punster and a smutster" and a "great snob" for making paladins of the two young peasants in Cymbeline, owing to the mere fact that royal blood coursed secretly in their veins.

1

It remains true that Shakespeare is inscrutable,—he "ne'er left his bosom's gate ajar "; yet he is not so wholly elusive as Matthew Arnold would have us believe; 1 nor can the patient and attentive student by means of negative and analogical processes fail to discern at least some traces of the distinctive lineaments of his genius. Like not a few of the greatest creators of world-literature, Cervantes, Molière, Scott, Shakespeare was not a self-conscious artist. His literary work, conceived as he pursued a round of avocations that would have quite sufficiently absorbed a more than ordinarily successful man of talent, must have found expression and taken form, without extraordinary elaboration; but with a perfectly amazing rapidity. He was evidently no eccentric; to the exhaustion incident upon preliminary labours which has sterilised so many men of first-rate talent he was obviously a stranger; of the seclusion which so many deem indispensable to perform intellectual labour he was manifestly oblivious. The inner necessity that prompted him to such work as he performed must have been strong, nay, overpowering. As with Sir Walter Scott or Napoleon I., the ostensible pretext (even to himself) for an amount of effort that may well seem to us superhuman was the alleged necessity of building up a property, an ancestral mansion, or an empire-in each case for phantom heirs to inherit. In each case, in strict reality, the work must have been its own stimulus and its achievement the main, truly substantial, reward. As in the case of Scott, we have contemporary evidence which seems to us to point decisively

1" Others abide our question. Thou art free." "Selfschool'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure."

to Shakespeare's exceptional sociability and to the sweetness and serenity of his temper. Apart from his work, however, there is no necessity for believing that Shakespeare was in the ordinary traffic of human intercourse (any more than Scott) an exceptionally brilliant man. Fuller's brilliant word-picture of Ben Jonson as conversationally a solid high-built Spanish galleon, and Shakespeare as a trim English man-of-war, taking advantage of every wind, and sailing round and round his adversary by sheer quickness of wit and invention, was, we must remember, a purely imaginary one printed after the Restoration. Had Shakespeare really excelled so greatly in conversation as his great contemporary Jonson, or Ben's still more illustrious namesake the incomparable Doctor of a later age, we could hardly have failed to have specific reference to such a talent. Ben Jonson, for instance, in his Timber (published 1641), in which he so cordially praises his old rival, as "honest and of an open nature," a man to be loved, and his memory honoured "on this side idolatry," never thinks of comparing him as a talker with Lord Bacon, whose discourse was such that "a hearer could not cough or look aside from him without loss." In Shakespeare's case, as in that of so many typical men of letters, we are prepared to believe that the faculty of expression. was by a subtle alchemy transmuted and the man himself, as it were, transfigured by the magic of the pen.

To continue the process of analogy: Shakespeare, like other men of genius who stand nearest in relation to his particular stamp, borrowed materials very freely, but imitated in the strictest sense very little. Of the distilling process, and sedulous imitation of artistic effects as practised by such masters as Milton and Tennyson, he was altogether innocent. His art, we may say in fine, was consistently more of the subconscious than of the selfconscious order.

Once more, it seems to us, does Shakespeare resemble Scott in his master qualities of humour, reality of observation, and constructive imagination. Beside his Richards. and Henrys, as beside the James I. and Louis XI. of Sir Walter, how shadowy and faint do most elaborate historical portraits appear, even those of a Motley or Macaulay! The humorous figures of his comedy-veritable giants, some of these stand equally apart: Falstaff, Autolycus, Bottom, Dogberry, Sir Toby, unrivalled, perhaps, in any literature, unapproached in English, save only by Sterne and Dickens. The same in even a greater degree applies to his tragic figures, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Isabella and Claudia, Othello and Iago, for instance. Reflect only for a moment on the energy, the brain power, the passion, the throbbing humanity in the contrast between these last two characters alone; and then the extraordinary and lifelike vividness with which the crisis of those two men's lives and those of the group depending on them are adapted and concentrated into two brief hours of stage dialogue and the successive fevers of delight, anxiety, wrath, dismay, and anguish excited in the mind of every spectator who possesses a heart and a brain. Where out of Shakespeare can this overpowering effect upon the imagination of man be approached? Macaulay cannot be far wrong when he says, "This play of love and jealousy is the master-work of the whole world." Shakespeare added to all these qualities, as we have seen, an almost superabundant wit. He abused the gift sometimes, it cannot be denied. On the other hand, we must remember that many of his jests (such as those in Much Ado and Twelfth Night), now decidedly obscure, were momentarily the most exquisite of all, the most topical, and consequently the most highly relished at the time. Out of a play, more than almost every form of literary composition, virtue inevitably

evaporates with the lapse of time. But for the most part Shakespeare's wit is still pregnant in the highest sense, and reminds the reader of Porson's saying, "Wit is in general the finest sense in the world." "Wit and Truth (true reasoning) I discovered to be one and the same."

A

So completely free is Shakespeare from the meshes of anything approaching a philosophical system, that one would hesitate to pronounce him definitely either an optimist or a pessimist. For "utter freedom of thought," as Goethe observed, not infrequently in the direction of irony and cynicism, it is difficult to surpass some passages in Troilus and Cressida; while speeches in Hamlet and Macbeth are indicative in the strongest way of a deepseated weariness and nausea of the self-complacent optimism of everyday respectability and worldly success. rather gloomy philosophy of life, by no means wholly free from fatalism, emerges from such plays as Measure for Measure, Othello, and even Romeo and Juliet, in which the most vital issues are shown to be woven inextricably into the merest chapter of accidents. Shakespeare had seen too much of life at first hand to ignore or underrate the value of luck. But in his most typical moods, especially, perhaps, in his later plays, what amazes us is the centrality and the serenity of his point of view. Shakespeare this one point is clear-had always been a clean and strenuous worker. The incentive to be active and to do things had kept him out of the dark corners which are as likely eventually to warp the artist as to dissolve the man. Charles Lamb was fortunate in his epithet when he wrote of Shakespeare's plays as "this manly book." Of the sickly, decadent "cast of thought" which has come to pervade so much of our literature, there is absolutely no trace in Shakespeare. Such modern subjects as ugly disease and painful mediocrity, the bête humaine or the hideous lusts and morbidities which humanity in all ages.