importuned by several images at once, he knocked two or three of them forcibly together; but I believe that the temptation to do so came chiefly from his delight in the new marriage of words thus consummated. Indeed, we spread a radical misconception of the poet's art, of the means whereby he gains his hold upon our sensibilities, when we lay M. Taine's stress upon the genesis of his imagery. It is not the pictures of form and colour that are the principal ingredients in the poet's charm: they complete the spell, but are not the essence of it. What takes us captive is the gathering up of ideas in new groups under new bands of words; our senses are ravished by new combinations of words in a poem as by fresh harmonies in an oratorio. In a new combination of words, of course, we are affected by much beyond the mere sound, though that, doubtless, is a large element to many minds. The words appeal to us by multitudinous associations, awake slumbering echoes in many different chambers of our being: the charm of the new encounter is that it rouses and locks together many memories never before united. Several people in the Elizabethan age, or indeed in any other age, could have led us through “a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which conceal you and close your path, which delight and dazzle your eyes by the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their bloom." Spenser comes very much nearer this description than Shakespeare, to my mind: to me it conveys not the remotest approach to the peculiar effect of Shakespeare. Simple and easy as the operation seems, the power of fresh and effective word-combination is one of the rarest of gifts: it is indispensable to a great poet; and part of Shakespeare's main distinction among great poets is the possession of this power in an incomparable degree. Something in the effect of his combinations upon us is due, no doubt, to change in the usage of words: many words whose conjunction raised no surprise in an Elizabethan, have since wandered away from each other and gathered other associations about them, so that their reunion in our minds is like the reunion of youthful friends in old age. The words lay near each other then, and had little variety of idea to bring into collision: now, in this later stage of their existence, they have lived long apart, they surprise us by their mutual recognition, and they bring many memories into shifting indefinite comparison, indefinably charming collision. In reading Shakespeare's predecessors, we often meet with what appear to have been the suggestions or seeds of passages in his plays; and the comparison of the suggestion with its development gives a most vivid notion of the amplitude and rapidity of growth in Shakespeare's mind. So abundant and mobile were words and images in that soil, so warm its generating force, that a seed fallen there at once germinated and shot up with the utmost facility of assimilation into a complete organism. Take a simple case. When Gaveston, in Marlowe's "Edward II.," returns from banishment, and is recognised as the king's favourite, he is besieged by a host of hunters for patronage. Among the rest is a traveller, at whom Gaveston looks for a moment, and then says "Let me see thou wouldst do well to wait at my trencher and tell me lies at dinner-time; and as I like your discoursing, I'll have you. Shakespeare seems to have been tickled with this deliberate utilisation of the traveller, for he makes the Bastard in "King John,” when he has obtained royal favour, take delight in the prospect of the same entertainment. But in Shakespeare's mind the idea ripens into a complete picture of well-fed satisfaction, condescension, obsequiousness, and rambling after-dinner talk ("King John,” i. I, 190). : III. CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. The most general reader is impressed by the width of Shakespeare's range through varied effects of strength, pathos, and humour and minute methodical reading brings an increase of admiration. It must not, however, be supposed that Shakespeare's poetry embraces all the qualities to be found in all other poets— that every effect producible by poetry on the human spirit finds its most conspicuous exemplification in his plays. He fills us with wonder, with submissive awe, with heroic energy; he runs us through the gamut of tears and laughter, smiling and sadness: no mortal man has struck so many different notes; yet with all his marvellous versatility, he had his own individual touch, and he left an inexhaustible variety of notes to be sounded. Shakespeare was a man of wonderful range; but his plays are not a measure of the effects that lie within the compass of poetic language. The might that Shakespeare excels in expressing is not the might of slow and regular agencies, but the might of swift and confounding agencies. His power is figured in the boast of Prospero "To the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak The awful energies that he sets in motion move with lightning swiftness and overpowering suddenness: the sublime influence does not soar and sail above us; it comes about our senses, flashing and crackling, dazzling and confounding, like Jove's own bolt. His words pass over us like the burst and ear-deafening voice of the oracle over Cleomenes, surprising the hearer into nothingness; or flame before our amazed eyes like the sight-outrunning activity of Ariel on board the king's ship in the tempest. Milton's sublimity has not the same life, the same magic energy: it is statelier and less intimate the effect is not so sudden and overwhelming. There is an excitement akin to madness in the swiftly concentrated energy of some of Shakespeare's occasional bursts. Lear's curses are quivering with compressed force "All the stored vengeances of heaven fall On her ungrateful top! Strike her young bones, And again "Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air Hang fated o'er men's faults light on thy daughters!" There is a similar half-maddening excitement compressed, as it were, with strong hand, but trembling on the verge of frantic explosion, in Lucrece's invocation of Night— "O comfort-killing Night, image of hell! Claudio's anticipation of the horrors of death ("Measure for Measure," iii. 1, 118), Lady Macbeth's invocation (i. 5, 40), Calphurnia's description of the portents ("Julius Cæsar," ii. 2, 13), Othello's imprecation on himself (v. 2, 277), are pregnant with a similar energy. Such passages are few and far between, as in a volcanic country you find many grandeurs with supreme accumulations here and there. In Macbeth's dark hints to his wife about the plot to murder Banquo, the sublime passion is calmer and less thrilling, but there is a lurking devil of swift excitability even in that lofty passage : "Macb. There's comfort yet; they are assailable: Lady Macb. What's to be done? Macb. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale! Light thickens; and the crow Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; While night's black agents to their preys do rouse. I am not aware that any passage can be quoted from Shakespeare with the composed, stately, sustained grandeur of Milton's description of Satan: Shakespeare's sublime agencies do not move with the same massive dignity—they are instinct with quick life and motion, and their change of attitude is like lightning. The planetary Miltonic grandeur was not, indeed, suited to his purposes as a dramatist. A Satan of Miltonic dignity put upon the stage must have appeared more or less of a bombast Tamburlaine. Cæsar, "the foremost man of all this world," who, as Casca mockingly said, "bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus," and who, as he said himself, was constant as the northern star," is Shakespeare's nearest approach to Miltonic grandeur of conception; but the grandeur is not sustained as in Milton, it is made up by momentary glances of the poet's swift-ranging imagination. Othello is grand with a volcanic grandeur: he is easily moved; he blazes out suddenly with such commands as― "Hold, for your lives! He that stirs next to carve for his own rage Henry V. was a favourite with the poet, and the prologue to the play where he appears, after shaking off the base contagious clouds that smothered up his beauty from the world, is conceived in a spirit of swelling sublimity; but mark the nature and attitude of the powers held in reserve by the mighty monarch—; "O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire In accordance with this characteristic, Shakespeare's descriptions of storms and tempests, or the dread witching hour with devilry in the mysterious background; of hurly-burly, riot, and confusion, or vague impending terrors; of hell let loose or hell pent up and stealthily preparing to spring out,-are far and away incomparable. Description is more in the way of the epic poet than of the dramatist; but the dramatist also, even in the modern drama, often has occasion to describe what his personages saw before they made their appearance on the stage. Shakespeare loses no opportunity for description. Sometimes, as in the beginning of the Second Act of "Othello," he makes personages on the stage describe with vivid effect what they see taking place behind the scenes the struggle of vessel after vessel on a fiercely tempestuous sea. In "Pericles," he brings a storm as it were on the stage, asking the audience to imagine the stage to be the deck of the sea-tost mariners, and making his personages speak and act as if on shipboard. The scene ("Pericles," iii. 1) is one of Shakespeare's most magnificent passages. The Storms in the social world, "the grappling vigour and rough frown of war," were large elements in the Elizabethan drama, and Shakespeare entered into them with delighted energy. various circumstances of war are described in his historical plays with a spirit and vividness that one might expect from a professional man of blood, possessed with the habitual fierceness of M. Taine's typical Elizabethan. His imagination revelled in the scenic glories and horrors of invasion and conflict. picture of the invading army in "Richard II." ii. 3, 95— The carries his peculiar thrill in its compressed force: and there is a still more unhinging panic-striking energy in the announcement made to King John (v. 1, 35)— "And wild amazement hurries up and down He describes the night watch before the battle with the dreadful note of preparation ("Henry V." iv., Prologue), and the bloody field after the battle ("Henry V." iv. 7, 74). The actual horrors of extended conflict he would not seem to have realised minutely, or to have considered fitted for narration, except in such special episodes as the death of York and Suffolk (" Henry V." iv. 6). Conflict on the large scale he expressed in vague powerful figures, such as the following in a speech of the Bastard's (" King John,' ii. 1, 350)— “Ha, majesty! how high thy glory towers, When the rich blood of kings is set on fire! O, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel: In undetermined differences of kings. Why stand these royal fronts amazed thus ? Cry 'havoc !' kings; back to the stained field You equal potents, fiery kindled spirits! Then let confusion of one part confirm The other's peace; till then, blows, blood, and death!" |