of his own qualities, giving, it may be, to one his wit, to another his philosophic doubt, to another his love of action, to another the simplicity and constancy that he finds deep in his own nature. There is no thrill of feeling communicated from the printed page but has first been alive in the mind of the author; there was nothing alive in his mind that was not intensely and sincerely felt. Plays like those of Shakespeare cannot be written in cold blood; they call forth the man's whole energies, and take toll of the last farthing of his wealth of sympathy and experience. In the plays we may learn what are the questions that interest Shakespeare most profoundly and recur to his mind with most insistence; we may note how he handles his story, what he rejects, and what he alters, changing its purport and fashion; how many points he is content to leave dark; what matters he chooses to decorate with the highest resources of his romantic art, and what he gives over to be the sport of triumphant ridicule; how in every type of character he emphasises what most appeals to his instinct and imagination, so that we see the meaning of character more plainly than it is to be seen in life. We share in the emotions that are aroused in him by certain situations and events; we are made to respond to the strange imaginative appeal of certain others; we know, more clearly than if we had heard it uttered, the verdict that he passes on certain characters and certain kinds of conduct. He has made us acquainted with all that he sees and all that he feels, he has spread out before us the scroll that contains his interpretation of the world;-how dare we complain that he has hidden himself from our knowledge? The main cause of these difficulties is a misconception of the nature of poetry, and of the workings of a poet's mind. Among readers of poetry there are men and women not a few who challenge a poet to deliver a short statement of his doctrine and creed. To positive and rigid natures the roundness of the world is bewildering; they must needs have a four-square scheme of things, mapped out in black and white; and when they meet with anything that does not fit into their scheme, they do not "as a stranger give it welcome"; they either ignore it, or treat it as a monster. They are perfectly at ease with general maxims and principles, which are simple only because they are partly false. What does not admit of this kind of statement they incline to treat as immoral, not without some sense of personal indignity. They ask a poet what he believes, and the answer does not satisfy them. A poet believes nothing but what he sees. The power of his utterance springs from this, that all his statements carry with them the immediate warrant of experience. Where dull minds rest on proverbs and apply them, he reverses the process; his brilliant general statements of truth are sudden divinations born of experience, sparks thrown out into the darkness from the luminous centre of his own self-knowledge. Dramatic genius, which is sometimes treated as though it could dispense with experience, is in truth a capacity for experience, and for widening and applying experience by intelligence and sympathy. When we find a poet speaking confidently of matters that seem to lie wholly outside the possible limits of his own immediate knowledge, we are tempted to credit him with magic powers. We are deceived; we forget the profusion of impressions that are poured in upon us, every day and every hour, through the channels of the senses, so that the quickest mind cannot grasp or realise a hundredth part of them. A story has often been told of an ignorant servant-girl, who in the delirium of fever recited long screeds of Hebrew, which she had learned, all unconsciously, from overhearing the mutterings of the Hebrew scholar who was her master. The fine frenzy of a poet's brain gives to it something of the same abnormal quickness of apprehension and memory. When the mind is stirred by passion, or heated by the fire of imagination, all kinds of trivial and forgotten things rise to the surface and take on a new significance. Try as we may, we can never find Shakespeare talking in vague and general terms of that which lay beyond his vision. He testifies of what he knows. But if we attempt to argue backwards and to recreate his personal history from a study of his cosmic wisdom, we fall into a trap. There are so many ways of learning a thing; and so many of the most important lessons are repeated daily. Take any random example of Shakespeare's lore: How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds Or, again: O Opportunity, thy guilt is great ; 'Tis thou that execut'st the traitor's treason; Thou set'st the wolf where he the lamb may get; Whoever plots the sin, thou point'st the season. It is reasonable to think that there were events and moments in Shakespeare's life which brought this truth home to him. But who can guess what they were? The truth itself is proved and known by every infant. A similar insecurity attaches to almost all inferences made from Shakespeare's writings to the events of his life. He speaks with unmistakably deep feeling of the faithlessness of friends, of inequality in the marriage-bond, of lightness in woman, and of lust in man. Phantom events have been fitted to all these utterances; and indeed many of them do irresistibly suggest a background of bitter personal reminiscence. But the generative moments between experience and his soul have passed beyond recovery, as they were doubtless many of them lost to his own remembrance long before he died. What remains is the child of his passion; and that child is immortal. There is a description in Johnson's account of his friend Savage which might be more extensively applied to the workings of poetic, and particularly of dramatic, genius. "His mind," says Johnson, "was in an uncommon degree vigorous and active. His judgment was accurate, his apprehension quick, and his memory so tenacious, that he was frequently observed to know what he had learned from others, in a short time, better than those by whom he was informed; and could frequently recollect incidents, with all their combination of circumstances, which few would have regarded at the present time, but which the quickness of his apprehension impressed upon him. He had the art of escaping from his own reflections, and accommodating himself to every new scene. To this quality is to be imputed the extent of his knowledge, compared with the small time which he spent in visible endeavours to acquire it. He mingled in cursory conversation with the same steadiness of attention as others apply to a lecture; and amidst the appearance of thoughtless gaiety lost no new idea that was started, nor any hint that could be improved. He had therefore made in coffee-houses the same proficiency as others in their closets; and it is remarkable, that the writings of a man of little education and little reading have an air of learning scarcely to be found in any other performances." Reinstate the Elizabethan taverns in place of the coffee-houses, and every word of this description is probably true of Shakespeare. If we may infer anything from his writings, we may be sure of this, that he had the art of giving himself wholly to his company, and accommodating himself to every new scene. This is a strong personal trait in him, though it does not help us to picture him as what is usually called a character. He presents none of those angles and whimsicalities which lend themselves to caricature. Those of his contemporaries who tried to parody his style generally fastened on the high strain of rhetoric which he assigns to such a character as Hotspur By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap, To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon. It cannot be denied that Shakespeare had a great love of sumptuous rhetoric; he had also a very happy, humorous knack of contrasting it with reality. Here, as elsewhere, he is found on both sides. Sometimes he seems to be caught in the business and desire of the world, and to be inviting us to commit ourselves to a party. But he is not to be trusted; he will rise to his heights again, and look out on the battle from the mount of humour and contemplation. Some of the most living characters in his plays are those who prefer thus to look on life-Biron, Falstaff, Hamlet, Prospero. They have all, in one sense or another, failed at practical business; but the width and truth of their vision is never impaired, and they are dear to Shakespeare. Shakespeare, then, was not a character in the narrow sense of that word, or in any sense which may be readily grasped by minds accustomed to shorthand |