difficulty of interpreting his Sonnets would vanish. We should accept them as things of exotic beauty, impersonal and symbolic, which derive their immortality from the intellect and make appeal to the intellect. But Shakespeare's Sonnets are written in the most ruddy, fluent, spontaneous, inspired vernacular that the English language can show. Their frequent anticlimaxes, their constant carelessness, their monotonies, their absurdities, are sustained and floated on a lyrical genius of the first order. There is no poetry in the world quite like them. Shakespeare thus turned the sonnet into something it had never been before; for its ideas and conceits remain absolutely impersonal and supersensuous, while its language has become warm, rippling, and offhand.

It is wonderful that the single bit of Elizabethan gossip that has come down to us should give us what we most want to know about Shakespeare's Sonnets, namely, "how they struck a contemporary." In 1598 Francis Meres, in reviewing current poetry, wrote that "the sweet and witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his 'Venus and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece' and his sugred sonnets among his private friends." Sugar'd sonnets among his private friends! I doubt whether anything has ever been said about Shakespeare's Sonnets that explains them better than these six words. Open them anywhere, and lines or phrases of such rapturous felicity greet us that we seem to hear the wren.

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;

Resembling sire and child and happy mother,

Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing.

When forty summers shall besiege thy brow,

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,

The Sonnets should be dipped into, or read by the half-hour together, singly or in sequences, and without any special effort to understand them; for they have been written in a mood of quietude and relaxation, perhaps the gentlest mood that the gentlest poet ever knew.

In reading them to-day, we are under certain disabilities due to our own age. During the Renaissance the passion for beauty and for the looks of things led men to rediscover the fact that very great beauty merges into something that is a symbol, a divine thing, intellectual, and, as it were, superhuman. The chairs and tables and portraits and palaces of the Renaissance have this splendor for the eye. The Italian and French literatures of the period are steeped in a passion for objects, for statues, processions, pictures, personal beauty. This passion invaded England and attacked the poets. Spenser was its most eminent victim, but Shakespeare by no means escaped. His "Venus and Adonis" and his "Lucrece" are plastic, beautymaddened, Italianate performances-pagan if you like, and a part of that pagan period which produced the supreme animal perfection and godlike unmorality of Titian's portraits. Sheer beauty was felt as a power, a dynamo, an intoxicating influence.

The symbolic, impersonal quality of all the Cinquecento work is the inimitable part of it. Modern painters and poets are forever expressing their intimate personal feelings; and we have had during the last century such a downpour of the personal in the work of Byron, Wordsworth, and Keats; of Tennyson, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Musset, Heine, and the rest, that our very conception of a poet is of a man who writes a private journal in verse, who hugs himself and sings. He uses ideas and abstractions merely as a means of expressing his private feelings and personal experiences. But the Cinquecento school made use of its private feelings and personal experiences to express abstract ideas. You will say that the matter is of small importance, so long as something beautiful is produced in either case. But the matter is important from the point of view of autobiography. For instance: if you credit Tennyson with having felt toward a particular man the sentiments which he expresses in "In Memoriam" for Arthur Hallam, you do right. But if you credit Shakespeare with truly feeling toward a particular man the sentiments which he expresses in the Sonnets for his patron, you do wrong.

Tennyson is undoubtedly laying open his private feelings; for such is the poet's ideal in Tennyson's age. Shakespeare is expressing a mood which he understands, has felt, when or how we know notperhaps only in that heaven of invention where he found Romeo, Imogen, and King Lear. The Shakespeare of the Sonnets is merely one of Shakespeare's characters, and he sprang out of the book and volume of Shakespeare's brain,— out of all the trivial,

fond records that youth and observation copied there, - even as Romeo, Imogen, or King Lear sprang from the same source. And this personage of the Sonnets disappeared — just as Romeo, Imogen, and King Lear disappeared with the occasion that gave each of them birth. Just what the circumstances were that gave rise to the Sonnets we do not know; but even if we knew all their details, we should still have to understand them by a light which we are apt to forget the light of The Sonnet.

I

Shakespeare's Sonnets were almost certainly paid for by his patron, and were certainly handed about freely among the wits of the time. To our taste it seems absurd that Shakespeare should have written. seventeen sonnets to a young nobleman, beseeching the lad to beget children in order that his beauty might be transmitted to posterity. But we must remember that the exchange of absurd sonnets was a social game, lately introduced from France, which everyone was playing when Shakespeare wrote. can go as far as believing that the pampered boy was handsome, and perhaps resembled a portrait of Adonis by Giorgione; but I cannot believe that Shakespeare was sincerely anxious about the continuance of the human species by this youth. If it were the case of Tennyson, I should believe every word the poet said. I should be surprised, of course, that any man should have strong feelings about such a matter; but I should accept Tennyson's word for it. In the case of Shakespeare, however, I feel that what the sociologists call the "playinstinct" is involved. To speak brutally, it is a joke. The first seventeen Sonnets, when viewed in this

light, thus explain their artificiality as perfectly as if Shakespeare had written them in an archaic language. The extraordinary beauty of certain lines in them fails to raise in our minds any problems as to Shakespeare's biography: we accept the lines as poetry. And indeed the Twelfth Sonnet is one of the most beautiful that Shakespeare ever wrote:

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When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Now it is natural to suppose that Shakespeare, having discovered a new talent in himself in writing the first seventeen Sonnets, proceeded to write many more in the same manner. The order in which they are printed is not quite authoritative, for they are supposed to have been published piratically by the booksellers. The general theme of them is the celebration of ideal love - precisely the theme of Dante and of Petrarch. The mood they depict is not the mood of one who is in love, but the mood of one who knows what love is. There is a monotony about the theme, as Shakespeare himself several times points