when at times a vague picture of a moving lake of blood crosses his brain and makes him gloomy. Sudden and extreme resolves are confused in his mind with desire; barely planned, the thing is done; the wide interval which a Frenchman places between the idea of an action and the action itself is not to be found here.[441] Barabas conceived murders, and straightway murders were accomplished; there is no deliberation, no pricks of conscience; that is how he commits a score of them; his daughter leaves him, he becomes unnatural, and poisons her; his confidential servant betrays him, he disguises himself, and poisons him. Rage seizes these men like a fit, and then they are forced to kill. Benvenuto Cellini relates how, being offended, he tried to restrain himself, but was nearly suffocated; and that in order to cure himself, he rushed with his dagger upon his opponent. So, in "Edward the Second," the nobles immediately appeal to arms; all is excessive and unforeseen: between two replies the heart is turned upside down, transported to the extremes of hate or tenderness. Edward, seeing his favorite Gaveston again, pours out before him his treasure, casts his dignities at his feet, gives him his seal, himself, and, on a threat from the Bishop of Coventry, suddenly cries:

"Throw off his golden mitre, rend his stole, And in the channel christen him anew."[442]

Then, when the queen supplicates:

"Fawn not on me, French strumpet! get thee gone.... Speak not unto her: let her droop and pine."[443]

Furies and hatreds clash together like horsemen in battle. The Earl of Lancaster draws his sword on Gaveston to slay him, before the king; Mortimer wounds Gaveston. These powerful loud voices growl; the noblemen will not even let a dog approach the prince, and rob them of their rank. Lancaster says of Gaveston:

"... He comes not back, Unless the sea cast up his shipwrack'd body. _Warwick._ And to behold so sweet a sight as that, There's none here but would run his horse to death."[444]

They have seized Gaveston, and intend to hang him "at a bough"; they refuse to let him speak a single minute with the king. In vain they are entreated; when they do at last consent, they are sorry for it; it is a prey they want immediately, and Warwick, seizing him by force, "strake off his head in a trench." Those are the men of the Middle Ages. They have the fierceness, the tenacity, the pride of big, well-fed, thorough-bred bull-dogs. It is this sternness and impetuosity of primitive passions which produced the Wars of the Roses, and for thirty years drove the nobles on each other's swords and to the block.

What is there beyond all these frenzies and gluttings of blood? The idea of crushing necessity and inevitable ruin in which everything sinks and comes to an end. Mortimer, brought to the block, says with a smile:

"Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel There is a point, to which, when men aspire, They tumble headlong down: that point I touch'd, And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher, Why should I grieve at my declining fall?-- Farewell, fair queen; weep not for Mortimer, That scorns the world, and, as a traveller, Goes to discover countries yet unknown."[445]

Weigh well these grand words; they are a cry from the heart, the profound confession of Marlowe, as also of Byron, and of the old sea-kings. The northern paganism is fully expressed in this heroic and mournful sigh: it is thus they imagine the world so long as they remain on the outside of Christianity, or as soon as they quit it. Thus, when men see in life, as they did, nothing but a battle of unchecked passions, and in death but a gloomy sleep, perhaps filled with mournful dreams, there is no other supreme good but a day of enjoyment and victory. They glut themselves, shutting their eyes to the issue, except that they may be swallowed up on the morrow. That is the master-thought of "Doctor Faustus," the greatest of Marlowe's dramas: to satisfy his soul, no matter at what price, or with what results:

"A sound magician is a mighty god.... How am I glutted with conceit of this!... I'll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl.... I'll have them read me strange philosophy, And tell the secrets of all foreign kings; I'll have them wall all Germany with brass, And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg.... Like lions shall they guard us when we please; Like Almain rutters with their horsemen's staves, Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides; Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids, Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows Than have the white breasts of the queen of love."[446]

What brilliant dreams, what desires, what vast or voluptuous wishes, worthy of a Roman Cæsar or an Eastern poet, eddy in this teeming brain! To satiate them, to obtain four-and-twenty years of power, Faustus gave his soul, without fear, without need of temptation, at the first outset, voluntarily, so sharp is the prick within:

"Had I as many souls as there be stars, I'd give them all for Mephistophilis. By him I'll be great emperor of the world, And make a bridge thorough the moving air.... Why shouldst thou not? Is not thy soul thine own?"[447]

And with that he gives himself full swing: he wants to know everything, to have everything; a book in which he can behold all herbs and trees which grow upon the earth; another in which shall be drawn all the constellations and planets; another which shall bring him gold when he wills it, and "the fairest courtezans"; another which summons "men in armour" ready to execute his commands, and which holds "whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightning" chained at his disposal. He is like a child, he stretches out his hands for everything shining; then grieves to think of hell, then lets himself be diverted by shows:

"_Faustus._ O this feeds my soul! _Lucifer._ Tut, Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight. _Faustus._ Oh, might I see hell, and return again, How happy were I then!..."[448]

He is conducted, being invisible, over the whole world: lastly to Rome, amongst the ceremonies of the pope's court. Like a schoolboy during a holiday, he has insatiable eyes, he forgets everything before a pageant, he amuses himself in playing tricks, in giving the pope a box on the ear, in beating the monks, in performing magic tricks before princes, finally in drinking, feasting, filling his belly, deadening his thoughts. In his transport he becomes an atheist, and says there is no hell, that those are "old wives' tales." Then suddenly the sad idea knocks at the gates of his brain.

"I will renounce this magic, and repent... My heart's so harden'd I cannot repent: Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven, But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears, 'Faustus, thou are damn'd!' then swords and knives, Poison, guns, halters, and envenom'd steel Are laid before me to despatch myself; And long ere this I should have done the deed, Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair. Have not I made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander's love and Œnon's death? And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophilis? Why should I die, then, or basely despair? I am resolv'd; Faustus shall ne'er repent.-- Come Mephistophilis, let us dispute again, And argue of divine astrology. Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon? Are all celestial bodies but one globe, As is the substance of this centric earth?..."[449] "One thing... let me crave of thee To glut the longing of my heart's desire.... Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss! Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!-- Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.... O thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"[450]

"Oh, my God, I would weep! but the devil draws in my tears. Gush forth blood, instead of tears! yea, life and soul! Oh, he stays my tongue! I would lift up my hands; but see, they hold them, they hold them; Lucifer and Mephistophilis...."[451]

"Ah, Faustus, Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damn'd perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come.... The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd. Oh, I'll leap up to my God!--Who pulls me down?-- See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ, Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ, Yet will I call on him.... Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon.... Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd.... It strikes, it strikes.... Oh soul, be chang'd into little water-drops, And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!"[452]

There is the living, struggling, natural, personal man, not the philosophic type which Goethe has created, but a primitive and genuine man, hot-headed, fiery, the slave of his passions, the sport of his dreams, wholly engrossed in the present, moulded by his lusts, contradictions, and follies, who amidst noise and starts, cries of pleasure and anguish, rolls, knowing it and willing it, down the slope and crags of his precipice. The whole English drama is here, as a plant in its seed, and Marlowe is to Shakespeare what Perugino was to Raphael.

SECTION V.--Formation of the Drama

Gradually art is being formed; and toward the close of the century it is complete. Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Webster, Massinger, Ford, Middleton, Heywood, appear together, or close upon each other, a new and favored generation, flourishing largely in the soil fertilized by the efforts of the generation which preceded them. Henceforth the scenes are developed and assume consistency, the characters cease to move all of a piece, the drama is no longer like a piece of statuary. The poet who a little while ago knew only how to strike or kill, introduces now a sequence of situation and a rationale in intrigue. He begins to prepare the way for sentiments, to forewarn us of events, to combine effects, and we find a theatre at last, the most complete, the most life-like, and also the most strange that ever existed.

We must follow its formation, and regard the drama when it was formed, that is, in the minds of its authors. What was going on in these minds? What sorts of ideas were born there, and how were they born? In the first place, they see the event, whatever it be, and they see it as it is; I mean that they have it within themselves, with its persons and details, beautiful and ugly, even dull and grotesque. If it is a trial, the judge is there, in their minds, in his place, with his physiognomy and his warts; the plaintiff in another place, with his spectacles and brief-bag; the accused is opposite, stooping and remorseful; each with his friends, cobblers, or lords; then the buzzing crowd behind, all with their grinning faces, their bewildered or kindling eyes.[453] It is a genuine trial which they imagine, a trial like those they have seen before the justice, where they screamed or shouted as witnesses or interested parties, with their quibbling terms, their pros and cons, the scribblings, the sharp voices of the counsel, the stamping of feet, the crowding, the smell of their fellow-men, and so forth. The endless myriads of circumstances which accompany and influence every event, crowd round that event in their heads, and not merely the externals, that is, the visible and picturesque traits, the details of color and costume, but also, and chiefly, the internals, that is, the motions of anger and joy, the secret tumult of the soul, the ebb and flow of ideas and passions which are expressed by the countenance, swell the veins, make a man to grind his teeth, to clench his fists, which urge him on or restrain him. They see all the details, the tides that sway a man, one from without, another from within, one through another, one within another, both together without faltering and without ceasing. And what is this insight but sympathy, an imitative sympathy, which puts us in another's place, which carries over their agitations to our own breasts, which makes our life a little world, able to reproduce the great one in abstract? Like the characters they imagine, poets and spectators make gestures, raise their voices, act. No speech or story can show their inner mood, but it is the scenic effect which can manifest it. As some men invent a language for their ideas, so these act and mimic them; theatrical imitation and figured representation is their genuine speech: all other expression, the lyrical song of Æschylus, the reflective symbolism of Goethe, the oratorical development of Racine, would be impossible for them. Involuntarily, instantaneously, without forecast, they cut life into scenes, and carry it piecemeal on the boards; this goes so far that often a mere character becomes an actor,[454] playing a part within a part; the scenic faculty is the natural form of their mind. Beneath the effort of this instinct, all the accessory parts of the drama come before the footlights and expand before your eyes. A battle has been fought; instead of relating it, they bring it before the public, trumpets and drums, pushing crowds, slaughtering combatants. A shipwreck happens; straightway the ship is before the spectator, with the sailors' oaths, the technical orders of the pilot. Of all the details of human life,[455] tavern-racket and statesmen's councils, scullion's talk and court processions, domestic tenderness and pandering--none is to small or too lofty: these things exist in life--let them exist on the stage, each in full, in the rough, atrocious, or absurd, just as they are, no matter how. Neither in Greece, nor Italy, nor Spain, nor France, has an art been seen which tried so boldly to express the soul, and its innermost depths—the truth, and the whole truth.

How did they succeed, and what is this new art which tramples on all ordinary rules? It is an art for all that, since it is natural; a great art, since it embraces more things, and that more deeply than others do, like the art of Rembrandt and Rubens; but like theirs, it is a Teutonic art, and one whose every step is in contrast with those of classical art. What the Greeks and Romans, the originators of the latter, sought in everything, was charm and order. Monuments, statues, and paintings, the theatre, eloquence and poetry, from Sophocles to Racine, they shaped all their work in the same mould, and attained beauty by the same method. In the infinite entanglement and complexity of things, they grasped a small number of simple ideas, which they embraced in a small number of simple representations, so that the vast confused vegetation of life is presented to the mind from that time forth, pruned and reduced, and perhaps easily embraced at a single glance. A square of walls with rows of columns all alike; a symmetrical group of draped or undraped forms; a young man standing up and raising one arm; a wounded warrior who will not return to the camp, though they beseech him: this, in their noblest epoch, was their architecture, their painting, their sculpture, and their theatre. No poetry but a few sentiments not very intricate, always natural, not toned down, intelligible to all; no eloquence but a continuous argument, a limited vocabulary, the loftiest ideas brought down to their sensible origin, so that children can understand such eloquence and feel such poetry; and in this sense they are classical.[456] In the hands of Frenchmen, the last inheritors of the simple art, these great legacies of antiquity undergo no change. If poetic genius is less, the structure of mind has not altered. Racine puts on the stage a sole action, whose details he adjusts, and whose course he regulates; no incident, nothing unforeseen, no appendices or incongruities; no secondary intrigue. The subordinate parts are effaced; at the most four or five principal characters, the fewest possible; the rest, reduced to the condition of confidants, take the tone of their masters, and merely reply to them. All the scenes are connected, and flow insensibly one into the other, and every scene, like the entire piece, has its order and progress. The tragedy stands out symmetrically and clear in the midst of human life, like a complete and solitary temple which limns its regular outline on the luminous azure of the sky, in England all is different. All that the French call proportion and fitness is wanting; Englishmen do not trouble themselves about them, they do not need them. There is no unity; they leap suddenly over twenty years, or five hundred leagues. There are twenty scenes in an act--we stumble without preparation from one to the other, from tragedy to buffoonery; usually it appears as though the action gained no ground; the different personages waste their time in conversation, dreaming, displaying their character. We were moved, anxious for the issue, and here they bring us in quarrelling servants, lovers making poetry. Even the dialogue and speeches, which we would think ought particularly to be of a regular and continuous flow of engrossing ideas, remain stagnant, or are scattered in windings and deviations. At first sight we fancy we are not advancing, we do not feel at every phrase that we have made a step. There are none of those solid pleadings, none of those conclusive discussions, which every moment add reason to reason, objection to objection; people might say that the different personages only knew how to scold, to repeat themselves, and to mark time. And the disorder is as great in general as in particular things. They heap a whole reign, a complete war, an entire novel, into a drama; they cut up into scenes an English chronicle or an Italian novel: this is all their art; the events matter little; whatever they are, they accept them. They have no idea of progressive and individual action. Two or three actions connected endwise, or entangled one within another, two or three incomplete endings badly contrived, and opened up again; no machinery but death, scattered right and left and unforeseen: such is the logic of their method. The fact is, that our logic, the Latin, fails them. Their mind does not march by the smooth and straightforward paths of rhetoric and eloquence. It reaches the same end, but by other approaches. It is at once more comprehensive and less regular than ours. It demands a conception more complete, but less consecutive. It proceeds, not as with us, by a line of uniform steps, but by sudden leaps and long pauses. It does not rest satisfied with a simple idea drawn from a complex fact, but demands the complex fact entire, with its numberless particularities, its interminable ramifications. It sees in man not a general passion--ambition, anger, or love; not a pure quality--happiness, avarice, folly; but a character, that is, the imprint, wonderfully complicated, which inheritance, temperament, education, calling, age, society, conversation, habits, have stamped on every man; an incommunicable and individual imprint, which, once stamped in a man, is not found again in any other. It sees in the hero not only the hero, but the individual, with his manner of walking, drinking, swearing, blowing his nose; with the tone of his voice, whether he is thin or fat;[457] and thus plunges to the bottom of things, with every look, as by a miner's deep shaft. This sunk, it little cares whether the second shaft be two paces or a hundred from the first; enough that it reaches the same depth, and serves equally well to display the inner and visible layer. Logic is here from beneath, not from above. It is the unity of a character which binds the two actions of the personage, as the unity of an impression connects the two scenes of a drama. To speak exactly, the spectator is like a man whom we should lead along a wall pierced at separate intervals with little windows; at every window he catches for an instant a glimpse of a new landscape, with its million details: the walk over, if he is of Latin race and training, he finds a medley of images jostling in his head, and asks for a map that he may recollect himself; if he is of German race and training, he perceives as a whole, by natural concentration, the wide country which he has only seen piecemeal. Such a conception, by the multitude of details which it combines, and by the depth of the vistas which it embraces, is a half-vision which shakes the whole soul. What its works are about to show us is, with what energy, what disdain of contrivance, what vehemence of truth, it dares to coin and hammer the human medal; with what liberty it is able to reproduce in full prominence worn-out characters, and the extreme flights of virgin nature.

SECTION VI.--Furious Passions--Exaggerated Characters

Let us consider the different personages which this art, so suited to depict real manners, and so apt to paint the living soul, goes in search of amidst the real manners and the living souls of its time and country. They are of two kinds, as befits the nature of the drama: one which produces terror, the other which moves to pity; these graceful and feminine, those manly and violent. All the differences of sex, all the extremes of life, all the resources of the stage, are embraced in this contrast; and if ever there was a complete contrast, it is here.

The reader must study for himself some of these pieces, or he will have no idea of the fury into which the stage is hurled: force and transport are driven every instant to the point of atrocity, and further still, if there be any further. Assassinations, poisonings, tortures, outcries of madness and rage; no passion and no suffering are too extreme for their energy or their effort. Anger is with them a madness, ambition a frenzy, love a delirium. Hippolyto, who has lost his mistress, says, "Were thine eyes clear as mine, thou mightst behold her, watching upon yon battlements of stars, how I observe them."[458] Aretus, to be avenged on Valentinian, poisons him after poisoning himself, and with the death-rattle in his throat, is brought to his enemy's side, to give him a foretaste of agony. Queen Brunhalt has panders with her on the stage, and causes her two sons to slay each other. Death everywhere; at the close of every play, all the great people wade in blood: with slaughter and butcheries, the stage becomes a field of battle or a churchyard.[459] Shall I describe a few of these tragedies? In the "Duke of Milan," Francesco, to avenge his sister, who has been seduced, wishes to seduce in his turn the Duchess Marcelia, wife of Sforza, the seducer; he desires her, he will have her; he says to her, with cries of love and rage:

"For with this arm I'll swim through seas of blood, Or make a bridge, arch'd with the bones of men, But I will grasp my aims in you, my dearest, Dearest, and best of women!"[460]

For he wishes to strike the duke through her, whether she lives or dies, if not by dishonor, at least by murder; the first is as good as the second, nay, better, for so he will do a greater injury. He calumniates her, and the duke, who adores her, kills her; then, being undeceived, loses his senses, will not believe she is dead, has the body brought in, kneels before it, rages and weeps. He knows now the name of the traitor, and at the thought of him he swoons or raves:

"I'll follow him to hell, but I will find him, And there live a fourth Fury to torment him. Then, for this cursed hand and arm that guided The wicked steel, I'll have them, joint by joint, With burning irons sear'd off, which I will eat, I being a vulture fit to taste such carrion."[461]

Suddenly he gasps for breath, and falls; Francesco has poisoned him. The duke dies, and the murderer is led to torture. There are worse scenes than this; to find sentiments strong enough, they go to those which change the very nature of man. Massinger puts on the stage a father who judges and condemns his daughter, stabbed by her husband; Webster and Ford, a son who assassinates his mother; Ford, the incestuous loves of a brother and sister.[462] Irresistible love overtakes them; the ancient love of Pasiphaë and Myrrha, a kind of madness-like enchantment, and beneath which the will entirely gives way. Giovanni says:

"Lost! I am lost! My fates have doom'd my death! The more I strive, I love; the more I love, The less I hope: I see my ruin certain.... I have even wearied heaven with pray'rs, dried up The spring of my continual tears, even starv'd My veins with daily fasts: what wit or art Could counsel, I have practis'd; but, alas! I find all these but dreams, and old men's tales, To fright unsteady youth: I am still the same; Or I must speak, or burst."[463]

What transports follow! what fierce and bitter joys, and how short too, how grievous and mingled with anguish, especially for her! She is married to another. Read for yourself the admirable and horrible scene which represents the wedding night. She is pregnant, and Soranzo, the husband, drags her along the ground, with curses, demanding the name of her lover:

"Come strumpet, famous whore?... Harlot, rare, notable harlot, That with thy brazen face maintain'st thy sin, Was there no man in Parma to be bawd To your loose cunning whoredom else but I? Must your hot itch and plurisy of lust, The heyday of your luxury, be fed Up to a surfeit, and could none but I Be pick'd out to be cloak to your close tricks, Your belly-sports?--Now I must be the dad To all that gallimaufry that is stuff'd In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb? Say, must I? _Annabella._ Beastly man? why, 'tis thy fate. I su'd not to thee.... _S._ Tell me by whom."[464]

She gets excited, feels and cares for nothing more, refuses to tell the name of her lover, and praises him in the following words. This praise in the midst of danger is like a rose she has plucked, and of which the odor intoxicates her:

"_A._ Soft! 'twas not in my bargain. Yet somewhat, sir, to stay your longing stomach I am content t' acquaint you with _the_ man, The more than man, that got this sprightly boy-- (For 'tis a boy, and therefore glory, sir, Your heir shall be a son.) _S._ Damnable monster? _A._ Nay, and you will not hear, I'll speak no more. _S._ Yes, speak, and speak thy last. _A._ A match, a match?... You, why you are not worthy once to name His name without true worship, or, indeed, Unless you kneel'd to hear another name him. _S._ What was he call'd? _A._ We are not come to that; Let it suffice that you shall have the glory To father what so brave a father got.... _S._ Dost thou laugh? Come, whore, tell me your lover, or, by truth, I'll hew thy flesh to shreds; who is't?"[465]

She laughs; the excess of shame and terror has given her courage; she insults him, she sings; so like a woman!

"_A._ (Sings) _Che morte piu dolce che morire per amore._ _S._ Thus will I pull thy hair, and thus I'll drag Thy lust be-leper'd body through the dust.... (_Hales her up and down_) _A._ Be a gallant hangman.... I leave revenge behind, and thou shalt feel't.... (_To Vasquez._) Pish, do not beg for me, I prize my life As nothing; if the man will needs be mad, Why, let him take it."[466]

In the end all is discovered, and the two lovers know they must die. For the last time, they see each other in Annabella's chamber, listening to the noise of the feast below which shall serve for their funeral feast. Giovanni, who has made his resolve like a madman, sees Annabella richly dressed, dazzling. He regards her in silence, and remembers the past. He weeps and says:

"These are the funeral tears, Shed on your grave; these furrow'd-up my cheeks When first I lov'd and knew not how to woo.... Give me your hand: how sweetly life doth run In these well-colour'd veins! How constantly These palms do promise health!... Kiss me again, forgive me.... Farewell."[467]

He then stabs her, enters the banqueting room, with her heart upon his dagger:

"Soranzo see this heart, which was thy wife's. Thus I exchange it royally for thine."[468]

He kills him, and casting himself on the swords of banditti, dies. It would seem that tragedy could go no further.

But it did go further; for if these are melodramas, they are sincere, composed, not like those of to-day, by Grub Street writers for peaceful citizens, but by impassioned men, experienced in tragical arts, for a violent, over-fed, melancholy race. From Shakespeare to Milton, Swift, Hogarth, no race has been more glutted with coarse expressions and horrors, and its poets supply them plentifully; Ford less so than Webster; the latter a sombre man, whose thoughts seem incessantly to be haunting tombs and charnel-houses. "Places in court," he says, "are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower."[469] Such are his images. No one has equalled Webster in creating desperate characters, utter wretches, bitter misanthropes,[470] in blackening and blaspheming human life, above all, in depicting the shameless depravity and refined ferocity of Italian manners.[471] The Duchess of Malfi has secretly married her steward Antonio, and her brother learns that she has children; almost mad[472] with rage and wounded pride, he remains silent, waiting until he knows the name of the father; then he arrives all of a sudden, means to kill her, but so that she shall taste the lees of death. She must suffer much, but above all, she must not die too quickly! She must suffer in mind; these griefs are worse than the body's. He sends assassins to kill Antonio, and meanwhile comes to her in the dark, with affectionate words; he pretends to be reconciled, and suddenly shows her waxen figures, covered with wounds, whom she takes for her slaughtered husband and children. She staggers under the blow, and remains in gloom without crying out. Then she says:

"Good comfortable fellow, Persuade a wretch that's broke upon the wheel To have all his bones new set; entreat him live To be executed again. Who must despatch me?... _Bosola._ Come, be of comfort, I will save your life. _Duchess._ Indeed, I have not leisure to tend So small a business. _B._ Now, by my life, I pity you. _D._ Thou art a fool, then, To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched As cannot pity itself. I am full of daggers."[473]

Slow words, spoken in a whisper, as in a dream, or as if she were speaking of a third person. Her brother sends to her a company of madmen, who leap and howl and rave around her in mournful wise; a pitiful sight, calculated to unseat the reason; a kind of foretaste of hell. She says nothing, looking upon them; her heart is dead, her eyes fixed, with vacant stare:

"_Cariola._ What think you of, madam? _Duchess._ Of nothing: When I muse thus, I sleep. _C._ Like a madman, with your eyes open? _D._ Dost thou think we shall know one another In the other world? _C._ Yes, out of question. _D._ O that it were possible we might But hold some two days' conference with the dead! From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure, I never shall know here. I'll teach thee a miracle; I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow: The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass, The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad. I am acquainted with sad misery As the tann'd galley-slave is with his oar...."[474]

In this state, the limbs, like those of one who has been newly executed, still quiver, but the sensibility is worn out; the miserable body only stirs mechanically; it has suffered too much. At last the gravedigger comes with executioners, a coffin, and they sing before her a funeral dirge:

"_Duchess._ Farewell, Cariola... I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep.--Now, what you please: What death? _Bosola._ Strangling; here are your executioners. _D._ I forgive them: The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs Would do as much as they do.... My body Bestow upon my women, will you?... Go, tell my brothers, when I am laid out, They then may feed in quiet."[475]

After the mistress the maid; the latter cries and struggles:

"_Cariola._ I will not die; I must not; I am contracted To a young gentleman. _1st Executioner._ Here's your wedding-ring. _C._ If you kill me now, I am damn'd. I have not been at confession This two years. _B._ When?[476] _C._ I am quick with child."[477]

They strangle her also, and the two children of the duchess. Antonio is assassinated; the cardinal and his mistress, the duke and his confidant, are poisoned or butchered; and the solemn words of the dying, in the midst of this butchery, utter, as from funereal trumpets, a general curse upon existence:

"We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves, That, ruin'd yield no echo. Fare you well.... O this gloomy world! In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness, Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!"[478]

"In all our quest of greatness, Like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, We follow after bubbles blown in the air. Pleasure of life, what is't? only the good hours Of an ague; merely a preparative to rest, To endure vexation.... Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust."[479]

You will find nothing sadder or greater from the Edda to Lord Byron.

We can well imagine what powerful characters are necessary to sustain these terrible dramas. All these personages are ready for extreme acts; their resolves break forth like blows of a sword; we follow, meet at every change of scene their glowing eyes, wan lips, the starting of their muscles, the tension of their whole frame. Their powerful will contracts their violent hands, and their accumulated passion breaks out in thunderbolts, which tear and ravage all around them, and in their own hearts. We know them, the heroes of this tragic population, Iago, Richard III, Lady Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus, Hotspur, full of genius, courage, desire, generally mad or criminal, always self-driven to the tomb. There are as many around Shakespeare as in his own works. Let me exhibit one character more, written by the same dramatist, Webster. No one, except Shakespeare, has seen further into the depths of diabolical and unchained nature. The "White Devil" is the name which he gives to his heroine. His Vittoria Corombona receives as her lover the Duke of Brachiano, and at the first interview dreams of the issue:

"To pass away the time, I'll tell your grace A dream I had last night."

It is certainly well related, and still better chosen, of deep meaning and very clear import. Her brother Flaminio says, aside:

"Excellent devil! she hath taught him in a dream To make away his duchess and her husband."[480]

So, her husband, Camillo, is strangled, the Duchess poisoned, and Vittoria, accused of the two crimes, is brought before the tribunal. Step by step, like a soldier brought to bay with his back against a wall, she defends herself, refuting and defying advocates and judges, incapable of blenching or quailing, clear in mind, ready in word, amid insults and proofs, even menaced with death on the scaffold. The advocate begins to speak in Latin.

"_Vittoria._ Pray my lord, let him speak his usual tongue; I'll make no answer else. _Francisco de Medicis._ Why, you understand Latin. _V._ I do, sir; but amongst this auditory Which come to hear my cause, the half or more May be ignorant in't."

She wants a duel, bare-breasted, in open day, and challenges the advocate:

"I am at the mark, sir: I'll give aim to you, And tell you how near you shoot."

She mocks his legal phraseology, insults him, with biting irony:

"Surely, my lords, this lawyer here hath swallow'd Some pothecaries' bills, or proclamations; And now the hard and undigestible words Come up, like stones we use give hawks for physic: Why, this is Welsh to Latin."

Then, to the strongest adjuration of the judges:

"To the point, Find me but guilty, sever head from body, We'll part good friends; I scorn to hold my life At yours, or any man's entreaty, sir.... These are but feigned shadows of my evils: Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils; I am past such needless palsy. For your names Of whore and murderess, they proceed from you, As if a man should spit against the wind; The filth returns in's face."[481]

Argument for argument: she has a parry for every blow: a parry and a thrust:

"But take you your course: it seems you have beggar'd me first, And now would fain undo me. I have houses. Jewels, and a poor remnant of crusadoes: Would those would make you charitable!"

Then, in a harsher voice:

"In faith, my lord, you might go pistol flies; The sport would be more noble."

They condemn her to be shut up in a house of convertites:

"_V._ A house of convertites! What's that? _Monticelso._ A house of penitent whores. _V._ Do the noblemen in Rome Erect it for their wives, that I am sent To lodge there?"[482]

The sarcasm comes home like a sword-thrust; then another behind it; then cries and curses. She will not bend, she will not weep. She goes off erect, bitter and more haughty than ever:

"I will not weep; No, I do scorn to call up one poor tear To fawn on your injustice: bear me hence Unto this house of what's your mitigating title? _Mont._ Of convertites. _V._ It shall not be a house of convertites; My mind shall make it honester to me Than the Pope's palace, and more peaceable Than thy soul, though thou art a cardinal."[483]

Against her furious lover, who accuses her of unfaithfulness, she is as strong as against her judges; she copes with him, casts in his teeth the death of his duchess, forces him to beg pardon, to marry her; she will play the comedy to the end, at the pistol's mouth, with the shamelessness and courage of a courtesan and an empress;[484] snared at last, she will be just as brave and more insulting when the dagger's point threatens her:

"Yes, I shall welcome death As princes do some great ambassadors; I'll meet thy weapon half way.... 'Twas a manly blow; The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant; And then thou wilt be famous."[485]

When a woman unsexes herself, her actions transcend man's, and there is nothing which she will not suffer or dare.

SECTION VII.--Female Characters

Opposed to this band of tragic characters, with their distorted features, brazen fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop of sweet and timid figures, pre-eminently tender-hearted, the most graceful and loveworthy whom it has been given to man to depict. In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virgilia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in the others; and it is a characteristic of the race to have furnished them, as it is of the drama to have represented them. By a singular coincidence, the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than elsewhere. The two natures go each to its extreme: in the one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection[486]--a thing unknown in distant lands, in France especially so: a woman in England gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing and professing only to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely and forever chosen.[487] It is this, an old German instinct, which these great painters of instinct diffuse here, one and all: Penthea, Dorothea, in Ford and Greene; Isabella and the Duchess of Malfi, in Webster; Bianca, Ordella, Arethusa, Juliana, Euphrasia, Amoret, and others, in Beaumont and Fletcher: there are a score of them who, under the severest tests and the strongest temptations, display this wonderful power of self-abandonment and devotion.[488] The soul, in this race, is at once primitive and serious. Women keep their purity longer than elsewhere. They lose respect less quickly; weigh worth and characters less suddenly: they are less apt to think evil, and to take the measure of their husbands. To this day, a great lady, accustomed to company, blushes in the presence of an unknown man, and feels bashful like a little girl: the blue eyes are dropped, and a child-like shame flies to her rosy cheeks. Englishwomen have not the smartness, the boldness of ideas, the assurance of bearing, the precocity, which with the French make of a young girl, in six months, a woman of intrigue and the queen of a drawing-room.[489] Domestic life and obedience are more easy to them. More pliant and more sedentary, they are at the same time more concentrated and introspective, more disposed to follow the noble dream called duty, which is hardly generated in mankind but by silence of the senses. They are not tempted by the voluptuous sweetness which in southern countries is breathed out in the climate, in the sky, in the general spectacle of things; which dissolves every obstacle, which causes privation to be looked upon as a snare and virtue as a theory. They can rest content with dull sensations, dispense with excitement, endure weariness; and in this monotony of a regulated existence, fall back upon themselves, obey a pure idea, employ all the strength of their hearts in maintaining their moral dignity. Thus supported by innocence and conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright sentiment, abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation: they do not lie nor simper. When they love, they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are binding themselves for their whole life. Thus understood, love becomes almost a holy thing; the spectator no longer wishes to be spiteful or to jest; women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the loved ones; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion. Euphrasia, relating her history to Philaster, says:

"My father oft would speak Your worth and virtue; and, as I did grow More and more apprehensive, I did thirst To see the man so prais'd; but yet all this Was but a maiden longing, to be lost As soon as found; till sitting in my window, Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god, I thought (but it was you), enter our gates. My blood flew out, and back again as fast, As I had puff'd it forth and suck'd it in Like breath: Then was I call'd away in haste To entertain you. Never was a man, Heav'd from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, rais'd So high in thoughts as I: You left a kiss Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep From you forever. I did hear you talk, Far above singing! After you were gone, I grew acquainted with my heart, and search'd What stirr'd it so: Alas! I found it love; Yet far from lust; for could I but have liv'd In presence of you, I had had my end."[490]

She had disguised herself as a page,[491] followed him, was his servant; what greater happiness for a woman than to serve on her knees the man she loves? She let him scold her, threaten her with death, wound her.

"Blest be that hand! It meant me well. Again, for pity's sake!"[492]

Do what he will, nothing but words of tenderness and adoration can proceed from this heart, these wan lips. Moreover, she takes upon herself a crime of which he is accused, contradicts him when he asserts his guilt, is ready to die in his place. Still more, she is of use to him with the Princess Arethusa, whom he loves; she justifies her rival, brings about their marriage, and asks no other thanks but that she may serve them both. And strange to say, the princess is not jealous.

"_Euphrasia._ Never, Sir, will I Marry; it is a thing within my vow: But if I may have leave to serve the princess, To see the virtues of her lord and her, I shall have hope to live. _Arethusa._... Come, live with me; Live free as I do. She that loves my lord, Curst be the wife that hates her!"[493]

What notion of love have they in this country? Whence happens it that all selfishness, all vanity, all rancor, every little feeling, either personal or base, flees at its approach? How comes it that the soul is given up wholly, without hesitation, without reserve, and only dreams thenceforth of prostrating and annihilating itself, as in the presence of a god? Biancha, thinking Cesario ruined, offers herself to him as his wife; and learning that he is not so, gives him up straightway, without a murmur:

"_Biancha._ So dearly I respected both your fame And quality, that I would first have perish'd In my sick thoughts, than e'er have given consent To have undone your fortunes, by inviting A marriage with so mean a one as I am: I should have died sure, and no creature known The sickness that had kill'd me... Now since I know There is no difference 'twixt your birth and mine, Not much 'twixt our estates (if any be, The advantage is on my side) I come willingly To tender you the first-fruits of my heart, And am content t' accept you for my husband. Now when you are at the lowest.... _Cesario._ Why, Biancha, Report has cozen'd thee; I am not fallen From my expected honors or possessions, Tho' from the hope of birth-right. _B._ Are you not? Then I am lost again! I have a suit too; You'll grant it, if you be a good man.... Pray do not talk of aught what I have said t'ye.... ... Pity me; But never love me more!... I'll pray for you, That you may have a virtuous wife, a fair one; And when I'm dead... _C._ Fy, fy! _B._ Think on me sometimes, With mercy for this trespass! _C._ Let us kiss At parting, as at coming! _B._ This I have As a free dower to a virgin's grave, All goodness dwell with you!"[494]

Isabella, Brachiano's duchess, is defrayed, insulted by her faithless husband; to shield him from the vengeance of her family, she takes upon herself the blame of the rupture, purposely plays the shrew, and leaving him at peace with his courtesan, dies embracing his picture. Arethusa allows herself to be wounded by Philaster, stays the people who would hold back the murderer's arm, declares that he has done nothing, that it is not he, prays for him, loves him in spite of all, even to the end, as though all his acts were sacred, as if he had power of life and death over her. Ordella devotes herself, that the king, her husband, may have children;[495] she offers herself for a sacrifice, simply, without grand words, with her whole heart:

"_Ordella._ Let it be what it may then, what it dare, I have a mind will hazard it. _Thierry._ But, hark you; What may that woman merit, makes this blessing? _O._ Only her duty, sir. _T._ 'Tis terrible! _O._ 'Tis so much the more noble. _T._ 'Tis full of fearful shadows! _O._ So is sleep, sir, Or anything that's merely ours, and mortal; We were begotten gods else: but those fears, Feeling but once the fires of noble thoughts, Fly, like the shapes of clouds we form, to nothing. _T._ Suppose it death! _O._ I do. _T._ And endless parting With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness, With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay reason! For in the silent grave, no conversation, No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers, No careful father's counsel, nothing's heard, Nor nothing is, but all oblivion, Dust and endless darkness: and dare you, woman, Desire this place? _O._ 'Tis of all sleeps the sweetest: Children begin it to us, strong men seek it, And kings from height of all their painted glories Fall, like spent exhalations, to this centre.... _T._ Then you can suffer? _O._ As willingly as say it. _T._ Martell, a wonder! Here is a woman that dares die.--Yet, tell me, Are you a wife? _O._ I am, sir. _T._ And have children?-- She sighs and weeps! _O._ Oh, none, sir. _T._ Dare you venture For a poor barren praise you ne'er shall hear, To part with these sweet hopes? _O._ With all but Heaven."[496]

Is not this prodigious? Can you understand how one human being can thus be separated from herself, forget and lose herself in another? They do so lose themselves, as in an abyss. When they love in vain and without hope, neither reason nor life resist; they languish, grow mad, die like Ophelia. Aspasia, forlorn,

"Walks discontented, with her watry eyes Bent on the earth. The unfrequented woods Are her delight; and when she sees a bank Stuck full of flowers, she with a sigh will tell Her servants what a pretty place it were To bury lovers in; and make her maids Pluck 'em, and strew her over like a corse. She carries with her an infectious grief, That strikes all her beholders; she will sing The mournful'st things that ever ear hath heard, And sigh and sing again; and when the rest Of our young ladies, in their wanton blood, Tell mirthful tales in course, that fill the room With laughter, she will with so sad a look Bring forth a story of the silent death Of some forsaken virgin, which her grief Will put in such a phrase, that, ere she end, She'll send them weeping one by one away."[497]

Like a spectre about a tomb, she wanders forever about the remains of her destroyed love, languishes, grows pale, swoons, ends by causing herself to be killed. Sadder still are those who, from duty or submission, allow themselves to be married while their heart belongs to another. They are not resigned, do not recover, like Pauline in "Polyeucte." They are crushed to death. Penthea, in Ford's "Broken Heart," is as upright, but not so strong, as Pauline; she is the English wife, not the Roman, stoical and calm.[498] She despairs sweetly, silently, and pines to death. In her innermost heart she holds herself married to him to whom she has pledged her soul: it is the marriage of the heart which in her eyes is alone genuine; the other is only disguised adultery. In marrying Bassanes she has sinned against Orgilus; moral infidelity is worse than legal infidelity, and thenceforth she is fallen in her own eyes. She says to her brother:

"Pray, kill me.... Kill me, pray; nay, will ye _Ithocles._ How does thy lord esteem thee? _P._ Such an one As only you have made me; a faith-breaker, A spotted whore; forgive me, I am one-- In act, not in desires, the gods must witness.... For she's that wife to Orgilus, and lives In known adultery with Bassanes, Is, at the best, a whore. Wilt kill me now?... The handmaid to the wages Of country toil, drinks the untroubled streams With leaping kids, and with the bleating lambs, And so allays her thirst secure; whiles I Quench my hot sighs with fleetings of my tears."[499]

With tragic greatness, from the height of her incurable grief, she throws her gaze on life:

"My glass of life, sweet princess, hath few minutes Remaining to run down; the sands are spent; For by an inward messenger I feel The summons of departure short and certain.... Glories Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams, And shadows soon decaying; on the stage Of my mortality, my youth hath acted Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length By varied pleasures, sweeten'd in the mixture, But tragical in issue... That remedy Must be a winding-sheet, a fold of lead, And some untrod-on corner in the earth."[500]

There is no revolt, no bitterness; she affectionately assists her brother who has caused her unhappiness; she tries to enable him to win the woman he loves; feminine kindness and sweetness overflow in her in the depths of her despair. Love here is not despotic, passionate, as in southern climes. It is only deep and sad; the source of life is dried up, that is all; she lives no longer, because she cannot; all go by degrees--health, reason, soul; in the end she becomes mad, and behold her dishevelled, with wide staring eyes, with words that can hardly find utterance. For ten days she has not slept, and will not eat any more; and the same fatal thought continually afflicts her heart, amidst vague dreams of maternal tenderness and happiness brought to nought, which come and go in her mind like phantoms:

"Sure, if we were all sirens, we would sing pitifully, And 'twere a comely music, when in parts One sung another's knell; the turtle sighs When he hath lost his mate; and yet some say He must be dead first: 'tis a fine deceit To pass away in a dream! indeed, I've slept With mine eyes open, a great while. No falsehood Equals a broken faith; there's not a hair Sticks on my head, but, like a leaden plummet, It sinks me to the grave: I must creep thither; The journey is not long.... Since I was first a wife, I might have been Mother to many pretty prattling babes; They would have smiled when I smiled; and, for certain, I should have cried when they cried:--truly, brother, My father would have pick'd me out a husband, And then my little ones had been no bastards; But 'tis too late for me to marry now, I'm past child-bearing; Tis not my fault.... Spare your hand; Believe me, I'll not hurt it.... Complain not though I wring it hard: I'll kiss it, Oh, 'tis a fine soft palm!--hark, in thine ear; Like whom do I look, prithee?--nay, no whispering, Goodness! we had been happy; too much happiness Will make folk proud, they say.... There is no peace left for a ravish'd wife, Widow'd by lawless marriage; to all memory Penthea's, poor Penthea's name is strumpeted.... Forgive me; Oh! I faint."[501]

She dies, imploring that some gentle voice may sing her a plaintive air, a farewell ditty, a sweet funeral song. I know nothing in the drama more pure and touching.

When we find a constitution of soul so new, and capable of such great effects, it behooves us to look at the bodies. Man's extreme actions come not from his will, but his nature.[502] In order to understand the great tensions of the whole machine, we must look upon the whole--I mean man's temperament, the manner in which his blood flows, his nerves quiver, his muscles act, the moral interprets the physical, and human qualities have their root in the animal species. Consider then the species in this case--namely, the race; for the sisters of Shakespeare's Ophelia and Virgilia, Goethe's Clara and Margaret, Otway's Belvidera, Richardson's Pamela, constitute a race by themselves, soft and fair, with blue eyes, lily whiteness, blushing, of timid delicacy, serious sweetness, framed to yield, bend, cling. Their poets feel it clearly when they bring them on the stage; they surround them with the poetry which becomes them, the murmur of streams, the pendant willow-tresses, the frail and humid flowers of the country, so like themselves:

"The flower, that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azure harebell, like thy veins; no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander, Out-sweeten'd not thy breath."[503]

They make them sweet, like the south wind, which with its gentle breath causes the violets to bend their heads, abashed at the slightest reproach, already half bowed down by a tender and dreamy melancholy.[504] Philaster, speaking of Euphrasia, whom he takes to be a page, and who has disguised herself in order to be near him, says:

"Hunting the buck, I found him sitting by a fountain-side, Of which he borrow'd some to quench his thirst, And paid the nymph again as much in tears. A garland lay him by, made by himself, Of many several flowers, bred in the bay, Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness Delighted me: But ever when he turn'd His tender eyes upon 'em, he would weep, As if he meant to make 'em grow again. Seeing such pretty helpless innocence Dwell in his face, I asked him all his story. He told me, that his parents gentle dy'd, Leaving him to the mercy of the fields, Which gave him roots; and of the crystal springs, Which did not stop their courses; and the sun, Which still, he thank'd him, yielded him his light. Then he took up his garland, and did shew What every flower, as country people hold, Did signify; and how all, order'd thus, Express'd his grief: And, to my thoughts, did read The prettiest lecture of his country art That could be wish'd.... I gladly entertain'd him, Who was as glad to follow; and have got The trustiest, loving'st, and the gentlest boy That ever master kept."[505]

The idyl is self-produced among these human flowers: the dramatic action is stopped before the angelic sweetness of their tenderness and modesty. Sometimes even the idyl is born com plete and pure, and the whole theatre is occupied by a sentimental and poetical kind of opera. There are two or three such plays in Shakespeare; in rude Jonson, "The Sad Shepherd"; in Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess." Ridiculous titles nowadays, for they remind us of the interminable platitudes of d'Urfé, or the affected conceits of Florian; charming titles, if we note the sincere and overflowing poetry which they contain. Amoret, the faithful shepherdess, lives in an imaginary country, full of old gods, yet English, like the dewy verdant landscapes in which Rubens sets his nymphs dancing:

"Thro' yon same bending plain That flings his arms down to the main, And thro' these thick woods, have I run, Whose bottom never kiss'd the sun Since the lusty spring began."...

"For to that holy wood is consecrate A virtuous well, about whose flow'ry banks The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds, By the pale moon-shine, dipping oftentimes Their stolen children, so to make them free From dying flesh, and dull mortality...[506]

"See the dew-drops, how they kiss Ev'ry little flower that is; Hanging on their velvet heads, Like a rope of christal beads. See the heavy clouds low falling, And bright Hesperus down calling The dead Night from underground."[507]

These are the plants and the aspects of the ever fresh English country, now enveloped in a pale diaphanous mist, now glistening under the absorbing sun, teeming with grasses so full of sap, so delicate, that in the midst of their most brilliant splendor and their most luxuriant life, we feel that to-morrow will wither them. There, on a summer night, the young men and girls, after their custom,[508] go to gather flowers and plight their troth. Amoret and Perigot are together; Amoret,

"Fairer far Than the chaste blushing morn, or that fair star That guides the wand'ring seaman thro' the deep,"

modest like a virgin, and tender as a wife, says to Perigot:

"I do believe thee: 'Tis as hard for me To think thee false, and harder, than for thee To hold me foul."[509]

Strongly as she is tried, her heart, once given, never draws back. Perigot, deceived, driven to despair, persuaded that she is unchaste, strikes her with his sword, and casts her bleeding to the ground. The "sullen shepherd" throws her into a well; but the god lets fall "a drop from his watery locks" into the wound; the chaste flesh closes at the touch of the divine water, and the maiden, recovering, goes once more in search of him she loves:

"Speak, if thou be here, My Perigot! Thy Amoret, thy dear, Calls on thy loved name.... 'Tis thy friend, Thy Amoret; come hither, to give end To these consumings. Look up, gentle boy, I have forgot those pains and dear annoy I suffer'd for thy sake, and am content To be thy love again. Why hast thou rent Those curled locks, where I have often hung Ribbons, and damask-roses, and have flung Waters distill'd to make thee fresh and gay, Sweeter than nosegays on a bridal day? Why dost thou cross thine arms, and hang thy face Down to thy bosom, letting fall apace, From those two little Heav'ns, upon the ground, Show'rs of more price, more orient, and more round, Than those that hang upon the moon's pale brow? Cease these complainings, shepherd! I am now The same I ever was, as kind and free, And can forgive before you ask of me: Indeed, I can and will."[510]

Who could resist her sweet and sad smile? Still deceived, Perigot wounds her again; she falls, but without anger.

"So this work hath end! Farewell, and live! be constant to thy friend That loves thee next."[511]

A nymph cures her, and at last Perigot, disabused, comes and throws himself on his knees before her. She stretches out her arms; in spite of all that he had done, she was not changed:

"I am thy love, Thy Amoret, for evermore thy love! Strike once more on my naked breast, I'll prove As constant still. Oh, could'st thou love me yet, How soon could I my former griefs forget!"[512]

Such are the touching and poetical figures which these poets introduce in their dramas, or in connection with their dramas, amidst murders, assassinations, the clash of swords, the howl of slaughter, striving against the raging men who adore or torment them, like them carried to excess, transported by their tenderness as the others by their violence; it is a complete exposition, as well as a perfect opposition of the feminine instinct ending in excessive self-abandonment, and of masculine harshness ending in murderous inflexibility. Thus built up and thus provided, the drama of the age was enabled to bring out the inner depths of man, and to set in motion the most powerful human emotions; to bring upon the stage Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia, the death of Desdemona and the butcheries of Macbeth.

[Footnote 393: "The very age and body of the time, his form and pressure."--Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 394: Ben Jonson, "Every Man in his Humour"; "Cynthia's Revels."]

[Footnote 395: "The Defence of Poesie," ed. 1629, p. 562.]

[Footnote 396: "Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Julius Cæsar."]

[Footnote 397: Strype, in his "Annals of the Reformation" (1571), says: "Many now were wholly departed from the communion of the church, and came no more to hear divine service in their parish churches, nor received the holy sacrament, according to the laws of the realm." Richard Baxter, in his "Life," published in 1696, says: "We lived in a country that had but little preaching at all.... In the village where I lived the Reader read the Common Prayer briefly; and the rest of the day, even till dark night almost, except Eating time, was spent in Dancing under a Maypole ana a great tree, not far from my father's door, where all the Town did meet together. And though one of my father's own Tenants was the piper, he could not restrain him nor break the sport. So that we could not read the Scripture in our family without the great disturbance of the Taber and Pipe and noise in the street."]

[Footnote 398: Ben Jonson, "Every Man in his Humour."]

[Footnote 399: "The Chronicle" of John Hardyng (1436), ed. H. Ellis, 1812, Preface.]

[Footnote 400: Act IV. sc. 2 and 4. See also the character of Calypso in Massinger; Putana in Ford; Protalyce in Beaumont and Fletcher.]

[Footnote 401: Middleton, "Dutch Courtezan."]

[Footnote 402: Commission given by Henry VIII to the Earl of Hertford, 1544: "You are there to put all to fire and sword; to burn Edinburgh town, and to raze and deface it, when you have sacked it, and gotten what you can out of it.... Do what you can out of hand, and without long tarrying, to beat down and overthrow the castle, sack Holyrood-House, and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as ye conveniently can; sack Leith, and burn and subvert it, and all the rest, putting man, woman, and child to fire and sword, without exception, when any resistance shall be made against you; and this done, pass over to the Fife land, and extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting amongst all the rest, so to spoil and turn upside down the cardinal's town of St. Andrew's, as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one stick stand by another, sparing no creature alive within the same, specially such as either in friendship or blood be allied to the cardinal. This journey shall succeed most to his majesty's honour."]

[Footnote 403: Laneham, "A Goodly Relief."]

[Footnote 404: February 13, 1587. Nathan Drake, "Shakspeare and his Times," II. p. 165. See also the same work for all these details.]

[Footnote 405: Essex, when struck by the queen, put his hand on the hilt of his sword.]

[Footnote 406: A page in the "Mariage de Figaro," a comedy by Beaumarchais.--Tr.]

[Footnote 407: The great Chancellor Burleigh often wept, so harshly was he used by Elizabeth.]

[Footnote 408: Compare, to understand this character, the parts assigned to James Harlowe by Richardson, old Osborne by Thackeray, Sir Giles Overreach by Massinger, and Manly by Wycherley.]

[Footnote 409: Hentzner's "Travels"; Benvenuto Cellini. See passim, the costumes printed in Venice and Germany: "Belicosissimi." Froude, I. pp. 19, 52.]

[Footnote 410: This is not so true of the English now, if it was in the sixteenth century, as it is of Continental nations. The French lycées are far more military in character than English schools.--Tr.]

[Footnote 411: Froude's "History of England," vols. I. II. III.]

[Footnote 412: "When his heart was torn out he uttered a deep groan."--"Execution of Parry;" Strype, III. 251.]

[Footnote 413: Holinshed, "Chronicles of England," III. p. 793.]

[Footnote 414: Holinshed, "Chronicles of England," III, p. 797.]

[Footnote 415: Under Henry IV and Henry V.]

[Footnote 416: Froude, I. 15.]

[Footnote 417: In 1547.]

[Footnote 418: In 1596.]

[Footnote 419: Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure," Act III. I. See also "The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth."]

[Footnote 420: "We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."--"Tempest," IV. I.]

[Footnote 421: Beaumont and Fletcher, "Thierry and Theodoret," Act IV. I.]

[Footnote 422: Αιεηονήθη δ’ ὲν παισὶ καὶ περὶ παλαΐστραν καὶ μουσικὴν, ὲξ ὼν ὰμφοτέοων ὲστέφανώθη... Φιλαθηναιότατος καὶ θεοφιλής.--Scholiast.]

[Footnote 423: Except Beaumont and Fletcher.]

[Footnote 424: Hartley Coleridge, in his "Introduction to the Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford," says of Massinger's father: "We are not certified of the situation which he held in the noble house-hold (Earl of Pembroke), but we may be sure that it was neither menial nor mean. Service in those days was not derogatory to gentle birth."--Tr.]

[Footnote 425: See, amongst others, "The Woman Killed with Kindness," by Heywood. Mrs. Frankfort, so upright of heart, accepts Wendoll at his first offer. Sir Francis Acton, at the sight of her whom he wishes to dishonor, and whom he hates, falls "into an ecstasy," and dreams of nothing save marriage. Compare the sudden transport of Juliet, Romeo, Macbeth, Miranda, etc.; the counsel of Prospero to Fernando, when he leaves him alone for a moment with Miranda.]

[Footnote 426: Compare "La Vie de Bohême" and "Les Nuits d'Hiver," by Murger; "Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle," by A. de Musset.]

[Footnote 427: The hero of one of Alfred de Musset's poems.--Tr.]

[Footnote 428: Burnt in 1589.]

[Footnote 429: I have used Marlowe's Works, ed. Dyce, 3 vols. 1850. Append, I. vol. 3.--Tr.]

[Footnote 430: See especially "Titus Andronicus," attributed to Shakespeare: there are parricides, mothers whom they cause to eat their children, a young girl who appears on the stage violated, with her tongue and hands cut off.]

[Footnote 431: The chief character in Schiller's "Robbers," a virtuous brigand and redresser of wrongs.--Tr.]

[Footnote 432: For in a field, whose superficies Is cover'd with a liquid purple veil, And sprinkled with the brains of slaughter'd men. My royal chair of state shall be advanc'd; And he that means to place himself therein, Must armed wade up to the chin in blood.... And I would strive to swim through pools of blood, Or make a bridge of murder'd carcasses, Whose arches should be fram'd with bones of Turks Ere I would lose the title of a king.--"Tamburlaine," part II. I. 3.]

[Footnote 433: The editor of Marlowe's Works, Pickering, 1826, says in his Introduction: "Both the matter and style of 'Tamburlaine,' however, differ materially from Marlowe's other compositions, and doubts have more than once been suggested as to whether the play was properly assigned to him. We think that Marlowe did not write it." Dyce is of a contrary opinion.--Tr.]

[Footnote 434: Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta," II. p. 275 et passim.]

[Footnote 435: Ibid. IV. p. 311.]

[Footnote 436: Ibid. III. p. 291.]

[Footnote 437: Ibid. IV. p. 313.]

[Footnote 438: Up to this time, in England, poisoners were cast into a boiling caldron.]

[Footnote 439: In the Museum of Ghent.]

[Footnote 440: See in the "Jew of Malta" the seduction of Ithamore, by Bellamira, a rough, but truly admirable picture.]

[Footnote 441: Nothing could be falser than the hesitation and arguments of Schiller's "William Tell"; for a contrast, see Goethe's "Goetz von Berlichingen." In 1377, Wycliff pleaded in St. Paul's before the bishop of London, and that raised a quarrel. The Duke of Lancaster, Wycliff's protector, "threatened to drag the bishop out of the church by the hair"; and next day the furious crowd sacked the duke's palace.]

[Footnote 442: Marlowe, "Edward the Second," I. p. 173.]

[Footnote 443: Ibid. p. 186.]

[Footnote 444: Ibid. p. 188.]

[Footnote 445: Marlowe, "Edward the Second," last scene, p. 288.]

[Footnote 446: Marlowe, "Doctor Faustus," I. p. 9 et passim.]

[Footnote 447: Marlowe, "Doctor Faustus," I. pp. 22, 29.]

[Footnote 448: Ibid. p. 43.]

[Footnote 449: Marlowe, "Doctor Faustus," I. p. 37.]

[Footnote 450: Ibid. p. 75.]

[Footnote 451: Ibid. p. 78.]

[Footnote 452: Marlowe "Doctor Faustus," I. p. 80.]

[Footnote 453: See the trial of Vittoria Corombona, of Virginia in Webster, of Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar in Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 454: Falstaff in Shakespeare; the queen in "London," by Greene and Decker; Rosalind in Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 455: In Webster's "Duchess of Malfi" there is an admirable accouchement scene.]

[Footnote 456: This is, in fact, the English view of the French mind, which is doubtless a refinement, many times refined, of the classical spirit. But M. Taine has seemingly not taken into account such products as the Medea on the one hand, and the works of Aristophanes and the Latin sensualists on the other.--Tr.]

[Footnote 457: See Hamlet, Coriolanus, Hotspur. The queen in "Hamlet" (v. 2) says: "He (Hamlet) is fat, and scant of breath."]

[Footnote 458: Middleton, "The Honest Whore," part I. IV. 1.]

[Footnote 459: Beaumont and Fletcher, "Valentinian, Thierry and Theodoret." See Massinger's "Picture," which resembles Musset's "Barberine." Its crudity, the extraordinary repulsive energy, will show the difference of the two ages.]

[Footnote 460: Massinger's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859, "Duke of Milan," II. 1.]

[Footnote 461: Ibid. V. 2.]

[Footnote 462: Massinger, "The Fatal Dowry"; Webster and Ford, "A late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother" (a play not extant); "'Tis pity she's a Whore." See also Ford's "Broken Heart," with its sublime scenes of agony and madness.]

[Footnote 463: Ford's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859.]

[Footnote 464: Ibid. IV. 3.]

[Footnote 465: Ford's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859, IV. 3.]

[Footnote 466: Ibid. IV. 3.]

[Footnote 467: Ibid. V. 5.]

[Footnote 468: Ibid. V. 6.]

[Footnote 469: Webster's Works, ed. Dyce, 1857, "Duchess of Malfi," I. 1.]

[Footnote 470: The characters of Bosola, Flaminio.]

[Footnote 471: See Stendhal, "Chronicles of Italy, The Cenci, The Duchess of Palliano," and all the biographies of the time; of the Borgias, of Bianca Capello, of Vittoria Corombona.]

[Footnote 472: Ferdinand, one of the brothers, says (II. 5): "I would have their bodies Burnt in a coal-pit with the ventage stopp'd, That their curs'd smoke might not ascend to heaven; Or dip the sheets they lie in in pitch or sulphur, Wrap them in't, and then light them as a match; Or else to boil their bastard to a cullis, And give't his lecherous father to renew The sin of his back."]

[Footnote 473: "Duchess of Malfi," IV. 1.]

[Footnote 474: Ibid. IV. 2.]

[Footnote 475: "Duchess of Malfi," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 476: "When," an exclamation of impatience, equivalent to "make haste," very common among the old English dramatists.--Tr.]

[Footnote 477: "Duchess of Malfi," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 478: Ibid. V. 5.]

[Footnote 479: Ibid. V. 4 and 5.]

[Footnote 480: "Vittoria Corombona," I. 2.]

[Footnote 481: Webster Dyce, 1857, "Vittoria Corombona," p. 20, 21.]

[Footnote 482: Ibid. III. 2, p. 23.]

[Footnote 483: "Vittoria Corombona," III. 2, p. 24.]

[Footnote 484: Compare Mme. Marneffe in Balzac's "La Cousine Bette."]

[Footnote 485: "Vittoria Corombona," V. last scene, pp. 49, 50.]

[Footnote 486: Hence the happiness and strength of the marriage tie. In France it is but an association of two comrades, tolerably alike and tolerably equal, which gives rise to endless disturbance and bickering.]

[Footnote 487: See the representation of this character throughout English and German literature. Stendhal, an acute observer, saturated with Italian and French morals and ideas, is astonished at this phenomenon. He understands nothing of this kind of devotion, "this slavery which English husbands have had the wit to impose on their wives under the name of duty." These are "the manners of a seraglio." See also "Corinne," by Mme de Staël.]

[Footnote 488: A perfect woman already: meek and patient.--Heywood.]

[Footnote 489: See, by way of contrast, all Molière's women, so French; even Agnes and little Louison.]

[Footnote 490: Beaumont and Fletcher, Works, ed. G. Colman, 3 vols. 1811, "Philaster", V.]

[Footnote 491: Like Kaled in Byron's "Lara."]

[Footnote 492: "Philaster," IV.]

[Footnote 493: Ibid. V.]

[Footnote 494: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Fair Maid of the Inn," IV.]

[Footnote 495: Beaumont and Fletcher, "Thierry and Theodoret, The Maid's Tragedy, Philaster." See also the part of Lucina in "Valentinian."]

[Footnote 496: "Thierry and Theodoret," IV, 1.]

[Footnote 497: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Maid's Tragedy," I.]

[Footnote 498: Pauline says, in Corneille's "Polyeucte" (III. 2): "Avant qu'abandonner mon âme à mes douleurs, Il me faut essayer la force de mes pleurs; En qualité de femme ou de fille, j'espère Qu'ils vaincront un époux, ou fléchiront un père. Que si sur l'un et l'autre ils manquent de pouvoir, Je ne prendrai conseil que de mon désespoir. Apprends-moi cependant ce qu'ils ont fait au temple."

We could not find a more reasonably and reasoning woman. So with Éliante, and Henrietta in Molière.]

[Footnote 499: Ford's "Broken Heart," III. 2.]

[Footnote 500: Ibid. 5.]

[Footnote 501: Ford's "Broken Heart," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 502: Schopenhauer, "Metaphysics of Love and Death." Swift also said that death and love are the two things in which man is fundamentally irrational. In fact, it is the species and the instinct which are displayed in them, not the will and the individual.]

[Footnote 503: "Cymbeline," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 504: The death of Ophelia, the obsequies of Imogen.]

[Footnote 505: "Philaster," I.]

[Footnote 506: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess," I.]

[Footnote 507: Ibid, II.]

[Footnote 508: See the description in Nathan Drake, "Shakspeare and his Times."]

[Footnote 509: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess," I.]

[Footnote 510: Ibid. IV.]

[Footnote 511: Ibid.]

[Footnote 512: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess," V. Compare, as an illustration of the contrast of races, the Italian pastorals, Tasso's "Aminta," Guarini's "Il Pastor fido," etc.]

CHAPTER THIRD

Ben Jonson

SECTION I.--The Man--His Life

When a new civilization brings a new art to light, there are about a dozen men of talent who partly express the general idea, surrounding one or two men of genius who express it thoroughly. Guillen de Castro, Perez de Montalvan, Tirzo de Molina, Ruiz de Alarcon, Agustin Moreto, surrounding Calderon and Lope de Vega; Crayer, Van Oost, Rombouts, Van Thulden, Vandyke, Honthorst, surrounding Rubens; Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher, surrounding Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The first constitute the chorus, the others are the leading men. They sing the same piece together, and at times the chorist is equal to the solo artist; but only at times. Thus, in the dramas which I have just referred to, the poet occasionally reaches the summit of his art, hits upon a complete character, a burst of sublime passion; then he falls back, gropes amid qualified successes, rough sketches, feeble imitations, and at last takes refuge in the tricks of his trade. It is not in him, but in great men like Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, that we must look for the attainment of his idea and the fulness of his art. "Numerous were the wit-combats," says Fuller, "betwixt him (Shakespeare) and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention."[513] Such was Ben Jonson physically and morally, and his portraits do but confirm this just and animated outline: a vigorous, heavy, and uncouth person; a broad and long face, early disfigured by scurvy, a square jaw, large cheeks; his animal organs as much developed as those of his intellect: the sour aspect of a man in a passion or on the verge of a passion; to which add the body of an athlete, about forty years of age, "mountain belly, ungracious gait." Such was the outside, and the inside is like it. He was a genuine Englishman, big and coarsely framed, energetic, combative, proud, often morose, and prone to strange splenetic imaginations. He told Drummond that for a whole night he imagined "that he saw the Carthaginians and Romans fighting on his great toe."[514] Not that he is melancholic by nature; on the contrary, he loves to escape from himself by free and noisy, unbridled merriment, by copious and varied converse, assisted by good Canary wine, which he imbibes, and which ends by becoming a necessity to him. These great phlegmatic butchers' frames require a generous liquor to give them a tone, and to supply the place of the sun which they lack. Expansive moreover, hospitable, even lavish, with a frank imprudent spirit,[515] making him forget himself wholly before Drummond, his Scotch host, an over-rigid and malicious pedant, who has marred his ideas and vilified his character.[516] What we know of his life is in harmony with his person; he suffered much, fought much, dared much. He was studying at Cambridge, when his stepfather, a bricklayer, recalled him, and taught him to use the trowel. He ran away, enlisted as a common soldier, and served in the English army, at that time engaged against the Spaniards in the Low Countries, killed and despoiled a man in single combat, "in the view of both armies." He was a man of bodily action, and he exercised his limbs in early life.[517] On his return to England, at the age of nineteen, he went on the stage for his livelihood, and occupied himself also in touching up dramas. Having been challenged, he fought a duel, was seriously wounded, but killed his adversary; for this he was cast into prison, and found himself "nigh the gallows." A Catholic priest visited and converted him; quitting his prison penniless, at twenty years of age, he married. At last, four years later, his first successful play was acted. Children came, he must earn bread for them; and he was not inclined to follow the beaten track to the end, being persuaded that a fine philosophy--a special nobleness and dignity—ought to be introduced into comedy--that it was necessary to follow the example of the ancients, to imitate their severity and their accuracy, to be above the theatrical racket and the common improbabilities in which the vulgar delighted. He openly proclaimed his intention in his prefaces, sharply railed at his rivals, proudly set forth on the stage[518] his doctrines, his morality, his character. He thus made bitter enemies, who defamed him outrageously and before their audiences, whom he exasperated by the violence of his satires, and against whom he struggled without intermission to the end. He did more, he constituted himself a judge of the public corruption, sharply attacked the reigning vices, "fearing no strumpet's drugs, nor ruffian's stab."[519] He treated his hearers like schoolboys, and spoke to them always like a censor and a master. If necessary, he ventured further. His companions, Marston and Chapman, had been committed to prison for some reflections on the Scotch in one of their pieces called "Eastward-Hoe"; and the report spreading that they were in danger of losing their noses and ears, Jonson, who had written part of the piece, voluntarily surrendered himself a prisoner, and obtained their pardon. On his return, amid the feasting and rejoicing, his mother showed him a violent poison which she intended to put into his drink, to save him from the execution of the sentence; and "to show that she was not a coward," adds Jonson, "she had resolved to drink first." We see that in vigorous actions he found examples in his own family. Toward the end of his life, money was scarce with him; he was liberal, improvident; his pockets always had holes in them, and his hand was always ready to give; though he had written a vast quantity, he was still obliged to write in order to live. Paralysis came on, his scurvy became worse, dropsy set in. He could not leave his room, nor walk without assistance. His last plays did not succeed. In the epilogue to the "New Inn" he says:

"If you expect more than you had to-night, The maker is sick and sad.... All that his faint and fait'ring tongue doth crave, Is, that you not impute it to his brain, That's yet unhurt, altho, set round with pain, It cannot long hold out."

His enemies brutally insulted him:

"Thy Pegasus... He had bequeathed his belly unto thee, To hold that little learning which is fled Into thy guts from out thy emptye head."

Inigo Jones, his colleague, deprived him of the patronage of the court. He was obliged to beg a supply of money from the Lord Treasurer, then from the Earl of Newcastle:

"Disease, the enemy, and his engineers, Want, with the rest of his concealed compeers, Have cast a trench about me, now five years.... The muse not peeps out, one of hundred days; But lies blocked up and straitened, narrowed in, Fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win Health, or scarce breath, as she had never been."[520]

His wife and children were dead; he lived alone, forsaken, waited on by an old woman. Thus almost always sadly and miserably is dragged out and ends the last act of the human comedy. After so many years, after so many sustained efforts, amid so much glory and genius, we find a poor shattered body, drivelling and suffering, between a servant and a priest.

SECTION II.--His Freedom and Precision of Style

This is the life of a combatant, bravely endured, worthy of the seventeenth century by its crosses and its energy; courage and force abounded throughout. Few writers have labored more, and more conscientiously; his knowledge was vast, and in this age of eminent scholars he was one of the best classics of his time, as deep as he was accurate and thorough, having studied the most minute details and understood the true spirit of ancient life. It was not enough for him to have stored his mind from the best writers, to have their whole works continually in his mind, to scatter his pages whether he would or no, with recollections of them. He dug into the orators, critics, scholiasts, grammarians, and compilers of inferior rank; he picked up stray fragments; he took characters, jokes, refinements, from Athenæus, Libanius, Philostratus. He had so well entered into and digested the Greek and Latin ideas, that they were incorporated with his own. They enter into his speech without incongruity; they spring forth in him as vigorous as at their first birth; he originates even when he remembers. On every subject he had this thirst for knowledge, and this gift of mastering knowledge. He knew alchemy when he wrote the "Alchemist." He is familiar with alembics, retorts, receivers, as if he had passed his life seeking after the philosopher's stone. He explains incineration, calcination, imbibition, rectification, reverberation, as well as Agrippa and Paracelsus. If he speaks of cosmetics,[521] he brings out a shopful of them; we might make out of his plays a dictionary of the oaths and costumes of courtiers; he seems to have a specialty in all branches. A still greater proof of his force is, that his learning in no wise mars his vigor; heavy as is the mass with which he loads himself, he carries it without stooping. This wonderful mass of reading and observation suddenly begins to move, and falls like a mountain on the overwhelmed reader. We must hear Sir Epicure Mammon unfold the vision of splendors and debauchery, in which he means to plunge, when he has learned to make gold. The refined and unchecked impurities of the Roman decadence, the splendid obscenities of Heliogabalus, the gigantic fancies of luxury and lewdness, tables of gold spread with foreign dainties, draughts of dissolved pearls, nature devastated to provide a single dish, the many crimes committed by sensuality against nature, reason, and justice, the delight in defying and outraging law--all these images pass before the eyes with the dash of a torrent and the force of a great river. Phrase follows phrase without intermission, ideas and facts crowd into the dialogue to paint a situation, to give clearness to a character, produced from this deep memory, directed by this solid logic, launched by this powerful reflection. It is a pleasure to see him advance weighted with so many observations and recollections, loaded with technical details and learned reminiscences, without deviation or pause, a genuine literary Leviathan, like the war elephants which used to bear towers, men, weapons, machines, on their backs, and ran as swiftly with their freight as a nimble steed.

In the great dash of this heavy attempt, he finds a path which suits him. He has his style. Classical erudition and education made him a classic, and he writes like his Greek models and his Roman masters. The more we study the Latin races and literatures in contrast with the Teutonic, the more fully we become convinced that the proper and distinctive gift of the first is the art of development; that is, of drawing up ideas in continuous rows, according to the rules of rhetoric and eloquence, by studied transitions, with regular progress, without shock or bounds. Jonson received from his acquaintance with the ancients the habit of decomposing ideas, unfolding them bit by bit in natural order, making himself understood and believed. From the first thought to the final conclusion, he conducts the reader by a continuous and uniform ascent. The track never fails with him as with Shakespeare. He does not advance like the rest by abrupt intuitions, but by consecutive deductions; we can walk with him without need of bounding, and we are continually kept upon the straight path: antithesis of words unfolds antithesis of thoughts; symmetrical phrases guide the mind through difficult ideas; they are like barriers set on either side of the road to prevent our falling into the ditch. We do not meet on our way extraordinary, sudden, gorgeous images, which might dazzle or delay us; we travel on, enlightened by moderate and sustained metaphors. Jonson has all the methods of Latin art; even, when he wishes it, especially on Latin subjects, he has the last and most erudite, the brilliant conciseness of Seneca and Lucan, the squared, equipoised, filed-off antithesis, the most happy and studied artifices of oratorical architecture.[522] Other poets are nearly visionaries; Jonson is almost a logician.

Hence his talent, his successes, and his faults: if he has a better style and better plots than the others, he is not, like them, a creator of souls. He is too much of a theorist, too preoccupied by rules. His argumentative habits spoil him when he seeks to shape and motion complete and living men. No one is capable of fashioning these unless he possesses, like Shakespeare, the imagination of a seer. The human being is so complex that the logician who perceives his different elements in succession can hardly study them all, much less gather them all in one flash, so as to produce the dramatic response or action in which they are concentrated and which should manifest them. To discover such actions and responses, we need a kind of inspiration and fever. Then the mind works as in a dream. The characters move within the poet, almost involuntarily: he waits for them to speak, he remains motionless, hearing their voices, wholly wrapt in contemplation, in order that he may not disturb the inner drama which they are about to act in his soul. That is his artifice: to let them alone. He is quite astonished at their discourse; as he observes them he forgets that it is he who invents them. Their mood, character, education, disposition of mind, situation, attitude, and actions, form within him so well-connected a whole, and so readily unite into palpable and solid beings, that he dares not attribute to his reflection or reasoning a creation so vast and speedy. Beings are organized in him as in nature; that is, of themselves, and by a force which the combinations of his art could not replace.[523] Jonson has nothing wherewith to replace it but these combinations of art. He chooses a general idea--cunning, folly, severity--and makes a person out of it. This person is called Crites, Asper, Sordido, Deliro, Pecunia, Subtil, and the transparent name indicates the logical process which produced it. The poet took an abstract quality, and putting together all the actions to which it may give rise, trots it out on the stage in a man's dress. His characters, like those of La Bruyère and Theophrastus, were hammered out of solid deductions. Now it is a vice selected from the catalogue of moral philosophy, sensuality thirsting for gold: this perverse double inclination becomes a personage, Sir Epicure Mammon; before the alchemist, before the famulus, before his friend, before his mistress, in public or alone, all his words denote a greed of pleasure and of gold, and they express nothing more.[524] Now it is a mania gathered from the old sophists, a babbling with horror of noise; this form of mental pathology becomes a personage, Morose; the poet has the air of a doctor who has undertaken to record exactly all the desires of speech, all the necessities of silence, and to record nothing else. Now he picks out a ridicule, an affectation, a species of folly, from the manners of the dandies and the courtiers; a mode of swearing, an extravagant style, a habit of gesticulating, or any other oddity contracted by vanity or fashion. The hero whom he covers with these eccentricities is overloaded by them. He disappears beneath his enormous trappings; he drags them about with him everywhere; he cannot get rid of them for an instant. We no longer see the man under the dress; he is like a manikin, oppressed under a cloak, too heavy for him. Sometimes, doubtless, his habits of geometrical construction produce personages almost life-like. Bobadil, the grave boaster; Captain Tucca, the begging bully, inventive buffoon, ridiculous talker; Amorphus the traveller, a pedantic doctor of good manners, laden with eccentric phrases, create as much illusion as we can wish; but it is because they are flitting comicalities and low characters. It is not necessary for a poet to study such creatures; it is enough that he discovers in them three or four leading features; it is of little consequence if they always present themselves with the same attitudes; they produce laughter, like the Countess d'Escarbagans or any of the Fâcheux in Molière; we want nothing else of them. On the contrary, the others weary and repel us. They are stage-masks, not living figures. Having acquired a fixed expression, they persist to the end of the piece in their unvarying grimace or their eternal frown. A man is not an abstract passion. He stamps the vices and virtues which he possesses with his individual mark. These vices and virtues receive, on entering into him, a bent and form which they have not in others. No one is unmixed sensuality. Take a thousand sensualists, and you will find a thousand different modes of sensuality; for there are a thousand paths, a thousand circumstances and degrees, in sensuality. If Jonson wanted to make Sir Epicure Mammon a real being, he should have given him the kind of disposition, the species of education, the manner of imagination, which produce sensuality. When we wish to construct a man, we must dig down to the foundations of mankind; that is, we must define to ourselves the structure of his bodily machine, and the primitive gait of his mind. Jonson has not dug sufficiently deep, and his constructions are incomplete; he has built on the surface, and he has built but a single story. He was not acquainted with the whole man and he ignored man's basis; he put on the stage and gave a representation of moral treatises, fragments of history, scraps of satire; he did not stamp new beings on the imagination of mankind.

He possesses all other gifts, and in particular the classical; first of all, the talent for composition. For the first time we see a connected, well-contrived plot, a complete intrigue, with its beginning, middle, and end; subordinate actions well arranged, well combined; an interest which grows and never flags; a leading truth which all the events tend to demonstrate; a ruling idea which all the characters unite to illustrate; in short, an art like that which Molière and Racine were about to apply and teach. He does not, like Shakespeare, take a novel from Greene, a chronicle from Holinshed, a life from Plutarch, such as they are, to cut them into scenes, irrespective of likelihood, indifferent as to order and unity, caring only to set up men, at times wandering into poetic reveries, at need finishing up the piece abruptly with a recognition or a butchery. He governs himself and his characters; he wills and he knows all that they do, and all that he does. But beyond his habits of Latin regularity, he possesses the great faculty of his age and race--the sentiment of nature and existence, the exact knowledge of precise detail, the power in frankly and boldly handling frank passions. This gift is not wanting in any writer of the time; they do not fear words that are true, shocking, and striking details of the bedchamber or medical study; the prudery of modern England and the refinement of monarchical France veil not the nudity of their figures, or dim the coloring of their pictures. They live freely, amply, amidst living things; they see the ins and outs of lust raging without any feeling of shame, hypocrisy, or palliation; and they exhibit it as they see it, Jonson as boldly as the rest, occasionally more boldly than the rest, strengthened as he is by the vigor and ruggedness of his athletic temperament, by the extraordinary exactness and abundance of his observations and his knowledge. Add also his moral loftiness, his asperity, his powerful chiding wrath, exasperated and bitter against vice, his will strengthened by pride and by conscience:

"With an armed and resolved hand, I'll strip the ragged follies of the time Naked as at their birth... and with a whip of steel, Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs. I fear no mood stampt in a private brow, When I am pleas'd t' unmask a public vice. I fear no strumpet's drugs, nor ruffian's stab, Should I detect their hateful luxuries;"[525]

above all, a scorn of base compliance, an open disdain for

"Those jaded wits That run a broken pace for common hire,"[526]

an enthusiasm, or deep love of

"A happy muse, Borne on the wings of her immortal thought, That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel, And beats at heaven gates with her bright hoofs."[527]

Such are the energies which he brought to the drama and to comedy; they were great enough to insure him a high and separate position.

SECTION III.--The Dramas Catiline and Sejanus

For whatever Jonson undertakes, whatever be his faults, haughtiness, rough-handling, predilection for morality and the past, antiquarian and censorious instincts, he is never little or dull. It signifies nothing that in his latinized tragedies, "Sejanus, Catiline," he is fettered by the worship of the old worn models of the Roman decadence; nothing that he plays the scholar, manufactures Ciceronian harangues, hauls in choruses imitated from Seneca, holds forth in the style of Lucan and the rhetors of the empire; he more than once attains a genuine accent; through his pedantry, heaviness, literary adoration of the ancients, nature forces its way; he lights, at his first attempt, on the crudities, horrors, gigantic lewdness, shameless depravity of imperial Rome; he takes in hand and sets in motion the lusts and ferocities, the passions of courtesans and princesses, the daring of assassins and of great men, which produced Messalina, Agrippina, Catiline, Tiberius.[528] In the Rome which he places before us we go boldly and straight to the end; justice and pity oppose no barriers. Amid these customs of victors and slaves, human nature is upset, corruption and villainy are held as proofs of insight and energy. Observe how, in "Sejanus," assassination is plotted and carried out with marvellous coolness. Livia discusses with Sejanus the methods of poisoning her husband, in a clear style, without circumlocution, as if the subject were how to gain a lawsuit or to serve up a dinner. There are no equivocations, no hesitation, no remorse in the Rome of Tiberius. Glory and virtue consist in power; scruples are for base minds; the mark of a lofty heart is to desire all and to dare all. Macro says rightly:

"Men's fortune there is virtue; reason their will; Their license, law; and their observance, skill. Occasion is their foil; conscience, their stain; Profit, their lustre; and what else is, vain."[529]

Sejanus addresses Livia thus:

"Royal lady,... Yet, now I see your wisdom, judgment, strength, Quickness, and will, to apprehend the means To your own good and greatness, I protest Myself through rarified, and turn'd all aflame In your affection."[530]

These are the loves of the wolf and his mate; he praises her for being so ready to kill. And observe in one moment the morals of a prostitute appear behind the manners of the poisoner. Sejanus goes out, and immediately, like a courtesan, Livia turns to her physician, saying:

"How do I look to-day? _Eudemus._ Excellent clear, believe it. This same fucus Was well laid on. _Livia._ Methinks 'tis here not white. _E._ Lend me your scarlet, lady. 'Tis the sun Hath giv'n some little taint unto the ceruse, You should have us'd of the white oil I gave you. Sejanus, for your love! His very name Commandeth above Cupid or his shafts.... [_Paints her cheeks._] "'Tis now well, lady, you should Use of the dentrifice I prescrib'd you too, To clear your teeth, and the prepar'd pomatum, To smooth the skin. A lady cannot be Too curious of her form, that still would hold The heart of such a person, made her captive, As you have his: who, to endear him more In your clear eye, hath put away his wife...'" Fair Apicata, and made spacious room To your new pleasures. _L._ Have not we return'd That with our hate to Drusus, and discovery Of all his counsels?... _E._ When will you take some physic, lady? _L._ When I shall, Eudemus: but let Drusus' drug Be first prepar'd. _E._ Were Lygdus made, that's done.... I'll send you a perfume, first to resolve And procure sweat, and then prepare a bath To cleanse and clear the cutis; against when I'll have an excellent new fucus made Resistive 'gainst the sun, the rain or wind, Which you shall lay on with a breath or oil, As you best like, and last some fourteen hours. This change came timely, lady, for your health."[531]

He ends by congratulating her on her approaching change of husbands; Drusus was injuring her complexion; Sejanus is far preferable; a physiological and practical conclusion. The Roman apothecary kept on the same shelf his medicine-chest, his chest of cosmetics, and his box of poisons.[532]

After this we find one after another all the scenes of Roman life unfolded, the bargain of murder, the comedy of justice, the shamelessness of flattery, the anguish and vacillation of the Senate. When Sejanus wishes to buy a conscience, he questions, jokes, plays round the offer he is about to make, throws it out as if in pleasantry, so as to be able to withdraw it, if need be; tempt, on the crudities, horrors, gigantic lewdness, shameless depravity of imperial Rome; he takes in hand and sets in motion the lusts and ferocities, the passions of courtesans and princesses, the daring of assassins and of great men, which produced Messalina, Agrippina, Catiline, Tiberius.[533] In the Rome which he places before us we go boldly and straight to the end; justice and pity oppose no barriers. Amid these customs of victors and slaves, human nature is upset, corruption and villainy are held as proofs of insight and energy. Observe how, in "Sejanus," assassination is plotted and carried out with marvellous coolness. Livia discusses with Sejanus the methods of poisoning her husband, in a clear style, without circumlocution, as if the subject were how to gain a lawsuit or to serve up a dinner. There are no equivocations, no hesitation, no remorse in the Rome of Tiberius. Glory and virtue consist in power; scruples are for base minds; the mark of a lofty heart is to desire all and to dare all. Macro says rightly:

"Men's fortune there is virtue; reason their will; Their license, law; and their observance, skill. Occasion is their foil; conscience, their stain; Profit, their lustre; and what else is, vain."[534]

Sejanus addresses Livia thus:

"Royal lady,... Yet, now I see your wisdom, judgment, strength, Quickness, and will, to apprehend the means To your own good and greatness, I protest Myself through rarified, and turn'd all aflame In your affection."[535]

These are the loves of the wolf and his mate; he praises her for being so ready to kill. And observe in one moment the morals of a prostitute appear behind the manners of the poisoner. Sejanus goes out, and immediately, like a courtesan, Livia turns to her physician, saying:

"How do I look to-day? _Eudemus._ Excellent clear, believe it. This same fucus Was well laid on. _Livia._ Methinks 'tis here not white. _E._ Lend me your scarlet, lady. 'Tis the sun Hath giv'n some little taint unto the ceruse, You should have us'd of the white oil I gave you. Sejanus, for your love! His very name Commandeth above Cupid or his shafts...." [_Paints her cheeks._] "'Tis now well, lady, you should Use of the dentrifice I prescrib'd you too, To clear your teeth, and the prepar'd pomatum, To smooth the skin. A lady cannot be Too curious of her form, that still would hold The heart of such a person, made her captive, As you have his: who, to endear him more In your clear eye, hath put away his wife... Fair Apicata, and made spacious room To your new pleasures. _L._ Have not we return'd That with our hate to Drusus, and discovery Of all his counsels?... _E._ When will you take some physic, lady? _L._ When I shall, Eudemus: but let Drusus' drug Be first prepar'd. _E._ Were Lygdus made, that's done.... I'll send you a perfume, first to resolve And procure sweat, and then prepare a bath To cleanse and clear the cutis; against when I'll have an excellent new fucus made Resistive 'gainst the sun, the rain or wind, Which you shall lay on with a breath or oil, As you best like, and last some fourteen hours. This change came timely, lady, for your health."[536]

He ends by congratulating her on her approaching change of husbands; Drusus was injuring her complexion; Sejanus is far preferable; a physiological and practical conclusion. The Roman apothecary kept on the same shelf his medicine-chest, his chest of cosmetics, and his box of poisons.[537]

After this we find one after another all the scenes of Roman life unfolded, the bargain of murder, the comedy of justice, the shamelessness of flattery, the anguish and vacillation of the Senate. When Sejanus wishes to buy a conscience, he questions, jokes, plays round the offer he is about to make, throws it out as if in pleasantry, so as to be able to withdraw it, if need be; then, when the intelligent look of the rascal, whom he is trafficking with, shows that he is understood:

"Protest not, Thy looks are vows to me.... Thou art a man, made to make consuls. Go."[538]

Elsewhere, the senator Latiaris in his own house storms before his friend Sabinus against tyranny, openly expresses a desire for liberty, provoking him to speak. Then two spies who were hid "between the roof and ceiling," cast themselves on Sabinus, crying, "Treason to Cæsar!" and drag him, with his face covered, before the tribunal, thence to "be thrown upon the Gemonies."[539] So, when the Senate is assembled, Tiberius has chosen beforehand the accusers of Silius, and their parts distributed to them. They mumble in a corner, whilst aloud is heard, in the emperor's presence:

"Cæsar, Live long and happy, great and royal Cæsar; The gods preserve thee and thy modesty, Thy wisdom and thy innocence.... Guard His meekness, Jove, his piety, his care, His bounty."[540]

Then the herald cites the accused; Varro, the consul, pronounces the indictment; After hurls upon them his bloodthirsty eloquence: the senators get excited; we see laid bare, as in Tacitus and Juvenal, the depths of Roman servility, hypocrisy, insensibility, the venomous craft of Tiberius. At last, after so many others, the turn of Sejanus comes. The fathers anxiously assemble in the temple of Apollo; for some days past Tiberius has seemed to be trying to contradict himself; one day he appoints the friends of his favorite to high places, and the next day sets his enemies in eminent positions. The senators mark the face of Sejanus, and know not what to anticipate; Sejanus is troubled, then after a moment's cringing is more arrogant than ever. The plots are confused, the rumors contradictory. Macro alone is in the confidence of Tiberius, and soldiers are seen, drawn up at the porch of the temple, ready to enter at the slightest commotion. The formula of convocation is read, and the council marks the names of those who do not respond to the summons; then Regulus addresses them, and announces that Cæsar

Propounds to this grave Senate, the bestowing Upon the man he loves, honor'd Sejanus, The tribunitial dignity and power: Here are his letters, signed with his signet. What pleaseth now the Fathers to be done? "_Senators._ Read, read them, open, publicly read them. _Cotta._ Cæsar hath honor'd his own greatness much In thinking of this act. _Trio._ It was a thought Happy, and worthy Cæsar. _Latiaris._ And the lord As worthy it, on whom it is directed! _Haterius._ Most worthy! _Sanquinius._ Rome did never boast the virtue That could give envy bounds, but his: Sejanus-- _1st Sen._ Honor'd and noble! _2d Sen._ Good and great Sejanus! _Prœcones._ Silence!"[541]

Tiberius's letter is read. First, long, obscure, and vague phrases, mingled with indirect protestations and accusations, foreboding something and revealing nothing. Suddenly comes an insinuation against Sejanus. The fathers are alarmed, but the next line reassures them. A word or two further on the same insinuation is repeated with greater exactness. "Some there be that would interpret this his public severity to be particular ambition; and that, under a pretext of service to us, he doth but remove his own lets: alleging the strengths he hath made to himself, by the praetorian soldiers, by his faction in court and Senate, by the offices he holds himself, and confers on others, his popularity and dependents, his urging (and almost driving) us to this our unwilling retirement, and lastly, his aspiring to be our son-in-law." The fathers rise: "This is strange!" Their eager eyes are fixed on the letter, on Sejanus, who perspires and grows pale; their thoughts are busy with conjectures, and the words of the letter fall one by one, amidst a sepulchral silence, caught up as they fall with all devouring and attentive eagerness. The senators anxiously weigh the value of these shifty expressions, fearing to compromise themselves with the favorite or with the prince, all feeling that they must understand, if they value their lives.

"'_Your wisdoms, conscript fathers, are able to examine, and censure these suggestions. But, were they left to our absolving voice, we durst pronounce them, as we think them, most malicious._' _Senator._ O, he has restor'd all; list. _Prœco. 'Yet are they offered to be averr'd, and on the lives of the informers._'"[542]

At this word the letter becomes menacing. Those next Sejanus forsake him. "Sit farther.... Let's remove!" The heavy Sanquinius leaps panting over the benches. The soldiers come in; then Macro. And now, at last, the letter orders the arrest of Sejanus.

"_Regulus._ Take him hence; And all the gods guard Cæsar! _Trio._ Take him hence. _Haterius._ Hence. _Cotta._ To the dungeon with him. _Sanquinius._ He deserves it. _Senator._ Crown all our doors with bays. _San._ And let an ox, With gilded horns and garlands, straight be led Unto the Capitol. _Hat._ And sacrific'd To Jove, for Cæsar's safety. _Tri._ All our gods Be present still to Cæsar!... _Cot._ Let all the traitor's titles be defac'd. _Tri._ His images and statues be pull'd down.... _Sen._ Liberty, liberty, liberty! Lead on, And praise to Macro that hath saved Rome!"[543]

It is the baying of a furious pack of hounds, let loose at last on him, under whose hand they had crouched, and who had for a long time beaten and bruised them. Jonson discovered in his own energetic soul the energy of these Roman passions; and the clearness of his mind, added to his profound knowledge, powerless to construct characters, furnished him with general ideas and striking incidents, which suffice to depict manners.

SECTION IV.--Comedies

Moreover, it was to this that he turned his talent. Nearly all his work consists of comedies, not sentimental and fanciful as Shakespeare's, but imitative and satirical, written to represent and correct follies and vices. He introduced a new model; he had a doctrine; his masters were Terence and Plautus. He observes the unity of time and place, almost exactly. He ridicules the authors who, in the same play,

"Make a child now swaddled, to proceed Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed, Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars.... He rather prays you will be pleas'd to see."[544]

He wishes to represent on the stage

"One such to-day, as other plays shou'd be; Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas, Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please: Nor nimble squib is seen to' make afeard The gentlewomen.... But deeds, and language, such as men do use.... You, that have so grac'd monsters, may like men."[545]

Men, as we see them in the streets, with their whims and humors--

"When some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers In their conductions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humor."[546]

It is these humors which he exposes to the light, not with the artist's curiosity, but with the moralist's hate:

"I will scourge those apes, And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror, As large as is the stage whereon we act; Where they shall see the time's deformity Anatomized in every nerve, and sinew, With constant courage, and contempt of fear.... My strict hand Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe Squeeze out the humour of such spongy souls, As lick up every idle vanity."[547]

Doubtless a determination so strong and decided does violence to the dramatic spirit. Jonson's comedies are not rarely harsh; his characters are too grotesque, laboriously constructed, mere automatons; the poet thought less of producing living beings than of scotching a vice; the scenes get arranged, or are confused together in a mechanical manner; we see the process, we feel the satirical intention throughout; delicate and easy-flowing imitation is absent, as well as the graceful fancy which abounds in Shakespeare. But if Jonson comes across harsh passions, visibly evil and vile, he will derive from his energy and wrath the talent to render them odious and visible, and will produce a "Volpone," a sublime work, the sharpest picture of the manners of the age, in which is displayed the full brightness of evil lusts, in which lewdness, cruelty, love of gold, shamelessness of vice, display a sinister yet splendid poetry, worthy of one of Titian's bacchanals.[548] All this makes itself apparent in the first scene, when Volpone says:

"Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!---- Open the shrine, that I may see my saint."

This saint is his piles of gold, jewels, precious plate:

"Hail the world's soul, and mine!... O thou son of Sol, But brighter than thy father, let me kiss, With adoration, thee, and every relick Of sacred treasure in this blessed room."[549]

Presently after, the dwarf, the eunuch, and the hermaphrodite of the house sing a sort of pagan and fantastic interlude; they chant in strange verses the metamorphoses of the hermaphrodite, who was first the soul of Pythagoras. We are at Venice, in the palace of the magnifico Volpone. These deformed creatures, the splendor of gold, this strange and poetical buffoonery, carry the thought immediately to the sensual city, queen of vices and of arts.

The rich Volpone lives like an ancient Greek or Roman. Childless and without relatives, playing the invalid, he makes all his flatterers hope to be his heir, receives their gifts,

"Letting the cherry knock against their lips, And draw it by their mouths, and back again."[550]

Glad to have their gold, but still more glad to deceive them, artistic in wickedness as in avarice, and just as pleased to look at a contortion of suffering as at the sparkle of a ruby.

The advocate Voltore arrives, bearing a "huge piece of plate." Volpone throws himself on his bed, wraps himself in furs, heaps up his pillows, and coughs as if at the point of death:

"_Volpone._ I thank you, signior Voltore, Where is the plate? mine eyes are bad.... Your love Hath taste in this, and shall not be unanswer'd.... I cannot now last long.... I fell me going-- Uh, uh, uh, uh!"[551]

He closes his eyes, as though exhausted:

"_Voltore._ Am I inscrib'd his heir for certain? _Mosca_ (_Volpone's Parasite_). Are you! I do beseech you, sir, you will vouchsafe To write me in your family. All my hopes Depend upon your worship: I am lost, Except the rising sun do shine on me. _Volt._ It shall both shine and warm thee, Mosca. _M._ Sir, I am man, that hath not done your love All the worst offices: here I wear your keys, See all your coffers and your caskets lock'd, Keep the poor inventory of your jewels, Your plate and monies; am your steward, sir, Husband your goods here. _Volt._ But am I sole heir? _M._ Without a partner, sir; confirm'd this morning The wax is warm yet, and the ink scarce dry Upon the parchment. _Volt._ Happy, happy me! By what good chance, sweet Mosca? _M._ Your desert, sir; I know no second cause."[552]

And he details the abundance of the wealth in which Voltore is about to revel, the gold which is to pour upon him, the opulence which is to flow in his house as a river:

"When will you have your inventory brought, sir? Or see a copy of the will?"

The imagination is fed with precise words, precise details. Thus, one after another, the would-be heirs come like beasts of prey. The second who arrives is an old miser, Corbaccio, deaf, "impotent," almost dying, who, nevertheless, hopes to survive Volpone. To make more sure of it, he would fain have Mosca give his master a narcotic. He has it about him, this excellent opiate: he has had it prepared under his own eyes, he suggests it. His joy on finding Volpone more ill than himself is bitterly humorous:

"_Corbaccio._ How does your patron?... _Mosca._ His mouth Is ever gaping, and his eyelids hang. _C._ Good. _M._ A freezing numbness stiffens all his joints, And makes the color of his flesh like lead. _C._ 'Tis good. _M._ His pulse beats slow, and dull. _C._ Good symptoms still. _M._ And from his brain-- _C._ I conceive you; good. _M._ Flows a cold sweat, with a continual rheum, Forth the resolved corners of his eyes. _C._ Is't possible? Yet I am better, ha! How does he, with the swimming of his head? _M._ O, sir, 'tis past the scotomy; he now Hath lost his feeling, and hath left to snort: You hardly can perceive him, that he breathes. _C._ Excellent, excellent! sure I shall outlast him: This makes me young again, a score of years."[553]

If you would be his heir, says Mosca, the moment is favorable, but you must not let yourself be forestalled. Voltore has been here, and presented him with this piece of plate:

"_C._ See, Mosca, look, Here, I have brought a bag of bright chequines. Will quite weigh down his plate.... _M._ Now, would I counsel you, make home with speed; There, frame a will; whereto you shall inscribe My master your sole heir.... _C._ This plot Did I think on before.... _M._ And you so certain to survive him-- _C._ Ay. _M._ Being so lusty a man-- _C._ 'Tis true."[554]

And the old man hobbles away, not hearing the insults and ridicule thrown at him, he is so deaf.

When he is gone the merchant Corvino arrives, bringing an orient pearl and a splendid diamond:

"_Corvino._ Am I his heir? _Mosca._ Sir, I am sworn, I may not show the will Till he be dead; but here has been Corbaccio, Here has been Voltore, here were others too, I cannot number 'em, they were so many; All gaping here for legacies: but I, Taking the vantage of his naming you, _Signior Corvino, Signior Corvino_, took Paper, and pen, and ink, and there I asked him, Whom he would have his heir? Corvino. Who Should be executor? Corvino. And, To any question he was silent to, I still interpreted the nods he made, Through weakness, for consent: and sent home th' others, Nothing bequeath'd them, but to cry and curse. _Cor._ O my dear Mosca!... Has he children? _M._ Bastards, Some dozen, or more, that he begot on beggars, Gypsies, and Jews, and black-moors, when he was drunk.... Speak out: You may be louder yet.... Faith, I could stifle him rarely with a pillow, As well as any woman that should keep him. _C._ Do as you will; but I'll begone."[555]

Corvino presently departs; for the passions of the time have all the beauty of frankness. And Volpone, casting aside his sick man's garb, cries:

"My divine Mosca! Thou hast to-day out gone thyself.... Prepare Me music, dances, banquets, all delights; The Turk is not more sensual in his pleasures, Than will Volpone."[556]

On this invitation, Mosca draws a most voluptuous portrait of Corvino's wife, Celia. Smitten with a sudden desire, Volpone dresses himself as a mountebank, and goes singing under her windows with all the sprightliness of a quack; for he is naturally a comedian, like a true Italian, of the same family as Scaramouch, as good an actor in the public square as in his house. Having once seen Celia, he resolves to obtain her at any price:

"Mosca, take my keys, Gold, plate, and jewels, all's at thy devotion; Employ them how thou wilt; nay, coin me too: So thou, in this, but crown my longings, Mosca."[557]

Mosca then tells Corvino that some quack's oil has cured his master, and that they are looking for a "young woman, lusty and full of juice," to complete the cure:

"Have you no kinswoman? Odso--Think, think, think, think, think, think, think, sir. One o' the doctors offer'd there his daughter. _Corvino._ How! _Mosca._ Yes, signior Lupo, the physician. _C._ His daughter! _M._ And a virgin, sir.... _C._ Wretch! Covetous wretch."[558]

Though unreasonably jealous, Corvino is gradually induced to offer his wife. He has given too much already, and would not lose his advantage. He is like a half-ruined gamester, who with a shaking hand throws on the green cloth the remainder of his fortune. He brings the poor sweet woman, weeping and resisting. Excited by his own hidden pangs, he becomes furious:

"Be damn'd! Heart, I will drag thee hence, home, by the hair; Cry thee a strumpet through the streets; rip up Thy mouth unto thine ears; and slit thy nose; Like a raw rochet!--Do not tempt me; come, Yield, I am loth--Death! I will buy some slave Whom I will kill, and bind thee to him, alive; And at my window hang you forth, devising Some monstrous crime, which I, in capital letters, Will eat into thy flesh with aquafortis, And burning corsives, on this stubborn breast. Now, by the blood thou hast incensed, I'll do it! _Celia._ Sir, what you please, you may, I am your martyr. _Corvino._ Be not thus obstinate, I have not deserv'd it: Think who it is intreats you. Prithee, sweet;-- Good faith thou shalt have jewels, gowns, attires, What thou wilt think, and ask. Do but go kiss him, Or touch him, but. For my sake.--At my suit.-- This once.--No! not! I shall remember this. Will you disgrace me thus? Do you thirst my undoing?"[559]

Mosca turned a moment before, to Volpone:

"Sir, Signior Corvino... hearing of the consultation had So lately, for your health, is come to offer, Or rather, sir, to prostitute.-- _Corvino._ Thanks, sweet Mosca. _Mosca._ Freely, unask'd, or unintreated. _C._ Well. _Mosca._ As the true fervent instance of his love, His own most fair and proper wife; the beauty Only of price in Venice.-- _C._ 'Tis well urg'd."[560]

Where can we see such blows launched and driven hard, full in the face, by the violent hand of satire? Celia is alone with Volpone, who, throwing off his feigned sickness, comes upon her "as fresh, as hot, as high, and in as jovial plight," as on the gala days of the Republic, when he acted the part of the lovely Antinous. In his transport he sings a love-song; his voluptuousness culminates in poetry; for poetry was then in Italy the blossom of vice. He spreads before her pearls, diamonds, carbuncles. He is in raptures at the sight of the treasures, which he displays and sparkles before her eyes:

"Take these, And wear, and lose them: yet remains an ear-ring To purchase them again, and this whole state. A gem but worth a private patrimony, Is nothing: we will eat such at a meal, The heads of parrots, tongues of nightingales, The brains of peacocks, and of estriches, Shall be our food.... Conscience? 'Tis the beggar's virtue.... Thy baths shall be of the juice of July flowers, Spirit of roses, and of violets, The milk of unicorns, and panthers' breath Gather'd in bags, and mixt with Cretan wines. Our drink shall be prepared gold and amber; Which we will take, until my roof whirl round With the vertigo: and my dwarf shall dance, My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic, Whilst we, in changed shapes, act Ovid's tales, Thou, like Europa now, and I like Jove, Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine; So, of the rest, till we have quite run through, And wearied all the fables of the gods."[561]

We recognize Venice in this splendor of debauchery--Venice, the throne of Aretinus, the country of Tintoretto and Giorgione. Volpone seizes Celia: "Yield, or I'll force thee!" But suddenly Bonario, disinherited son of Corbaccio, whom Mosca had concealed there with another design, enters violently, delivers her, wounds Mosca, and accuses Volpone before the tribunal, of imposture and rape.

The three rascals who aim at being his heirs, work together to save Volpone. Corbaccio disavows his son, and accuses him of parricide. Corvino declares his wife an adulteress, the shameless mistress of Bonario. Never on the stage was seen such energy of lying, such open villany. The husband, who knows his wife to be innocent, is the most eager:

"This woman (please your fatherhoods) is a whore, Of most hot exercise, more than a partrich, Upon record. _1st Advocate._ No more. _Corvino._ Neighs like a jennet. _Notary._ Preserve the honor of the court. _C._ I shall, And modesty of your most reverend ears. And yet I hope that I may say, these eyes Have seen her glued unto that piece of cedar, That fine well-timber'd gallant; and that here The letters may be read, thorough the horn, That make the story perfect.... _3d Adv._ His grief hath made him frantic. (_Celia swoons._) _C._ Rare! Prettily feign'd! again!"[562]

They have Volpone brought in, like a dying man; manufacture false "testimony," to which Voltore gives weight with his advocate's tongue, with words worth a sequin apiece. They throw Celia and Bonario into prison, and Volpone is saved. This public imposture is for him only another comedy, a pleasant pastime, and a masterpiece.

"_Mosca._ To gull the court. _Volpone._ And quite divert the torrent Upon the innocent.... _M._ You are not taken with it enough, methinks. _V._ O, more than if I had enjoy'd the wench?"[563]

To conclude, he writes a will in Mosca's favor, has his death reported, hides behind a curtain, and enjoys the looks of the would-be heirs. They had just saved him from being thrown into prison, which makes the fun all the better; the wickedness will be all the greater and more exquisite. "Torture 'em rarely," Volpone says to Mosca. The latter spreads the will on the table, and reads the inventory aloud. "Turkey carpets nine. Two cabinets, one of ebony, the other mother-of-pearl. A perfum'd box, made of an onyx." The heirs are stupefied with disappointment, and Mosca drives them off with insults. He says to Corvino:

"Why should you stay here? with what thought, what promise? Hear you; do you not know, I know you an ass, And that you would most fain have been a wittol, If fortune would have let you? That you are A declar'd cuckold, on good terms? This pearl, You'll say, was yours? Right: this diamond? I'll not deny't, but thank you. Much here else? It may be so. Why, think that these good works May help to hide your bad. [_Exit Corvino._]... _Corbaccio._ I am cozen'd, cheated, by a parasite slave; Harlot, thou hast gull'd me. _Mosca._ Yes, sir. Stop your mouth, Or I shall draw the only tooth is left. Are not you he, that filthy covetous wretch, With the three legs, that here, in hope of prey, Have, any time this three years, snufft about, With your most grov'ling nose, and would have hir'd Me to the pois'ning of my patron, sir? Are not you he that have to-day in court Profess'd the disinheriting of your son? Perjur'd yourself? Go home, and die, and stink."[564]

Volpone goes out disguised, comes to each of them in turn, and succeeds in wringing their hearts. But Mosca, who has the will, acts with a high hand, and demands of Volpone half his fortune. The dispute between the two rascals discovers their impostures, and the master, the servant, with the three would-be heirs, are sent to the galleys, to prison, to the pillory--as Corvino says, to

"Have mine eyes beat out with stinking fish, Bruis'd fruit, and rotten eggs.--'Tis well. I'm glad, I shall not see my shame yet."[565]

No more vengeful comedy has been written, none more persistently athirst to make vice suffer, to unmask, triumph over, and to punish it.

Where can be the gayety of such a theatre? In caricature and farce. There is a rough gayety, a sort of physical, external laughter which suits this combative, drinking, blustering mood. It is thus that this mood relaxes from war-waging and murderous satire; the pastime is appropriate to the manners of the time, excellent to attract men who look upon hanging as a good joke, and laugh to see the Puritan's ears cut. Put yourself for an instant in their place, and you will think like them, that "The Silent Woman" is a masterpiece. Morose is an old monomaniac, who has a horror of noise, but loves to speak. He inhabits a street so narrow that a carriage cannot enter it. He drives off with his stick the bear-leaders and sword-players, who venture to pass under his windows. He has sent away his servant whose shoes creaked; and Mute, the new one, wears slippers "soled with wool," and only speaks in a whisper through a tube. Morose ends by forbidding the whisper, and makes him reply by signs. He is also rich, an uncle, and he ill-treats his nephew Sir Dauphine Eugenie, a man of wit, but who lacks money. We anticipate all the tortures which poor Morose is to suffer. Sir Dauphine finds him a supposed silent woman, the beautiful Epicœne. Morose, enchanted by her brief replies and her voice, which he can hardly hear, marries her, to play his nephew a trick. It is his nephew who has played him a trick. As soon as she is married, Epicœne speaks, scolds, argues as loud and as long as a dozen women: "Why, did you think you had married a statue? or a motion only? one of the French puppets, with the eyes turned with a wire? or some innocent out of the hospital, that would stand with her hands thus, and a plaise mouth, and look upon you?"[566]

She orders the servants to speak louder; she opens the doors wide to her friends. They arrive in shoals, offering their noisy congratulations to Morose. Five or six women's tongues overwhelm him all at once with compliments, questions, advice, remonstrances. A friend of Sir Dauphine comes with a band of music, who play all together, suddenly, with their whole force. Morose says, "O, a plot, a plot, a plot, a plot, upon me! This day I shall be their anvil to work on; they will grate me asunder. 'Tis worse than the noise of a saw."[567] A procession of servants is seen coming, with dishes in their hands; it is the racket of a tavern which Sir Dauphine is bringing to his uncle. The guests clash the glasses, shout, drink healths; they have with them a drum and trumpets which make great noise. Morose flees to the top of the house, puts "a whole nest of night-caps" on his head and stuffs up his ears. Captain Otter cries, "Sound, Tritons o' the Thames! _Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero._ Villains, murderers, sons of the earth and traitors," cries Morose from above, "what do you there?" The racket increases. Then the captain, somewhat "jovial," maligns his wife, who falls upon him and gives him a good beating. Blows, cries, music, laughter, resound like thunder. It is the poetry of uproar. Here is a subject to shake coarse nerves, and to make the mighty chests of the companions of Drake and Essex shake with uncontrollable laughter. "Rogues, hell-hounds, Stentors! ... They have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder, with their brazen throats!" Morose casts himself on his tormentors with his long sword, breaks the instruments, drives away the musicians, disperses the guests amidst an inexpressible uproar, gnashing his teeth, looking haggard. Afterwards they pronounce him mad and discuss his madness before him.[568] The disease in Greek is called _μανία_, in Latin _insania, furor, vel ecstasis melancholica_; that is, _egressio_, when a man _ex melancholico evadit fanaticus._... But he may be but phreneticus yet, mistress; and phrenetis is only delirium, or so. They talk of the books which he must read aloud to cure him. They add, by way of consolation, that his wife talks in her sleep, "and snores like a porpoise. O redeem me, fate; redeem me, fate!" cries the poor man.[569] "For how many causes may a man be divorced, nephew?" Sir Dauphine chooses two knaves, and disguises them, one as a priest, the other as a lawyer, who launch at his head Latin terms of civil and canon law, explain to Morose the twelve cases of nullity, jingle in his ears one after another the most barbarous words in their obscure vocabulary, wrangle, and make between them as much noise as a couple of bells in a belfry. Following their advice, he declares himself impotent. The wedding-guests propose to toss him in a blanket; others demand an immediate inspection. Fall after fall, shame after shame; nothing serves him: his wife declares that she consents to "take him with all his faults." The lawyer proposes another legal method; Morose shall obtain a divorce by proving that his wife is faithless. Two boasting knights, who are present, declare that they have been her lovers. Morose, in raptures, throws himself at their knees, and embraces them. Epicœne weeps, and Morose seems to be delivered. Suddenly the lawyer decides that the plan is of no avail, the infidelity having been committed before the marriage. "O, this is worst of all worst worsts that hell could have devis'd! marry a whore, and so much noise!" There is Morose then, declared impotent and a deceived husband, at his own request, in the eyes of the whole world, and moreover married forever. Sir Dauphine comes in like a clever rascal, and as a succoring deity. "Allow me but five hundred during life, uncle, and I free you." Morose signs the deed of gift with alacrity; and his nephew shows him that Epicœne is a boy in disguise.[570] Add to this enchanting farce the funny parts of the two accomplished and gallant knights, who, after having boasted of their bravery, receive gratefully, and before the ladies, flips and kicks.[571] Never was coarse physical laughter more adroitly produced. In this broad coarse gayety, this excess of noisy transport, you recognize the stout roisterer, the stalwart drinker who swallowed hogsheads of Canary, and made the windows of the Mermaid shake with his bursts of humor.

SECTION V.--Limits of Jonson's Talent--His Smaller Poems--His Masques

Jonson did not go beyond this; he was not a philosopher like Molière, able to grasp and dramatize the crisis of human life, education, marriage, sickness, the chief characters of his country and century, the courtier, the tradesman, the hypocrite, the man of the world.[572] He remained on a lower level, in the comedy of plot,[573] the painting of the grotesque,[574] the representation of too transient subjects of ridicule,[575] too general vices.[576] If at times, as in the "Alchemist," he has succeeded by the perfection of plot and the vigor of satire, he has miscarried more frequently by the ponderousness of his work and the lack of comic lightness. The critic in him mars the artist; his literary calculations strip him of spontaneous invention; he is too much of a writer and moralist, not enough of a mimic and an actor. But he is loftier from another side, for he is a poet; almost all writers, prose-authors, preachers even, were so at the time we speak of. Fancy abounded, as well as the perception of colors and forms, the need and wont of enjoying through the imagination and the eyes. Many of Jonson's pieces, the "Staple of News, Cynthia's Revels," are fanciful and allegorical comedies like those of Aristophanes. He there dallies with the real, and beyond the real, with characters who are but theatrical masks, abstractions personified, buffooneries, decorations, dances, music, pretty laughing whims of a picturesque and sentimental imagination. Thus, in "Cynthia's Revels," three children come on "pleading possession of the cloke" of black velvet, which an actor usually wore when he spoke the prologue. They draw lots for it; one of the losers, in revenge, tells the audience beforehand the incidents of the piece. The others interrupt him at every sentence, put their hands on his mouth, and taking the cloak one after the other, begin to criticise the spectators and authors. This child's play, these gestures and loud voices, this little amusing dispute, divert the public from their serious thoughts, and prepare them for the oddities which they are to look upon.

We are in Greece, in the valley of Gargaphie, where Diana[577] has proclaimed "a solemn revels." Mercury and Cupid have come down, and begin by quarrelling; the latter says: "My light feather-heel'd coz, what are you any more than my uncle Jove's pander? a lacquey that runs on errands for him, and can whisper a light message to a loose wench with some round volubility?... One that sweeps the gods' drinking-room every morning, and sets the cushions in order again, which they threw one at another's head over night?"[578]

They are good-tempered gods. Echo, awoke by Mercury, weeps for the "too beauteous boy Narcissus":

"That trophy of self-love, and spoil of nature, Who, now transformed into this drooping flower, Hangs the repentant head, back from the stream.... Witness thy youth's dear sweets, here spent untasted, Like a fair taper, with his own flame wasted!... And with thy water let this curse remain, As an inseparate plague, that who but taste A drop thereof, may, with the instant touch, Grow doatingly enamour'd on themselves."[579]

The courtiers and ladies drink thereof, and behold, a sort of a review of the follies of the time, arranged, as in Aristophanes, in an improbable farce, a brilliant show. A silly spendthrift, Asotus, wishes to become a man of the court and of fashionable manners; he takes for his master Amorphus, a learned traveller, expert in gallantry, who, to believe himself, is

"An essence so sublimated and refined by travel... able... to speak the mere extraction of language; one that... was your first that ever enrich'd his country with the true laws of the duello; whose optics have drunk the spirit of beauty in some eight-score and eighteen princes' courts, where I have resided, and been there fortunate in the amours of three hundred forty and five ladies, all nobly if not princely descended,... in all so happy, as even admiration herself doth seem to fasten her kisses upon me."[580]

Asotus learns at this good school the language of the court, fortifies himself like other people with quibbles, learned oaths, and metaphors; he fires off in succession supersubtle tirades, and duly imitates the grimaces and tortuous style of his masters. Then, when he has drunk the water of the fountain, becoming suddenly pert and rash, he proposes to all comers a tournament of "court compliment." This odd tournament is held before the ladies; it comprises four jousts, and at each the trumpets sound. The combatants perform in succession "the _bare accost_; the _better regard_; the _solemn address_;" and "the perfect close."[581] In this grave buffoonery the courtiers are beaten. The severe Crites, the moralist of the play, copies their language, and pierces them with their own weapons. Already, with grand declamation, he had rebuked them thus:

"O vanity, How are thy painted beauties doated on, By light, and empty idiots! how pursu'd With open and extended appetite! How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath, Rais'd on their toes, to catch thy airy forms, Still turning giddy, till they reel like drunkards, That buy the merry madness of one hour, With the long irksomeness of following time!"[582]

To complete the overthrow of the vices, appear two symbolical masques, representing the contrary virtues. They pass gravely before the spectators, in splendid array, and the noble verses exchanged by the goddess and her companions raise the mind to the lofty regions of serene morality, whither the poet desires to carry us:

"Queen, and huntress, chaste and fair, Now the sun is laid to sleep, Seated in thy silver chair, State in wonted manner keep.... Lay thy bow of pearl apart, And thy crystal shining quiver; Give unto the flying hart Space to breathe, how short soever."[583]

In the end, bidding the dancers to unmask, Cynthia shows that the vices have disguised themselves as virtues. She condemns them to make fit reparation, and to bathe themselves in Helicon. Two by two they go off singing a palinode, whilst the chorus sings the supplication "Good Mercury defend us."[584] Is it an opera or a comedy? It is a lyrical comedy; and if we do not discover in it the airy lightness of Aristophanes, at least we encounter, as in the "Birds" and the "Frogs," the contrasts and medleys of poetic invention, which, through caricature and ode, the real and the impossible, the present and the past, sent forth to the four quarters of the globe, simultaneously unites all kinds of incompatibilities, and culls all flowers.

Jonson went further than this, and entered the domain of pure poetry. He wrote delicate, voluptuous, charming love poems, worthy of the ancient idyllic muse.[585] Above all, he was the great, the inexhaustible inventor of Masques, a kind of masquerades, ballets, poetic choruses, in which all the magnificence and the imagination of the English Renaissance is displayed. The Greek gods, and all the ancient Olympus, the allegorical personages whom the artists of the time delineate in their pictures; the antique heroes of popular legends; all worlds, the actual, the abstract, the divine, the human, the ancient, the modern, are searched by his hands, brought on the stage to furnish costumes, harmonious groups, emblems, songs, whatever can excite, intoxicate the artistic sense. The _élite_, moreover, of the kingdom is there on the stage. They are not mountebanks moving about in borrowed clothes, clumsily worn, for which they are still in debt to the tailor; they are ladies of the court, great lords, the queen, in all the splendor of their rank and pride, with real diamonds, bent on displaying their riches, so that the whole splendor of the national life is concentrated in the opera which they enact, like jewels in a casket. What dresses! what profusion of splendors! what medley of strange characters, gipsies, witches, gods, heroes, pontiffs, gnomes, fantastic beings! How many metamorphoses, jousts, dances, marriage songs! What variety of scenery, architecture, floating isles, triumphal arches, symbolic spheres! Gold glitters; jewels flash; purple absorbs the lustre-lights in its costly folds; streams of light shine upon the crumpled silks; diamond necklaces, darting flame, clasp the bare bosoms of the ladies; strings of pearls are displayed, loop after loop, upon the silver-sown brocaded dresses; gold embroidery, weaving whimsical arabesques, depicts upon their dresses flowers, fruits, and figures, setting picture within picture. The steps of the throne bear groups of Cupids, each with a torch in his hand.[586] On either side the fountains cast up plumes of pearls; musicians, in purple and scarlet, laurel-crowned, make harmony in the bowers. The trains of masques cross, commingling their groups; "the one half in orange-tawny and silver, the other in sea-green and silver. The bodies and short skirts (were of) white and gold to both."

Such pageants Jonson wrote year after year, almost to the end of his life, true feasts for the eyes, like the processions of Titian. Even when he grew to be old, his imagination, like that of Titian, remained abundant and fresh. Though forsaken, lying gasping on his bed, feeling the approach of death, in his supreme bitterness he did not lose his faculties, but wrote "The Sad Shepherd," the most graceful and pastoral of his pieces. Consider that this beautiful dream arose in a sick-chamber, amidst medicine bottles, physic, doctors, with a nurse at his side, amidst the anxieties of poverty and the choking-fits of a dropsy! He is transported to a green forest, in the days of Robin Hood, amidst the gay chase and the great barking greyhounds. There are the malicious fairies, who, like Oberon and Titania, lead men to flounder in mishaps. There are open-souled lovers, who, like Daphne and Chloe, taste with awe the painful sweetness of the first kiss. There lived Earine, whom the stream has "suck'd in," whom her lover, in his madness, will not cease to lament:

"Earine, Who had her very being, and her name With the first knots or buddings of the spring, Born with the primrose or the violet, Or earliest roses blown: when Cupid smil'd, And Venus led the graces out to dance, And all the flowers and sweets in nature's lap Leap'd out, and made their solemn conjuration To last but while she liv'd!"...[587] "But she, as chaste as was her name, Earine, Died undeflower'd: and now her sweet soul hovers Here in the air above us."[588]

Above the poor old paralytic artist, poetry still hovers like a haze of light. Yes, he had cumbered himself with science, clogged himself with theories, constituted himself theatrical critic and social censor, filled his soul with unrelenting indignation, fostered a combative and morose disposition; but divine dreams never left him. He is the brother of Shakespeare.

SECTION VI.--General Idea of Shakespeare

So now at last we are in the presence of one, whom we perceived before us through all the vistas of the Renaissance, like some vast oak to which all the forest ways converge. I will treat of Shapespeare by himself. In order to take him in completely, we must have a wide and open space. And yet how shall we comprehend him? how lay bare his inner constitution? Lofty words, eulogies, are all used in vain; he needs no praise, but comprehension merely; and he can only be comprehended by the aid of science. As the complicated revolutions of the heavenly bodies become intelligible only by use of a superior calculus, as the delicate transformations of vegetation and life need for their explanation the intervention of the most difficult chemical formulas, so the great works of art can be interpreted only by the most advanced psychological systems; and we need the loftiest of all these to attain to Shakespeare's level--to the level of his age and his work, of his genius and of his art.

After all practical experience and accumulated observations of the soul, we find as the result that wisdom and knowledge are in man only effects and fortuities. Man has no permanent and distinct force to secure truth to his intelligence, and common-sense to his conduct. On the contrary, he is naturally unreasonable and deceived. The parts of his inner mechanism are like the wheels of clock-work, which go of themselves, blindly, carried away by impulse and weight, and which yet sometimes, by virtue of a certain unison, end by indicating the hour. This final intelligent motion is not natural, but fortuitous; not spontaneous, but forced; not innate, but acquired. The clock did not always go regularly; on the contrary, it had to be regulated little by little, with much difficulty. Its regularity is not insured; it may go wrong at any time. Its regularity is not complete; it only approximately marks the time. The mechanical force of each piece is always ready to drag all the rest from their proper action, and to disarrange the whole agreement. So ideas, once in the mind, pull each their own way blindly and separately, and their imperfect agreement threatens confusion every moment. Strictly speaking, man is mad, as the body is ill, by nature; reason and health come to us as a momentary success, a lucky accident.[589] If we forget this, it is because we are now regulated, dulled, deadened, and because our internal motion has become gradually, by friction and reparation, half harmonized with the motion of things. But this is only a semblance; and the dangerous primitive forces remain untamed and independent under the order which seems to restrain them. Let a great danger arise, a revolution take place, they will break out and explode, almost as terribly as in earlier times. For an idea is not a mere inner mark, employed to designate one aspect of things, inert, always ready to fall into order with other similar ones, so as to make an exact whole. However it may be reduced and disciplined, it still retains a sensible tinge which shows its likeness to an hallucination; a degree of individual persistence which shows its likeness to a monomania; a network of singular affinities which shows its likeness to the ravings of delirium. Being such, it is beyond question the rudiment of a nightmare, a habit, an absurdity. Let it become once developed in its entirety, as its tendency leads it,[590] and you will find that it is essentially an active and complete image, a vision drawing along with it a train of dreams and sensations, which increases of itself, suddenly, by a sort of rank and absorbing growth, and which ends by possessing, shaking, exhausting the whole man. After this, another, perhaps entirely opposite, and so on successively: there is nothing else in man, no free and distinct power: he is in himself but the process of these headlong impulses and swarming imaginations: civilization has mutilated, attenuated, but not destroyed them; shocks, collisions, transports, sometimes at long intervals a sort of transient partial equilibrium: this is his real life, the life of a lunatic, who now and then simulates reason, but who is in reality "such stuff as dreams are made on";[591] and this is man, as Shakespeare has conceived him. No writer, not even Molière, has penetrated so far beneath the semblance of common-sense and logic in which the human machine is enclosed, in order to disentangle the brute powers which constitute its substance and its mainspring.

How did Shakespeare succeed? and by what extraordinary instinct did he divine the remote conclusions, the deepest insights of physiology and psychology? He had a complete imagination; his whole genius lies in that complete imagination. These words seem commonplace and void of meaning. Let us examine them closer, to understand what they contain. When we think a thing, we, ordinary men, we only think a part of it; we see one side, some isolated mark, sometimes two or three marks together; for what is beyond, our sight fails us; the infinite network of its infinitely complicated and multiplied properties escapes us; we feel vaguely that there is something beyond our shallow ken, and this vague suspicion is the only part of our idea which at all reveals to us the great beyond. We are like tyro naturalists, quiet people of limited understanding, who, wishing to represent an animal, recall its name and ticket in the museum, with some indistinct image of its hide and figure; but their mind stops there. If it so happens that they wish to complete their knowledge, they lead their memory, by regular classifications, over the principal characters of the animal, and slowly, discursively, piecemeal, bring at last the bare anatomy before their eyes. To this their idea is reduced, even when perfected; to this also most frequently is our conception reduced, even when elaborated. What a distance there is between this conception and the object, how imperfectly and meanly the one represents the other, to what extent this mutilates that; how the consecutive idea, disjoined in little, regularly arranged and inert fragments, resembles but slightly the organized, living thing, created simultaneously, ever in action, and ever transformed, words cannot explain. Picture to yourself, instead of this poor dry idea, propped up by a miserable mechanical linkwork of thought, the complete idea, that is, an inner representation, so abundant and full that it exhausts all the properties and relations of the object, all its inward and outward aspects; that it exhausts them instantaneously; that it conceives of the entire animal, its color, the play of the light upon its skin, its form, the quivering of its outstretched limbs, the flash of its eyes, and at the same time its passion of the moment, its excitement, its dash; and beyond this its instincts, their composition, their causes, their history; so that the hundred thousand characteristics which make up its condition and its nature find their analogues in the imagination which concentrates and reflects them: there you have the artist's conception, the poet's--Shakespeare's; so superior to that of the logician, of the mere savant or man of the world, the only one capable of penetrating to the very essence of existences, of extricating the inner from beneath the outer man, of feeling through sympathy, and imitating without effort, the irregular oscillation of human imaginations and impressions, of reproducing life with its infinite fluctuations, its apparent contradictions, its concealed logic; in short, to create as nature creates. This is what is done by the other artists of this age; they have the same kind of mind, and the same idea of life: you will find in Shakespeare only the same faculties, with a still stronger impulse; the same idea, with a still more prominent relief.

[Footnote 513: Fuller's "Worthies," ed. Nuttall, 1840, 3 vols. III. 284.]

[Footnote 514: There is a similar hallucination to be met with in the life of Lord Castlereagh, who afterwards committed suicide.]

[Footnote 515: His character lies between those of Fielding and Dr. Johnson.]

[Footnote 516: Mr. David Laing remarks, however, in Drummond's defence, that as "Jonson died August 6, 1637, Drummond survived till December 4, 1649, and no portion of these Notes (Conversations) were made public till 1711, or sixty-two years after Drummond's death, and seventy-four after Jonson's, which renders quite nugatory all Gifford's accusations of Drummond's having published them 'without shame.' As to Drummond decoying Jonson under his roof with any premeditated design on his reputation, as Mr. Campbell has remarked, no one can seriously believe it."--"Archæologica Scotica," vol. IV. page 243.—-Tr.]

[Footnote 517: At the age of forty-four he went to Scotland on foot.]

[Footnote 518: Parts of "Crites" and "Asper."]

[Footnote 519: "Every Man out of his Humour," I; Gifford's "Jonson," p. 30.]

[Footnote 520: Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. Bell, An Epistle Mendicant, to Richard, Lord Weston, Lord High Treasurer (1631), p. 244.]

[Footnote 521: "The Devil is an Ass."]

[Footnote 522: Sejanus, Catiline, passim.]

[Footnote 523: Alfred de Musset, preface to "La Coupe et les Lèvres." Plato: "Ion."]

[Footnote 524: Compare Sir Epicure Mammon with Baron Hulot from Balzac's "Cousine Bette." Balzac, who is learned like Jonson, creates real beings like Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 525: "Every Man out of his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 526: "Poetaster," I. 1.]

[Footnote 527: Ibid.]

[Footnote 528: See the second act of "Catiline."]

[Footnote 529: "The Fall of Sejanus," III. last scene.]

[Footnote 530: Ibid. II.]

[Footnote 531: "The Fall of Sejanus." II.]

[Footnote 532: See "Catiline," Act II; a very fine scene, no less plain spoken and animated, on the dissipation of the higher ranks in Rome.]

[Footnote 533: "The Fall of Sejanus," I.]

[Footnote 534: Ibid. IV.]

[Footnote 535: Ibid. III.]

[Footnote 536: "The Fall of Sejanus," V.]

[Footnote 537: "The Fall of Sejanus," V.]

[Footnote 538: Ibid.]

[Footnote 539: "Every Man in his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 540: Ibid.]

[Footnote 541: Ibid.]

[Footnote 542: "Every Man in his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 543: Compare "Volpone" with Regnard's "Légataire"; the end of the sixteenth with the beginning of the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 544: "Volpone," I. 1.]

[Footnote 545: "Volpone," I. 1.]

[Footnote 546: Ibid. I. 3.]

[Footnote 547: Ibid.]

[Footnote 548: "Volpone," I. 4.]

[Footnote 549: "Volpone," I. 4.]

[Footnote 550: Ibid. I. 5.]

[Footnote 551: "Volpone," I. 5.]

[Footnote 552: Ibid. II. 2.]

[Footnote 553: Ibid.]

[Footnote 554: "Volpone," III. 5. We pray reader to pardon us for Ben Jonson's broadness. If I omit it, I cannot depict the sixteenth century. Grant the same the indulgence to the historian as to the anatomist.]

[Footnote 555: Ibid.]

[Footnote 556: "Volpone," III. 5.]

[Footnote 557: "Volpone" IV. 1.]

[Footnote 558: Ibid. V. 1.]

[Footnote 559: "Volpone," V. 1.]

[Footnote 560: Ibid. V. 8.]

[Footnote 561: "Epicœne," III. 2.]

[Footnote 562: Ibid. III. 2.]

[Footnote 563: Compare M. de Pourceaugnac in Molière.]

[Footnote 564: "Epicœne," IV. I, 2.]

[Footnote 565: Ibid. V.]

[Footnote 566: Compare Polichinelle in "Le Malade imaginaire"; Géronte in "Les Fourberies de Scapin."]

[Footnote 567: Compare "L'École des Femmes, Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois-gentilhomme, Le Malade imaginaire, Georges Dandin."]

[Footnote 568: Compare "Les Fourberies de Scapin."]

[Footnote 569: Compare "Les Fâcheux."]

[Footnote 570: Compare "Les Précieuses Ridicules."]

[Footnote 571: Compare the plays of Destouches.]

[Footnote 572: By Diana, Queen Elizabeth is meant.]

[Footnote 573: "Cynthia's Revels," I. 1.]

[Footnote 574: Ibid.]

[Footnote 575: "Cynthia's Revels," I. 1.]

[Footnote 576: Ibid. V. 2.]

[Footnote 577: Ibid. I. 1.]

[Footnote 578: Ibid. V. 3.]

[Footnote 579: "Cynthia's Revels," last scene.]

[Footnote 580: Celebration of Charis; "Miscellaneous Poems."]

[Footnote 581: "Masque of Beauty."]

[Footnote 582: "The Sad Shepherd," I. 2.]

[Footnote 583: "The Sad Shepherd," III. 2.]

[Footnote 584: This idea may be expanded psychologically: external perception, memory, are real hallucinations, etc. This is the analytical aspect: under another aspect reason and health are the natural goals.]

[Footnote 585: See Spinoza and Dugald Stewart: Conception in its natural state is belief.]

[Footnote 586: "Tempest," IV. 1.]

CHAPTER FOURTH

Shakespeare

I am about to describe an extraordinary species of mind, perplexing to all the French modes of analysis and reasoning, all-powerful, excessive, master of the sublime as well as of the base; the most creative mind that ever engaged in the exact copy of the details of actual existence, in the dazzling caprice of fancy, in the profound complications of superhuman passions; a nature poetical, immoral, inspired, superior to reason by the sudden revelations of its seer's madness; so extreme in joy and grief, so abrupt of gait, so agitated and impetuous, in its transports, that this great age alone could have cradled such a child.

SECTION I.--Life and Character of Shakespeare

Of Shakespeare all came from within--I mean from his soul and his genius; circumstances and the externals contributed but slightly to his development.[592] He was intimately bound up with his age; that is, he knew by experience the manners of country, court, and town; he had visited the heights, depths, the middle ranks of mankind; nothing more. In all other respects his life was commonplace; its irregularities, troubles, passions, successes, were, on the whole, such as we meet with everywhere else.[593] His father, a glover and wool-stapler, in very easy circumstances, having married a sort of country heiress, had become high-bailiff and chief alderman in his little town; but when Shakespeare was nearly fourteen he was on the verge of ruin, mortgaging his wife's property, obliged to resign his municipal offices, and to remove his son from school to assist him in his business. The young fellow applied himself to it as well as he could, not without some scrapes and frolics: if we are to believe tradition, he was one of the thirsty souls of the place, with a mind to support the reputation of his little town in its drinking powers. Once, they say, having been beaten at Bideford in one of these ale-bouts, he returned staggering from the fight, or rather could not return, and passed the night with his comrades under an apple-tree by the roadside. Without doubt he had already begun to write verses, to rove about like a genuine poet, taking part in the noisy rustic feasts, the gay allegorical pastorals, the rich and bold outbreak of pagan and poetical life, as it was then to be found in an English village. At all events, he was not a pattern of propriety, and his passions were as precocious as they were imprudent. While not yet nineteen years old, he married the daughter of a substantial yeoman, about eight years older than himself--and not too soon, as she was about to become a mother.[594] Other of his outbreaks were no more fortunate. It seems that he was fond of poaching, after the manner of the time, being "much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison and rabbits," says the Rev. Richard Davies;[595] "particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly the country;... but his revenge was so great, that he is his Justice Clodpate." Moreover, about this time Shakespeare's father was in prison, his affairs were not prosperous, and he himself had three children, following one close upon the other; he must live, and life was hardly possible for him in his native town. He went to London, and took to the stage: took the lowest parts, was a "servant" in the theatre, that is, an apprentice, or perhaps a supernumerary. They even said that he had begun still lower, and that to earn his bread he had held gentlemen's horses at the door of the theatre.[596] At all events he tasted misery, and felt, not in imagination, but in fact, the sharp thorn of care, humiliation, disgust, forced labor, public discredit, the power of the people. He was a comedian, one of "His Majesty's poor players"[597]--a sad trade, degraded in all ages by the contrasts and the falsehoods which it allows: still more degraded then by the brutalities of the crowd, who not seldom would stone the actors, and by the severities of the magistrates, who would sometimes condemn them to lose their ears. He felt it, and spoke of it with bitterness:

"Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear."[598]

And again:

"When in disgrace with fortune[599] and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed.... With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in those thoughts myself almost despising."[600]

We shall find further on the traces of this long-enduring disgust, in his melancholy characters, as where he says:

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns The patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin?"[601]

But the worst of this undervalued position is, that it eats into the soul. In the company of actors we become actors: it is vain to wish to keep clean, if you live in a dirty place; it cannot be. No matter if a man braces himself; necessity drives him into a corner and sullies him. The machinery of the decorations, the tawdriness and medley of the costumes, the smell of the tallow and the candles, in contrast with the parade of refinement and loftiness, all the cheats and sordidness of the representation, the bitter alternative of hissing or applause, the keeping of the highest and lowest company, the habit of sporting with human passions, easily unhinge the soul, drive it down the slope of excess, tempt it to loose manners, green-room adventures, the loves of strolling actresses. Shakespeare escaped them no more than Molière, and grieved for it, like Molière:

"O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds."[602]

They used to relate in London how his comrade Burbadge, who played Richard III, having a rendezvous with the wife of a citizen, Shakespeare went before, was well received, and was pleasantly occupied, when Burbage arrived, to whom he sent the message that William the Conqueror came before Richard III.[603] We may take this as an example of the tricks and somewhat coarse intrigues which are planned, and follow in quick succession, on this stage. Outside the theatre he lived with fashionable young nobles, Pembroke, Montgomery, Southampton,[604] and others, whose hot and licentious youth gratified his imagination and senses by the example of Italian pleasures and elegancies. Add to this the rapture and transport of poetical nature, and this kind of afflux, this boiling over of all the powers and desires which takes place in brains of this kind, when the world for the first time opens before them, and you will understand the "Venus and Adonis, the first heir of his invention." In fact, it is a first cry, a cry in which the whole man is displayed. Never was seen a heart so quivering to the touch of beauty, of beauty of every kind, so delighted with the freshness and splendor of things, so eager and so excited in adoration and enjoyment, so violently and entirely carried to the very essence of voluptuousness. His Venus is unique; no painting of Titian's has a more brilliant and delicious coloring;[605] no strumpet-goddess of Tintoretto or Giorgione is more soft and beautiful:

"With blindfold fury she begins to forage, Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil.... And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth; Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey, Paying what ransom the insulter willeth; Whose vulture thought doth pitch the price so high, That she will draw his lips' rich treasure dry."[606]

"Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast, Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone, Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste, Till either gorge be stuff'd or prey be gone; Even so she kiss'd his brow, his cheek, his chin, And where she ends she doth anew begin."[607]

All is taken by storm, the senses first, the eyes dazzled by carnal beauty, but the heart also from whence the poetry overflows: the fulness of youth inundates even inanimate things; the country looks charming amidst the rays of the rising sun, the air, saturated with brightness, makes a gala-day:

"Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The sun riseth in his majesty; Who doth the world so gloriously behold That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."[608]

An admirable debauch of imagination and rapture, yet disquieting; for such a mood will carry one a long way.[609] No fair and frail dame in London was without "Adonis" on her table.[610] Perhaps Shakespeare perceived that he had transcended the bounds, for the tone of his next poem, the "Rape of Lucrece," is quite different; but as he had already a mind liberal enough to embrace at the same time, as he did afterwards in his dramas, the two extremes of things, he continued none the less to follow his bent. The "sweet abandonment of love" was the great occupation of his life; he was tender-hearted, and he was a poet: nothing more is required to be smitten, deceived, to suffer, to traverse without pause the circle of illusions and troubles, which whirls and whirls round, and never ends.

He had many loves of this kind, amongst others one for a sort of Marion Delorme,[611] a miserable deluding despotic passion, of which he felt the burden and the shame, but from which nevertheless he could not and would not free himself. Nothing can be sadder than his confessions, or mark better the madness of love, and the sentiment of human weakness:

"When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies."[612]

So spoke Alceste of Célimène;[613] but what a soiled Célimène is the creature before whom Shakespeare kneels, with as much of scorn as of desire!

"Those lips of thine, That have profaned their scarlet ornaments And seal'd false bonds of love as oft as mine, Robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents. Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lov'st those Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee."[614]

This is plain-speaking and deep shamelessness of soul, such as we find only in the stews; and these are the intoxications, the excesses, the delirium into which the most refined artists fall, when they resign their own noble hand to these soft, voluptuous, and clinging ones. They are higher than princes, and they descend to the lowest depths of sensual passion. Good and evil then lose their names; all things are inverted:

"How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose! That tongue that tells the story of thy days, Making lascivious comments on thy sport, Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise; Naming thy name blesses an ill report."[615]

What are proofs, the will, reason, honor itself, when the passion is so absorbing? What can be said further to a man who answers, "I know all that you are going to say, and what does it all amount to?" Great loves are inundations, which drown all repugnance and all delicacy of soul, all preconceived opinions and all received principles. Thenceforth the heart is dead to all ordinary pleasures: it can only feel and breathe on one side. Shakespeare envies the keys of the instrument over which his mistress's fingers run. If he looks at flowers, it is she whom he pictures beyond them; and the extravagant splendors of dazzling poetry spring up in him repeatedly, as soon as he thinks of those glowing black eyes:

"From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing, That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him."[616]

He saw none of it:

"Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose."[617]

All this sweetness of spring was but her perfume and her shade:

"The forward violet thus I did chide: 'Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, If not from my love's breath? The purple pride, Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.' The lily I condemned for thy hand, And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair: The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, One blushing shame, another white despair: A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;... More flowers I noted, yet I none could see But sweet or color it had stol'n from thee."[618]

Passionate archness, delicious affectations, worthy of Heine and the contemporaries of Dante, which tell us of long rapturous dreams concentrated on one subject. Under a sway so imperious and sustained, what sentiment could maintain its ground? That of family? He was married and had children--a family which he went to see "once a year"; and it was probably on his return from one of these journeys that he used the words above quoted. Conscience? "Love is too young to know what conscience is." Jealousy and anger?

"For, thou betraying me, I do betray My nobler part to my gross body's treason."[619]

Repulses?

"He is contented thy poor drudge to be To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side."[620]

He is no longer young; she loves another, a handsome, young, light-haired fellow, his own dearest friend, whom he has presented to her, and whom she wishes to seduce:

"Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still: The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman color'd ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side."[621]

And when she has succeeded in this,[622] he dares not confess it to himself, but suffers all, like Molière. What wretchedness is there in these trifles of every-day life! How man's thoughts instinctively place by Shakespeare's side the great unhappy French poet (Molière), also a philosopher by nature, but more of a professional laugher, a mocker of old men in love, a bitter railer at deceived husbands, who, after having played in one of his most approved comedies, said aloud to a friend, "My dear fellow, I am in despair; my wife does not love me!" Neither glory, nor work, nor invention satisfies these vehement souls: love alone can gratify them, because, with their senses and heart, it contents also their brain; and all the powers of man, imagination like the rest, find in it their concentration and their employment. "Love is my sin," he said, as did Musset and Heine; and in the Sonnets we find traces of yet other passions, equally abandoned; one in particular, seemingly for a great lady. The first half of his dramas, "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Romeo and Juliet," the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," preserve the warm imprint more completely; and we have only to consider his latest women's character,[623] to see with what exquisite tenderness, what full adoration, he loved them to the end.

In this is all his genius; his was one of those delicate souls which, like a perfect instrument of music, vibrate of themselves at the slightest touch. This fine sensibility was the first thing observed in him. "My darling Shakespeare, Sweet Swan of Avon": these words of Ben Jonson only confirm what his contemporaries reiterate. He was affectionate and kind, "civil in demeanor, and excellent in the qualitie he professes";[624] if he had the impulse, he had also the effusion of true artists; he was loved, men were delighted in his company; nothing is more sweet or winning than this charm, this half-feminine abandonment in a man. His wit in conversation was ready, ingenious, nimble; his gayety brilliant; his imagination fluent, and so copious, that, as his, friends tell us, he never erased what he had written; at least when he wrote out a scene for the second time, it was the idea which he would change, not the words, by an after-glow of poetic thought, not with a painful tinkering of the verse. All these characteristics are combined into a single one: he had a sympathetic genius; I mean that naturally he knew how to forget himself and become transfused into all the objects which he conceived. Look around you at the great artists of your time, try to approach them, to become acquainted with them, to see them as they think, and you will observe the full force of this word. By an extraordinary instinct, they put themselves at once in a position of existences; men, animals, flowers, plants, landscapes, whatever the objects are, living or not, they feel by intuition the forces and tendencies which produce the visible external; and their soul, infinitely complex, becomes by its ceaseless metamorphoses a sort of abstract of the universe. This is why they seem to live more than other men; they have no need to be taught, they divine. I have seen such a man, a propos of a piece of armor, a costume, a collection of furniture, enter into the Middle Ages more fully than three savants together. They reconstruct, as they build, naturally, surely, by an inspiration which is a winged chain of reasoning. Shakespeare had only an imperfect education, "small Latin and less Greek," barely French and Italian,[625] nothing else; he had not travelled, he had only read the current literature of his day, he had picked up a few law words in the court of his little town: reckon up, if you can, all that he knew of man and of history. These men see more objects at a time; they grasp them more closely than other men, more quickly and thoroughly; their mind is full, and runs over. They do not rest in simple reasoning; at every idea their whole being, reflections, images, emotions, are set a-quiver. See them at it; they gesticulate, mimic their thought, brim over with comparisons; even in their talk they are imaginative and original, with familiarity and boldness of speech, sometimes happily, always irregularly, according to the whims and starts of the adventurous improvisation. The animation, the brilliancy of their language is marvellous; so are their fits, the wide leaps which they couple widely removed ideas, annihilating distance, passing from pathos to humor, from vehemence to gentleness. This extraordinary rapture is the last thing to quit them. If perchance ideas fail, or if their melancholy is too violent, they still speak and produce, even if it be nonsense: they become clowns, though at their own expense, and to their own hurt. I know one of these men who will talk nonsense when he thinks he is dying, or has a mind to kill himself; the inner wheel continues to turn, even upon nothing, that wheel which man must needs see ever turning, even though it tear him as it turns; his buffoonery is an outlet: you will find him, this inextinguishable urchin, this ironical puppet, at Ophelia's tomb, at Cleopatra's death-bed, at Juliet's funeral. High or low, these men must always be at some extreme. They feel their good and their ill too deeply; they expatiate too abundantly on each condition of their soul, by a sort of involuntary novel. After their traducings and the disgusts by which they debase themselves beyond measure they rise and become exalted in a marvellous fashion, even trembling with pride and joy. "Haply," says Shakespeare, after one of these dull moods:

"Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."[626]

Then all fades away, as in a furnace where a stronger flare than usual has left no substance fuel behind it.

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest...."[627]

"No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell: Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so. That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot If thinking on me then should make you woe."[628]

These sudden alternatives of joy and sadness, divine transports and grand melancholies, exquisite tenderness and womanly depressions, depict the poet, extreme in emotions, ceaselessly troubled with grief or merriment, feeling the slightest shock, more strong, more dainty in enjoyment and suffering than other men, capable of more intense and sweeter dreams, within whom is stirred an imaginary world of graceful or terrible beings, all impassioned like their author.

Such as I have described him, however, he found his resting-place. Early, at least what regards outward appearances, he settled down to an orderly, sensible, almost humdrum existence, engaged in business, provident of the future. He remained on the stage for at least seventeen years, though taking secondary parts;[629] he sets his wits at the same time to the touching up of plays with so much activity, that Greene called him "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers;... an absolute Johannes factotum, in his owne conceyte the onely shake-scene in a countrey."[630] At the age of thirty-three he had amassed money enough to buy at Stratford a house with two barns and two gardens, and he went on steadier and steadier in the same course. A man attains only to easy circumstances by his own labor; if he gains wealth, it is by making others labor for him. This is why, to the trades of actor and author, Shakespeare added those of manager and director of a theatre. He acquired a share in the Blackfriars and Globe theatres, farmed tithes, bought large pieces of land, more houses, gave a dowry to his daughter Susanna, and finally retired to his native town on his property, in his own house, like a good landlord, an honest citizen, who manages his fortune fitly, and takes his share of municipal work. He had an income of two or three hundred pounds, which would be equivalent to about eight or twelve hundred at the present time, and according to tradition, lived cheerfully and on good terms with his neighbors; at all events, it does not seem that he thought much about his literary glory, for he did not even take the trouble to collect and publish his works. One of his daughters married a physician, the other a wine merchant; the last did not even know how to sign her name. He lent money, and cut a good figure in this little world. Strange close; one which at first sight resembles more that of a shopkeeper than of a poet. Must we attribute it to that English instinct which places happiness in the life of a country gentleman and a landlord with a good rent-roll, well connected, surrounded by comforts, who quietly enjoys his undoubted respectability,[631] his domestic authority, and his county standing? Or rather, was Shakespeare, like Voltaire, a common-sense man, though of an imaginative brain, keeping a sound judgment under the sparkling of his genius, prudent from scepticism, saving through a desire for independence, and capable, after going the round of human ideas, of deciding with Candide,[632] that the best thing one can do in this world is "to cultivate one's garden"? I had rather think, as his full and solid head suggests,[633] that by the mere force of his overflowing imagination he escaped, like Goethe, the perils of an overflowing imagination; that in depicting passion, he succeeded, like Goethe, in deadening passion; that the fire did not break out in his conduct, because it found issue in his poetry; that his theatre kept pure his life; and that, having passed, by sympathy, through every kind of folly and wretchedness that is incident to human existence, he was able to settle down amidst them with a calm and melancholic smile, listening, for the sake of relaxation, to the aerial music of the fancies in which he revelled.[634] I am willing to believe, lastly, that in frame as in other things, he belonged to his great generation and his great age; that with him, as with Rabelais, Titian, Michel Angelo, and Rubens, the solidity of the muscles was a counterpoise to the sensibility of the nerves; that in those days the human machine, more severely tried and more firmly constructed, could withstand the storms of passion and the fire of inspiration; that soul and body were still at equilibrium; that genius was then a blossom, and not, as now, a disease. We can but make conjectures about all this: if we would become acquainted more closely with the man, we must seek him in his works.

SECTION II.--Shakespeare's Style--Copiousness--Excesses

Let us then look for the man, and in his style. The style explains the work; whilst showing the principal features of the genius, it infers the rest. When we have once grasped the dominant faculty, we see the whole artist developed like a flower.

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

"The single and peculiar life is bound, With all the strength and armor of the mind, To keep itself from noyance; but much more That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest The lives of many. The cease of majesty Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel, Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone Did the king sigh, but with a general groan."[635]

Here we have three successive images to express the same thought. It is a whole blossoming; a bough grows from the trunk, from that another, which is multiplied into numerous fresh branches. Instead of a smooth road, traced by a regular line of dry and cunningly fixed landmarks, you enter a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which conceal and prevent your progress, which delight and dazzle your eyes by the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their bloom. You are astonished at first, modern mind that you are, business man, used to the clear dissertations of classical poetry; you become cross; you think the author is amusing himself, and that through conceit and bad taste he is misleading you and himself in his garden thickets. By no means; if he speaks thus, it is not from choice, but of necessity; metaphor is not his whim, but the form of his thought. In the height of passion, he imagines still. When Hamlet, in despair, remembers his father's noble form, he sees the mythological pictures with which the taste of the age filled the very streets:

"A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill."[636]

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

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

"Such an act That blurs the grace and blush of modesty, Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love, And sets a blister there, makes marriage-vows As false as dicers' oaths: O, such a deed As from the body of contraction plucks The very soul, and sweet religion makes A rhapsody of words: Heaven's face doth glow; Yea, this solidity and compound mass, With tristful visage, as against the doom, Is thought-sick at the act."[637]

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

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

Yet this is little; for that singular force of concentration is redoubled by the suddenness of the dash which calls it into existence. In Shakespeare there is no preparation, no adaptation, no development, no care to make himself understood. Like a too fiery and powerful horse, he bounds, but cannot run. He bridges in a couple of words an enormous interval; is at the two poles in a single instant. The reader vainly looks for the intermediate track; dazed by these prodigious leaps, he wonders by what miracle the poet has entered upon a new idea the very moment when he quitted the last, seeing perhaps between the two images a long scale of transitions, which we mount with difficulty step by step, but which he has spanned in a stride. Shakespeare flies, we creep. Hence comes a style made up of conceits, bold images, shattered in an instant by others still bolder, barely indicated ideas completed by others far removed, no visible connection, but a visible incoherence; at every step we halt, the track failing; and there, far above us, lo, stands the poet, and we find that we have ventured in his footsteps, through a craggy land, full of precipices, which he threads as if it were a straightforward road, but on which our greatest efforts barely carry us along.

What will you think, further, if we observe that these vehement expressions, so natural in their up-welling, instead of following one after the other, slowly and with effort, are hurled out by hundreds, with an impetuous ease and abundance, like the bubbling waves from a welling spring, which are heaped together, rise one above another, and find nowhere room enough to spread and exhaust themselves? You may find in "Romeo and Juliet" a score of examples of this inexhaustible inspiration. The two lovers pile up an infinite mass of metaphors, impassioned exaggerations, clenches, contorted phrases, amorous extravagances. Their language is like the trill of nightingales. Shakespeare's wits, Mercutio, Beatrice, Rosalind, his clowns, buffoons, sparkle with far-fetched jokes, which rattle out like a volley of musketry. There is none of them but provides enough play on words to stock a whole theatre. Lear's curses, or Queen Margaret's, would suffice for all the madmen in an asylum, or all the oppressed of the earth. The sonnets are a delirium of ideas and images, labored at with an obstinacy enough to make a man giddy. His first poem, "Venus and Adonis," is the sensual ecstasy of a Correggio, insatiable and excited. This exuberant fecundity intensifies qualities already in excess, and multiplies a hundred-fold the luxuriance of metaphor, the incoherence of style, and the unbridled vehemence of expression.[638]

All that I have said may be compressed into a few words. Objects were taken into his mind organized and complete; they pass into ours disjointed, decomposed, fragmentarily. He thought in the lump, we think piecemeal; hence his style and our style--two languages not to be reconciled. We, for our part, writers and reasoners, can note precisely by a word each isolated fraction of an idea, and represent the due order of its parts by the due order of our expressions. We advance gradually; we follow the filiations, refer continually to the roots, try and treat our words as numbers, our sentences as equations; we employ but general terms, which every mind can understand, and regular constructions, into which any mind can enter; we attain justness and clearness, not life. Shakespeare lets justness and clearness look out for themselves, and attains life. From amidst his' complex conception and his colored semi-vision, he grasps a fragment, a quivering fibre, and shows it; it is for you, from this fragment, to divine the rest. He, behind the word, has a whole picture, an attitude, a long argument abridged, a mass of swarming ideas; you know them, these abbreviative, condensive words: these are they which we launch out amidst the fire of invention, in a fit of passion--words of slang or of fashion, which appeal to local memory or individual experience;[639] little desultory and incorrect phrases, which, by their irregularity, express the suddenness and the breaks of the inner sensation; trivial words, exaggerated figures.[640] There is a gesture beneath each, a quick contraction of the brows, a curl of laughing lips, a clown's trick, an unhinging of the whole machine. None of them mark ideas, all suggest images; each is the extremity and issue of a complete mimic action; none is the expression and definition of a partial and limited idea. This is why Shakespeare is strange and powerful, obscure and creative, beyond all the poets of his or any other age; the most immoderate of all violators of language, the most marvellous of all creators of souls, the farthest removed from regular logic and classical reason, the one most capable of exciting in us a world of forms and of placing living beings before us.

SECTION III.--Shakespeare's Language And Manners

Let us reconstruct this world, so as to find in it the imprint of its creator. A poet does not copy at random the manners which surround him; he selects from this vast material, and involuntarily brings upon the stage the habits of the heart and conduct which best suit his talent. If he is a logician, a moralist, an orator, as, for instance, one of the French great tragic poets (Racine) of the seventeenth century, he will only represent noble manners; he will avoid low characters; he will have a horror of menials and the plebs; he will observe the greatest decorum amidst the strongest outbreaks of passion; he will reject as scandalous every low or indecent word; he will give us reason, loftiness, good taste throughout; he will suppress the familiarity, childishness, artlessness, gay banter of domestic life; he will blot out precise details, special traits, and will carry tragedy into a serene and sublime region, where his abstract personages, unencumbered by time and space, after an exchange of eloquent harangues and able dissertations, will kill each other becomingly, and as though they were merely concluding a ceremony. Shakespeare does just the contrary, because his genius is the exact opposite. His master faculty is an impassioned imagination, freed from the shackles of reason and morality. He abandons himself to it, and finds in man nothing that he would care to lop off. He accepts nature and finds it beautiful in its entirety. He paints it in its littlenesses, it deformities, its weaknesses, its excesses, its irregularities, and its rages; he exhibits man at his meals, in bed, at play, drunk, mad, sick; he adds that which ought not to be seen to that which passes on the stage. He does not dream of ennobling, but of copying human life, and aspires only to make his copy more energetic and more striking than the original.

Hence the morals of this drama; and first, the want of dignity. Dignity arises from self-command. A man selects the most noble of his acts and attitudes, and allows himself no other. Shakespeare's characters select none, but allow themselves all. His kings are men, and fathers of families. The terrible Leontes, who is about to order the death of his wife and his friend, plays like a child with his son: caresses him, gives him all the pretty pet names which mothers are wont to employ; he dares be trivial; he gabbles like a nurse; he has her language and fulfils her duties:

"_Leontes._ What, hast smutch'd thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, captain, We must be neat; not neat, but cleanly, captain:... Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear'st! my collop... Looking on the lines Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd, In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled, Lest it should bite its master.... How like, methought, I then was to this kernel, This squash, this gentleman!... My brother, Are you so fond of your young prince as we Do seem to be of ours? _Polixenes._ If at home, sir, He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter, Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy, My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all: He makes a July's day short as December, And with his varying childness cures in me Thoughts that would thick my blood."[641]

There are a score of such passages in Shakespeare. The great passions, with him as in nature, are preceded or followed by trivial actions, small-talk, commonplace sentiments. Strong emotions are accidents in our life: to drink, to eat, to talk of indifferent things, to carry out mechanically a habitual duty, to dream of some stale pleasure or some ordinary annoyance, that is in which we employ all our time. Shakespeare paints us as we are; his heroes bow, ask people for news, speak of rain and fine weather, as often and as casually as ourselves, on the very eve of falling into the extremity of misery, or of plunging into fatal resolutions. Hamlet asks what's o'clock, finds the wind biting, talks of feasts and music heard without; and this quiet talk, so unconnected with the action, so full of slight, insignificant facts, which chance alone has raised up and guided, lasts until the moment when his father's ghost, rising in the darkness, reveals the assassination which it is his duty to avenge.

Reason tells us that our manners should be measured; this is why the manners which Shakespeare paints are not so. Pure nature is violent, passionate: it admits no excuses, suffers no middle course, takes no count of circumstances, wills blindly, breaks out into railing, has the irrationality, ardor, anger of children. Shakespeare's characters have hot blood and a ready hand. They cannot restrain themselves, they abandon themselves at once to their grief, indignation, love, and plunge desperately down the steep slope, where their passion urges them. How many need I quote? Timon, Posthumus, Cressida, all the young girls, all the chief characters in the great dramas; everywhere Shakespeare paints the unreflecting impetuosity of the impulse of the moment. Capulet tells his daughter Juliet that in three days she is to marry Earl Paris, and bids her be proud of it; she answers that she is not proud of it, and yet she thanks the earl for this proof of love. Compare Capulet's fury with the anger of Orgon,[642] and you may measure the difference of the two poets and the two civilizations:

"_Capulet._ How now, how now, chop-logic! What is this? 'Proud,' and 'I thank you,' and 'I thank you not;' And yet 'not proud,' mistress minion, you, Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds, But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next, To go with Paris to Saint Peter's church, Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither. Out, you green-sickness carrion! out, you baggage! You tallow-face! _Juliet._ Good father, I beseech you on my knees, Hear me with patience but to speak a word. _C._ Hang thee, young baggage! disobedient wretch I tell thee what: get thee to church o' Thursday, Or never after look me in the face: Speak not, reply not, do not answer me; My fingers itch.... _Lady C._ You are too hot. _C._ God's bread! it makes me mad: Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play, Alone, in company, still my care hath been To have her match'd: and having now provided A gentleman of noble parentage, Of fair demesnes, youthful, and nobly train'd, Stuff'd, as they say, with honorable parts, Proportion'd as one's thoughts would wish a man; And then to have a wretched puling fool, A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender, To answer, '_I'll not wed; I cannot love, I am too young; I pray you, pardon me_,'-- But, an you will not wed, I'll pardon you: Graze where you will, you shall not house with me: Look to't, think on't, I do not use to jest. Thursday is near; lay hand on heart, advise: An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend; An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets, For, by my soul, I'll ne'er acknowledge thee."[643]

This method of exhorting one's child to marry is peculiar to Shakespeare and the sixteenth century. Contradiction to these men was like a red rag to a bull; it drove them mad.

We might be sure that in this age, and on this stage, decency was a thing unknown. It is wearisome, being a check; men got rid of it, because it was wearisome. It is a gift of reason and morality; as indecency is produced by nature and passion. Shakespeare's words are too indecent to be translated. His characters call things by their dirty names, and compel the thoughts to particular images of physical love. The talk of gentlemen and ladies is full of coarse allusions; we should have to find out an alehouse of the lowest description to hear like words nowadays.[644]

It would be in an alehouse too that we should have to look for the rude jests and brutal kind of wit which form the staple of these conversations. Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and everyday discourse; it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others; it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross. This is why it is absent from the manners of the drama we are considering. You will see carmen, out of sportiveness and good humor, deal one another hard blows; so it is pretty well with the conversation of the lords and ladies of Shakespeare who are in a sportive mood; for instance, Beatrice and Benedick, very well bred folk as things go,[645] with a great reputation for wit and politeness, whose smart retorts create amusement for the bystanders. These "skirmishes of wit" consist in telling one another plainly: You are a coward, a glutton, an idiot, a buffoon, a rake, a brute! You are a parrot's tongue, a fool, a... (the word is there). Benedick says:

"I will go... to the Antipodes... rather than hold three words' conference with this harpy.... I cannot endure my Lady Tongue.... _Don Pedro._ You have put him down, lady, you have put him down. _Beatrice._ So I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should prove the mother of fools."[646]

We can infer the tone they use when in anger. Emilia, in "Othello," says:

"He call'd her whore; a beggar in his drink Could not have laid such terms upon his callat."[647]

They have a vocabulary of foul words as complete as that of Rabelais, and they exhaust it. They catch up handfuls of mud and hurl it at their enemy, not conceiving themselves to be smirched.

Their actions correspond. They go without shame or pity to the limits of their passion. They kill, poison, violate, burn; the stage is full of abominations. Shakespeare lugs upon the stage all the atrocious deeds of the Civil Wars. These are the ways of wolves and hyenas. We must read of Jack Cade's sedition[648] to gain an idea of this madness and fury. We might imagine we were seeing infuriated beasts, the murderous recklessness of a wolf in a sheepfold, the brutality of a hog fouling and rolling himself in filth and blood. They destroy, kill, butcher each other; with their feet in the blood of their victims, they call for food and drink; they stick heads on pikes and make them kiss one another, and they laugh.

"_Jack Cade._ There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny.... There shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery.... And here sitting upon London-stone, I charge and command that, of the city's cost, the pissing-conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign.... Away, burn all the records of the realm; my mouth shall be the parliament of England.... And henceforth all things shall be in common.... What canst thou answer to my majesty for giving up of Normandy unto Mounsieur Basimecu, the dauphin of France?... The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he pay me tribute; there shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her maidenhead ere they have it. (_Re-enter rebels with the heads of Lord Say and his son-in-law._) But is not this braver? Let them kiss one another, for they loved well when they were alive."[649]

Man must not be let loose; we know not what lusts and rage may brood under a sober guise. Nature was never so hideous, and this hideousness is the truth.

Are these cannibal manners only met with among the scum? Why, the princes are worse. The Duke of Cornwall orders the old Earl of Gloucester to be tied to a chair, because, owing to him, King Lear has escaped:

"Fellows, hold the chair. Upon these eyes of thine I'll set my foot. (_Gloucester is held down in the chair, while Cornwall plucks out one of his eyes, and sets his foot on it._) _Glou._ He that will think to live till he be old, Give me some help! O cruel: O you gods! _Regan._ One side will mock another; the other too. _Cornwall._ If you see vengeance-- _Servant._ Hold your hand, my lord: I have served you ever since I was a child; But better service have I never done you, Than now to bid you hold. _Regan._ How now, you dog! _Serv._ If you did wear a beard upon your chin, I'd shake it on this quarrel. What do you mean? _Corn._ My villain! (_Draws and runs at him._) _Serv._ Nay, then, come on, and take the chance of anger. (_Draws; they fight; Cornwall is wounded._) _Regan._ Give me thy sword. A peasant stands up thus. (_Snatches a sword, comes behind, and stabs him._) _Serv._ O, I am slain! My lord, you have one eye left To see some mischief on him. O! (_Dies._) _Corn._ Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now? _Glou._ All dark and comfortless. Where's my son?... _Regan._ Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell His way to Dover."[650]

Such are the manners of that stage. They are unbridled, like those of the age, and like the poet's imagination. To copy the common actions of every-day life, the puerilities and feeblenesses to which the greatest continually sink, the outbursts of passion which degrade them, the indecent, harsh, or foul words, the atrocious deeds in which license revels, the brutality and ferocity of primitive nature, is the work of a free and unencumbered imagination. To copy this hideousness and these excesses with a selection of such familiar, significant, precise details, that they reveal under every word of every personage a complete civilization, is the work of a concentrated and all-powerful imagination. This species of manners and this energy of description indicate the same faculty, unique and excessive, which the style had already indicated.

SECTION IV.--Dramatis Personæ

On this common background stands out in striking relief a population of distinct living figures, illuminated by an intense light. This creative power is Shakespeare's great gift, and it communicates an extraordinary significance to his words. Every phrase pronounced by one of its characters enables us to see, besides the idea which it contains and the emotion which prompted it, the aggregate of the qualities and the entire character which produced it--the mood, physical attitude, bearing, look of the man, all instantaneously, with a clearness and force approached by no one. The words which strike our ears are not the thousandth part of those we hear within; they are like sparks thrown off here and there; the eyes catch rare flashes of flame; the mind alone perceives the vast conflagration of which they are the signs and the effect. He gives us two dramas in one: the first strange, convulsive, curtailed, visible; the other consistent, immense, invisible; the one covers the other so well, that as a rule we do not realize that we are perusing words: we hear the roll of those terrible voices, we see contracted features, glowing eyes, pallid faces; we see the agitation, the furious resolutions which mount to the brain with the feverish blood, and descend to the sharp-strung nerves. This property possessed by every phrase to exhibit a world of sentiments and forms, comes from the fact that the phrase is actually caused by a world of emotions and images. Shakespeare, when he wrote, felt all that we feel, and much besides. He had the prodigious faculty of seeing in a twinkling of the eye a complete character, body, mind, past and present, in every detail and every depth of his being, with the exact attitude and the expression of face, which the situation demanded. A word here and there of Hamlet or Othello would need for its explanation three pages of commentaries; each of the half-understood thoughts, which the commentator may have discovered, has left its trace in the turn of the phrase, in the nature of the metaphor, in the order of the words; nowadays, in pursuing these traces, we divine the thoughts. These innumerable traces have been impressed in a second, within the compass of a line. In the next line there are as many, impressed just as quickly, and in the same compass. You can gauge the concentration and the velocity of the imagination which creates thus.

These characters are all of the same family. Good or bad, gross or delicate, witty or stupid, Shakespeare gives them all the same kind of spirit which is his own. He has made of them imaginative people, void of will and reason, impassioned machines, vehemently jostled one against another, who were outwardly whatever is most natural and most abandoned in human nature. Let us act the play to ourselves, and see in all its stages this clanship of figures, this prominence of portraits.

Lowest of all are the stupid folk, babbling or brutish. Imagination already exists there, where reason is not yet born; it exists also there where reason is dead. The idiot and the brute blindly follow the phantoms which exist in their benumbed or mechanical brains. No poet has understood this mechanism like Shakespeare. His Caliban, for instance, a deformed savage, fed on roots, growls like a beast under the hand of Prospero, who has subdued him. He howls continually against his master, though he knows that every curse will be paid back with "cramps and aches." He is a chained wolf, trembling and fierce, who tries to bite when approached, and who crouches when he see's the lash raised. He has a foul sensuality, a loud base laugh, the gluttony of degraded humanity. He wishes to violate Miranda in her sleep. He cries for his food, and gorges himself when he gets it. A sailor who had landed in the island, Stephano, gives him wine; he kisses his feet, and takes him for a god; he asks if he has not dropped from heaven, and adores him. We find in him rebellious and baffled passions, which are eager to rise again and to be satiated. Stephano had beaten his comrade. Caliban cries, "Beat Him enough: after a little time I'll beat him too." He prays Stephano to come with him and murder Prospero in his sleep; he thirsts to lead him there, dances through joy and sees his master already with his "weasand" cut, and his brains scattered on the earth:

"Prithee, my king, be quiet. See'st thou here, This is the mouth o' the cell: no noise, and enter. Do that good mischief which may make this island Thine own forever, and I, thy Caliban, For aye thy foot-licker."[651]

Others, like Ajax and Cloten, are more like men, and yet it is pure mood that Shakespeare depicts in them, as in Caliban. The clogging corporeal machine, the mass of muscles, the thick blood sluggishly moving along in the veins of these fighting men, oppress the intelligence, and leave no life but for animal passions. Ajax uses his fists, and devours meat; that is his existence; if he is jealous of Achilles, it is pretty much as a bull is jealous of his fellow. He permits himself to be restrained and led by Ulysses, without looking before him: the grossest flattery decoys him. The Greeks have urged him to accept Hector's challenge. Behold him puffed up with pride, scorning to answer anyone, not knowing what he says or does. Thersites cries, "Good-morrow, Ajax"; and he replies, "Thanks, Agamemnon." He has no further thought than to contemplate his enormous frame, and roll majestically his big stupid eyes. When the day of the fight has come, he strikes at Hector as on an anvil. After a good while they are separated. "I am not warm yet," says Ajax, "let us fight again."[652] Cloten is less massive than this phlegmatic ox; but he is just as idiotic, just as vainglorious, just as coarse. The beautiful Imogen, urged by his insults and his scullion manners, tells him that his whole body is not worth as much a Posthumus's meanest garment. He is stung to the quick, repeats the words several times; he cannot shake off the idea, and runs at it again and again with his head down, like an angry ram:

"_Cloten._ 'His garment?' Now, the devil-- _Imogen._ To Dorothy my woman hie thee presently-- _C._ 'His garment?'... You have abused me: 'His meanest garment!'... I'll be revenged: 'His meanest garment!' Well."[653]

He gets some of Posthumus's garments, and goes to Milford Haven, expecting to meet Imogen there. On his way he mutters thus:

"With that suit upon my back, will I ravish her: first kill him, and in her eyes; there shall she see my valor, which will then be a torment to her contempt. He on the ground, my speech of insultment ended on his dead body, and when my lust has dined--which, as I say, to vex her I will execute in the clothes that she so praised--to the court I'll knock her back, foot her home again."[654]

Others again, are but babblers: for example, Polonius, the grave brainless counsellor; a great baby, not yet out of his "swathing clouts"; a solemn booby, who rains on men a shower of counsels, compliments, and maxims; a sort of court speaking-trumpet, useful in grand ceremonies, with the air of a thinker, but fit only to spout words. But the most complete of all these characters is that of the nurse in "Romeo and Juliet," a gossip, loose in her talk, a regular kitchen oracle, smelling of the stewpan and old boots, foolish, impudent, immoral, but otherwise a good creature, and affectionate to her nurse-child. Mark this disjointed and never-ending gossip's babble:

"_Nurse._ 'Faith I can tell her age unto an hour. _Lady Capulet._ She's not fourteen.... _Nurse._ Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen. Susan and she--God rest all Christian souls!-- Were of an age: well, Susan is with God; She was too good for me: but, as I said, On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen; That shall she, marry; I remember it well. 'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years; And she was wean'd--I never shall forget it-- Of all the days of the year, upon that day: For I had then laid wormwood to my dug, Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall; My lord and you were then at Mantua:-- Nay, I do bear a brain:--but, as I said, When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool, To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug! Shake, quoth the dove-house: 'twas no need, I trow, To bid me trudge: And since that time it is eleven years; For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood, She could have run and waddled all about; For even the day before, she broke her brow."[655]

Then she tells an indecent anecdote, which she begins over again four times. She is silenced: what then? She has her anecdote in her head, and cannot cease repeating it and laughing to herself. Endless repetitions are the mind's first step. The vulgar do not pursue the straight line of reasoning and of the story; they repeat their steps, as it were merely marking time: struck with an image, they keep it for an hour before their eyes, and are never tired of it. If they do advance, they turn aside to a hundred subordinate ideas before they get at the phrase required. They allow themselves to be diverted by all the thoughts which come across them. This is what the nurse does; and when she brings Juliet news of her lover, she torments and wearies her, less from a wish to tease than from a habit of wandering from the point:

"_Nurse._ Jesu, what haste? can you not stay awhile? Do you not see that I am out of breath? _Juliet._ How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath To say to me that thou art out of breath? Is thy news good, or bad? answer to that; Say either, and I'll stay the circumstance: Let me be satisfied: is't good or bad? _N._ Well, you have made a simple choice; you know not how to choose a man: Romeo! no, not he: though his face be better than any man's, yet his legs excels all men's; and for a hand and a foot, and a body, though they be not to be talked on, yet they are past compare: he is not the flower of courtesy, but, I'll warrant him, as gentle as a lamb. Go thy ways, wench; serve God. What, have you dined at home? _J._ No, no: but all this did I know before. What says he of our marriage? what of that? _N._ Lord, how my head aches! what a head have I! It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces. My back o' t'other side--O, my back, my back! Beshrew your heart for sending me about, To catch my death with jaunting up and down! _J._ I' faith, I am sorry that thou art not well. Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my love? _N._ Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome, and, I warrant, a virtuous--Where is your mother?"[656]

It is never-ending. Her gabble is worse when she comes to announce to Juliet the death of her cousin and the banishment of Romeo. It is the shrill cry and chatter of an overgrown asthmatic magpie. She laments, confuses the names, spins roundabout sentences, ends by asking for _aqua-vitœ._ She curses Romeo, then brings him to Juliet's chamber. Next day Juliet is ordered to marry Earl Paris; Juliet throws herself into her nurse's arms, praying for comfort, advice, assistance. The other finds the true remedy: Marry Paris,

"O, he's a lovely gentleman! Romeo's a dishclout to him: an eagle, madam, Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart, I think you are happy in this second match. For it excels your first."[657]

This cool immorality, these weather-cock arguments, this fashion of estimating love like a fishwoman, completes the portrait.

SECTION V.--Men of Wit

The mechanical imagination produces Shakespeare's fool-characters: a quick, venturesome, dazzling, unquiet imagination, produces his men of wit. Of wit there are many kinds. One, altogether French, which is but reason, a foe to paradox, scorner of folly, a sort of incisive common-sense, having no occupation but to render truth amusing and evident, the most effective weapon with an intelligent and vain people: such was the wit of Voltaire and the drawing-rooms. The other, that of improvisators and artists, is a mere inventive rapture, paradoxical, unshackled, exuberant, a sort of self-entertainment, a phantasmagoria of images, flashes of wit, strange ideas, dazing and intoxicating, like the movement and illumination in a ball-room. Such is the wit of Mercutio, of the clowns, of Beatrice, Rosalind, and Benedick. They laugh, not from a sense of the ridiculous, but from the desire to laugh. You must look elsewhere for the campaigns with aggressive reason makes against human folly. Here folly is in its full bloom. Our folk think of amusement, and nothing more. They are good-humored; they let their wit prance gayly over the possible and the impossible. They play upon words, contort their sense, draw absurd and laughable inferences, send them back to one another, and without intermission, as if with shuttlecocks, and vie with each other in singularity and invention. They dress all their ideas in strange or sparkling metaphors. The taste of the time was for masquerades; their conversation is a masquerade of ideas. They say nothing in a simple style; they only seek to heap together subtle things, far-fetched, difficult to invent and to understand; all their expressions are over-refined, unexpected, extraordinary; they strain their thought, and change it into a caricature. "Alas, poor Romeo!" says Mercutio, "he is already dead; stabbed with a white wench's black eye; shot through the ear with a love-song, the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft."[658] Benedick relates a conversation he has just held with his mistress: "O, she misused me past the endurance of a block! an oak, but with one green leaf on it would have answered her; my very visor began to assume life, and scold with her."[659] These gay and perpetual extravagances show the bearing of the speakers. They do not remain quietly seated in their chairs, like the Marquesses in the "Misanthrope"; they whirl round, leap, paint their faces, gesticulate boldly their ideas; their wit-rockets end with a song. Young folk, soldiers and artists, they let off their fireworks of phrases, and gambol round about. "There was a star danced, and under that was I born."[660] This expression of Beatrice's aptly describes the kind of poetical, sparkling, unreasoning, charming wit, more akin to music than to literature, a sort of dream, which is spoken out aloud, and whilst wide awake, not unlike that described by Mercutio:

"O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the fore-finger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep; Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs, The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, The traces of the smallest spider's web, The collars of the moonshine's watery beams, Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film, Her wagoner a small gray-coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid; Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut, Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers. And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love; O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight, O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees, O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream.... Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose, And then dreams he of smelling out a suit; And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail Tickling a person's nose as a' lies asleep, Then dreams he of another benefice: Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck, And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, Of healths five-fathom deep: and then anon Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes, And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two And sleeps again. This is that very Mab That plats the manes of horses in the night, And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs, Which once untangled much misfortune bodes... This is she."[661]

Romeo interrupts him, or he would never end. Let the reader compare with the dialogue of the French theatre this little poem

"Child of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,"[662]

introduced without incongruity in the midst of a conversation of the sixteenth century, and he will understand the difference between the wit which devotes itself to reasoning, or to record a subject for laughter, and that imagination which is self-amused with its own act.

Falstaff has the passions of an animal, and the imagination of a man of wit. There is no character which better exemplifies the fire and immorality of Shakespeare. Falstaff is a great supporter of disreputable places, swearer, gamester, idler, wine-bibber, as low as he well can be. He has a big belly, bloodshot eyes, bloated face, shaking legs; he spends his life with his elbows among the tavern-jugs, or asleep on the ground behind the arras; he only wakes to curse, lie, brag, and steal. He is as big a swindler as Panurge, who had sixty-three ways of making money, "of which the honestest was by sly theft." And what is worse, he is an old man, a knight, a courtier, and well educated. Must he not be odious and repulsive? By no means; we cannot help liking him. At bottom, like his brother Panurge, he is "the best fellow in the world." He has no malice in his composition; no other wish than to laugh and be amused. When insulted, he bawls out louder than his attackers, and pays them back with interest in coarse words and insults; but he owes them no grudge for it. The next minute he is sitting down with them in a low tavern, drinking their health like a brother and comrade. If he has vices, he exposes them so frankly that we are obliged to forgive him them. He seems to say to us, "Well, so I am, what then? I like drinking: isn't the wine good? I take to my heels when hard hitting begins; don't blows hurt? I get into debt, and do fools out their money; isn't it nice to have money in your pocket? I brag; isn't it natural to want to be well thought of?"--"Dost thou hear, Hal? thou knowest, in the state of innocency, Adam fell; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty."[663] Falstaff is so frankly immoral, that he ceases to be so. Conscience ends at a certain point; nature assumes its place, and man rushes upon what he desires, without more thought of being just or unjust than an animal in the neighboring wood. Falstaff, engaged in recruiting, has sold exemptions to all the rich people, and only enrolled starved and half-naked wretches. There's but a shirt and a half in all his company: that does not trouble him. Bah: "they'll find linen enough on every hedge." The prince, who has seen them, says, "I did never see such pitiful rascals. Tut, tut," answers Falstaff, "good enough to toss; food for powder; they'll fill a pit as well as better; tush, man, mortal men, mortal men."[664] His second excuse is his unfailing spirit. If ever there was a man who could jabber, it is he. Insults and oaths, curses, jobations, protests, flow from him as from an open barrel. He is never at a loss; he devises a shift for every difficulty. Lies sprout out of him, fructify, increase, beget one another, like mushrooms on a rich and rotten bed of earth. He lies still more from his imagination and nature than from interest and necessity. It is evident from the manner in which he strains his fictions. He says he has fought alone against two men. The next moment it is four. Presently we have seven, then eleven, then fourteen. He is stopped in time, or he would soon be talking of a whole army. When unmasked, he does not lose his temper, and is the first to laugh at his boastings. "Gallants, lads, boys, hearts of gold.... What, shall we be merry? shall we have a play extempore?"[665] He does the scolding part of King Henry with so much truth that we might take him for a king, or an actor. This big potbellied fellow, a coward, a cynic, a brawler, a drunkard, a lewd rascal, a pothouse poet, is one of Shakespeare's favorites. The reason is, that his morals are those of pure nature, and Shakespeare's mind is congenial with his own.

SECTION VI.--Shakespeare's Women

Nature is shameless and gross amidst this mass of flesh, heavy with wine and fatness. It is delicate in the delicate body of women, but as unreasoning and impassioned in Desdemona as in Falstaff. Shakespeare's women are charming children, who feel in excess and love passionately. They have unconstrained manners, little rages, nice words of friendship, a coquettish rebelliousness, a graceful volubility, which recall the warbling and the prettiness of birds. The heroines of the French stage are almost men; these are women, and in every sense of the word. More imprudent than Desdemona a woman could not be. She is moved with pity for Cassio, and asks a favor for him passionately, recklessly, be the thing just or no, dangerous or no. She knows nothing of man's laws, and does not think of them. All that she sees is, that Cassio is unhappy:

"Be thou assured, good Cassio... My lord shall never rest; I'll watch him, tame and talk him out of patience; His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift; I'll intermingle everything he does With Cassio's suit."[666]

She asks her favor:

"_Othello._ Not now, sweet Desdemona; some other time. _Desdemona._ But shall't be shortly? _O._ The sooner, sweet, for you. _Des._ Shall't be to-night at supper? _O._ No, not to-night. _Des._ To-morrow dinner, then? _O._ I shall not dine at home; I meet the captains at the citadel. _Des._ Why, then, to-morrow night; or Tuesday morn; On Tuesday noon, or night; on Wednesday morn; I prithee, name the time, but let it not Exceed three days: in faith, he's penitent."[667]

She is somewhat astonished to see herself refused: she scolds Othello. He yields: who would not yield seeing a reproach in those lovely sulking eyes? O, says she, with a pretty pout:

"This is not a boon; 'Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves, Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm, Or sue to you to do peculiar profit To your own person."[668]

A moment after, when he prays her to leave him alone for a while, mark the innocent gayety, the ready observance, the playful child's tone:

"Shall I deny you? no: farewell, my lord.... Emilia, come: Be as your fancies teach you; Whate'er you be, I am obedient."[669]

This vivacity, this petulance, does not prevent shrinking modesty and silent timidity: on the contrary, they spring from a common cause, extreme sensibility. She who feels much and quickly has more reserve and more passion than others; she breaks out or is silent; she says nothing or everything. Such is this Imogen.

"So tender of rebukes that words are strokes, And strokes death to her."[670]

Such is Virgilia, the sweet wife of Coriolanus; her heart is not a Roman one; she is terrified at her husband's victories: when Volumnia describes him stamping on the field of battle, and wiping his bloody brow with his hand, she grows pale:

"His bloody brow! O Jupiter, no blood!... Heavens bless my lord from fell Aufidius!"[671]

She wishes to forget all that she knows of these dangers; she dare not think of them. When asked if Coriolanus does not generally return wounded, she cries, "O, no, no, no." She avoids this cruel picture, and yet nurses a secret pang at the bottom of her heart. She will not leave the house: "I'll not over the threshold till my lord return."[672] She does not smile, will hardly admit a visitor; she would blame herself, as for a lack of tenderness, for a moment's forgetfulness or gayety. When he does return, she can only blush and weep. This exalted sensibility must needs end in love. All Shakespeare's women love without measure, and nearly all at first sight. At the first look Juliet cast on Romeo, she says to the nurse:

"Go, ask his name: if he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed."[673]

It is the revelation of their destiny. As Shakespeare has made them, they cannot but love, and they must love till death. But this first look is an ecstasy: and this sudden approach of love is a transport. Miranda seeing Fernando, fancies that she sees "a thing divine." She halts motionless, in the amazement of this sudden vision, at the sound of these heavenly harmonies which rise from the depths of her heart. She weeps, on seeing him drag the heavy logs; with her slender white hands she would do the work whilst he reposed. Her compassion and tenderness carry her away; she is no longer mistress of her words, she says what she would not, what her father has forbidden her to disclose, what an instant before she would never have confessed. The too full heart overflows unwittingly, happy, and ashamed at the current of joy and new sensations with which an unknown feeling has flooded her:

"_Miranda._ I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of.... _Fernando._ Wherefore weep you? _M._ At mine unworthiness that dare not offer What I desire to give, and much less take What I shall die to want.... I am your wife, if you will marry me; If not, I'll die your maid."[674]

This irresistible invasion of love transforms the whole character. The shrinking and tender Desdemona, suddenly, in full Senate, before her father, renounces her father; dreams not for an instant of asking his pardon, or consoling him. She will leave for Cyprus with Othello, through the enemy's fleet and the tempest. Everything vanishes before the one and adored image which has taken entire and absolute possession of her whole heart. So, extreme evils, bloody resolves, are only the natural sequence of such love. Ophelia becomes mad, Juliet commits suicide; no one but looks upon such madness and death as necessary. You will not then discover virtue in these souls, for by virtue is implied a determinate desire to do good, and a rational observance of duty. They are only pure through delicacy or love. They recoil from vice as a gross thing, not as an immoral thing. What they feel is not respect for the marriage vow, but adoration of their husband. "O sweetest, fairest lily!" So Cymbeline speaks of one of these frail and lovely flowers which cannot be torn from the tree to which they have grown, whose least impurity would tarnish their whiteness. When Imogen learns that her husband means to kill her as being faithless, she does not revolt at the outrage; she has no pride, but only love. "False to his bed!" She faints at the thought that she is no longer loved. When Cordelia hears her father, an irritable old man, already almost insane, ask her how she loves him, she cannot make up her mind to say aloud the flattering protestations which her sisters have been lavishing. She is ashamed to display her tenderness before the world, and to buy a dowry by it. He disinherits her, and drives her away; she holds her tongue. And when she afterwards finds him abandoned and mad, she goes on her knees before him, with such a touching emotion, she weeps over that dear insulted head with so gentle a pity, that you might fancy it was the tender voice of a desolate but delighted mother, kissing the pale lips of her child:

"O yon kind gods, Cure this great breach in his abused nature! The untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up Of this child-changed father!... O my dear father! Restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Have in thy reverence made!... Was this a face To be opposed against the warring winds? ... Mine enemy's dog, Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire.... How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?"[675]

If, in short, Shakespeare comes across a heroic character, worthy of Corneille, a Roman, such as the mother of Coriolanus, he will explain by passion what Corneille would have explained by heroism. He will depict it violent and thirsting for the violent feelings of glory. She will not be able to refrain herself. She will break out into accents of triumph when she sees her son crowned; into imprecations of vengeance when she sees him banished. She will descend to the vulgarities of pride and anger; she will abandon herself to mad effusions of joy, to dreams of an ambitious fancy,[676] and will prove once more that the impassioned imagination of Shakespeare has left its trace in all the creatures whom it has called forth.

SECTION VII.--Types of Villains

Nothing is easier to such a poet than to create perfect villains. Throughout he is handling the unruly passions which make their character, and he never hits upon the moral law which restrains them; but at the same time, and by the same faculty, he changes the inanimate masks, which the conventions of the stage mould on an identical pattern, into living and illusory figures. How shall a demon be made to look as real as a man? Iago is a soldier of fortune who has roved the world from Syria to England, who, nursed in the lowest ranks, having had close acquaintance with the horrors of the wars of the sixteenth century, had drawn thence the maxims of a Turk and the philosophy of a butcher; principles he has none left. "O my reputation, my reputation!" cries the dishonored Cassio. "As I am an honest man," says Iago, "I thought you had received some bodily wound; there is more sense in that than in reputation."[677] As for woman's virtue, he looks upon it like a man who has kept company with slave-dealers. He estimates Desdemona's love as he would estimate a mare's: that sort of thing lasts so long--then... And then he airs an experimental theory with precise details and nasty expressions like a stud doctor. "It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor, nor he his to her.... These Moors are changeable in their wills;... the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice."[678] Desdemona, on the shore, trying! to forget her cares, begs him to sing the praises of her sex. For every portrait he finds the most insulting insinuations. She insists, and bids him take the case of a deserving woman. "Indeed," he replies, "she was a wight, if ever such wight were,... to suckle fools and chronicle small beer."[679] He also says, when Desdemona asks him what he would write in praise of her: "O gentle lady do not put me to't, for I am nothing, if not critical."[680] This is the key to his character. He despises man; to him Desdemona is a little wanton wench, Cassio an elegant word-shaper, Othello a mad bull, Roderigo an ass to be basted, thumped, made to go. He diverts himself by setting these passions at issue; he laughs at it as at a play. When Othello, swooning, shakes in his convulsions, he rejoices at this capital result: "Work on, my medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught."[681] You would take him for one of the poisoners of the time, studying the effect of a new potion on a dying dog. He only speaks in sarcasms; he has them ready for everyone, even for those whom he does not know. When he wakes Brabantio to inform him of the elopement of his daughter, he tells him the matter in coarse terms, sharpening the sting of the bitter pleasantry, like a conscientious executioner, rubbing his hands when he hears the culprit groan under the knife. "Thou art a villain!" cries Brabantio. "You are--a senator!" answers Iago. But the feature which really completes him, and makes him take rank with Mephistopheles, is the atrocious truth and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue.[682] Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her intercession for him; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and Cassio. Iago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly, then cries:

"And what's he then that says I play the villain? When this advice is free I give and honest, Probal to thinking and indeed the course To win the Moor again."[683]

To all these features must be added a diabolical energy,[684] an inexhaustible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the manners of a guard-room, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper, habits of dissimulation, coolness, hatred, and patience, contracted amid the perils and devices of a military life, and the continuous miseries of long degradation and frustrated hope; you will understand how Shakespeare could transform abstract treachery into a concrete form, and how Iago's atrocious vengeance is only the natural consequence of his character, life, and training.

SECTION VIII.--Principal Characters

How much more visible is this impassioned and unfettered genius of Shakespeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight of the drama! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the manifold and exuberant ideas, passion let loose, rushing upon death and crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium bursting through will and reason: such are the forces and ravings which engender them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds Antony in the whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates and kills, who scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of desert dust, the fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with love and death, impetuous, irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a tempest, whose thought, ever barbed and broken, is like the crackling of a lightning flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the graphic picture of physical adultery, cries at every word of Iago like a man on the rack; who, his nerves hardened by twenty years of war and shipwreck, grows mad and swoons for grief, and whose soul, poisoned by jealousy, is distracted and disorganized in convulsions and in stupor? Or of old King Lear, violent and weak, whose half-unseated reason is gradually toppled over under the shocks of incredible treacheries, who presents the frightful spectacle of madness, first increasing, then complete, of curses, bowlings, superhuman sorrows, into which the transport of the first access of fury carries him, and then of peaceful incoherence, chattering imbecility, into which the shattered man subsides; a marvellous creation, the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason, which reason could never have conceived?[685] Amid so many portraitures let us choose two or three to indicate the depth and nature of them all. The critic is lost in Shakespeare, as in an immense town; he will describe a couple of monuments, and entreat the reader to imagine the city.

Plutarch's Coriolanus is an austere, coldly haughty patrician, a general of the army. In Shakespeare's hands he becomes a coarse soldier, a man of the people as to his language and manners, an athlete of war, with a voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion's soul in the body of a bull. The philosopher Plutarch told of him a lofty philosophic action, saying that he had been at pains to save his landlord in the sack of Corioli. Shakespeare's Coriolanus has indeed the same disposition, for he is really a good fellow; but when Lartius asks him the name of this poor Volscian, in order to secure his liberty, he yawns out:

"By Jupiter! forgot. I am weary; yea, my memory is tired. Have we no wine here?"[686]

He is hot, he has been fighting, he must drink; he leaves his Volscian in chains, and thinks no more of him. He fights like a porter, with shouts and insults, and the cries from that deep chest are heard above the din of the battle like the sounds from a brazen trumpet. He has scaled the walls of Corioli, he has butchered till he is gorged with slaughter. Instantly he turns to the army of Cominius, and arrives red with blood, "as he were flay'd. Come I too late?" Cominius begins to compliment him. "Come I too late?" he repeats. The battle is not yet finished: he embraces Cominius:

"O! let me clip ye In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart As merry as when our nuptial day was done."[687]

For the battle is a real holiday to him. Such senses, such a strong frame, need the outcry, the din of battle, the excitement of death and wounds. This haughty and indomitable heart needs the joy of victory and destruction. Mark the display of his patrician arrogance and his soldier's bearing, when he is offered the tenth of the spoils:

"I thank you, general; But cannot make my heart consent to take A bribe to pay my sword."[688]

The soldiers cry, Marcius! Marcius! and the trumpets sound. He gets into a passion: rates the brawlers:

"No more, I say! For that I have not wash'd My nose that bled, or foil'd some debile wretch-- ... You shout me forth In acclamations hyperbolical; As if I loved my little should be dieted In praises sauced with lies."[689]

They are reduced to loading him with honors: Cominius gives him a war-horse; decrees him the cognomen of Coriolanus; the people shout Caius Marcius Coriolanus! He replies:

"I will go wash; And when my face is fair, you shall perceive Whether I blush or no: howbeit, I thank you. I mean to stride your steed."[690]

This loud voice, loud laughter, blunt acknowledgment, of a man who can act and shout better than speak, foretell the mode in which he will treat the plebeians. He loads them with insults; he cannot find abuse enough for the cobblers, tailors, envious cowards, down on their knees for a coin. "To beg of Hob and Dick! Bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean." But he must beg, if he would be consul; his friends constrain him. It is then that the passionate soul, incapable of self-restraint, such as Shakespeare knew how to paint, breaks forth without hinderance. He is there in his candidate's gown, gnashing his teeth, and getting up his lesson in this style:

"What must I say? 'I pray, sir'--Plague upon't! I cannot bring My tongue to such a pace:--'Look, sir, my wounds! I got them in my country's service, when Some certain of your brethren roar'd and ran From the noise of our own drums.'"[691]

The tribunes have no difficulty in stopping the election of a candidate who begs in this fashion. They taunt him in full Senate, reproach him with his speech about the corn. He repeats it, with aggravations. Once roused, neither danger nor prayer restrains him:

"His heart's his mouth: And, being angry, does forget that ever He heard the name of death."[692]

He rails against the people, the tribunes, ediles, flatterers of the plebs. "Come, enough," says his friend Menenius. "Enough, with over-measure," says Brutus the tribune. He retorts:

"No, take more: What may be sworn by, both divine and human, Seal what I end withal!... At once pluck out The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick The sweet which is their poison."[693]

The tribune cries, Treason! and bids seize him. He cries:

"Hence, old goat!... Hence, rotten thing! or I shall shake thy bones Out of thy garments!"[694]

He strikes him, drives the mob off: he fancies himself amongst Volscians. "On fair ground I could beat forty of them!" And when his friends hurry him off, he threatens still, and

"Speak(s) o' the people As if you (he) were a god to punish, not A man of their infirmity."[695]

Yet he bends before his mother, for he has recognized in her a soul as lofty and a courage as intractable as his own. He has submitted from his infancy to the ascendancy of this pride which he admires. Volumnia reminds him: "My praises made thee first a soldier." Without power over himself, continually tossed on the fire of his too hot blood, he has always been the arm, she the thought. He obeys from involuntary respect, like a soldier before his general, but with what effort!

"_Coriolanus._ The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up The glances of my sight! a beggar's tongue Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath received an alms!--I will not do't.... _Volumnia._ ... Do as thou list. Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me, But owe thy pride thyself. _Cor._ Pray, be content: Mother, I am going to the market-place; Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves, Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved Of all the trades in Rome."[696]

He goes, and his friends speak for him. Except a few bitter asides, he appears to be submissive. Then the tribunes pronounce the accusation, and summon him to answer as a traitor:

"_Cor._ How! traitor! _Men._ Nay, temperately: your promise. _Cor._ The fires i' the lowest hell fold-in the people! Call me their traitor! Thou injurious tribune! Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths, In thy hands clutch'd as many millions, in Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say, 'Thou liest,' unto thee with a voice as free As I do pray the gods."[697]

His friends surround him, entreat him: he will not listen; he foams at the mouth, he is like a wounded lion:

"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death, Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger But with a grain a day, I would not buy Their mercy at the price of one fair word."[698]

The people vote exile, supporting by their shouts the sentence of the tribune:

"_Cor._ You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o' the rotten fens, whose love I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you.... Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere."[699]

Judge of his hatred by these raging words. It goes on increasing whilst waiting for vengeance. We find him next with the Volscian army before Rome. His friends kneel before him, he lets them kneel. Old Menenius, who had loved him as a son, only comes now to be driven away. "Wife, mother, child, I know not."[700] He knows not himself. For this strength of hating in a noble heart is the same as the force of loving. He has transports of tenderness as of rage, and can contain himself no more in joy than in grief. He runs, spite of his resolution, to his wife's arms; he bends his knee before his mother. He had summoned the Volscian chiefs to make them witnesses of his refusals; and before them, he grants all, and weeps. On his return to Corioli, an insulting word from Aufidius maddens him, and drives him upon the daggers of the Volscians. Vices and virtues, glory and misery, greatness and feebleness, the unbridled passion which composes his nature, endowed him with all.

If the life of Coriolanus is the history of a mood, that of Macbeth is the history of a monomania. The witches' prophecy has sunk into his mind at once, like a fixed idea. Gradually this idea corrupts the rest, and transforms the whole man. He is haunted by it; he forgets the thanes who surround him and "who stay upon his leisure"; he already sees in the future an indistinct chaos of images of blood:

"... Why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs?... My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is But what is not."[701]

This is the language of hallucination. Macbeth's hallucination becomes complete when his wife has persuaded him to assassinate the king. He sees in the air a blood-stained dagger, "in form as palpable, as this which now I draw." His whole brain is filled with grand and terrible phantoms, which the mind of a common murderer could never have conceived: the poetry of which indicates a generous heart, enslaved to an idea of fate, and capable of remorse:

"... Now o'er the one half world Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost.... (_A bell rings._) I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell."[702]

He has done the deed, and returns tottering, haggard, like a drunken man. He is horrified at his bloody hands, "these hangman's hands." Nothing now can cleanse them. The whole ocean might sweep over them, but they would keep the hue of murder. "What hands are here? ha, they pluck out mine eyes!" He is disturbed by a word which the sleeping chamberlains uttered:

"One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other; As they had seen me with these hangman's hands. Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,' When they did say, 'God bless us!'... But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen!' I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen' Stuck in my throat."[703]

Then comes a strange dream; a frightful vision of the punishment that awaits him descends upon him.

Above the beating of his heart, the tingling of the blood which seethes in his brain, he had heard them cry:

"'Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast."[704]

And the voice, like an angel's trumpet, calls him by all his titles:

"'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more!'"[705]

This idea, incessantly repeated, beats in his brain, with monotonous and quick strokes, like the tongue of a bell. Insanity begins; all the force of his mind is occupied by keeping before him, in spite of himself, the image of the man whom he has murdered in his sleep:

"To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. (_Knock._) Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!"[706]

Thenceforth, in the rare intervals in which the fever of his mind is assuaged, he is like a man worn out by a long malady. It is the sad prostration of maniacs worn out by their fits of rage:

"Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant There's nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of."[707]

When rest has restored force to the human machine, the fixed idea shakes him again, and drives him onward, like a pitiless horseman, who has left his panting horse only for a moment, to leap again into the saddle, and spur him over precipices. The more he has done, the more he must do:

"I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er..."[708]

He kills in order to preserve the fruit of his murders. The fatal circlet of gold attracts him like a magic jewel; and he beats down, from a sort of blind instinct, the heads, which he sees between the crown and him:

"But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly: better be with the dead, Whom we to gain our peace, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch him further."[709]

Macbeth has ordered Banquo to be murdered, and in the midst of a great feast he is informed of the success of his plan. He smiles, and proposes Banquo's health. Suddenly, conscience-smitten, he sees the ghost of the murdered man; for this phantom, which Shakespeare summons, is not a mere stage-trick: we feel that here the supernatural is unnecessary, and that Macbeth would create it even if hell would not send it. With muscles twitching, dilated eyes, his mouth half open with deadly terror, he sees it shake its bloody head, and cries with that hoarse voice, which is only to be heard in maniacs' cells:

"Prithee, see there? Behold! look! lo! how say you? Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too. If charnel-houses and our graves must send Those that we bury back, our monuments Shall be the maws of kites.... Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,... Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd Too terrible for the ear: the times have been, That, when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end; but now they rise again, With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools:... Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee! Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; Thou hast no speculation in those eyes Which thou dost glare with!"[710]

His body trembling like that of an epileptic, his teeth clenched, foaming at the mouth, he sinks on the ground, his limbs writhe, shaken with convulsive quiverings, whilst a dull sob swells his panting breast, and dies in his swollen throat. What joy can remain for a man beset by such visions? The wide dark country, which he surveys from his towering castle, is but a field of death, haunted by ominous apparitions; Scotland, which he is depopulating, a cemetery,

"Where... the dead man's knell Is there scarce ask'd for who; and good men's lives Expire before the flowers in their caps. Dying or ere they sicken."[711]

His soul is "full of scorpions." He has "supp'd full with horrors," and the loathsome odor of blood has disgusted him with all else. He goes stumbling over the corpses which he has heaped up, with the mechanical and desperate smile of a maniac-murderer. Thenceforth death, life, all is one to him; the habit of murder has placed him out of the pale of humanity. They tell him that his wife is dead:

"_Macbeth._ She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."[712]

There remains for him the hardening of the heart in crime, the fixed belief in destiny. Hunted down by his enemies, "bearlike, tied to a stake," he fights, troubled only by the prediction of the witches, sure of being invulnerable so long as the man whom they have described does not appear. Henceforth his thoughts dwell on a supernatural world, and to the last he walks with his eyes fixed on the dream, which has possessed him, from the first.

The history of Hamlet, like that of Macbeth, is a story of moral poisoning. Hamlet has a delicate soul, an impassioned imagination, like that of Shakespeare. He has lived hitherto, occupied in noble studies, skilful in mental and bodily exercises, with a taste for art, loved by the noblest father, enamored of the purest and most charming girl, confiding, generous, not yet having perceived, from the height of the throne to which he was born, aught but the beauty, happiness, grandeur of nature and humanity.[713] On this soul, which character and training make more sensitive than others, misfortune suddenly falls, extreme, overwhelming of the very kind to destroy all faith and every motive for action: with one glance he has seen all the vileness of humanity; and this insight is given him in his mother. His mind is yet intact; but judge from the violence of his style, the crudity of his exact details, the terrible tension of the whole nervous machine, whether he has not already one foot on the verge of madness:

"O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: So excellent a king,... so loving to my mother That he might not let e'en the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth! ... And yet, within a month-- Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!-- A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow'd my poor father's body,... Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor it cannot come to good! But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue!"[714]

Here already are contortions of thought, a beginning of hallucination, the symptoms of what is to come after. In the middle of conversation the image of his father rises before his mind. He thinks he sees him. How then will it be when the "canonised bones have burst their cerements," "the sepulchre hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws," and when the ghost comes in the night, upon a high "platform" of land, to tell him of the tortures of his prison of fire, and of the fratricide, who has driven him thither? Hamlet grows faint, but grief strengthens him, and he has a desire for living:

"Hold, hold, my heart; And you my sinews, grow not instant old, But bear me stiffly up! Remember thee! Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe.--Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,... And thy commandment all alone shall live,... O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables--meet it is I set it down, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark: So, uncle, there you are."[715] (_Writing._)

This convulsive outburst, this fevered writing hand, this frenzy of intentness, prelude the approach of a kind of monomania. When his friends come up, he treats them with the speeches of a child or an idiot. He is no longer master of his words; hollow phrases whirl in his brain, and fall from his mouth as in a dream. They call him; he answers by imitating the cry of a sportsman whistling to his falcon: "Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come." Whilst he is in the act of swearing them to secrecy, the ghost below repeats "Swear." Hamlet cries, with a nervous excitement and a fitful gayety:

"Ah ha, boy! say'st thou so? art thou there, truepenny? Come on--you hear this fellow in the cellarage-- Consent to swear.... _Ghost_ (_beneath_). Swear. _Hamlet. Hic et ubique?_ then we'll shift our ground. Come hither, gentlemen.... Swear by my sword. _Ghost_ (_beneath_). Swear. _Ham._ Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast? A worthy pioneer!"[716]

Understand that as he says this his teeth chatter, "pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other." Intense anguish ends with a kind of laughter, which is nothing else than a spasm. Thenceforth Hamlet speaks as though he had a continuous nervous attack. His madness is feigned, I admit; but his mind, as a door whose hinges are twisted, swings and bangs with every wind with a mad haste and with a discordant noise. He has no need to search for the strange ideas, apparent incoherencies, exaggerations, the deluge of sarcasms which he accumulates. He finds them within him; he does himself no violence, he simply gives himself up to himself. When he has the piece played which is to unmask his uncle, he raises himself, lounges on the floor, lays his head in Ophelia's lap; he addresses the actors, and comments on the piece to the spectators; his nerves are strung, his excited thought is like a surging and crackling flame, and cannot find fuel enough in the multitude of objects surrounding it, upon all of which it seizes. When the king rises unmasked and troubled, Hamlet sings, and says, "Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers--if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me--with two Provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir!"[717] And he laughs terribly, for he is resolved on murder. It is clear that this state is a disease, and that the man will not survive it.

In a soul so ardent of thought, and so mighty of feeling, what is left but disgust and despair? We tinge all nature with the color of our thoughts; we shape the world according to our own ideas; when our soul is sick, we see nothing but sickness in the universe:

"This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither."[718]

Henceforth his thought sullies whatever it touches. He rails bitterly before Ophelia against marriage and love. Beauty! Innocence! Beauty is but a means of prostituting innocence: "Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?... What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us."[719]

When he has killed Polonius by accident, he hardly repents it; it is one fool less. He jeers lugubriously:

"_King._ Now Hamlet, where's Polonius? _Hamlet._ At supper. _K._ At supper! where? _H._ Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him."[720]

And he repeats in five or six fashions these gravedigger jests. His thoughts already inhabit a churchyard; to this hopeless philosophy a genuine man is a corpse. Public functions, honors, passions, pleasures, projects, science, all this is but a borrowed mask, which death removes, so that people may see what we are, an evil-smelling and grinning skull. It is this sight he goes to see by Ophelia's grave. He counts the skulls which the gravedigger turns up; this was a lawyer's, that a countier's. What bows, intrigues, pretensions, arrogance! And here now is a clown knocking it about with his spade, and playing "at loggats with 'em." Cæsar and Alexander have turned to clay and make the earth fat; the masters of the world have served to "patch a wall. Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that."[721] When a man has come to this, there is nothing left but to die.

This heated imagination, which explains Hamlet's nervous disease and his moral poisoning, explains also his conduct. If he hesitates to kill his uncle, it is not from horror of blood or from our modern scruples. He belongs to the sixteenth century. On board ship he wrote the order to behead Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and to do so without giving them "shriving-time." He killed Polonius, he caused Ophelia's death, and has no great remorse for it. If for once he spared his uncle, it was because he found him praying, and was afraid of sending him to heaven. He thought he was killing him when he killed Polonius. What his imagination robs him of, is the coolness and strength to go quietly and with premeditation to plunge a sword into a breast. He can only do the thing on a sudden suggestion; he must have a moment of enthusiasm; he must think the king is behind the arras, or else, seeing that he himself is poisoned, he must find his victim under his foil's point. He is not master of his acts; opportunity dictates them; he cannot plan a murder, but must improvise it. A too lively imagination exhausts the will, by the strength of images which it heaps up, and by the fury of intentness which absorbs it. You recognize in him a poet's soul, made not to act, but to dream, which is lost in contemplating the phantoms of its creation, which sees the imaginary world too clearly to play a part in the real world; an artist whom evil chance has made a prince, whom worse chance has made an avenger of crime, and who, destined by nature for genius, is condemned by fortune to madness and unhappiness. Hamlet is Shakespeare, and, at the close of this gallery of portraits which have all some features of his own, Shakespeare has painted himself in the most striking of all.

If Racine or Corneille had framed a psychology, they would have said, with Descartes: Man is an incorporeal soul, served by organs, endowed with reason and will, dwelling in palaces or porticos, made for conversation and society, whose harmonious and ideal action is developed by discourse and replies, in a world constructed by logic beyond the realms of time and place.

If Shakespeare had framed a psychology, he would have said, with Esquirol:[722] Man is a nervous machine, governed by a mood, disposed to hallucinations, carried away by unbridled passions, essentially unreasoning, a mixture of animal and poet, having instead of mind rapture, instead of virtue sensibility, imagination for prompter and guide, and led at random, by the most determinate and complex circumstances, to sorrow, crime, madness, and death.

SECTION IX.--Characteristics of Shakespeare's Genius

Could such a poet always confine himself to the imitation of nature? Will this poetical world which is going on in his brain never break loose from the laws of the world of reality? Is he not powerful enough to follow his own laws? He is; and the poetry of Shakespeare naturally finds an outlet in the fantastical. This is the highest grade of unreasoning and creative imagination. Despising ordinary logic, it creates another; it unites facts and ideas in a new order, apparently absurd, in reality regular; it lays open the land of dreams, and its dreams seem to us the truth.

When we enter upon Shakespeare's comedies, and even his half-dramas,[723] it is as though we met him on the threshold, like an actor to whom the prologue is committed, to prevent misunderstanding on the part of the public, and to tell them: "Do not take too seriously what you are about to hear: I am amusing myself. My brain, being full of fancies, desired to array them, and here they are. Palaces, distant landscapes, transparent clouds which blot in the morning the horizon with their gray mists, the red and glorious flames into which the evening sun descends, white cloisters in endless vista through the ambient air, grottos, cottages, the fantastic pageant of all human passions, the irregular sport of unlooked-for adventures--this is the medley of forms, colors, sentiments, which I let become entangled and confused in my presence, a many-tinted skein of glistening silks, a slender arabesque, whose sinuous curves, crossing and mingled, bewilder the mind by the whimsical variety of their infinite complications. Don't regard it as a picture. Don't look for a precise composition, a sole and increasing interest, the skilful management of a well-ordered and congruous plot. I have tales and novels before me which I am cutting up into scenes. Never mind the _finis_, I am amusing myself on the road. It is not the end of the journey which pleases me, but the journey itself. Is there any need in going so straight and quick? Do you only care to know whether the poor merchant of Venice will escape Shylock's knife? Here are two happy lovers, seated under the palace walls on a calm night; wouldn't you like to listen to the peaceful reverie which arises like a perfume from the bottom of their hearts?"

"'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st, But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (_Enter musicians._) Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn: With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear. And draw her home with music. _Jessica._ I am never merry when I hear sweet music.'"[724]

"Have I not the right, when I see the big laughing face of a clownish servant, to stop near him, see him gesticulate, frolic, gossip, go through his hundred pranks and his hundred grimaces, and treat myself to the comedy of his spirit and gayety? Two fine gentlemen pass by. I hear the rolling fire of their metaphors, and I follow their skirmish of wit. Here in a corner is the artless arch face of a young wench. Do you forbid me to linger by her, to watch her smiles, her sudden blushes, the childish pout of her rosy lips, the coquetry of her pretty motions? You are in a great hurry if the prattle of this fresh and musical voice can't stop you. Is it no pleasure to view this succession of sentiments and faces? Is your fancy so dull that you must have the mighty mechanism of a geometrical plot to shake it? My sixteenth century playgoers were easier to move. A sunbeam that had lost its way on an old wall, a foolish song thrown into the middle of a drama, occupied their mind as well as the blackest of catastrophes. After the horrible scene in which Shylock brandished his butcher's knife before Antonio's bare breast, they saw just as willingly the petty household wrangle, and the amusing bit of raillery which ends the piece. Like soft moving water, their soul rose and sank in an instant to the level of the poet's emotion, and their sentiments readily flowed in the bed he had prepared for them. They let him stray here and there on his journey, and did not forbid him to make two voyages at once. They allowed several plots in one. If but the slightest thread united them it was sufficient. Lorenzo eloped with Jessica, Shylock was frustrated in his revenge, Portia's suitors failed in the test imposed upon them; Portia, disguised as a doctor of laws, took from her husband the ring which he had promised never to part with; these three or four comedies, disunited, mingled, were shuffled and unfolded together, like an unknotted skein in which threads of a hundred colors are entwined. Together with diversity, my spectators allowed improbability. Comedy is a slight winged creature, which flutters from dream to dream, whose wings you would break if you held it captive in the narrow prison of common-sense. Do not press its fictions too hard; do not probe their contents. Let them float before your eyes like a charming swift dream. Let the fleeting apparition plunge back into the bright misty land from whence it came. For an instant it deluded you; let it suffice. It is sweet to leave the world of realities behind you; the mind rests amidst impossibilities. We are happy when delivered from the rough chains of logic, to wander amongst strange adventures, to live in sheer romance, and know that we are living there. I do not try to deceive you, and make you believe in the world where I take you. A man must disbelieve it in order to enjoy it. We must give ourselves up to illusion, and feel that we are giving ourselves up to it. We must smile as we listen. We smile in "The Winter's Tale" when Hermione descends from her pedestal, and when, Leontes discovers his wife in the statue, having believed her to be dead. We smile in "Cymbeline" when we see the lone cavern in which the young princes have lived like savage hunters. Improbability deprives emotions of their sting. The events interest or touch us without making us suffer. At the very moment when sympathy is too intense, we remind ourselves that it is all a fancy. They become like distant objects, whose distance softens their outline, and wraps them in a luminous veil of blue air. Your true comedy is an opera. We listen to sentiments without thinking too much of plot. We follow the tender or gay melodies without reflecting that they interrupt the action. We dream elsewhere on hearing music; here I bid you dream on hearing verse."

Then the speaker of the prologue retires, and the actors come on.

"As You Like It" is a caprice.[725] Action there is none; interest barely; likelihood still less. And the whole is charming. Two cousins, princes' daughters, come to a forest with a court clown, Celia disguised as a shepherdess, Rosalind as a boy. They find here the old duke, Rosalind's father, who, driven out of his duchy, lives with his friends like a philosopher and a hunter. They find amorous shepherds, who with songs and prayers pursue intractable shepherdesses. They discover or they meet with lovers who become their husbands. Suddenly it is announced that the wicked Duke Frederick, who had usurped the crown, has just retired to a cloister, and restored the throne to the old exiled duke. Everyone gets married, everyone dances, everything ends with a "rustic revelry." Where is the pleasantness of these puerilities? First, the fact of its being puerile; the absence of the serious is refreshing; There are no events, and there is no plot. We gently follow the easy current of graceful or melancholy emotions, which takes us away and moves us about without wearying. The place adds to the illusion and charm. It is an autumn forest, in which the sultry rays permeate the blushing oak leaves, or the half-stripped, ashes tremble and smile to the feeble breath of evening. The lovers wander by brooks that "brawl" under antique roots. As you listen to them you see the slim birches, whose cloak of lace grows glossy under the slant rays of the sun that gilds them, and the thoughts wander down the mossy vistas in which their footsteps are not heard. What better place could be chosen for the comedy of sentiment and the play of heart-fancies? Is not this a fit spot in which to listen to love-talk? Someone has seen Orlando, Rosalind's lover, in this glade; she hears it and blushes. "Alas the day!... What did he, when thou sawest him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? and when shalt thou see him again?" Then, with a lower voice, somewhat hesitating: "Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?" She is not yet exhausted: "Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak. Sweet, say on."[726] One question follows another, she closes the mouth of her friend, who is ready to answer. At every word she jests, but agitated, blushing, with a forced gayety; her bosom heaves, and her heart beats. Nevertheless she is calmer when Orlando comes; bandies words with him; sheltered under her disguise, she makes him confess that he loves Rosalind. Then she plagues him, like the frolic, the wag, the coquette she is. "Why, how now, Orlando, where have you been all this while? You a lover?" Orlando repeats that he loves Rosalind, and she pleases herself by making him repeat it more than once. She sparkles with wit, jests, mischievous pranks; pretty fits of anger, feigned sulks, bursts of laughter, deafening babble, engaging caprices. "Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were your very, very Rosalind?" And every now and then she repeats with an arch smile, "And I am your Rosalind; am I not your Rosalind?"[727] Orlando protests that he would die. Die! Who ever thought of dying for love? Leander? He took one bath too many in the Hellespont; so poets have said he died for love. Troilus? A Greek broke his head with a club; so poets have said he died for love. Come, come, Rosalind will be softer. And then she plays at marriage with him, and makes Celia pronounce the solemn words. She irritates and torments her pretended husband; tells him all the whims she means to indulge in, all the pranks she will play, all the teasing he will have to endure. The retorts come one after another like fireworks. At every phrase we follow the looks of these sparkling eyes, the curves of this laughing mouth, the quick movements of this supple figure. It is a bird's petulance and volubility. "O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love." Then she provokes her cousin Celia, sports with her hair, calls her by every woman's name. Antitheses without end, words all a-jumble, quibbles, pretty exaggerations, word-racket; as you listen, you fancy it is the warbling of a nightingale. The trill of repeated metaphors, the melodious roll of the poetical gamut, the summer-warbling rustling under the foliage, change the piece into a veritable opera. The three lovers end by chanting a sort of trio. The first throws out a fancy, the others take it up. Four times this strophe is renewed; and the symmetry of ideas, added to the jingle of the rhymes, makes of a dialogue a concerto of love:

"_Phebe._ Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love. _Silvius._ It is to be all made of sighs and tears; And so am I for Phebe. _P._ And I for Ganymede. _Orlando._ And I for Rosalind. _Rosalind._ And I for no woman.... _S._ It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience and impatience, All purity, all trial, all observance; And so I am for Phebe. _P._ And so am I for Ganymede. _O._ And so am I for Rosalind. _R._ And so am I for no woman."[728]

The necessity of singing is so urgent that a minute later songs break out of themselves. The prose and the conversation end in lyric poetry. We pass straight on into these odes. We do not find ourselves in a new country. We feel the emotion and foolish gayety as if it were a holiday. We see the graceful couple whom the song of the two pages brings before us, passing in the misty light "o'er the green corn-field," amid the hum of sportive insects, on the finest day of the flowering spring-time. Unlikelihood grows natural, and we are not astonished when we see Hymen leading the two brides by the hand to give them to their husbands.

Whilst the young folk sing, the old folk talk. Their life also is a novel, but a sad one. Shakespeare's delicate soul, bruised by the shocks of social life, took refuge in contemplations of solitary life. To forget the strife and annoyances of the world, he must bury himself in a wide silent forest, and

"Under the shade of melancholy boughs, Loose and neglect the creeping hours of time."[729]

We look at the bright images which the sun carves on the white beech-boles, the shade of trembling leaves flickering on the thick moss, the long waves of the summit of the trees; then the sharp sting of care is blunted; we suffer no more, simply remembering that we suffered once; we feel nothing but a gentle misanthropy, and being renewed, we are the better for it. The old duke is happy in his exile. Solitude has given him rest, delivered him from flattery, reconciled him to nature. He pities the stags which he is obliged to hunt for food:

"Come, shall we go and kill us venison? And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools, Being native burghers of this desert city, Should in their own confines with forked heads Have their round haunches gored."[730]

Nothing sweeter than this mixture of tender compassion, dreamy philosophy, delicate sadness, poetical complaints, and rustic songs. One of the lords sings:

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude. Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: Then, heigh-ho, the holly! This life is most jolly."[731]

Amongst these lords is found a soul that suffers more, Jacques the melancholy, one of Shakespeare's best-loved characters, a transparent mask behind which we perceive the face of the poet. He is sad because he is tender; he feels the contact of things too keenly, and what leaves others indifferent, makes him weep.[732] He does not scold, he is sad; he does not reason, he is moved; he has not the combative spirit of a reforming moralist; his soul is sick and weary of life. Impassioned imagination leads quickly to disgust. Like opium, it excites and shatters. It leads man to the loftiest philosophy, then lets him down to the whims of a child. Jacques leaves other men abruptly, and goes to the quiet nooks to be alone. He loves his sadness, and would not exchange it for joy. Meeting Orlando, he says:

"Rosalind is your love's name? _Orlando._ Yes, just. _Jacques._ I do not like her name."[733]

He has the fancies of a nervous woman. He is scandalized because Orlando writes sonnets on the forest trees. He is eccentric, and finds subjects of grief and gayety where others would see nothing of the sort:

"A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool; a miserable world! As I do live by food, I met a fool; Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms and yet a motley fool...."

Jacques hearing him moralize in such a manner begins to laugh "sans intermission" that a fool could be so meditative:

"O noble fool; a worthy fool! Motley's the only wear.... O that I were a fool! I am ambitious for a motley coat."[734]

The next minute he returns to his melancholy dissertations, bright pictures whose vivacity explains his character, and betrays Shakespeare, hiding under his name:

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, In second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."[735]

"As you Like it" is a half dream. "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a complete one.

The scene, buried in the far-off mist of fabulous antiquity, carries us back to Theseus, Duke of Athens, who is preparing his palace for his marriage with the beautiful queen of the Amazons. The style, loaded with contorted images, fills the mind with strange and splendid visions, and the airy elf-world divert the comedy into the fairy-land from whence it sprung.

Love is still the theme: of all sentiments, is it not the greatest fancy-weaver? But love is not heard here in the charming, prattle of Rosalind; it is glaring, like the season of the year. It does not brim over in slight conversations, in supple and skipping prose; it breaks forth into big rhyming odes, dressed in magnificent metaphors, sustained by impassioned accents, such as a warm night, odorous and star-spangled, inspires in a poet and a lover. Lysander and Hermia agree to meet.

"_Lysander._ To-morrow night when Phoebe doth behold Her silver visage in the watery glass, Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass, A time that lovers' flights doth still conceal, Through Athens' gates have we devised to steal. _Hermia._ And in the wood, where often you and I Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie.... There my Lysander and myself shall meet."[736]

They get lost, and fall asleep, wearied, under the trees. Puck squeezes in the youth's eyes the juice of a magic flower, and changes his heart. Presently, when he awakes, he will become enamored of the first woman he sees. Meanwhile Demetrius, Hermia's rejected lover, wanders with Helena, whom he rejects, in the solitary wood. The magic flower changes him in turn, he now loves Helena. The lovers flee and pursue one another, beneath the lofty trees, in the calm night. We smile at their transports, their complaints, their ecstasies, and yet we join in them. This passion is a dream, and yet it moves us: It is like those airy webs which we find at morning on the crest of the hedgerows where the dew has spread them, and whose weft sparkles like a jewel-casket. Nothing can be more fragile, and nothing more graceful. The poet sports with emotions; he mingles, confuses, redoubles, interweaves them; he twines and untwines these loves like the mazes of a dance, and we see the noble and tender figures pass by the verdant bushes, beneath the radiant eyes of the stars, now wet with tears, now bright with rapture. They have the abandonment of true love, not the grossness of sensual love. Nothing causes us to fall from the ideal world in which Shakespeare conducts us. Dazzled by beauty, they adore it, and the spectacle of their happiness, their emotion, and their tenderness, is a kind of enchantment.

Above these two couples flutters and hums the swarm of elves and fairies. They also love. Titania, their queen, has a young boy for her favorite, son of an Indian king, of whom Oberon, her husband, wishes to deprive her. They quarrel, so that the elves creep for fear into the acorn cups, in the golden primroses. Oberon, by way of vengeance, touches Titania's sleeping eyes with the magic flower, and thus on waking the nimblest and most charming of the fairies finds herself enamored of a stupid blockhead with an ass's head. She kneels before him; she sets on his "hairy temples a coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers":

"And that same dew, which sometime on the buds Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls, Stood now within the pretty floweret's eyes, Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail."[737]

She calls round her all her fairy attendants;

"Be kind and courteous to this gentleman; Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes; Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries; The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes, To have my love to bed and to arise; And pluck the wings from painted butterflies To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.... Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower. The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye; And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. Tie up my love's tongue, bring him silently."[738]

It was necessary, for her love brayed horribly, and to all the offers of Titania, replied with a petition for hay. What can be sadder and sweeter than this irony of Shakespeare? What raillery against love, and what tenderness for love! The sentiment is divine; its object unworthy. The heart is ravished, the eyes blind. It is a golden butterfly, fluttering in the mud; and Shakespeare, whilst painting its misery, preserves all its beauty:

"Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed, While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head, And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.... Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.... So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!"[739]

At the return of morning, when

"The eastern gate, all fiery red, Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams,"[740]

the enchantment ceases, Titania awakes on her couch of wild thyme and drooping violets. She drives the monster away; her recollections of the night are effaced in a vague twilight:

"These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds."[741]

And the fairies

"Go seek some dew drops here And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear."[742]

Such is Shakespeare's fantasy, a slight tissue of bold inventions, of ardent passions, melancholy mockery, dazzling poetry, such as one of Titania's elves would have made. Nothing could be more like the poet's mind than these nimble genii, children of air and flame, whose flights "compass the globe" in a second, who glide over the foam of the waves and skip between the atoms of the winds. Ariel flies, an invisible songster, around shipwrecked men to console them, discovers the thoughts of traitors, pursues the savage beast Caliban, spreads gorgeous visions before lovers, and does all in a lightning-flash:

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip's bell I lie.... Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.... I drink the air before me, and return Or ere your pulse twice beat."[743]

Shakespeare glides over things on as swift a wing, by leaps as sudden, with a touch as delicate.

What a soul! what extent of action, and what sovereignty of an unique faculty! what diverse creations, and what persistence of the same impress! There they all are united, and all marked by the same sign, void of will and reason, governed by mood, imagination, or pure passion, destitute of the faculties contrary to those of the poet, dominated by the corporeal type which his painter's eyes have conceived, endowed by the habits of mind and by the vehement sensibility which he finds in himself.[744] Go through the groups, and you will only discover in them divers forms and divers states of the same power. Here, a herd of brutes, dotards, and gossips, made up of a mechanical imagination; further on, a company of men of wit, animated by a gay and foolish imagination; then, a charming swarm of women whom their delicate imagination raises so high, and their self-forgetting love carries so far; elsewhere a band of villains, hardened by unbridled passions, inspired by artistic rapture; in the centre a mournful train of grand characters, whose excited brain is filled with sad or criminal visions, and whom an inner destiny urges to murder, madness, or death. Ascend one stage, and contemplate the whole scene: the aggregate bears the same mark as the details. The drama reproduces promiscuously uglinesses, basenesses, horrors, unclean details, profligate and ferocious manners, the whole reality of life just as it is, when it is unrestrained by decorum, common-sense, reason, and duty. Comedy, led through a phantasmagoria of pictures, gets lost in the likely and the unlikely, with no other connection but the caprice of an amused imagination, wantonly disjointed and romantic, an opera without music, a concerto of melancholy and tender sentiments, which bears the mind into the supernatural world, and brings before our eyes on its fairy-wings the genius which has created it. Look now. Do you not see the poet behind the crowd of his creations? They have heralded his approach. They have all shown somewhat of him. Ready, impetuous, impassioned, delicate, his genius is pure imagination, touched more vividly and by slighter things than ours. Hence his style, blooming with exuberant images, loaded with exaggerated metaphors, whose strangeness is like incoherence, whose wealth is superabundant, the work of a mind, which, at the least incitement, produces too much and takes too wide leaps. Hence this involuntary psychology, and this terrible penetration, which instantaneously perceiving all the effects of a situation, and all the details of a character, concentrates them in every response, and gives to a figure a relief and a coloring which create illusion. Hence our emotion and tenderness. We say to him, as Desdemona to Othello: "I love thee for the battles, sieges, fortunes thou hast passed, and for the distressful stroke that thy youth suffered."

[Footnote 587: Halliwell's "Life of Shakespeare."]

[Footnote 588: Born 1564, died 1616. He adapted plays as early as 1591. The first play entirely from his pen appeared in 1593.--Payne Collier.]

[Footnote 589: Mr. Halliwell and other commentators try to prove that at this time the preliminary trothplight was regarded as the real marriage; that this trothplight had taken place, and that there was therefore no irregularity in Shakespeare's conduct.]

[Footnote 590: Halliwell, 123.]

[Footnote 591: All these anecdotes are traditions, and consequently more or less doubtful; but the other facts are authentic.]

[Footnote 592: Terms of an extant document. He is named along with Burbage and Greene.]

[Footnote 593: Sonnet 110.]

[Footnote 594: See Sonnets 91 and 111; also "Hamlet," III. 2. Many of Hamlet's words would come better from the mouth of an actor than a prince. See also the 66th Sonnet, "Tired with all these."]

[Footnote 595: Sonnet 29.]

[Footnote 596: "Hamlet," III. 1.]

[Footnote 597: Sonnet 111.]

[Footnote 598: Anecdote written in 1602 on the authority of Tooley the actor.]

[Footnote 599: The Earl of Southampton was nineteen years old when Shakespeare dedicated his "Adonis" to him.]

[Footnote 600: See Titian's picture. Loves of the Gods, at Blenheim.]

[Footnote 601: "Venus and Adonis," lines 548-553.]

[Footnote 602: Ibid. lines 55-60.]

[Footnote 603: Ibid, lines 853-858.]

[Footnote 604: Compare the first pieces of Alfred de Musset, "Contes d'Italie et d'Espagne."]

[Footnote 605: Crawley, quoted by Ph. Chasles, "Études sur Shakspeare."]

[Footnote 606: A famed French courtesan (1613-1650), the heroine of a drama of that name, by Victor Hugo, having for its subject-matter: "Love purifies everything."--Tr.]

[Footnote 607: Sonnet 138.]

[Footnote 608: Two characters in Molière's "Misanthrope." The scene referred to is Act V. Scene 7.--Tr.]

[Footnote 609: Sonnet 142.]

[Footnote 610: Sonnet 95.]

[Footnote 611: Sonnet 98.]

[Footnote 612: Ibid.]

[Footnote 613: Sonnet 99.]

[Footnote 614: Sonnet 151.]

[Footnote 615: Sonnet 151.]

[Footnote 616: Sonnet 144; also the "Passionate Pilgrim," 2.]

[Footnote 617: This new interpretation of the Sonnets is due to the ingenious and learned conjectures of M. Ph. Chasles.--For a short history of these Sonnets, see Dyce's "Shakspeare," I. pp. 96-102. This learned editor says: "I contend that allusions scattered through the whole series are not to be hastily referred to the personal circumstances of Shakspeare."--Tr.]

[Footnote 618: Miranda, Desdemona, Viola. The following are the first words of the Duke in "Twelfth Night": "If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor! Enough; no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there. Of what validity and pitch soever, But falls into abatement and low price. Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high-fantastical."]

[Footnote 619: H. Chettle, in repudiating Greene's sarcasm, attributed it to him.]

[Footnote 620: Dyce, "Shakespeare," I. 27: "Of French and Italian, I apprehend, he knew but little."--Tr.]

[Footnote 621: Sonnet 29.]

[Footnote 622: Sonnet 73.]

[Footnote 623: Sonnet 71.]

[Footnote 624: The part in which he excelled was that of the ghost in "Hamlet."]

[Footnote 625: Greene's "A Groatsworth of Wit," etc.]

[Footnote 626: "He was a respectable man. A good word; what does it mean? He kept a gig."--From Thurtell's trial for the murder of Weare.]

[Footnote 627: The model of an optimist, the hero of one of Voltaire's tales.--Tr.]

[Footnote 628: See his portraits, and in particular his bust.]

[Footnote 629: Especially in his later plays: "Tempest, Twelfth Night."]

[Footnote 630: "Hamlet," III. 3.]

[Footnote 631: Act III. Scene 4.]

[Footnote 632: Act III. Scene 4.]

[Footnote 633: This is why, in the eyes of a writer of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare's style is the most obscure, pretentious, painful, barbarous, and absurd, that could be imagined.]

[Footnote 634: Shakespeare's vocabulary is the most copious of all. It comprises about 15,000 words; Milton's only 8,000.]

[Footnote 635: See the conversation of Laertes and his sister, and of Laertes and Polonius, in "Hamlet." The style is foreign to the situation; and we see here plainly the natural and necessary process of Shakespeare's thought.]

[Footnote 636: "Winter's Tale," I. 2.]

[Footnote 637: One of Molière's characters in "Tartuffe."--Tr.]

[Footnote 638: "Romeo and Juliet," III. 5.]

[Footnote 639: "Henry VIII," II. 3, and many other scenes.]

[Footnote 640: "Much Ado about Nothing." See also the manner in which Henry V in Shakespeare's "King Henry V" pays court to Katharine of France (V. 2).]

[Footnote 641: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 642: Act IV. 2.]

[Footnote 643: Second part of "Henry VI," IV. 6.]

[Footnote 644: "Henry VI," 2d part, IV. 2, 6, 7.]

[Footnote 645: "King Lear," III. 7.]

[Footnote 646: "The Tempest," IV. 1.]

[Footnote 647: See "Troilus and Cressida," II. 3, the jesting manner in which the generals drive on this fierce brute.]

[Footnote 648: "Cymbeline," II. 3.]

[Footnote 649: Ibid. III. 5.]

[Footnote 650: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 3.]

[Footnote 651: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 5.]

[Footnote 652: Ibid. III. 5.]

[Footnote 653: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 4.]

[Footnote 654: "Much Ado about Nothing," II. 1.]

[Footnote 655: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 1.]

[Footnote 656: Ibid. I. 4.]

[Footnote 657: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 4.]

[Footnote 658: First part of "King Henry IV," III. 3.]

[Footnote 659: First Part of "King Henry IV," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 660: Ibid. II. 4.]

[Footnote 661: "Othello," III. 3.]

[Footnote 662: Ibid.]

[Footnote 663: Ibid.]

[Footnote 664: "Othello," III. 3.]

[Footnote 665: "Cymbeline," III. 5.]

[Footnote 666: "Coriolanus," I. 3.]

[Footnote 667: Ibid.]

[Footnote 668: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 5.]

[Footnote 669: "The Tempest," III. 1.]

[Footnote 670: "King Lear," IV. 7.]

[Footnote 671: "O ye're well met: the hoarded plague o' the gods Requite your love! If that I could for weeping, you should hear-- Nay, and you shall hear some.... I'll tell thee what; yet go: Nay but thou shalt stay too: I would my son Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him, His good sword in his hand."--Coriolanus, IV. 2.

See again, "Coriolanus," I. 3, the frank and abandoned triumph of a woman of the people, "I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man."]

[Footnote 672: Ibid. I. 3.]

[Footnote 673: "Othello," II. 3.]

[Footnote 674: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 675: "Othello," II. 1.]

[Footnote 676: Ibid. IV. 1.]

[Footnote 677: See the like cynicism and scepticism in Richard III. Both begin by slandering human nature, and both are misanthropical of malice prepense.]

[Footnote 678: "Othello," II. 3.]

[Footnote 679: See his conversation with Brabantio, then with Roderigo,