Moderation is unknown to Shakespeare. If his heroes love, they love like maniacs; when they hate they hate like fiends. He puts his own tremendous, superabounding, manhood into all of them, and gives each of them that earnestness which, as a fact, is the attribute of only great souls. Were Shakespeare really to be judged by the standard according to which many of his admirers extol him, he would have to be condemned; for, far from being, in the ordinary acceptation of the phrase, true to life, he places his creatures in a life entirely his own, and makes them rave and fume, and vow in a manner inexpressibly and intoxicatingly delightful, but never yet witnessed off the stage. Therein is his greatness, that he was never for a moment hampered by the facts, or even by the probabilities, of life, any more than his dramas are hampered by the unities. But for his towering imagination and his tumultuous wealth of words, he would have been a downright ranter. No one image supports him long. No one image could support him long. He exhausts it, and seizes upon another, and then another. He ransacks the earth, the sea, the air, the heavens, for forms of existence and modes of speech whereby he may convey even the simplest ideas and the most elementary feelings. Take a speech of Hamlet's. Occasions first "inform" against him. Then they "spur" his dull revenge. Next he asks if he must make market" of his time. His mother is bidden first not to skin and film her soul with flattering unction; but that not being enough, she is told further not to spread the compost on the weeds to make them ranker. He says things to the queen which she might well be pardoned for not understanding all at once. But she gives as good as she gets, and bandies metaphors with him with unflagging prodigality. Every one is as just as rich in images, and just as bountiful. a "Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister, Here we have five, if not six, different metaphors in nine lines; and the speaker is supposed to be only giving moral advice. There is no waste of time so gratuitous as the attempt to make one of Shakespeare's metaphors fit into another. It is his ordinary way of speaking, of thinking, when he makes Hamlet ask whether it is nobler to bear the slings and arrows-or, for that matter, stings and arrowsor to take arms against a sea. Rather than bear the whips and scorns of time, what should a man do? Why-shuffle off this mortal coil And if he does not do it, why is it? Because the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and—mark the and, this fearless coupling together of the two ideas, or rather of three ideas-enterprises of great pith their current turn awry. Whence this inexhaustible and prodigally expended wealth? It was born of the period of Early Manhood, whose immense force was combined with considerable knowledge, and was not checked by the selfcriticism, prudence, and hesitation of a later age. And Shakespeare was as fortunate as, in a prior paper, we pointed out Spenser to be, in this one important respect. The age of his muse exactly tallied with the age of the nation, and what is more, of the whole of civilised Europe. England was in its brilliant youth, and the world, thanks to the Pagan Renaissance, had put on afresh adolescent hues and adolescent garments, when the 'Faëry Queen' was penned; and England and Europe had just made that further advance which was required for the strengthening and co-operating with the manly muse of our great dramatist. Spenser was born in 1553, and died in 1598 ; Shakespeare was born in 1564, and died in 1616. The difference between the periods covered by their respective lives may seem to some at first sight scarcely to warrant the distinction we draw between Youth and Early Manhood. But it must not be forgotten that the distinction is to be found rather in their works than in the exact interval between them in mere point of time. Spenser might conceivably, as far as the period of his existence was concerned, have belonged to the Early Manhood stage rather than to that of Youth; only, as a fact, he did not, as an intelligent survey and comparative estimate of his work show. Again, Shakespeare might conceivably have belonged, in the same sense, to the stage of Youth, as in fact, he truly did. He sings the same songs as Spenser, and strikes many of the same notes; but his muse lived on, and got into a more advanced period, to which his writings therefore more especially and properly belong. And it was in this period of Early Manhood that the nation likewise found itself. It was a period of daring, adventure, and recklessness. Inherited opinions were scattered to the winds, and life, with its hard facts, its shocking contradictions, its injustices, immoralities, and unrepaired wrongs, was looked fully and fearlessly in the face. Childhood has never heard of such things. Youth has heard of them but does not believe in their existence. Manhood, and Early Manhood more particularly, frankly acknowledges their existence, and either tolerates or beards them. That is the real secret of the grand, calm, catholic toleration of Shakespeare's of which we hear so much. That in his heart of hearts, or in his mind, he reconciled good and evil, faith and doubt, order and revolution, love and cruelty, right and wrong, the creeds and the ideas which were passing away with the creeds and ideas that were gaining ground and asserting themselves so fast, need not be believed or supposed. Humanity, even in its highest development, is not altogether godlike; it does not know the secret which will reconcile perpetual contradictions. We may sit apart, as Mr. Tennyson has finely said, "like God, holding no form of creed, but contemplating all "; but we shall never, "like God," know what "all" the creeds mean, why they are so numerous, and why they change and pass. And Shakespeare did not know. It is a fine thing, to quote the excellent words of Mr. Matthew Arnold, to see life steadily and see it whole; at least it would be an excellent thing if we could so see it. But-Diis aliter visum; and they made no exception, even in favour of Shakespeare. But they interfered thus far in his favour, that they caused him to be born at a time when it was possible for him to reach the loftiest heights of contemplative toleration scaleable by man, easily mistaken by small spectators at the foot for the celestial regions themselves. Shakspeare's birth coincided with the wreck of old opinions and the anything but certain or reassuring setting forth of new ones. At such times the world becomes divided into two camps and a few dignified outsiders. There is the camp, filled with hot and unyielding followers, who pitch their tents on what they deem the impregnable ground long occupied by their forefathers, and who let the light of the sun beat fiercely in the face of their adversaries. There is the camp of these last, swarming with eager and confident reformers, revolutionists, liberals, men of the future-persons known by different names in different ages, but always fired by the same passion, the passion of new ideas. These are quite as positive and should we not add, quite as wrong ?-as those others, only the time for proving them to be wrong has not yet arrived. For the moment they fight on the winning side, which is always right. Apart and away from these embittered rivals invariably stands a group of deliberate neutrals, whose temperament is so cautious, whose penetration so far-seeing, whose equity so complete, that the very fact of the old opinions having failed them at a pinch forbids them to take up with faith or zeal, or indeed take up at all, the new opinions which they know will, like their predecessors, some day be old. These are the grand unorganised body of esoteric aristocrats, who, for the most part, are bound by a severe rule of silence. Why should they speak? They have nothing to prove, nothing even to assert. Their part is limited to outwardly listening and inwardly denying. Each of the conflicting camps knows best, but they know better, only they do not say so. They say nothing. They have no wish to expose their divine indecision to the scoffs and easy ridicule of a mob of fanatics. But, be the epoch what it may, there are two classes of men to whom this serene, sequestered attitude of mind is difficult, and almost impossible-the young and the old. The age to which a judicial reserve is most proper is the age of Manhood, and of Early Manhood. England, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, was, as we have seen, precisely in that stage, and as a necessary consequence the best minds felt the force of the situation. One by one the thoroughgoing leaders of the Reformation, as a movement which was to be final, are dropping out of account in history, and the names most prized and oftenest mentioned are its Erastian statesmen and its neutral men of thought. Amongst these Shakespeare towers by all a head and shoulders, and we might dispute till the crack of doom as to what were his religious and political opinions without ever getting one argument nearer to a solution. Was he a Catholic? Was he a Protestant? Thank heaven, no one can say. He was as alien to the ardent prophecies of the boy as from the semi-cynical clinging regrets of the old man. He was in the full stream, but he went on it, not with it. That it is which makes him not of an age, but for all time. He lived in a period of keenest controversy, and he got the benefit of the warmth and fervour of the time, without sharing the infirmity of either of the sides and parties to it. His morality is the morality of the human heart, not of the churches; his scepticism is the scepticism of sad reflective experience, not of the professed sceptic-of the hard cold thinker. He alienates neither side, for he agrees with neither side, though, consequently, in his lifetime, he had no partisans. "Be absolute for death; either death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences That dost this habitation where thou keep'st "The best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st, yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more." "Thou hast nor youth nor age, But, as it were, an after-dinner sleep, Dreaming on both." What's yet in this That bears the name of life ? Yet in this life Lie hid some thousand deaths: yet death we fear, Not much pulpit eloquence here. None of all this profound philo sophy is fetched from the sacristy. It is robed neither in a white stole nor a black cassock. It sounds not of " pulpit drum ecclesiastic." Open the Fathers of the Church. Is it in their pages? If so, where? Do you find anything like it in Thomas à Kempis, in the Imitation of Christ'? Will you find it, later on, in Jeremy Taylor? Would Luther have been satisfied with it? Would Calvin? It is the philosophy of the Unknowable, and all creeds, all doctors of divinity, know. That is the plea and justification of their existence. Shakespeare did not know. "Who is he that knows? From the great deep to the great deep he knows." So says Mr Tennyson very finely in Tristram and Isolt.' It is the poet's way of answering the question. It is thus Shakespeare puts and answers it: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; The weariest and most loathed earthly life To what we fear of death." How full is the passage! Yet where is the answer to the question? Shakespeare limits himself to seeing the matter all round, so far as it is seen and felt by men-real men-and leaves the doctors and theologians aside. His philosophy is not the philosophy of the Pyrrhonists, it is the philosophy of a man of the world, who, wonderfully enough, is a poet, and has continual glimpses of things divine. His partiality, his preference, is for the latter, but he is above all things a man of sense, and acknowledges and accepts the condition of things mundane. A distinguished French critic, who is not often either wrong or rash, has ventured to say, "L'art a besoin d'un énergique parti pris; pour exciter la haine du mal et l'amour du bien il crée des types absolus, qu'on chercherait vainement dans le spectacle du monde réel." Were this true, what would become of Shakespeare? "Parti pris" he has none. Living in an age of the most violent antagonism, he is never for one instant combative. And here may there not, without impropriety, be inserted a mild protest against the English habit, more common among English critics than in any other class of their countrymen, of expecting artists, and even poets, to take a side, to join some camp or other, and to fight VOL. XXXIX. P |