It were something beside my purpose to unfold and illustrate in detail the common principles of Art: I shall but endeavour to do this so far as may be needful for a due understanding of those principles as we have them embodied in the Shakespearian Drama.

The first of those principles, as I am to view them, is what I know not better how to designate than by the term Solidarity. By which I mean that the several parts of a given work must all stand in mutual sympathy and intelligence; or that the details must not only have each a force and meaning of their own, but must also be helpful, directly or remotely, to the force and meaning of the others; all being drawn together and made to coalesce in unity of effect by some one governing thought or paramount idea. This gives us what the philosophers of Art generally agree in calling an organic structure; that is, a structure in which an inward vital law shapes and determines the outward form; all the parts being, moreover, assimilated and bound each to each by the life that builds the organization, and so rendered mutually aidant, and at the same time conducive to the well-being of the whole. In a word, they must all have a purpose and a truth in common as well as each a truth and purpose of its own.

To illustrate this in a small instance, and perhaps the more intelligible for being small.—Critics had been wont to speak lightly, not to say sneeringly, of the Sonnet, as being but an elaborate trifle that cost more than it came to. Wordsworth undertook to vindicate the thing from this unjust reproach, as he considered it; and to that end he wrote the following:

"Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frown'd, Mindless of its just honours: with this key Shakespeare unlock'd his heart; the melody Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound; A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; With it Camoeens sooth'd an exile's grief; The Sonnet glitter'd a gay myrtle leaf Amid the cypress with which Dante crown'd His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp, It cheer'd mild Spenser, call'd from Faery-land To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains,—alas, too few!"

Now, here we have a place for every thing, and every thing in its place. There is nothing irrelevant, nothing ajar. The parts are not only each true and good and beautiful in themselves, but each is helpful to the others, and all to the author's purpose: every allusion, every image, every word, tells in furtherance of his aim. There need nothing be added, there must nothing be taken away. The argument at every step is clear and strong. The thing begins, proceeds, and ends, just as it ought; you cannot change a word in it without injuring it: the understanding, the imagination, the ear, are all satisfied with the result. And the specimen is itself a full triumph of the Sonnet, from the intellectual truth and beauty and sweetness which are here put into it. So that, what with the argument, and what with the example, the vindication of the Sonnet is perfect. Accordingly, I believe no one has spoken lightly of the thing since that specimen was given to the public.

Many have written poetry, and good poetry too, who, notwithstanding, have not written, and could not write, a Poem. But this sonnet is, in its measure, a genuine poem; and as such I am willing to bear the responsibility of pronouncing it faultless. Wordsworth could do the Sonnet completely, and did it so in many instances: and he could do more than this; in several of his longer pieces the workmanship is perhaps equally faultless; as, for instance, in Laodamia, and the Ode to Duty, which, to my sense, are perfect poems in their kind. But to do thus through so complex and multitudinous a work as our higher specimens of the Gothic Drama, is a very different matter,—a thing far beyond the power of a Wordsworth. To combine and carry on together various distinct lines of thought, and various individual members of character, so that each shall constantly remember and respect the others, and this through a manifold, diversified, and intricate course of action; to keep all the parts true to the terms and relations of organic unity, each coming in and stopping just where it ought, each doing its share, and no more than its share, in the common plan, so as not to hinder the life or interfere with the rights of the others; to knit them all together in a consistent and harmonious whole, with nothing of redundancy or of deficiency, nothing "overdone or come tardy off,"—the members, moreover, all mutually interacting, all modifying and tempering one another;—this is a task which it is given to few to achieve. For the difficulty of the work increases in a sort of geometrical ratio with the number and greatness of the parts; and when we come to such a work as Hamlet or Cymbeline or King Lear, few of us have heads long enough and strong enough to measure the difficulty of it.

Such, then, in my reckoning, is the first principle, I will not say of artistic perfection, but of all true excellence in Art. And the same law, which thus requires that in a given work each earlier part shall prepare for what comes after, and each later part shall finish what went before, holds with equal force in all the forms of Art; for whether the parts be rendered or delivered in space, as in Painting and Architecture, or in time, as in Music, a Poem, or a Drama, makes no difference in this respect.

The second principle of Art which I am to consider is Originality. And by this I do not mean novelty or singularity, either in the general structure or in the particular materials, but something that has reference to the method and process of the work. The construction must proceed from the heart outwards, not the other way, and proceed in virtue of the inward life, not by any surface aggregation of parts, or by any outward pressure or rule. In organic nature, every plant, and every animal, however cast in the mould of the species, and so kept from novelty or singularity, has an individual life of its own, which life is and must be original. It is a development from a germ; and the process of development is vital, and works by selection and assimilation of matter in accordance with the inward nature of the thing. And so in Art, a work, to be original, must grow from what the workman has inside of him, and what he sees of Nature and natural fact around him, and not by imitation of what others have done before him. So growing, the work will, to be sure, take the specific form and character; nevertheless it will have the essence of originality in the right sense of the term, because it will have originated from the author's mind, just as the offspring originates from the parent. And the result will be, not a showy, emphatic, superficial virtue, which is indeed a vice, but a solid, genuine, substantive virtue; that is, the thing will be just what it seems, and will mean just what it says. Moreover the greatness of the work, if it have any, will be more or less hidden in the order and temperance and harmony of the parts; so that the work will keep growing larger and richer to you as you become familiar with it: whereas in case of a thing made in the unoriginal way, at a distance it will seem larger than it is, and will keep shrinking and dwarfing as you draw nearer to it; and perhaps, when you get fairly into it, it will prove to be no substance at all, but only a mass of shining vapour; or, if you undertake to grasp it, your hand will just close through it, as it would through a shadow.[8]

[8] This law of originality I have never seen better stated than by Coleridge, in a passage justifying the form of Shakespeare's dramas against a mode of criticism which has now, happily, gone out of use. "The true ground," says he, "of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms: each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within,—its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror."—With this may well be coupled Schlegel's remarks on the same point: "Form is mechanical when it is impressed upon any piece of matter by an outward operation, as an accidental addition without regard to the nature of the thing; as, for example, when we give any form at pleasure to a soft mass, to be retained after induration. Organic form on the contrary, is innate; it unfolds, itself from within, and attains its determinate character along with the full development of the germ. Such forms are found in Nature universally, wherever living powers are in action. And in Art, as well as in Nature, the supreme artist, all genuine forms are organic, that is, are determined by the quality of the work. In short, the form is no other than a significant exterior, the physiognomy of a thing,—when not defaced by disturbing accidents, the speaking physiognomy,—which bears true witness of its hidden essence."

All this, however, is nowise to be understood as inferring that a great original artist must be an independent or isolated growth, without parents and brethren, and the natural aids and inspirations of society. This never was and never can be. Art-life must be had in common, or not at all. In this, as in other things, many minds must grow up together, else none can grow up. And no form of Art ever grew to perfection, or any thing near it, but that it was and long had been matter of strong national passion, or of a free and vigorous public spirit. Men are not kindled to such a height without many convergent rays of fellowship. In other words, before excellence of Art in any kind can come, there has to be a large and long preparation, and this not only in the spiritual culture and development of the people, but also in the formal order and method of the thing. Accordingly great artists, so far as the history of the matter is known, have always lived and worked in successions and clusters, each adding something, till at length a master mind arose, and gathered the finer efficacies of them all into one result. This is notoriously true of Greek, Venetian, Florentine, and Gothic Art: Phidias, Sophocles, Titian, and Raphael had each many precursors and companions. The fact indeed is apt to be lost sight of, because the earlier and inferior essays perish, and only the finished specimens survive; so that we see them more or less isolated; whereas in truth their origin and growth were social, the fruit of a large intellectual partnership and co-operation.—It is on the same principle that nothing truly excellent either in the minds or the characters of men is reached without much of "ennobling impulse from the Past"; and that they who live too much in the present miss the right food of human elevation, contented to be, perhaps proud of being the vulgar things they are, because ignorant of what has been before them. It is not that the present age is worse than former ages; it may even be better as a whole: but what is bad or worthless in an age dies with the age; so that only the great and good of the Past touches us; while of the present we are most touched by that which is little and mean.

The third principle of Art, as I am taking them, is Completeness. A work of art must have within itself all that is needful for the due understanding of it, as Art; so that the beholder will not have to go outside or beyond the work itself to learn what it means; that is, provided he have the corresponding faculties alive within him, so as to be capable of its proper force. For, if the work speaks through form and colour, there must be, in answering measure, a natural or an instructed eye; if sound is its organ, there must be a natural or an instructed ear; if its speech is verbal, there must be, besides a natural or an instructed taste, a sufficient knowledge also of the language in which it is written. All this of course. But, apart from this, the work must be complete in and of itself, so as to be intelligible without a commentary. And any work which requires a sign or a showman to tell the beholder what it is, or to enable him to take the sense and virtue of it, is most certainly a failure.

In all this, however, I am speaking of the work simply as art, and not as it is or may be something else. For works of art, in many cases, are or have a good deal besides that. And in connection with such a work there may arise various questions,—of antiquity, philology, local custom and allusion; in what place and at what time it was done; whence, how, and why it came to be as it is; where the author got any hints or materials for it, and what of antecedent or contemporary history may be gathered from it. All this is legitimate and right in its place, but has nothing to do with the character and meaning of the thing as a work of art, in which respect it must know its cue without a prompter, and be able to tell its own tale. That which holds the mirror up to nature must not need another mirror to discover or interpret its reflection to us. For instance, a building, as a building, looks to certain practical ends and uses; and, before we can rightly understand the order and reason of it, we must know from other sources the ends and uses for which it was designed: but in so far as it is architecture, in so far as it is truly imaginative, and embodies the author's intellectual soul, it must be able to express its own meaning, so that we can understand and feel it without any thing but what comes directly from the work itself. But perhaps the point may be better illustrated in the case of an historical drama, which may be viewed either as history or as art: and, to determine its merit as history, we must go to other sources; but, for ascertaining its merit as art, the work must itself give us all the knowledge we need: so that the question of its historic truth is distinct and separate from the question of its artistic truth: it may be true as history, yet false as art; or it may be historically wrong, yet artistically right; true to nature, though not true to past fact; and, however we may have to travel abroad in the historical inquiry, the virtue of the work as art must be ascertainable directly from the thing itself. This, then, is what I mean by artistic completeness; that quality in virtue of which a work justifies itself, without foreign help, by its own fulness and clearness of expression.

The fourth and last principle that I am to consider is Disinterestedness. This is partly an intellectual, but more a moral quality. Now one great reason why men fail so much in their mental work is because they are not willing to see and to show things as they are, but must still be making them as they would have them to be. Thus from self-love or wilfulness or vanity they work their own humours and crotchets and fancies into the matter, or overlay it with some self-pleasing quirks of peculiarity. Instead of this, the artist must lose himself, his personal aims, interests, passions, and preferences, in the enthusiasm and inspiration of his work, in the strength, vividness, and beauty of his ideas and perceptions, and must give his whole mind and soul to the task of working these out into expression. To this end, his mind must live in constant loving sympathy and intercourse with Nature; he must work close to her life and order; must study to seize and reproduce the truth of Nature just precisely as it is, and must not think to improve her or get ahead of her; though, to be sure, out of the materials she offers, the selection and arrangement must be his own; and all the strength he can put forth this way will never enable him to come up to her stern, honest, solid facts. So, for instance, the highest virtue of good writing stands in saying a plain thing in a plain way. And in all art-work the first requisite is, that a man have, in the collective sense and reason of mankind, a firm foothold for withstanding the shifting currents and fashions and popularities of the day. The artist is indeed to work in free concert with the imaginative soul of his age: but the trouble is, that men are ever mistaking some transient specialty of mode for the abiding soul; thus tickling the folly of the time, but leaving its wisdom untouched.

If, therefore, a man goes to admiring his own skill, or airing his own powers, or imitating the choice touches of others, or heeding the breath of conventional applause; if he yields to any strain of self-complacency, or turns to practising smiles, or to taking pleasure in his self-begotten graces and beauties and fancies;—in this giddy and vertiginous state he will be sure to fall into intellectual and artistic sin. The man, in such a case, is no more smitten with a genuine love of Art than Malvolio was with a genuine love of Virtue: like that hero of conceit, he is merely "sick of self-love, and tastes with a distempered appetite." And his giddiness of self-love will take from him the power of seeing things as they are; and because he sees them as they are not, therefore he will think he sees them better than they are. A man cannot find Nature by gazing in a looking-glass; and it is vanity or some undisinterested force, and not any inspiration of truth or genius, that puts a man upon doing so. And, in the condition supposed, the mind becomes a prism to sophisticate and falsify the light of truth into striking and brilliant colours, instead of being a clear and perfect lens to concentrate that light in its natural whiteness and purity. For, assuredly, the proper worth, health, strength, virtue, joy, and life of Art is to be the interpreter and discoverer of Truth, to "feel the soul of Nature, and see things as they are"; and when, instead of this, it turns to glorifying its own powers and achievements, or sets up any end apart from such discovery and interpretation, it becomes sickly, feeble, foolish, frivolous, vicious, joyless, and moribund; and meanness, cruelty, sensuality, impiety, and irreligion are the companions of it.

It is indeed true that an artist may find one of the main spurs to his art-work in the needs, duties, and affections of his earthly being. The support of himself, of his wife, or her whom he wishes to be his wife, of his children, his parents, or remoter kin; the desire of being independent, of having the respect of society, or of doing the charities of a Christian; an honest, manly yearning after fame, an ambition to achieve something that "the world will not willingly let die,"—all these, and yet others, may justly be among the determining motives of his pursuit, and the thought of them may add fresh life and vigour to his efforts: nevertheless he will not succeed, nor deserve to succeed, in his art, except he have such an earnest and disinterested love for it, and such a passion for artistic truth, as will find the work its own exceeding great reward. In a word, his heart and soul must be in it as an end, and not merely or chiefly as a means. However prudence may suggest and shape his plans, love must preside over the execution; and here, as elsewhere,

"Love's not love When it is mingled with respects that stand Aloof from the entire point."

These four, then, are, in my account, essential principles of Art, and the only ones which it lies within my purpose to consider; namely, Solidarity, Originality, Completeness, and Disinterestedness. And to the attaining of these there needs, especially, three things in the way of faculty,—high intellectual power, great force of will, and a very tender heart;—a strong head to perceive and grasp the truth of things, a strong will to select and order the materials for expressing it, and a strong heart, which is tenderness, to give the work a soul of beauty and sweetness and amiability. As a man combines all these strengths, and as, moreover, through the unifying power of imagination, he pours the united life and virtue of them all into his work; so will his worth and honour stand as an artist. For whence should the noblest fruitage of human thought and culture grow, but from the noblest parts and attributes of manhood, moving together in perfect concert and reciprocity?

DRAMATIC COMPOSITION.

Shakespeare's dramas—not all of them indeed, but those which were written after he reached what may be called his mastership—are in the highest sense of term Works of Art, and as such embody to the full the principles set forth in the preceding section. In this general survey of his workmanship, I propose to consider, first, his Dramatic Architecture or Composition.

I have remarked in a previous chapter,[9] that in Shakespeare's time, and for several ages before, the Drama was a national passion in England, nearly all classes of people being pervaded by it. And yet, strange to say, this passion, notwithstanding the great frequency and variety of dramatic exhibitions, never came to any sound fruitage of Art, till the work fell into Shakespeare's hands. Moreover the tide of patriotic feeling, or the passion of nationality, which had for centuries been growing in strength, intelligence, and manliness, was then at its height, the people of all sorts being possessed with a hearty, honest English enthusiasm and national pride. And this passion was inextricably bound up with traditions of the past and with the ancient currents of the national life. Therewithal this deep, settled reverence for what was then "Old England," while it naturally drew into the mind the treasured riches of many foregoing ages, was at the same time strangely combined with a very bold and daring spirit of progress and improvement. Men seem indeed to have been all the more open to healthy innovation for being thus firmly rooted in the ground of prescription. The public mind received what was new the more freely because it loved the old. So that hope and anticipation walked with the bolder pace, inasmuch as memory and retrospection were still their cherished companions. In a word, men's tenacity of the past gave them the larger and brighter vision of the future. Because they had no mind to forsake the law of their fathers, or to follow the leading of "sages undevoutly free," therefore they were able to legislate the better for their children, and felt the less of danger in true freedom of thought.

[9] Page 120 of this volume.

It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that those two passions thus coexisting should somehow work together, and at least endeavour to produce a joint result. And so it was in fact. Historical plays, or things purporting to be such, were highly popular: the public taste evidently favoured, not to say demanded them; and some of Shakespeare's earliest essays were undoubtedly in that line. There are many clear evidences to this point. For instance, Thomas Nash, in his Pierce Penniless, 1592, speaks of certain plays "wherein our forefathers' valiant acts, that have been long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books, are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honours in open presence." And again: "How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that, after he had lain two hundred years in the tomb, he should triumph again on the stage; and have his bones new-embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least,—at several times,—who, in the tragedian that represents his person, behold him fresh-bleeding!" From these passages it is clear that historical plays on English subjects were strong in the public interest and patronage. And I have no doubt that the second passage quoted refers to Shakespeare's First Part of King Henry the Sixth. And it might well be that the popular mind should take special delight in entertainments where, to the common interest of dramatic exhibitions was added the further charm of national feeling and recollection, and where a large patriotism, "looking before and after," would find itself at home.

The Historical Drama, then, grew up simultaneously with Comedy and Tragedy, and established itself as a cooerdinate branch of the Gothic Drama in England. Now this circumstance could not be without great influence in determining the whole scope and character of the English Drama in all its varieties. The natural effect was to make them all more or less historical in method and grain. For the process generated, and could not fail to generate, corresponding modes and habits of thought in dramatic composition; and these would needs go with the writers into whatever branch of the Drama they might take in hand. Because modes and habits of thought are not things that men can put off and on for different subjects and occasions. What they learn to practise in one field of labour transfers itself with them, whether they will or no, to other fields. Their way of viewing things, nay, their very faculties of vision, catch the temper and drift of what they work in; which drift and temper cleave to them in spite of themselves, and unconsciously shape all their movements of thought; so that, change their matter as they may, their mind still keeps the same. Accordingly, even when Shakespeare does not deal specifically with the persons and events of history; when he fetches his incidents and characters from the realms of imagination; still his workmanship is historical in its spirit and method; proceeding according to the laws, even while departing from the matter, of history; so that we have pure creations formed upon the principles, and in the order and manner, of historical dramas.

The practical consequences of all this were both manifold and strongly marked. The Drama thus cut itself loose and swung clean away from the narrow circle of myths and legends, where the ancients had fixed it, and ranged at large in all the freedom and variety of historical representation. It took on all the compass, amplitude, and expansiveness of the Homeric Epos. The stereotyped sameness and confinement of the Greek stage were necessarily discarded, and the utmost breadth of matter and scope, compatible with clearness of survey, became the recognized freehold of Dramatic Art.[10]

[10] At this time the Drama was recognized throughout Europe as the poetic form most suitable to modern times and races. As it occupied the place of the epic poem, and did not merely, like the ancient drama, stand side by side with it, so, along with the office of replacing it, it inherited also the task of showing itself capable of managing, like the epopee, any matter however extended. The materials presented to it were not common property, like the many well-known myths of antiquity, handed down in a ready-made poetical form; but they were those rudiments formed in the religious dramas, those Mysteries founded on vast actions, and those historical subjects, which required a whole cycle of pieces for the mastering of the huge matter. The things of the world had become complicated and manifold: the variety of men, their nature, their passions, their situations, their mutually-contending powers, would not submit, in dramatic representation, to be limited to a simple catastrophe: a wider horizon must be drawn; the actions must be represented throughout their course; the springs of action must be more deeply searched. Thus Art was put to the work of setting forth the utmost fulness of matter in a corresponding form, which, however, according to Aristotle's law, must not be extended so far as to preclude an easy survey.—GERVINUS.

So that, as I have before observed, the English Drama was, in the largest sense, a national growth, and not the work of any individual. Neither was it a sudden growth, as indeed nothing truly national ever can be: like the English State, it was the slow, gradual, silent production of centuries,—the result of the thoughts of many minds in many ages. The whole platform, and all that relates to the formal construction of the work, were fixed before Shakespeare put his hand to it: what remained for him to do, and what he was supremely gifted for doing, was to rear a grand and beautiful fabric on the basis and out of the materials already prepared. And where I like best to contemplate the Poet is, not in the isolation of those powers which lift him so far above all others, but as having the mind of the nation, with its great past and greater present, to back him up. And it seems to me, his greatness consisted very much in that, as he had the gift, so he surrendered himself to the high task, of reproducing in artistic immortality the beatings of old England's mighty heart. He therefore did not go, nor needed he, to books to learn what others had done: he just sucked in without stint, and to the full measure of his angelic capacity, the wisdom and the poetry that lived on the lips, and in the thoughts, feelings, sentiments, and manners of the people. What he thus sucked in, he purged from its drossy mixtures, replenished with fresh vitality, and gave it back clothed in the grace and strength of his own clear spirit. He told the nation better—O how much better!—than any other could, just what it wanted to hear,—the very things which its heart was swelling with; only it found not elsewhere a tongue to voice them, nor an imagination to body them forth.[11]

[11] The times, far from being a hindrance to a great poet, were, indeed, from fortunate local and national conditions, the most propitious that modern times could offer. In a few points they might be prejudicial to Shakespeare's poetry, but on the whole he had cause to bless his happy star. The conflict with scholastic philosophy and religious fanaticism was not indeed over; yet Shakespeare came at a precious moment of mental freedom, after the struggle with Popery, and before that with the Puritans. He could thus in his poetry give to the age the basis of a natural mode of feeling, thought, and life, upon which Art prospers in its purest form. In many respects the age itself was in this favourable to the Poet. It maintained a happy medium between crudeness and a vitiated taste: life was not insipid and colourless, as it is nowadays: men still ventured to appear what they were; there was still poetry in reality. Our German poets, in an age of rouge and powder, of hoops and wigs, of stiff manners, rigid proprieties, narrow society, and cold impulses, had indescribable trouble in struggling out of this dulness and deformity, which they had first to conquer in themselves before they could discern and approve what was better. In Shakespeare's time, nature was still alive: the age was just halting on the threshold of these distorted views of false civilization; and if our Poet had to combat against the first approaches of the disease, he was yet sound and free from it himself. He had the immense advantage of being at one with his age, and not at odds with it. When he sought materials for his poetry, he did not need, like our painters, to dive into past worlds, restore lost creeds, worship fallen gods, and imitate foreign works of art: from his national soil he drew the power which makes his poetry unrivalled. The age favoured him from another side also. He appeared at that auspicious period when the Drama had in England already obtained acceptance and, love; when the sympathy of the people was most alive; and when, on the other hand, the public were not yet corrupted with oversensibility. He took that in hand which most actively engaged the spirit of the people; and he carried it through progressive steps to a consummation beyond which there was nothing possible but retrogression.—GERVINUS.

Thus the time and the man were just suited to each other; and it was in his direct, fearless, whole-hearted sympathy with the soul of the time that the man both lost himself and found his power: which is doubtless one reason why we see so little of him in what he wrote. So that the work could not possibly have been done anywhere but in England,—the England of Spenser and Raleigh and Bacon; nor could it have been done there and then by any man but Shakespeare. In his hand what had long been a national passion became emphatically a National Institution: how full of life, is shown in that it has ever since refused to die. And it seems well worth the while to bring this clearly into view, inasmuch as it serves to remove the subject upon deeper and broader principles of criticism than have commonly stood uppermost in the minds of the Poet's critics.

Properly speaking, then, it was the mind and soul of old England that made the English Drama as we have it in Shakespeare: her life, genius, culture, spirit, character, built up the work, and built themselves into the work, at once infusing the soul and determining the form. Of course, therefore, they ordered and shaped the thing to suit their own purpose, or so as to express freely and fitly their proper force and virtue; and they did this in wise ignorance, or in noble disregard, of antecedent examples, and of all formal and conventional rules. In other words, they were the life of the thing; and that life organized its body, as it needs must do, according to its innate and essential laws.[12]

[12]

A Poet!—He hath put his heart to school, Nor dares to move unpropp'd upon the staff Which Art hath lodg'd within his hand,—must laugh By precept only, and shed tears by rule. Thy Art be Nature! the live current quaff, And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool, In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool Have kill'd him, Scorn should write his epitaph. How doth the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free Down to its root, and in that freedom bold; And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree Comes not by casting in a formal mould, But from its own divine vitality.

WORDSWORTH.

Which naturally starts the question, how or why the Shakespearian Drama came to take on a form so very different from that of the Classic Drama. This question has been partly disposed of already, in speaking of the freedom and variety which the historical branch imported into the sphere of dramatic production. Still it may be asked how, if the Classic form is right, as all admit it to be, can we avoid concluding the Shakespearian form to be wrong? The answer of course is, that the form differs, and ought to differ, just as much as the life does; so that both forms may be right, or at least equally so. Formerly it was the custom to censure the Poet greatly, if not to condemn him utterly, because, in his dramatic workmanship, he did not observe what are called the Minor Unities, that is, the Unities of Time and Place. The controversy indeed is now all out of date, and there need not a word be said by way of answering or refuting that old objection: no interest attaches to the question, nor is it worth considering at all, save as it may yield light and illustration in the philosophy of Art, and in the general matter of art criticism. On this account, it may be worth the while to look a little further into the reason of the difference in question.

I have already said that religion or religious culture has always been the originating and shaping spirit of Art. There is no workmanship of Art in which this holds more true than in the English Drama. Now the religious culture of Christian England was essentially different from that of Classic Greece; the two being of quite diverse and incommunicable natures; so that the spirit of the one could not possibly live in the dramatic form of the other. In other words, the body of the Classic Drama was not big enough nor strong enough to contain the soul of Christian England. The thing could no more be, except in a purely mechanical and arbitrary way, than an acorn could develop itself into a violet, or the life of an eagle build itself into the body of a trout, or the soul of a horse put on the organism of a dove. Moreover the Greek religion was mythical or fabulous, and could nowise stand the historic method: the Christian religion is historical both in origin and form; as such it has a natural sympathy and affinity with the historic method, the hardest facts being more in keeping with its spirit than the most beautiful and ingenious fables and myths. Not indeed but that Christianity has its own ideal, or rather its sphere of ideality, and this in a much higher and purer kind than any mythology ever had; but its nature is to idealize from fact; its ideality is that of the waking reason and the ruling conscience, not that of the dreaming fancy and the dominating senses; and even in poetry its genius is to "build a princely throne on humble truth": it opens to man's imaginative soul the largest possible scope,—"Beauty, a living Presence, surpassing the most fair ideal forms which craft of delicate spirits hath composed from earth's materials"; a world where imagination gathers fresh life and vigour from breathing the air of reason's serenest sky, and where it builds the higher and nobler, that it rests on a deep and solid basis of humility, instead of "revolving restlessly" around its own airy and flitting centre. The Shakespearian Drama works in the order and spirit of this principle; so that what the Poet creates is in effect historical, has the solidity and verisimilitude of Fact, and what he borrows has all the freedom and freshness of original creation. Therewithal he often combines the two, or interchanges them freely, in the same work; where indeed they seem just as much at home together as if they were twins; or rather each is so attempered to the other, that the two are vitally continuous.

But let us note somewhat further the difference of structure. Now the Classic Drama, as we have it in Sophocles, though exquisitely clear and simple in form, and austerely beautiful withal, is comparatively limited in its scope, with few characters, little change of scene, no blending or interchanging of the humourous and the grave, the tragic and the comic, and hardly exceeding in length a single Act of the Shakespearian Drama. The interest all, or nearly all, centres in the catastrophe, there being only so much of detail and range as is needful to the evolving of this. Thus the thing neither has nor admits any thing like the complexity and variety, the breadth, freedom, and massiveness, of Shakespeare's workmanship. There is timber enough and life enough in one of his dramas to make four or five Sophoclean tragedies; and one of these might almost be cut out of Hamlet without being missed. Take, for instance, the Oedipus at Colonos of Sophocles and King Lear, each perhaps the most complex and varied work of the author. The Greek tragedy, though the longest of the author's pieces, is hardly more than a third the length of King Lear. The former has no change of scene at all; the first Act of the other has five changes of scene. The Sophoclean drama has eight characters in all, besides the Chorus; King Lear has twenty characters, besides the anonymous persons. To be sure, quantity in such things is no measure of strength or worth; but when we come to wealth, range, and amplitude of thought, the difference is perhaps still greater.

And so, generally, the Classic Drama, like the Classic Architecture, is all light, graceful, airy, in its form; whereas the Gothic is in nature and design profound, solemn, majestic. The genius of the one runs to a simple expressiveness; of the other to a manifold suggestiveness. That is mainly statuesque, and hardly admits any effect of background and perspective; this is mainly picturesque, and requires an ample background and perspective for its characteristic effect. There the mind is drawn more to objects; here, more to relations. The former, therefore, naturally detaches things as much as possible, and sets each out by itself in the utmost clearness and definiteness of view; while the latter associates and combines them in the largest possible variety consistent with unity of interest and impression, so as to produce the effect of indefiniteness and mystery. Thus a Shakespearian drama is like a Gothic cathedral, which, by its complexity of structure, while catching the eye would fain lift the thoughts to something greater and better than the world, making the beholder feel his littleness, and even its own littleness, comparison of what it suggests. For, in this broad and manifold diversity struggling up into unity, we may recognize the awe-inspiring grandeur and vastness of the Gothic Architecture, as distinguished from the cheerful, smiling beauty of the Classic. Such is the difference between the spirit of Classic Art and the spirit of Gothic Art.[13]

[13] Schlegel has a passage that hits the core of the matter: "Rousseau recognized the contrast in Music, and showed that rhythm and melody was the ruling principle of ancient as harmony is of modern music. On the imaging arts, Hemsterhuys made this ingenious remark, that the ancient painters were perhaps too much of sculptors, modern sculptors too much of painters. This touches the very point of difference; for the spirit of collective ancient art and poetry is plastic, as that of the modern is picturesque." And again: "The Pantheon is not more different from Westminster Abbey or the Church of St. Stephen at Vienna than the structure of a tragedy of Sophocles from a drama of Shakespeare. The comparison between these two wonderful productions of poetry and architecture might be carried still further." Coleridge also has some very choice remarks on the subject: "I will note down the fundamental characteristics which contradistinguish the ancient literature from the modern generally, but which more especially appear in prominence in the tragic drama. The ancient was allied to statuary, the modern refers to painting. In the first there is a predominance of rhythm and melody; in the second, of harmony and counterpoint. The Greeks idolized the finite, and therefore were masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy, dignity, majesty,—of whatever, in short, is capable of being definitely conveyed by defined forms and thoughts; the moderns revere the infinite, and affect the indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite; hence their passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more august conception of man as man, their future rather than their past,—in a word, their sublimity."

Now, taking these two things together, namely, the historic spirit and method, and also the breadth and amplitude of matter and design, both of which belong to the Gothic Drama, and are indeed of its nature;—taking these together, it cannot but be seen, I think, that the work must have a much larger scope, a far more varied and expansive scene, than is consistent with the Minor Unities. If, for example, a man would represent any impressive course or body of historical events, the historic order and process of the thing plainly necessitate a form very different from that of the Classic Drama: the work must needs use considerable diversity of time and place, else narrative and description will have to be substituted, in a great measure, for representation; that is, the right dramatic form must be sacrificed to what, after all, has no proper coherence or consanguinity with the nature and genius of the work. As to which of the two is better in itself, whether the austere and simple beauty of the Sophoclean tragedy, or the colossal grandeur and massiveness of such a drama as King Lear, this is not for me to say: for myself, however, I cannot choose but prefer the latter; for this too has a beauty of its own; but it is indeed an awful beauty, and to my sense all the better for being so. Be this as it may, it is certain that the human mind had quite outgrown the formal limitations of the Classic Drama.[14]

[14] Two thousand years lie between Shakespeare and the flourishing period of the ancient tragedy. In this interval Christianity laid open unknown depths of mind: the Teutonic race, in their dispersion, filled wide spaces of the Earth; the Crusaders opened the way to the East, voyages of discovery revealed the West and the form of the whole globe; new spheres of knowledge presented themselves; whole nations and periods of time arose and passed away; a thousand forms of life, public and private, religious and political, had come and gone; the circle of views, ideas, experiences, and interests was immensely enlarged, the mind thereby made deeper and broader, wants increased, passions more various and refined, the conflict of human endeavours more diversified and intricate, the resources of the mind immeasurable; all in a way quite foreign to the childish times of antiquity. This abundance of external and internal material streamed into the sphere of Art on all sides: poetry could not resist it without injury, and even ruin.—GERVINUS.

But what are the conditions of building, in right artistic order, a work of such vastness and complexity? As the mind is taken away from the laws of time and place, it must be delivered over to the higher laws of reason. So that the work lies under the necessity of proceeding in such a way as to make the spectator live in his imagination, not in his senses, and even his senses must, for the time being, be made imaginative, or be ensouled. That is, instead of the formal or numerical unities of time and place, we must have the unities of intellectual time and intellectual space: the further the artist departs from the local and chronological succession of things, the more strict and manifest must be their logical and productive succession. Incidents and characters are to be represented, not in the order of sensible juxtaposition or procession, but in that of cause and effect, of principle and consequence. Whether, therefore, they stand ten minutes or ten months, ten feet or ten miles, asunder, matters not, provided they are really and evidently united in this way; that is, provided the unities of action and interest are made strong enough and clear enough to overcome the diversities of time and place. For, here, it is not where and when a given thing happened, but how it was produced, and why, whence it came and whither it tended, what caused it to be as it was, and to do as it did, that we are mainly concerned with.

The same principle is further illustrated in the well-known nakedness of the Elizabethan stage in respect of furniture and scenic accompaniment. The weakness, if such it were, appears to have been the source of vast strength. It is to this poverty of the old stage that we owe, in part, the immense riches of the Shakespearian Drama, since it was thereby put to the necessity of making up for the defect of sensuous impression by working on the rational, moral, and imaginative forces of the audience. And, undoubtedly, the modern way of glutting the senses with a profusion of showy and varied dress and scenery has struck, as it must always strike, a dead palsy on the legitimate processes of Gothic Art. The decline of the Drama began with its beginning, and has kept pace with its progress. So that here we have a forcible illustration of what is often found true, that men cannot get along because there is nothing to hinder them. For, in respect of the moral and imaginative powers, it may be justly affirmed that we are often assisted most when not assisted, and that the right way of helping us on is by leaving us unhelped. That the soul may find and use her wings, nothing is so good as the being left where there is little for the feet to get hold of and rest upon.

To answer fully the conditions of the work, to bring the Drama fairly through the difficulties involved therein, is, it seems to me, just the greatest thing the human intellect has ever done in the province of Art. Accordingly I place Shakespeare's highest and most peculiar excellence in the article of Dramatic Composition. He it was, and he alone, that accomplished the task of organizing the English Drama. Among his predecessors and senior contemporaries there was, properly speaking, no dramatic artist. What had been done was not truly Art, but only a preparation of materials and a settlement of preliminaries. Up to his time, there was little more than the elements of the work lying scattered here and there, some in greater, some in less perfection, and still requiring to be gathered up and combined in right proportions, and under the proper laws of dramatic life. Take any English drama written before his, and you will find that the several parts do not stand or draw together in any thing like organic consistency: the work is not truly a concrescence of persons and events, but only, at the best, a mere succession or aggregation of them; so that, for the most part, each would both be and appear just as it does, if detached from the others, and viewed by itself. Instead, therefore, of a vital unity, like that of a tree, the work has but a sort of aggregative unity, like a heap of sand.

Which may in some fair measure explain what I mean by dramatic composition. For a drama, regarded as a work of art, should be in the strictest sense of the term a society; that is, not merely a numerical collection or juxtaposition, but a living contexture, of persons and events. For men's natures do not, neither can they, unfold themselves severally and individually; their development proceeds from, through, and by each other. And, besides their individual circulations, they have a common circulation; their characters interpenetrating, more or less, one with another, and standing all together in mutual dependence and support. Nor does this vital coherence and reciprocity hold between the several characters merely, but also between these, taken collectively, and the various conditions, objects, circumstances, and influences, amidst which they have grown. So that the whole is like a large, full-grown tree, which is in truth made up of a multitude of little trees, all growing from a common root, nourished by a common sap, and bound together in a common life.

Now in Shakespeare's dramas—I do not say all of them, for some were but his apprentice-work, but in most of them—the several parts, both characters and incidents, are knit together in this organic way, so as to be all truly members one of another. Each needs all the others, each helps all the others, each is made what it is by the presence of all the others. Nothing stands alone, nothing exists merely for itself. The persons not only have each their several development, but also, besides this, and running into this, a development in common. In short, their whole transpiration proceeds by the laws and from the blood of mutual membership. And as each lives and moves and has his being, so each is to be understood and interpreted, with reference, explicit or implicit, to all the others. And there is not only this coherence of the characters represented, one with another, but also of them all with the events and circumstances of the representation. It is this coefficient action of all the parts to a common end, this mutual participation of each in all, and of all in each, that constitutes the thing truly and properly a work of art.

So then a drama may be fitly spoken of as an organic structure. And such it must be, to answer the conditions of Art. Here we have a thing made up of divers parts or elements, with a course or circulation of mutual reference and affinity pervading them all, and binding them together, so as to give to the whole the character of a multitudinous unit; just as in the illustration, before used, of a large tree made up of innumerable little trees. And it seems plain enough that, the larger the number and variety of parts embraced in the work, or the more diversified it is in matter and movement, the greater the strength of faculty required for keeping every thing within the terms of Art; while, provided this be done, the grander is the impression produced, and the higher is the standing of the work as an intellectual achievement of man.

This, then, as before observed, is just the highest and hardest part of dramatic creation: in the whole domain of literary workmanship there is no one thing so rarely attained, none that so few have been found capable of attaining, as this. And yet in this Shakespeare was absolutely—I speak advisedly—without any teacher whatever; not to say, what probably might be said without any hazard, that it is a thing which no man or number of men could impart. The Classic Drama, had he been ever so well acquainted with it, could not have helped him here at all, and would most likely have been a stumbling-block to him. And, in my view of the matter, the most distinguishing feature of the Poet's genius lies in this power of broad and varied combination; in the deep intuitive perception which thus enabled him to put a multitude of things together, so that they should exactly fit and finish one another. In some of his works, as Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, and the three Parts of King Henry the Sixth, though we have, especially in the latter, considerable skill in individual character,—far more than in any English plays preceding them,—there is certainly very little, perhaps nothing, that can be rightly termed dramatic composition. In several, again, as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, and King John, we have but the beginnings and first stages of it. But in various others, as The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, King Henry the Fourth, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, it is found, if not in entire perfection, at least so nearly perfect, that there has yet been no criticism competent to point out the defect.

All which makes a full and conclusive answer to the charge of irregularity which has been so often brought against the Poet. To be regular, in the right sense of the term, he did not need to follow the rules which others had followed before him: he was just as right in differing from them as they were in differing from him: in other words, he stands as an original, independent, authoritative legislator in the province of Art; or, as Gervinus puts it, "he holds the place of the revealing genius of the laws of Art in the Modern Drama"; so that it is sheer ignorance, or something worse, to insist on trying him by the laws of the ancient Tragedy. It is on this ground that Coleridge makes the pregnant remark,—"No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius,—the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination." So that I may fitly close this branch of the subject by applying to Shakespeare a very noteworthy saying of Burke's, the argument of which holds no less true of the law-making prerogative in Art than in the State: "Legislators have no other rules to bind them but the great principles of reason and equity, and the general sense of mankind. These they are bound to obey and follow; and rather to enlarge and enlighten law by the liberality of legislative reason, than to fetter and bind their higher capacity by the narrow constructions of subordinate, artificial justice."[15]

[15] Aristotle himself was very far from setting up the form and extent of the drama of his day as a rule for all time. He declared that, "as regards the natural limit of the action, the more extended will always be the more beautiful, so long as it is easily surveyed." Shakespeare's practice is strictly correspondent to this rule. But with this rule in mind, he went to the very verge of these limits. He chose his matter as rich and full as possible; he extended its form according to its requirements, but no further: it will not be found, in any of his dramas, that the thought is exhausted before the end; that there is any superfluous extension of the form, or any needless abundance of the matter. To arrange the most ample materials in the amplest form without overstepping its fair proportions, is a task which no one has accomplished as he has done. Therein lies a large part of his artistic greatness. No poet has represented so much in so little space; none has so widely enlarged the space without exceeding the poetical limitations. In this he did not suffer himself to be perplexed by the example of the ancient tragedy. He felt that the peculiar poetic material of the new world would perish in those old forms, and that it was therefore better to mould them afresh. He knew right well that the poet's task was to represent the very substance of his times, to reflect the age in his poetry, and to give it form and stamp: he therefore created, for the enlarged sphere of life, an enlarged sphere of Art: to this end he sought, not a ready-made rule, but the inward law of the given matter,—a spirit in the things, which in the work of art shaped the form for itself. For there is no higher worth in a poetical work than the agreement of the form with the nature of the matter represented, and this according to its own indwelling laws, not according to external rule. If we judge Shakespeare or Homer by any such conventional rule, we may equally deny them taste and law: measured, however, by that higher standard, Shakespeare's conformity to the inner law outstrips all those regular dramatists who learned from Aristotle, not the spirit of regularity, but mechanical imitation.—GERVINUS.

CHARACTERIZATION.

I am next to consider Shakespeare's peculiar mode of conceiving and working out character; as this stands next in order and importance to the article of Dramatic Composition.

Now, in several English writers before him, we find characters discriminated and sustained with considerable judgment and skill. Still we feel a want of reality about them: they are not men and women themselves, but only the outsides and appearances of men and women; often having indeed a good measure of coherence and distinctness, but yet mere appearances, with nothing behind or beneath, to give them real substance and solidity. Of course, therefore, the parts actually represented are all that they have; they stand for no more than simply what is shown; there is nothing in them or of them but what meets the beholder's sense: so that, however good they may be to look at, they will not bear looking into; because the outside, that which is directly seen or heard, really exhausts their whole force and meaning.

Instead, then, of beginning at the heart of a character, and working outwards, these authors began at the surface, and worked the other way; and so were precluded from getting beyond the surface, by their mode of procedure. It is as if the shell of an egg should be fully formed and finished before the contents were prepared; in which case the contents of course could not be got into it. It would have to remain a shell, and nothing more: as such, it might do well enough for a show, just as well indeed as if it were full of meat; but it would not stand the weighing.

With Shakespeare all this is just reversed. His egg is a real egg, brimful of meat, and not an empty shell; and this, because the formation began at the centre, and the shell was formed last. He gives us, not the mere imitations or appearances of things, but the very things themselves. His characters have more or less of surface, but they are solids: what is actually and directly shown, is often the least part of them, never the whole: the rest is left to be inferred; and the showing is so managed withal as to start and propagate the inferring process in the beholder's mind.

All which clearly implies that Shakespeare conceived his persons, not from their outside, but in their rudiments and first principles. He begins at the heart of a character, and unfolds it outwards, forming and compacting all the internal parts and organs as he unfolds it; and the development, even because it is a real and true development, proceeds at every step, not by mere addition or aggregation of particulars, but by digestion and vital assimilation of all the matter that enters into the structure; there being, in virtue of the life that pervades the thing, just such elements, and just so much of them, sent to each organ, as is necessary to its formation. The result of this wonderful process is, that the characters are all that they appear to be, and a vast deal more besides: there is food for endless thought and reflection in them: beneath and behind the surface, there is all the substance that the surface promises or has room for,—an inexhaustible stock of wealth and significance beyond what is directly seen; so that the more they are looked into the more they are found to contain.

Thus there is a sort of realistic verisimilitude in Shakespeare's characters. It is as if they had been veritable living men and women, and he had seen and comprehended and delivered the whole and pure truth respecting them. Of course, therefore, they are as far as possible from being mere names set before pieces of starched and painted rhetoric, or mere got-up figures of modes and manners: they are no shadows or images of fancy, no heroes of romance, no theatrical personages at all; they have nothing surreptitious or make-believe or ungenuine about them: they do not in any sort belong to the family of poetical beings; they are not designs from works of art; nay, they are not even designs from nature; they are nature itself. Nor are they compilations from any one-sided or sectional view of mankind, but are cut out round and full from the whole of humanity; so that they touch us at all points, and, as it were, surround us. From all this it follows that there is no repetition among them: though there are some striking family resemblances, yet no two of them are individually alike: for, as the process of forming them was a real growth, an evolution from a germ, the spontaneous result of creative Nature working within them, so there could be no copying of one from another. Accordingly, as in the men and women of Nature's own making, different minds conceive different ideas of them, and have different feelings towards them, and even the same mind at different times: in fact, hardly any two men view them alike, or any one man for two years together; the actual changes in us being reflected and measured by correspondent seeming changes in them: so that a further acquaintance with them always brings advancing knowledge, and what is added still modifies what was held before. Hence even so restrained, not to say grudging, a critic as Pope was constrained to pronounce Shakespeare's characters "so much Nature herself, that it is a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her."

"Of Nature's inner shrine thou art the Priest, Where most she works when we perceive her least."

I have placed Shakespeare's power of dramatic architecture or organization at the head of his gifts and prerogatives as an artist. And so I suppose a just Philosophy of Art is bound to reckon it. But comparatively few men are or can be, in the fair sense of the term, philosophers of Art, as this requires a course of special training and study. But Shakespeare is a great teacher in the School of Life as well as a great master in the School of Art. And indeed the right use of Art is nowise to serve as the raw material of philosophy, but to furnish instruction and inspiration in the truth of things; and unless it can work home to the business and bosoms of plain practical men, it might as well be struck from the roll of legitimate interests. Now, in the circle of uninspired forces, Shakespeare's art may be justly regarded as our broadest and noblest "discipline of humanity." And his characterization, not his dramatic composition, is his point of contact with us as a practical teacher. In other words, it is by his thorough at-homeness with human nature in the transpirations of individual character that he touches the general mind and heart. Here he speaks a language which all men of developed intelligence can understand and feel. Accordingly it is in his characters that most men place, and rightly place, his supreme excellence: here it is that his wisdom finds and grasps men directly as men; nor, at this point of meeting, does he leave any part of our many-sided being without its fitting portion of meat in due season; while our receptiveness is the only limit to our acquisitions.[16]

[16] Here is no stage language or manners, no standing parts, nothing that can be called ideal or favourite stage characters, no heroes of the theatre or of romance: in this active world there is nothing fantastic, nothing unsound, nothing exaggerated nor empty: neither the poet nor the actor speaks in them, but creative nature alone, which seems to dwell in and to animate these images. The forms vary, as they do in life, from the deepest to the shallowest, from the most noble to the most deformed: a prodigal dispenses these riches; but the impression is, that he is as inexhaustible as Nature herself. And not one of these figures is like another in features: there are groups which have a family likeness, but no two individuals resembling each other: they become known to us progressively, as we find it with living acquaintance: they make different impressions on different people, and are interpreted by each according to his own feelings. Hence, in the explanation of Shakespeare's characters, it would be an idle undertaking to balance the different opinions of men, or to insist arbitrarily on our own: each can only express his own view, and must then learn whose opinion best stands the test of time. For, on returning to these characters at another time, our greater ripeness and experience will ever lay open to us new features in them. Whoever has not been wrecked, with his ideals and principles, on the shore of life, whoever has not bled inwardly with sorrow, has not suppressed holy feelings, and stumbled over the enigmas of the world, will but half understand Hamlet. And whoever has borne the sharpest pains of consciousness will understand Shakespeare's characters like one of the initiated; and to him they will be ever new, ever more admirable, ever richer in significance: he will make out of them a school of life, free from the danger of almost all modern poetry, which is apt to lead us astray, and to give us heroes of romance, instead of true men.—GERVINUS.

"That which he hath writ Is with such judgment labour'd and distill'd Through all the needful uses of our lives, That, could a man remember but his lines, He should not touch at any serious point, But he might breathe his spirit out of him."

Shakespeare, it is true, idealizes his characters, all of them more or less, some of them very much. But this, too, is so done from the heart outwards, done with such inward firmness and such natural temperance, that there is seldom any thing of hollowness or insolidity in the result. Except in some of his earlier plays, written before he had found his proper strength, and before his genius had got fairly disciplined into power, there is nothing ambitious or obtrusive in his idealizing; no root of falsehood in the work, as indeed there never is in any work of art that is truly worthy the name. Works of artifice are a very different sort of thing. And one, perhaps the main, secret of Shakespeare's mode in this respect is, that the ideal is so equally diffused, and so perfectly interfused with the real, as not to disturb the natural balance and harmony of things. In other words, his poetry takes and keeps an elevation at all points alike above the plane of fact. Therewithal his mass of real matter is so great, that it keeps the ideal mainly out of sight. It is only by a special act of reflection that one discovers there is any thing but the real in his workmanship; and the appreciative student, unless his attention is specially drawn to that point, may dwell with him for years without once suspecting the presence of the ideal, because in truth his mind is kindled secretly to an answering state. It is said that even Schiller at first saw nothing but realism in Shakespeare, and was repelled by his harsh truth; but afterwards became more and more impressed with his ideality, which seemed to bring him near the old poets.

Thus even when Shakespeare idealizes most the effect is to make the characters truer to themselves and truer to nature than they otherwise would be. This may sound paradoxical, nevertheless I think a little illustration will make it good. For the proper idealizing of Art is a concentration of truth, and not, as is often supposed, a substitution of something else in the place of it. Now no man, that has any character to speak of, does or can show his whole character at any one moment or in any one turn of expression: it takes the gathered force and virtue of many expressions to make up any thing rightly characteristic of him. In painting, for instance, the portrait of an actual person, if the artist undertakes to represent him merely as he is at a given instant of time, he will of course be sure to misrepresent him. In such cases literal truth is essential untruth. Because the person cannot fairly deliver himself in any one instant of expression; and the business of Art is to distil the sense and efficacy of many transient expressions into one permanent one; that is, out of many passing lines and shades of transpiration the artist should so select and arrange and condense as to deliver the right characteristic truth about him. This is at least one of the ways, I think it is the commonest way, in which Shakespeare idealizes his characters; and he surpasses all other poets in the ease, sureness, and directness with which his idealizing works in furtherance of truth. It is in this sense that he idealizes from nature. And here, as elsewhere, it is "as if Nature had entrusted to him the secret of her working power"; for we cannot but feel that, if she should carry her human handiwork up to a higher stage of perfection, the result would be substantially as he gives it. Accordingly our first impression of his persons is that they are simply natural: had they been literal transcripts from fact, they would not have seemed more intensely real than they do: yet a close comparison of them with the reality of human nature discloses an ideal heightening in them of the finest and rarest quality. Even so realistic a delineation as Hostess Quickly, or the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, is not an exception to this rule.

The Poet's idealizing of his characters proceeds, in part, by putting his own intellectuality into them. And the wonder is, how he could do this in so large a measure as he often does, without marring or displacing or anywise obstructing their proper individuality. For they are never any the less themselves for having so much of his intelligence in them. Nay, more; whatever may be their peculiarity, whether wit, dulness, egotism, or absurdity, the effect of that infusion is to quicken their idiom, and set it free, so that they become all the more rightly and truly themselves. Thus what he gives them operates to extricate and enfranchise their propriety, and bring it out in greater clearness and purity. His intellectuality discovers them to us just as they are, and translates their mind, or want of mind, into fitting language, yet remains so transparently clear as to be itself unseen. He tells more truth of them, or rather makes them tell more truth of themselves, in a single sentence, than, without his help, they could tell in a month. The secret of this appears to lie in sifting out what is most idiomatic or characteristic of a man, purging and depurating this of all that is uncharacteristic, and then presenting the former unmixed and free, the man of the man.

We have a very striking instance of this in King Henry the Fifth, where the Boy, who figures as servant to Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, soliloquizes his judgment of those worthies: "As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to them all three; but they all three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph,—he is white-liver'd and red-fac'd; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol,—he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword; by the means whereof 'a breaks words, and keeps whole weapons. For Nym,—he hath heard that men of few words are the best men; and therefore he scorns to say his prayers, lest 'a should be thought a coward: but his few bad words are match'd with as few good deeds; for 'a never broke any man's head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk. They will steal any thing, and call it purchase. Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three half-pence. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching; and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel: I knew by that piece of service the men would carry coals. They would have me as familiar with men's pockets as their gloves or their handkerchers: which makes much against my manhood, if I should take from another's pocket to put into mine; for it is plain pocketing-up of wrongs. I must leave them, and seek some better service: their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up."

Here one might think the Poet must have lapsed a little from the character in making the Boy talk such a high and solid strain of intelligence: but it is not so; the Boy talks strictly in character. The intellect he shows is all truly his own too, but not his own in that space of time. He has indeed a shrewd, quick eye, and knows a thing or two; still he could not, unaided and alone, deliver so much intellect in a whole month as he here lets off in this brief speech. Shakespeare just inspires the youngster, and the effect of that inspiration is to make him so much the more himself.

But the process of the thing involves, moreover, a sort of double consciousness, which probably cannot be altogether explained. The Poet had a strange faculty, or at least had it in a strange degree, of being truly himself and truly another at one and the same time. For he does not mould a character from the outside, but is truly inside of it, nay, is the character for the time being, and yet all the while he continues just as much Shakespeare as if he were nothing else. His own proper consciousness, and the consciousness of the person he is representing, both of these are everywhere apparent in his characterization; both of them working together too, though in a manner which no psychology has been able to solve. In other words, Shakespeare is perfectly in his persons and perfectly out of them at the same time; has his consciousness and theirs thoroughly identified, yet altogether distinct; so that they get all the benefit of his intellect without catching the least tinge of his personality. There is the mystery of it. And the wonder on this point is greatly enhanced in his delineations of mental disease. For his consciousness takes on, so to speak, or passes into, the most abnormal states without any displacement or suspension of its normal propriety. Accordingly he explores and delivers the morbid and insane consciousness with no less truth to the life than the healthy and sound; as if in both cases alike he were inside and outside the persons at the same time. With what unexceptional mastery in Nature's hidden processes he does this, must be left till I come to the analysis of particular instances.

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It is to be noted further that Shakespeare's characters, generally, are not exhibited in any one fixed state or cast of formation. There is a certain vital limberness and ductility in them, so that upon their essential identity more or less of mutation is ever supervening. They grow on and unfold themselves under our eye: we see them in course of development, in the act and process of becoming; undergoing marked changes, passing through divers stages, animated by mixed and various motives and impulses, passion alternating with passion, purpose with purpose, train of thought with train of thought; so that they often end greatly modified from what they were at the beginning; the same, and yet another. Thus they have to our minds a past and a future as well as a present; and even in what we see of them at any given moment there is involved something both of history and of prophecy.

Here we have another pregnant point of divergence from the Classic form. For, as it is unnatural that a man should continue altogether the same character, or subject to the same passion, or absorbed in the same purpose, through a period of ten years; so it is equally against nature that a man should undergo much change of character, or be occupied by many passions, or get engrossed in many purposes, the same day. If, therefore, a character is to be represented under various phases and fluctuations, the nature of the work evidently requires much length of time, a great variety of objects and influences, and, consequently, a wide range of place. Thus, in the Gothic Drama, the complexity of matter, with the implied vicissitudes of character, was plainly incompatible with the Minor Unities. On the other hand, the clearness and simplicity of design, which belong to the Classic Drama, necessarily preclude any great diversity of time and place; since, as the genius of the thing requires character to be represented mainly under a single aspect, the time and place of the representation must needs be limited correspondingly.

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Again: It is admitted on all hands that in Shakespeare's works, far more than in almost any others, every thing appears to come, not from him, but from the characters; and from these too speaking, not as authors, but simply as men. The reason of which must be, that the word is just suited to the character, the character to the word; every thing exactly fitting into and filling the place. Doubtless there are many things which, considered by themselves, might be bettered; but it is not for themselves that the Poet uses them, but as being characteristic of the persons from whom they proceed; and the fact of their seeming to proceed from the persons, not from him, is clear proof of their strict dramatic propriety. Hence it is that in reading his works we think not of him, but only of what he is describing: we can hardly realize his existence, his individuality is so lost in the objects and characters he brings before us. In this respect, he is a sort of impersonal intelligence, with the power to make every thing visible but itself. Had he been merely an omniloquent voice, there could hardly have been less of subjective idiom in his deliverances. That he should have known so perfectly how to avoid giving too much or too little; that he should have let out and drawn in the reins precisely as the matter required;—this, as it evinces an almost inconceivable delicacy of mind, is also one of the points wherein his originality is most conspicuous.

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Equally remarkable is the Poet's intellectual plenipotence in so ordering and moving the several characters of a play as that they may best draw out each other by mutual influences, and set off each other by mutual contrasts. The persons are thus assorted and attempered with perfect insight both of their respective natures and of their common fitness to his purpose. And not the least wonderful thing in his works is the exquisite congruity of what comes from the persons with all the circumstances and influences under which they are represented as acting; their transpirations of character being withal so disposed that the principle of them shines out freely and clearly on the mind. We have a good instance of this in Romeo's speech just before he swallows the poison; every word of which is perfectly idiomatic of the speaker, and at the same time thoroughly steeped in the idiom of his present surroundings. It is true, Shakespeare's persons, like those in real life, act so, chiefly because they are so; but so perfectly does he seize and impart the germ of a character, along with the proper conditions of its development, that the results seem to follow all of their own accord. Thus in his delineations every thing is fitted to every other thing; so that each requires and infers the others, and all hang together in most natural coherence and congruity.

To illustrate this point a little more in detail, let us take his treatment of passion. How many forms, degrees, varieties of passion he has portrayed! Yet I am not aware that any instance of disproportion or unfitness has ever been successfully pointed out in his works. With but two or three exceptions at the most, so perfect is the correspondence between the passion and the character, and so freely and fitly does the former grow out of the circumstances in which the latter is placed, that we have no difficulty in justifying and accounting for the passion. The passion is thoroughly characteristic, and pervaded with the individuality of its subject. And this holds true not only of different passions, but of different modifications of the same passion; the forms of love, for instance, being just as various and distinct as the characters in which it is shown. Then too he unfolds a passion in its rise and progress, its turns and vicissitudes, its ebbings and flowings, so that we go along with it freely and naturally from first to last. Even when, as in case of Ferdinand and Miranda, or of Romeo and Juliet, he ushers in a passion at its full height, he so contrives to throw the mind back or around upon various predisposing causes and circumstances, as to carry our sympathies through without any revulsion. We are so prepared for the thing by the time it comes as to feel no abruptness in its coming. The exceptions to this, save in some of the Poet's earlier plays, are very rare indeed: the only one I have ever seemed to find is the jealousy of Leontes in The Winter's Tale, and I am by no means sure of it even there. This intuitive perception of the exact kind and degree of passion and character that are suited to each other; this quick and sure insight of the internal workings of a given mind, and of the why, the when, and the how far it should be moved; and this accurate letting-out and curbing-in of a passion precisely as the law of its individuality requires; in a word, this thorough mastery of the inmost springs and principles of human transpiration;—all this is so extraordinary, that I am not surprised to find even grave and temperate thinkers applying to the Poet such bold expressions as the instrument, the rival, the co-worker, the completer of Nature.

Nor is this the only direction in which he maintains the fitness of things: he keeps the matter right towards us as well as towards his characters. It is true, he often lays on us burdens of passion that would not be borne in any other writer. But, whether he wrings the heart with pity, or freezes the blood with terror, or fires the soul with indignation, the genial reader still rises from his pages refreshed. The reason of which is, instruction keeps pace with excitement: he strengthens the mind in proportion as he loads it. Shakespeare has been called the great master of passion: doubtless he is so; yet he is not more that than he is every thing else: for he makes us think as intensely as he requires us to feel; while opening the deepest fountains of the heart, he at the same time kindles the highest energies of the head. Nay, with such consummate art does he manage the fiercest tempests of our being, that in a healthy mind the witnessing of them is always attended by an overbalance of pleasure. With the very whirlwinds of passion he so blends the softening and assuaging influences of poetry, that they relish of nothing but sweetness and health; as in case of "the gentle Desdemona," where pathos is indeed carried to the extreme limit of endurance, so that "all for pity I could die," yet there is no breach of the rule in question. For while, as a philosopher, he surpassed all other philosophers in power to discern the passions of men; as an artist, he also surpassed all other artists in skill

"so to temper passion, that our ears Take pleasure in their pain, and eyes in tears Both weep and smile."

Another point well worth the noting is the perfect evenhandedness of Shakespeare's representations. For, among all his characters, with the single exception, perhaps, of "Prince Hal," we cannot discover from the delineation itself that he preferred any one to another; though of course we cannot conceive it possible for any man to regard, for example, Edmund and Edgar, or Iago and Desdemona, with the same feelings. It is as if the scenes of his dramas were forced on his observation against his will, himself being under a solemn oath to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He thus leaves the characters to make their own impression upon us. He is their mouth-piece, not they his: what they say is never Shakespeare ventriloquizing, but is to all intents and purposes their own. With the right or wrong, the honour or shame, of their actions, he has nothing to do: that they are so, and act so, is their concern, not his; and his business is, not to reform nor deprave, not to censure nor approve them, but simply to tell the truth about them. And so, because he would not serve as the advocate of any, therefore he was able to stand as the representative of all; which is indeed his characteristic office.

Most of the many faultings of Shakespeare's workmanship on the score of taste are easily disposed of from this point. As a general thing, the blame laid upon him in this behalf belongs only to his persons, and as regards him the matter of it should rather be a theme of praise. Take, for example, the gross images and foul language used by Leontes when the rage of jealousy is on him: the matter is offensive enough certainly in itself, but it is the proper outcome of the man's character in that state of mind; that is, it is a part, and an essential part, of the truth concerning him: as the passion turns him into a brute, so he is rightly made, or rather allowed to speak a brutal dialect; and the bad taste is his, not the Poet's. That jealousy, such as that of Leontes, naturally subverts a man's understanding and manners, turns his sense, his taste, his decency all out of doors, and causes him to gloat over loathsome thoughts and fancies,—this is among the things of human nature which it would be a sin to omit in a delineation of that passion.