SHAKESPEARE.

Two views of the character of Shakespeare have been offered for our acceptance; we are expected to make a choice between the two. According to one of these views, Shakespeare stands before us a cheerful, self-possessed, and prudent man, who conducted his life with sound worldly judgment; and he wrote plays, about which he did not greatly care; acquired property, about which he cared much; retired to Stratford, and attaining the end of his ambition, became a wealthy and respectable burgess of his native town, bore the arms of a gentleman, married his two daughters with prudence, and died with the happy consciousness of having gained a creditable and substantial position in the world. The other view of Shakespeare's character has been recently presented by M. Taine with his unflagging brilliancy and energy. According to this second conception, Shakespeare was a man of almost superhuman passions, extreme in joy and pain, impetuous in his transports, disorderly in his conduct, heedless of conscience, but sensitive to every touch of pleasure, a man of inordinate, extravagant genius.

It is impossible to accept either of these representations of Shakespeare as a complete statement of the fact. Certain it is, however, that a portion of truth is contained in the first of these two Shakespeare theories. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare considered it worth his while to be prudent, industrious, and economical. He would appear to have had a very sufficient sense of life, and in particular of his own life, as real, and of this earth as a possession. He had seen his father sinking deeper and deeper into pecuniary embarrassment, and dropping away from the good position which he had held amongst his fellow-townsmen. Shakespeare had married at eighteen years of age; he was at the age of twenty-one the father of a son and two daughters; a reckless, improvident life became more than ever undesirable. He

took the means which gave him the best chance of attaining worldly prosperity; he made himself useful in every possible way to his dramatic company. While others, Greene, and Nash, and Marlowe, had squandered their strength in the turbulent life of London, Shakespeare husbanded his strength. The theatrical life did not bring satisfaction to him; he felt that his moral being suffered loss while he spent himself upon the miscellaneous activities forced upon him by his position and profession; he was made for a higher, purer life of more continuous progress towards all that is excellent, and he felt painfully that his nature was being subdued to what it worked in, as the dyer's hand receives its stain. Nevertheless he did not, in the fashion of idealists, hastily abandon the life which seemed to entail a certain spiritual loss; he recognised the reality of external, objective duties and claims, duties to his father, to his family, to his own future self; he accepted the logic of facts; he compelled the lower and provisional life of player and playwright to become the servant of his higher life, as far as circumstances permitted: and he carefully and steadily applied himself to effecting his deliverance from that provisional life at the earliest suitable period; but not before that period had arrived. And afterwards, when Shakespeare had become a prosperous country gentleman, he did not endeavour to cut himself loose from his past life which had served him, and the associates who had been his friends and helpers: the Stratford gentleman who might write himself Armigero ‘in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation,' was not so enamoured of this distinction as to be ashamed of the days when he lived by public means; he remembers in his will among the rural esquires and gentry, 'My Fellowes, John Hemynges, Richard Burbage, and Henry Cundell.'

Thus all through his life we observe in Shakespeare a sufficient recognition of external fact, external claims and obligations. Hence worldly prosperity could not be a matter which would ever seem unimportant to Shakespeare. In 1604,

when he was a wealthy man, William Shakespeare brought an action against Philip Rogers, in the Court of Stratford, for £1, 15s. 10d., being the price of malt sold and delivered to him at different times. The incident is characteristic. Shakespeare evidently could estimate the precise value for this temporal life (though possibly not for eternity) of £1, 15s. 10d., and in addition to this he bore down with unfaltering

insistance on the positive fact that the right place out of all the universe for the said £1, 15s. 10d. to occupy, lay in the pocket of William Shakespeare.

Practical, positive, and alive to material interests, Shakespeare unquestionably was. But there is another side to his character. About the same time that he brought his action

against Philip Rogers for the price of malt, the poet was engaged upon his Othello and his Lear. Is it conceivable that Shakespeare thought more of his pounds than of his plays? Strongly as he felt the fact about the little sum of money which he sought to recover, is it not beyond possibility of doubt that his whole nature was immeasurably more kindled, aroused, and swayed by the vision of Lear upon the heath, of Othello taken in the snake-like folds of Iago's cunning, and by the inscrutable mysteries respecting human life which these suggested? It is highly important to fix our attention on what is positive, practical, and finite in Shakespeare's art, as well as in Shakespeare's life. But if the poet was of his own age, he was also 'for all time.' He does not merely endeavour to compass and comprehend the knowable; he broods with a passionate intensity over that which cannot be known. And again, he not only studies self-control; he could depict, and we cannot doubt that he knew by personal experience, absolute abandonment and self-surrender. The infinite of meditation, the infinite of passion, both these lay within the range of Shakespeare's experience and Shakespeare's art. He does not, indeed, come forward with explanations of the mysteries of existence; perhaps because he felt more than other men their mysteriousness. Many of us seem to think it the all-essential thing to be provided with answers to the difficult questions which the world propounds, no matter how little the answers be to these great questions. Shakespeare seems to have considered it more important to put the questions greatly, to feel the supreme problems.

Thus Shakespeare, like nature and like the vision of human life itself, if he does not furnish us with a doctrine, has the power to free, arouse, dilate. Again and again we fall back into our little creed or our little theory. Shakespeare delivers us ; under his influence we come anew into the presence of stupendous mysteries, and, instead of our little piece of comfort, and support, and contentment, we receive the gift of solemn awe, and bow the head in reverential silence.

These questions are not stated by Shakespeare as intellectual problems. He states them pregnantly, for the emotions and for the imagination. And it is by virtue of his very knowledge that he comes face to face with the mystery of the unknown. Because he had sent down his plummet farther into the depths than other men, he knew better than others how fathomless for human thought those depths remain. A genius,' Victor Hugo has said, 'is a promontory stretching out into the infinite.' This promontory which we name Shakespeare, stretching out long and sharp, has before it measureless sea and the mass of threatening cloud; behind it the habitable globe, illuminated, and alive with moving figures of men and women.

Our conclusion, therefore, is that Shakespeare lived and moved in two worlds-one limited, practical, positive; the other a world opening into two infinites, an infinite of thought and an infinite of passion. He did not suppress either life to the advantage of the other; but he adjusted them, and by stern and persistent resolution held them in the necessary adjustment.

EDWARD DOWDEN.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

On one of those sober and rather melancholy days, in the latter part of autumn, when the shadows of morning and evening almost mingle together, and throw a gloom over the decline of the year, I passed several hours in rambling about Westminster Abbey. There was something congenial to the season in the mournful magnificence of the old pile; and as I passed its threshold, it seemed like stepping back into the regions of antiquity, and losing myself among the shades of former ages.

I entered from the inner court of Westminster School, through a long, low, vaulted passage, that had an almost subterranean look, being dimly lighted in one part by circular