the silence which follows." In the main, however, the order justifies itself to an attentive reader. I have called Sonnets 127 to the end an appendix because they do not, like the first hundred and twenty-six, form a connected series on a single theme, but are largely concerned with an incident already handled in the earlier part of the first series, only from another point of view. It looks as if all the sonnets not addressed to the friend had been thrown together without arrangement at the end of the series with other occasional sonnets. The two concluding sonnets, which are alternative studies of a Greek epigram, have no relevancy to the rest, and the 146th sonnet, which must be the Envoy on the model of the concluding sonnet of Astrophel and Stella, comes next to a merely pretty piece of vers de société. The point of connection between the main series and the sonnets to a lady in the appendix is Sonnet 144, which sets out how the poet has "two loves,” a man and a woman, an angel and a devil, and how the "worser spirit" is endeavouring to corrupt the better. The incident is plainly that referred to in Sonnets 40-42, and it is handled again from various points of view in Sonnets 133–136, 143. Most of the other sonnets in the appendix describe the poet's attraction and repulsion to this woman, who, without great beauty and without virtue, had laid a spell upon him. The mood varies from tender or playful supplication, as in 128 and 132, to pathetic remonstrance, as in 139 and 140, or fierce denunciation mingled with brutal jests. So far as not a few of these sonnets are concerned, we may feel, in the familiar words of Hallam, that "it is impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never written them." Except for the magnificent Sonnet 129, the loss to the world would not have been great had they perished; though we should have lost the tender grace of 132, and such fine openings as those of 148 and 151. Professor Minto has defended them "as exercises of skill, undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace." Such a view seems to me to make them altogether intolerable by removing their one justification of sincerity, and also it does not seem to fit the facts. There are too many details not now understood (e.g. in 134 and 137) for us to presume them altogether imaginary. It has not been thought necessary in this edition to supply a résumé of the contents of either series. Those who come to them here for the first time will find the sections into which they have been divided a sufficient guide to their subject-matter. It may be worth while to conclude this Introduction by quoting two judgments as to the literary merit of the sonnets by persons whose capacity for estimating them will not be disputed. Wordsworth, in the supplementary essay to his Preface (1815), says: "There is extant a small Volume of miscellaneous Poems in which Shakespeare expresses his own feelings in his own Person. . . . There is not a part of the writings of this Poet where is found in an equal compass a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously expressed," and in a footnote he adds: "For the various merits of thought and language in Shakespeare's Sonnets, see Numbers 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 54, 64, 66, 68, 73, 76, 86, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 129, and many others." The other opinion shall be Hallam's, which is the more weighty as the enthusiastic friendship which the sonnets chronicle offended his taste, and he went so far in his repugnance as to wish that Shakespeare had never written them. "They rise in estimation as we attentively read and reflect upon them. No one ever entered more fully than Shakespeare into the character of this species of poetry, which admits of no expletive imagery, no merely ornamental line" (Literature of Europe, III, 38). |