So many years ere I shall shear the fleece: Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave. Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely! To shepherds, looking on their silly sheep, Is far beyond a prince's delicates, His viands sparkling in a golden cup, His body couchèd in a curious bed, When care, mistrust, and treason wait on him."* "A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool; - a miserable world! As I do live by food, I met a fool; Who laid him down and basked him in the sun, In good set terms,- and yet a motley fool. 'Good-morrow, fool,' quoth I; 'No, sir,' quoth he, And looking on it with lack-luster eye, Says, very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock; Thus may we see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags: 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine; And after one hour more 'twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And I did laugh, sans intermission, An hour by his dial."† *"3 King Henry VI.," ii. 5. "As You Like It,” ii. 7. No slight versatility of mind and pliancy of fancy could pass at will from scenes such as these to the ward of Eastcheap and the society which heard the chimes at midnight. One of the reasons of the rarity of great imaginative works is, that in very few cases is this capacity for musing solitude combined with that of observing mankind. A certain constitutional though latent melancholy is essential to such a nature. This is the exceptional characteristic in Shakespeare. All through his works you feel you are reading the popular author, the successful man; but through them all there is a certain tinge of musing sadness pervading, and as it were softening, their gayety. Not a trace can be found of "eating cares " or narrow and mind-contracting toil; but everywhere. there is, in addition to shrewd sagacity and buoyant wisdom, a refining element of chastening sensibility, which prevents sagacity from being rough and shrewdness from becoming cold. He had an eye for either sort of life: "Why, let the strucken deer go weep, The hart ungallèd play; For some must watch, while some must sleep: So runs the world away."* In another point also, Shakespeare as he was must be carefully contrasted with the estimate that would be formed of him from such delineations as that of Falstaff, and that was doubtless frequently made by casual though only by casual frequenters of "The Mermaid." It has been said that the mind of Shakespeare contained within it the mind of Scott; it remains to be observed that it contained also the mind of Keats. For, beside the delineation of human life, and beside also the delineation of nature, there remains also for the poet a third subject, the delineation of fancies. Of course these, be they what they may, are like to and were originally borrowed either from man or *Hamlet," iii. 2. from nature,- from one or from both together. We know but two things in the simple way of direct experience, and whatever else we know must be in some mode or manner compacted out of them. Yet "books are a substantial world, both pure and good," and so are fancies too. In all countries men have devised to themselves a whole series of half-divine creations, mythologies Greek and Roman, fairies, angels; beings who may be, for aught we know, but with whom in the mean time we can attain to no conversation. The most known of these mythologies are the Greek and - what is, we suppose, the second epoch of the Gothic-the fairies; and it so happens that Shakespeare has dealt with them both, and in a remarkable manner. We are not, indeed, of those critics who profess simple and unqualified admiration for the poem of "Venus and Adonis." It seems intrinsically, as we know it from external testimony to have been, a juvenile production, written when Shakespeare's nature might be well expected to be crude and unripened. Power is shown, and power of a remarkable kind; but it is not displayed in a manner that will please or does please the mass of men. In spite of the name of its author, the poem has never been popular; and surely this is sufficient. Nevertheless, it is remarkable as a literary exercise, and as a treatment of a singular though unpleasant subject. The fanciful class of poems differ from others in being laid, so far as their scene goes, in a perfectly unseen world. The type of such productions is Keats's "Endymion." We mean that it is the type, not as giving the abstract perfection of this sort of art, but because it shows and embodies both its excellences and defects in a very marked and prominent manner. In that poem there are no passions and no actions, there is no art and no life; but there is beauty, and that is meant to be enough, and to a reader of one-andtwenty it is enough and more. What are exploits or speeches, what is Cæsar or Coriolanus, what is a tragedy like "Lear," or a real view of human life in any kind whatever, to people who do not know and do not care what human life is? In early youth it is perhaps not true that the passions, taken generally, are particularly violent, or that the imagination is in any remarkable degree powerful; but it is certain. that the fancy (which, though it be in the last resort but a weak stroke of that same faculty which when it strikes hard we call imagination, may yet for this purpose be looked on as distinct) is particularly wakeful, and that the gentler species of passions are more absurd than they are afterwards. And the literature of this period of human life runs naturally away from the real world; away from the less ideal portion of it, from stocks and stones, and aunts and uncles, and rests on mere half-embodied sentiments, which in the hands of great poets assume a kind of semi-personality, and are, to the distinction between things and persons, "as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine."* The "Sonnets" of Shakespeare belong exactly to the same school of poetry. They are not the sort of verses to take any particular hold upon the mind permanently and forever, but at a certain period they take too much. For a young man to read in the spring of the year, among green fields and in gentle air, they are the ideal. As first-of-April poetry they are perfect. - The "Midsummer Night's Dream" is of another order. If the question were to be decided by "Venus and Adonis," in spite of the unmeasured panegyrics of many writers, we should be obliged in equity to hold that as a poet of mere fancy, Shakespeare was much inferior to the late Mr. Keats, and even to meaner men. Moreover, we should have been prepared with some refined reasonings to show that it was unlikely that a poet with so much hold on reality, in life and nature, both in solitude and in society, should have also a similar command over unreality should possess a command not only of flesh and blood, but * Tennyson, "Locksley Hall." * of the imaginary entities which the self-in working fancy brings forth,- impalpable conceptions of mere mind; quædam simulacra modis pallentia miris; thin ideas, which come we know not whence, and are given us we know not why. But unfortunately for this ingenious if not profound suggestion, Shakespeare in fact possessed the very faculty which it tends to prove that he would not possess. He could paint Poins and Falstaff, but he excelled also in fairy legends. He had such "Seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.”† As, for example, the idea of Puck or Queen Mab, of Ariel, or such a passage as the following: "Puck. Fairy. How now, spirit! whither wander you? Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough briar, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, In those freckles live their savors: Our queen and all our elves come here anon. Puck. The king doth keep his revels here to-night: Take heed the queen come not within his sight. For Oberon is passing fell and wrath, Because that she, as her attendant, hath A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king, "Certain wonderfully pale phantoms."- Lucretius, i. 24. |