dous impression of the heroic. Had it been necessary for dramatic effect, Shakespeare would have given us heroes; but his mind ran on pathetic climaxes, which are the making of heroines and the marring of heroes. Another consequence of Shakespeare's natal benignity was that he could not be cynical. Now and then he has occasion to try. The plot of the "Taming of the Shrew" gave him an opportunity for cynicism; but Shakespeare burlies it over into goodhumor: he keeps the plot farcical, boisterous, and fanciful. Petruchio is a sound-hearted man, and is really very fond of Katherine. On several occasions, however, Shakespeare tried to write a really cynical play, and in such cases he always produced a bad play. For instance, a true cynic would have written a good play about Timon or Troilus. Shakespeare did not know that pessimism constitutes a field of art by itself. Pessimism is not a mood that a man can drop into, and then do something clever, which will compete with the work of the professionals. Pessimism is a serious business to be a good pessimist requires lifelong study. A man must have been morbid in his youth, sick perhaps, unjustly thwarted, clever, and misunderstood. He must, before reaching the age of seventeen, have cried out, "Darkness be thou my light!" and proceeded to live in shadows, to luxuriate in depression and despair. The greatest pessimist who ever lived was Leopardi, who complained that the reading of Byron destroyed his gift. It appears that Byron was such a milk-and-water fellow compared to him, that Leopardi felt his divine powers of pessimism (il mio pessimismo) desert him when he read the verses of the pseudo-pessimist: he could not even get up a good fit of rancor in which to denounce the impostor. We must agree that Byron, in spite of his early training, is an amateur pessimist compared to the continental practitioners. The English are too cheery, too healthy, and live too much in the open air, to be true pessimists. And Shakespeare was the most cheery, healthy, and open-air Englishman of them all. Such a man would never even have dreamed of writing up a cynical theme, unless he happened to be out of sorts, sick perhaps, cross, or not himself. And Shakespeare, with all the genius and all the sincere, passionate acrimony which he displays in "Timon" and in "Troilus," has done no more than exhibit the nervous depression of an optimista sort of peevishness, very different from the logic, the cruelty, and the perverse beauty of true cynicism. Let us lay aside speculation and open the plays at random. Shylock, Hotspur, Falstaff, Mercutio, Polonius, Caliban, Bottom, Petruchio, Toby Belch, have the grotesque, homely vitality of medieval art. How did these characters come into being? They start from their frames, and seem to exist apart from their context. Yet it is to the context that they owe their existence. In Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry you do not find any trace of this peculiar power to draw character. In his Sonnets and poems he gives no inkling that such figures would come at his call from the abysses of his imagination. It was the pressure of drama that evoked them. In the Sonnets we see Shakespeare as a perfectly charming and rather helpless person, with an extreme and even angelic sweetness of disposition, musical rather than witty, and at moments as a half-godlike Orpheus in his gift of song. The "Lucrece" and the "Venus and Adonis" reveal him as an amazingly talented, luxurious, and somewhat artificial court poet. They are decorations for a Borgia palace. The influence of patronage is to be felt in the two longer poems; and if Shakespeare had been born ten years earlier, and had come up to London at the time when the stage was not in condition to absorb his dramatic talents, he would have written metrical romances that would have out-Spensered Spenser. We should have had more court fairylands. But once in harness at the theatre, a kind of good sense, or indifference, or love of his freedom, kept him at his treadmill of playwriting. It turned out that he could write, or learned to write, any kind of poetry that a situation called for. His characters are by-products as it were, discoveries. He puts the story into the crucible of his mind and the characters are the result. The "Merry Wives of Windsor" is a play not founded on a tale or a piece of history that touched Shakespeare's fancy; but is a thing manufactured to order; therefore it contains no Dogberry, no Toby Belch, no Touchstone. Unless Shakespeare's interest was excited by a story, his powers were not awakened. It is very remarkable that Shakespeare never developed a consistent technique, but to the end of his life was always at the mercy of his theme. "Romeo and Juliet" is one of the earliest of his plays and one of the best. His greatest tragedies were written in alternate years with his very worst plays. All the scholars, though they differ as to detail, agree in placing "Julius Cæsar," "Hamlet," "Othello," Macbeth," "King Lear" in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and in sandwiching between these masterpieces the atrocious plays of "Troilus and Cressida," "Measure for Measure," "Timon of Athens," and "Pericles." Is there another example of a very great artist who did his best and his worst work during the same decade? I do not know how to explain the matter, except by imagining that Shakespeare's instinct in the choice of tragic themes was unreliable. That he was in a tragic mood during the period in question is indubitable; but it seems to have been an accident with him whether he hit upon a theme that was suitable to his genius or not. If he happened to choose a bad theme, it ruined his play; for he had no conventional dramatic practices with which to sustain the piece. If we have regard merely to Shakespeare's literary vehicle, we can see that his verse, his language and turns of thought, his metaphors and his music, show a consistent development from the beginning to the end of his life. His speech bewrayeth him. His form of thought becomes ever more rapid and elliptical; and the critics have had recourse to metrical theories in their attempts to date the plays. But we have no clue to Shakespeare's progress in that art which makes him Shakespeare: his dramatic craft seems. like a series of miracles done upon a background of chaos. This lack of conventions was part and parcel of Shakespeare's age. The Elizabethan stage was a field upon which poets tried experiments in playwrit |