CHAPTER FOURTH

Shakespeare

I am about to describe an extraordinary species of mind, perplexing to all the French modes of analysis and reasoning, all-powerful, excessive, master of the sublime as well as of the base; the most creative mind that ever engaged in the exact copy of the details of actual existence, in the dazzling caprice of fancy, in the profound complications of superhuman passions; a nature poetical, immoral, inspired, superior to reason by the sudden revelations of its seer's madness; so extreme in joy and grief, so abrupt of gait, so agitated and impetuous, in its transports, that this great age alone could have cradled such a child.

SECTION I.—Life and Character of Shakespeare

Of Shakespeare all came from within—I mean from his soul and his genius; circumstances and the externals contributed but slightly to his development.[587] He was intimately bound up with his age; that is, he knew by experience the manners of country, court, and town; he had visited the heights, depths, the middle ranks of mankind; nothing more. In all other respects his life was commonplace; its irregularities, troubles, passions, successes, were, on the whole, such as we meet with everywhere else.[588] His father, a glover and wool-stapler, in very easy circumstances, having married a sort of country heiress, had become high-bailiff and chief alderman in his little town; but when Shakespeare was nearly fourteen he was on the verge of ruin, mortgaging his wife's property, obliged to resign his municipal offices, and to remove his son from school to assist him in his business. The young fellow applied himself to it as well as he could, not without some scrapes and frolics: if we are to believe tradition, he was one of the thirsty souls of the place, with a mind to support the reputation of his little town in its drinking powers. Once, they say, having been beaten at Bideford in one of these ale-bouts, he returned staggering from the fight, or rather could not return, and passed the night with his comrades under an apple-tree by the roadside. Without doubt he had already begun to write verses, to rove about like a genuine poet, taking part in the noisy rustic feasts, the gay allegorical pastorals, the rich and bold outbreak of pagan and poetical life, as it was then to be found in an English village. At all events, he was not a pattern of propriety, and his passions were as precocious as they were imprudent. While not yet nineteen years old, he married the daughter of a substantial yeoman, about eight years older than himself—and not too soon, as she was about to become a mother.[589] Other of his outbreaks were no more fortunate. It seems that he was fond of poaching, after the manner of the time, being "much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison and rabbits," says the Rev. Richard Davies;[590] "particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly the country;... but his revenge was so great, that he is his Justice Clodpate." Moreover, about this time Shakespeare's father was in prison, his affairs were not prosperous, and he himself had three children, following one close upon the other; he must live, and life was hardly possible for him in his native town. He went to London, and took to the stage: took the lowest parts, was a "servant" in the theatre, that is, an apprentice, or perhaps a supernumerary. They even said that he had begun still lower, and that to earn his bread he had held gentlemen's horses at the door of the theatre.[591] At all events he tasted misery, and felt, not in imagination, but in fact, the sharp thorn of care, humiliation, disgust, forced labor, public discredit, the power of the people. He was a comedian, one of "His Majesty's poor players"[592]—a sad trade, degraded in all ages by the contrasts and the falsehoods which it allows: still more degraded then by the brutalities of the crowd, who not seldom would stone the actors, and by the severities of the magistrates, who would sometimes condemn them to lose their ears. He felt it, and spoke of it with bitterness:

"Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear."[593]

And again:

"When in disgrace with fortune[594] and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed....
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in those thoughts myself almost despising."[595]

We shall find further on the traces of this long-enduring disgust, in his melancholy characters, as where he says:

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
The patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?"[596]

But the worst of this undervalued position is, that it eats into the soul. In the company of actors we become actors: it is vain to wish to keep clean, if you live in a dirty place; it cannot be. No matter if a man braces himself; necessity drives him into a corner and sullies him. The machinery of the decorations, the tawdriness and medley of the costumes, the smell of the tallow and the candles, in contrast with the parade of refinement and loftiness, all the cheats and sordidness of the representation, the bitter alternative of hissing or applause, the keeping of the highest and lowest company, the habit of sporting with human passions, easily unhinge the soul, drive it down the slope of excess, tempt it to loose manners, green-room adventures, the loves of strolling actresses. Shakespeare escaped them no more than Molière, and grieved for it, like Molière:

"O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds."[597]

They used to relate in London how his comrade Burbadge, who played Richard III, having a rendezvous with the wife of a citizen, Shakespeare went before, was well received, and was pleasantly occupied, when Burbage arrived, to whom he sent the message that William the Conqueror came before Richard III.[598] We may take this as an example of the tricks and somewhat coarse intrigues which are planned, and follow in quick succession, on this stage. Outside the theatre he lived with fashionable young nobles, Pembroke, Montgomery, Southampton,[599] and others, whose hot and licentious youth gratified his imagination and senses by the example of Italian pleasures and elegancies. Add to this the rapture and transport of poetical nature, and this kind of afflux, this boiling over of all the powers and desires which takes place in brains of this kind, when the world for the first time opens before them, and you will understand the "Venus and Adonis, the first heir of his invention." In fact, it is a first cry, a cry in which the whole man is displayed. Never was seen a heart so quivering to the touch of beauty, of beauty of every kind, so delighted with the freshness and splendor of things, so eager and so excited in adoration and enjoyment, so violently and entirely carried to the very essence of voluptuousness. His Venus is unique; no painting of Titian's has a more brilliant and delicious coloring;[600] no strumpet-goddess of Tintoretto or Giorgione is more soft and beautiful:

"With blindfold fury she begins to forage,
Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil....
And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth;
Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey,
Paying what ransom the insulter willeth;
Whose vulture thought doth pitch the price so high,
That she will draw his lips' rich treasure dry."[601]

"Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuff'd or prey be gone;
Even so she kiss'd his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends she doth anew begin."[602]

All is taken by storm, the senses first, the eyes dazzled by carnal beauty, but the heart also from whence the poetry overflows: the fulness of youth inundates even inanimate things; the country looks charming amidst the rays of the rising sun, the air, saturated with brightness, makes a gala-day:

"Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun riseth in his majesty;
Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."[603]

An admirable debauch of imagination and rapture, yet disquieting; for such a mood will carry one a long way.[604] No fair and frail dame in London was without "Adonis" on her table.[605] Perhaps Shakespeare perceived that he had transcended the bounds, for the tone of his next poem, the "Rape of Lucrece," is quite different; but as he had already a mind liberal enough to embrace at the same time, as he did afterwards in his dramas, the two extremes of things, he continued none the less to follow his bent. The "sweet abandonment of love" was the great occupation of his life; he was tender-hearted, and he was a poet: nothing more is required to be smitten, deceived, to suffer, to traverse without pause the circle of illusions and troubles, which whirls and whirls round, and never ends.

He had many loves of this kind, amongst others one for a sort of Marion Delorme,[606] a miserable deluding despotic passion, of which he felt the burden and the shame, but from which nevertheless he could not and would not free himself. Nothing can be sadder than his confessions, or mark better the madness of love, and the sentiment of human weakness:

"When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies."[607]

So spoke Alceste of Célimène;[608] but what a soiled Célimène is the creature before whom Shakespeare kneels, with as much of scorn as of desire!

"Those lips of thine,
That have profaned their scarlet ornaments
And seal'd false bonds of love as oft as mine,
Robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents.
Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lov'st those
Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee."[609]

This is plain-speaking and deep shamelessness of soul, such as we find only in the stews; and these are the intoxications, the excesses, the delirium into which the most refined artists fall, when they resign their own noble hand to these soft, voluptuous, and clinging ones. They are higher than princes, and they descend to the lowest depths of sensual passion. Good and evil then lose their names; all things are inverted:

"How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
Making lascivious comments on thy sport,
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise;
Naming thy name blesses an ill report."[610]

What are proofs, the will, reason, honor itself, when the passion is so absorbing? What can be said further to a man who answers, "I know all that you are going to say, and what does it all amount to?" Great loves are inundations, which drown all repugnance and all delicacy of soul, all preconceived opinions and all received principles. Thenceforth the heart is dead to all ordinary pleasures: it can only feel and breathe on one side. Shakespeare envies the keys of the instrument over which his mistress's fingers run. If he looks at flowers, it is she whom he pictures beyond them; and the extravagant splendors of dazzling poetry spring up in him repeatedly, as soon as he thinks of those glowing black eyes:

"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him."[611]

He saw none of it:

"Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose."[612]

All this sweetness of spring was but her perfume and her shade:

"The forward violet thus I did chide:
'Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride,
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.'
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair:
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;...
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or color it had stol'n from thee."[613]

Passionate archness, delicious affectations, worthy of Heine and the contemporaries of Dante, which tell us of long rapturous dreams concentrated on one subject. Under a sway so imperious and sustained, what sentiment could maintain its ground? That of family? He was married and had children—a family which he went to see "once a year"; and it was probably on his return from one of these journeys that he used the words above quoted. Conscience? "Love is too young to know what conscience is." Jealousy and anger?

"For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason."[614]

Repulses?

"He is contented thy poor drudge to be
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side."[615]

He is no longer young; she loves another, a handsome, young, light-haired fellow, his own dearest friend, whom he has presented to her, and whom she wishes to seduce:

"Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman color'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side."[616]

And when she has succeeded in this,[617] he dares not confess it to himself, but suffers all, like Molière. What wretchedness is there in these trifles of every-day life! How man's thoughts instinctively place by Shakespeare's side the great unhappy French poet (Molière), also a philosopher by nature, but more of a professional laugher, a mocker of old men in love, a bitter railer at deceived husbands, who, after having played in one of his most approved comedies, said aloud to a friend, "My dear fellow, I am in despair; my wife does not love me!" Neither glory, nor work, nor invention satisfies these vehement souls: love alone can gratify them, because, with their senses and heart, it contents also their brain; and all the powers of man, imagination like the rest, find in it their concentration and their employment. "Love is my sin," he said, as did Musset and Heine; and in the Sonnets we find traces of yet other passions, equally abandoned; one in particular, seemingly for a great lady. The first half of his dramas, "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Romeo and Juliet," the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," preserve the warm imprint more completely; and we have only to consider his latest women's character,[618] to see with what exquisite tenderness, what full adoration, he loved them to the end.

In this is all his genius; his was one of those delicate souls which, like a perfect instrument of music, vibrate of themselves at the slightest touch. This fine sensibility was the first thing observed in him. "My darling Shakespeare, Sweet Swan of Avon": these words of Ben Jonson only confirm what his contemporaries reiterate. He was affectionate and kind, "civil in demeanor, and excellent in the qualitie he professes";[619] if he had the impulse, he had also the effusion of true artists; he was loved, men were delighted in his company; nothing is more sweet or winning than this charm, this half-feminine abandonment in a man. His wit in conversation was ready, ingenious, nimble; his gayety brilliant; his imagination fluent, and so copious, that, as his, friends tell us, he never erased what he had written; at least when he wrote out a scene for the second time, it was the idea which he would change, not the words, by an after-glow of poetic thought, not with a painful tinkering of the verse. All these characteristics are combined into a single one: he had a sympathetic genius; I mean that naturally he knew how to forget himself and become transfused into all the objects which he conceived. Look around you at the great artists of your time, try to approach them, to become acquainted with them, to see them as they think, and you will observe the full force of this word. By an extraordinary instinct, they put themselves at once in a position of existences; men, animals, flowers, plants, landscapes, whatever the objects are, living or not, they feel by intuition the forces and tendencies which produce the visible external; and their soul, infinitely complex, becomes by its ceaseless metamorphoses a sort of abstract of the universe. This is why they seem to live more than other men; they have no need to be taught, they divine. I have seen such a man, a propos of a piece of armor, a costume, a collection of furniture, enter into the Middle Ages more fully than three savants together. They reconstruct, as they build, naturally, surely, by an inspiration which is a winged chain of reasoning. Shakespeare had only an imperfect education, "small Latin and less Greek," barely French and Italian,[620] nothing else; he had not travelled, he had only read the current literature of his day, he had picked up a few law words in the court of his little town: reckon up, if you can, all that he knew of man and of history. These men see more objects at a time; they grasp them more closely than other men, more quickly and thoroughly; their mind is full, and runs over. They do not rest in simple reasoning; at every idea their whole being, reflections, images, emotions, are set a-quiver. See them at it; they gesticulate, mimic their thought, brim over with comparisons; even in their talk they are imaginative and original, with familiarity and boldness of speech, sometimes happily, always irregularly, according to the whims and starts of the adventurous improvisation. The animation, the brilliancy of their language is marvellous; so are their fits, the wide leaps which they couple widely removed ideas, annihilating distance, passing from pathos to humor, from vehemence to gentleness. This extraordinary rapture is the last thing to quit them. If perchance ideas fail, or if their melancholy is too violent, they still speak and produce, even if it be nonsense: they become clowns, though at their own expense, and to their own hurt. I know one of these men who will talk nonsense when he thinks he is dying, or has a mind to kill himself; the inner wheel continues to turn, even upon nothing, that wheel which man must needs see ever turning, even though it tear him as it turns; his buffoonery is an outlet: you will find him, this inextinguishable urchin, this ironical puppet, at Ophelia's tomb, at Cleopatra's death-bed, at Juliet's funeral. High or low, these men must always be at some extreme. They feel their good and their ill too deeply; they expatiate too abundantly on each condition of their soul, by a sort of involuntary novel. After their traducings and the disgusts by which they debase themselves beyond measure they rise and become exalted in a marvellous fashion, even trembling with pride and joy. "Haply," says Shakespeare, after one of these dull moods:

"Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."[621]

Then all fades away, as in a furnace where a stronger flare than usual has left no substance fuel behind it.

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest...."[622]

"No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so.
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe."[623]

These sudden alternatives of joy and sadness, divine transports and grand melancholies, exquisite tenderness and womanly depressions, depict the poet, extreme in emotions, ceaselessly troubled with grief or merriment, feeling the slightest shock, more strong, more dainty in enjoyment and suffering than other men, capable of more intense and sweeter dreams, within whom is stirred an imaginary world of graceful or terrible beings, all impassioned like their author.

Such as I have described him, however, he found his resting-place. Early, at least what regards outward appearances, he settled down to an orderly, sensible, almost humdrum existence, engaged in business, provident of the future. He remained on the stage for at least seventeen years, though taking secondary parts;[624] he sets his wits at the same time to the touching up of plays with so much activity, that Greene called him "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers;... an absolute Johannes factotum, in his owne conceyte the onely shake-scene in a countrey."[625] At the age of thirty-three he had amassed money enough to buy at Stratford a house with two barns and two gardens, and he went on steadier and steadier in the same course. A man attains only to easy circumstances by his own labor; if he gains wealth, it is by making others labor for him. This is why, to the trades of actor and author, Shakespeare added those of manager and director of a theatre. He acquired a share in the Blackfriars and Globe theatres, farmed tithes, bought large pieces of land, more houses, gave a dowry to his daughter Susanna, and finally retired to his native town on his property, in his own house, like a good landlord, an honest citizen, who manages his fortune fitly, and takes his share of municipal work. He had an income of two or three hundred pounds, which would be equivalent to about eight or twelve hundred at the present time, and according to tradition, lived cheerfully and on good terms with his neighbors; at all events, it does not seem that he thought much about his literary glory, for he did not even take the trouble to collect and publish his works. One of his daughters married a physician, the other a wine merchant; the last did not even know how to sign her name. He lent money, and cut a good figure in this little world. Strange close; one which at first sight resembles more that of a shopkeeper than of a poet. Must we attribute it to that English instinct which places happiness in the life of a country gentleman and a landlord with a good rent-roll, well connected, surrounded by comforts, who quietly enjoys his undoubted respectability,[626] his domestic authority, and his county standing? Or rather, was Shakespeare, like Voltaire, a common-sense man, though of an imaginative brain, keeping a sound judgment under the sparkling of his genius, prudent from scepticism, saving through a desire for independence, and capable, after going the round of human ideas, of deciding with Candide,[627] that the best thing one can do in this world is "to cultivate one's garden"? I had rather think, as his full and solid head suggests,[628] that by the mere force of his overflowing imagination he escaped, like Goethe, the perils of an overflowing imagination; that in depicting passion, he succeeded, like Goethe, in deadening passion; that the fire did not break out in his conduct, because it found issue in his poetry; that his theatre kept pure his life; and that, having passed, by sympathy, through every kind of folly and wretchedness that is incident to human existence, he was able to settle down amidst them with a calm and melancholic smile, listening, for the sake of relaxation, to the aerial music of the fancies in which he revelled.[629] I am willing to believe, lastly, that in frame as in other things, he belonged to his great generation and his great age; that with him, as with Rabelais, Titian, Michel Angelo, and Rubens, the solidity of the muscles was a counterpoise to the sensibility of the nerves; that in those days the human machine, more severely tried and more firmly constructed, could withstand the storms of passion and the fire of inspiration; that soul and body were still at equilibrium; that genius was then a blossom, and not, as now, a disease. We can but make conjectures about all this: if we would become acquainted more closely with the man, we must seek him in his works.

SECTION II.—Shakespeare's Style—Copiousness—Excesses

Let us then look for the man, and in his style. The style explains the work; whilst showing the principal features of the genius, it infers the rest. When we have once grasped the dominant faculty, we see the whole artist developed like a flower.

Shakespeare imagines with copiousness and excess; he scatters metaphors profusely over all he writes; every instant abstract ideas are changed into images; it is a series of paintings which is unfolded in his mind. He does not seek them, they come of themselves; they crowd within him, covering his arguments; they dim with their brightness the pure light of logic. He does not labor to explain or prove; picture on picture, image on image, he is forever copying the strange and splendid visions which are engendered one after another, and are heaped up within him. Compare to our dull writers this passage, which I take at hazard from a tranquil dialogue:

"The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armor of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan."[630]

Here we have three successive images to express the same thought. It is a whole blossoming; a bough grows from the trunk, from that another, which is multiplied into numerous fresh branches. Instead of a smooth road, traced by a regular line of dry and cunningly fixed landmarks, you enter a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which conceal and prevent your progress, which delight and dazzle your eyes by the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their bloom. You are astonished at first, modern mind that you are, business man, used to the clear dissertations of classical poetry; you become cross; you think the author is amusing himself, and that through conceit and bad taste he is misleading you and himself in his garden thickets. By no means; if he speaks thus, it is not from choice, but of necessity; metaphor is not his whim, but the form of his thought. In the height of passion, he imagines still. When Hamlet, in despair, remembers his father's noble form, he sees the mythological pictures with which the taste of the age filled the very streets:

"A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill."[631]

This charming vision, in the midst of a bloody invective, proves that there lurks a painter underneath the poet. Involuntarily and out of season, he tears off the tragic mask which covered his face; and the reader discovers, behind the contracted features of this terrible mask, a graceful and inspired smile which he did not expect to see.

Such an imagination must needs be vehement. Every metaphor is a convulsion. Whosoever involuntarily and naturally transforms a dry idea into an image, has his brain on fire; true metaphors are flaming apparitions, which are like a picture in a flash of lightning. Never, I think, in any nation of Europe, or in any age of history, has so grand a passion been seen. Shakespeare's style is a compound of frenzied expressions. No man has submitted words to such a contortion. Mingled contrasts, tremendous exaggerations, apostrophes, exclamations; the whole fury of the ode, confusion of ideas, accumulation of images, the horrible and the divine, jumbled into the same line; it seems to my fancy as though he never writes a word without shouting it. "What have I done?" the queen asks Hamlet. He answers:

"Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there, makes marriage-vows
As false as dicers' oaths: O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words: Heaven's face doth glow;
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act."[632]

It is the style of frenzy. Yet I have not given all. The metaphors are all exaggerated, the ideas all verge on the absurd. All is transformed and disfigured by the whirlwind of passion. The contagion of the crime, which he denounces, has marred all nature. He no longer sees anything in the world but corruption and lying. To vilify the virtuous were little; he vilifies virtue herself. Inanimate things are sucked into this whirlpool of grief. The sky's red tint at sunset, the pallid darkness spread by night over the landscape, become the blush and the pallor of shame, and the wretched man who speaks and weeps sees the whole world totter with him in the dimness of despair.

Hamlet, it will be said, is half-mad; this explains the vehemence of his expressions. The truth is that Hamlet, here, is Shakespeare. Be the situation terrible or peaceful, whether he is engaged on an invective or a conversation, the style is excessive throughout. Shakespeare never sees things tranquilly. All the powers of his mind are concentrated in the present image or idea. He is buried and absorbed in it. With such a genius, we are on the brink of an abyss; the eddying water dashes in headlong, swallowing up whatever objects it meets, and only bringing them to light transformed and mutilated. We pause stupefied before these convulsive metaphors, which might have been written by a fevered hand in a night's delirium, which gather a pageful of ideas and pictures in half a sentence, which scorch the eyes they would enlighten. Words lose their meaning; constructions are put out of joint; paradoxes of style, apparently false expressions, which a man might occasionally venture upon with diffidence in the transport of his rapture, become the ordinary language. Shakespeare dazzles, repels, terrifies, disgusts, oppresses; his verses are a piercing and sublime song, pitched in too high a key, above the reach of our organs, which offends our ears, of which our mind alone can divine the justice and beauty.

Yet this is little; for that singular force of concentration is redoubled by the suddenness of the dash which calls it into existence. In Shakespeare there is no preparation, no adaptation, no development, no care to make himself understood. Like a too fiery and powerful horse, he bounds, but cannot run. He bridges in a couple of words an enormous interval; is at the two poles in a single instant. The reader vainly looks for the intermediate track; dazed by these prodigious leaps, he wonders by what miracle the poet has entered upon a new idea the very moment when he quitted the last, seeing perhaps between the two images a long scale of transitions, which we mount with difficulty step by step, but which he has spanned in a stride. Shakespeare flies, we creep. Hence comes a style made up of conceits, bold images, shattered in an instant by others still bolder, barely indicated ideas completed by others far removed, no visible connection, but a visible incoherence; at every step we halt, the track failing; and there, far above us, lo, stands the poet, and we find that we have ventured in his footsteps, through a craggy land, full of precipices, which he threads as if it were a straightforward road, but on which our greatest efforts barely carry us along.

What will you think, further, if we observe that these vehement expressions, so natural in their up-welling, instead of following one after the other, slowly and with effort, are hurled out by hundreds, with an impetuous ease and abundance, like the bubbling waves from a welling spring, which are heaped together, rise one above another, and find nowhere room enough to spread and exhaust themselves? You may find in "Romeo and Juliet" a score of examples of this inexhaustible inspiration. The two lovers pile up an infinite mass of metaphors, impassioned exaggerations, clenches, contorted phrases, amorous extravagances. Their language is like the trill of nightingales. Shakespeare's wits, Mercutio, Beatrice, Rosalind, his clowns, buffoons, sparkle with far-fetched jokes, which rattle out like a volley of musketry. There is none of them but provides enough play on words to stock a whole theatre. Lear's curses, or Queen Margaret's, would suffice for all the madmen in an asylum, or all the oppressed of the earth. The sonnets are a delirium of ideas and images, labored at with an obstinacy enough to make a man giddy. His first poem, "Venus and Adonis," is the sensual ecstasy of a Correggio, insatiable and excited. This exuberant fecundity intensifies qualities already in excess, and multiplies a hundred-fold the luxuriance of metaphor, the incoherence of style, and the unbridled vehemence of expression.[633]

All that I have said may be compressed into a few words. Objects were taken into his mind organized and complete; they pass into ours disjointed, decomposed, fragmentarily. He thought in the lump, we think piecemeal; hence his style and our style—two languages not to be reconciled. We, for our part, writers and reasoners, can note precisely by a word each isolated fraction of an idea, and represent the due order of its parts by the due order of our expressions. We advance gradually; we follow the filiations, refer continually to the roots, try and treat our words as numbers, our sentences as equations; we employ but general terms, which every mind can understand, and regular constructions, into which any mind can enter; we attain justness and clearness, not life. Shakespeare lets justness and clearness look out for themselves, and attains life. From amidst his' complex conception and his colored semi-vision, he grasps a fragment, a quivering fibre, and shows it; it is for you, from this fragment, to divine the rest. He, behind the word, has a whole picture, an attitude, a long argument abridged, a mass of swarming ideas; you know them, these abbreviative, condensive words: these are they which we launch out amidst the fire of invention, in a fit of passion—words of slang or of fashion, which appeal to local memory or individual experience;[634] little desultory and incorrect phrases, which, by their irregularity, express the suddenness and the breaks of the inner sensation; trivial words, exaggerated figures.[635] There is a gesture beneath each, a quick contraction of the brows, a curl of laughing lips, a clown's trick, an unhinging of the whole machine. None of them mark ideas, all suggest images; each is the extremity and issue of a complete mimic action; none is the expression and definition of a partial and limited idea. This is why Shakespeare is strange and powerful, obscure and creative, beyond all the poets of his or any other age; the most immoderate of all violators of language, the most marvellous of all creators of souls, the farthest removed from regular logic and classical reason, the one most capable of exciting in us a world of forms and of placing living beings before us.

SECTION III.—Shakespeare's Language And Manners

Let us reconstruct this world, so as to find in it the imprint of its creator. A poet does not copy at random the manners which surround him; he selects from this vast material, and involuntarily brings upon the stage the habits of the heart and conduct which best suit his talent. If he is a logician, a moralist, an orator, as, for instance, one of the French great tragic poets (Racine) of the seventeenth century, he will only represent noble manners; he will avoid low characters; he will have a horror of menials and the plebs; he will observe the greatest decorum amidst the strongest outbreaks of passion; he will reject as scandalous every low or indecent word; he will give us reason, loftiness, good taste throughout; he will suppress the familiarity, childishness, artlessness, gay banter of domestic life; he will blot out precise details, special traits, and will carry tragedy into a serene and sublime region, where his abstract personages, unencumbered by time and space, after an exchange of eloquent harangues and able dissertations, will kill each other becomingly, and as though they were merely concluding a ceremony. Shakespeare does just the contrary, because his genius is the exact opposite. His master faculty is an impassioned imagination, freed from the shackles of reason and morality. He abandons himself to it, and finds in man nothing that he would care to lop off. He accepts nature and finds it beautiful in its entirety. He paints it in its littlenesses, it deformities, its weaknesses, its excesses, its irregularities, and its rages; he exhibits man at his meals, in bed, at play, drunk, mad, sick; he adds that which ought not to be seen to that which passes on the stage. He does not dream of ennobling, but of copying human life, and aspires only to make his copy more energetic and more striking than the original.

Hence the morals of this drama; and first, the want of dignity. Dignity arises from self-command. A man selects the most noble of his acts and attitudes, and allows himself no other. Shakespeare's characters select none, but allow themselves all. His kings are men, and fathers of families. The terrible Leontes, who is about to order the death of his wife and his friend, plays like a child with his son: caresses him, gives him all the pretty pet names which mothers are wont to employ; he dares be trivial; he gabbles like a nurse; he has her language and fulfils her duties:

"Leontes. What, hast smutch'd thy nose?
They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, captain,
We must be neat; not neat, but cleanly, captain:...
Come, sir page,
Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain!
Most dear'st! my collop... Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd,
In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master....
How like, methought, I then was to this kernel,
This squash, this gentleman!... My brother,
Are you so fond of your young prince as we
Do seem to be of ours?
Polixenes. If at home, sir,
He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter,
Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy,
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all:
He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood."[636]

There are a score of such passages in Shakespeare. The great passions, with him as in nature, are preceded or followed by trivial actions, small-talk, commonplace sentiments. Strong emotions are accidents in our life: to drink, to eat, to talk of indifferent things, to carry out mechanically a habitual duty, to dream of some stale pleasure or some ordinary annoyance, that is in which we employ all our time. Shakespeare paints us as we are; his heroes bow, ask people for news, speak of rain and fine weather, as often and as casually as ourselves, on the very eve of falling into the extremity of misery, or of plunging into fatal resolutions. Hamlet asks what's o'clock, finds the wind biting, talks of feasts and music heard without; and this quiet talk, so unconnected with the action, so full of slight, insignificant facts, which chance alone has raised up and guided, lasts until the moment when his father's ghost, rising in the darkness, reveals the assassination which it is his duty to avenge.

Reason tells us that our manners should be measured; this is why the manners which Shakespeare paints are not so. Pure nature is violent, passionate: it admits no excuses, suffers no middle course, takes no count of circumstances, wills blindly, breaks out into railing, has the irrationality, ardor, anger of children. Shakespeare's characters have hot blood and a ready hand. They cannot restrain themselves, they abandon themselves at once to their grief, indignation, love, and plunge desperately down the steep slope, where their passion urges them. How many need I quote? Timon, Posthumus, Cressida, all the young girls, all the chief characters in the great dramas; everywhere Shakespeare paints the unreflecting impetuosity of the impulse of the moment. Capulet tells his daughter Juliet that in three days she is to marry Earl Paris, and bids her be proud of it; she answers that she is not proud of it, and yet she thanks the earl for this proof of love. Compare Capulet's fury with the anger of Orgon,[637] and you may measure the difference of the two poets and the two civilizations: