Part 15 (1/2)

It is curious that no one of the commentators has noticed this extraordinary one-sidedness of Shakespeare In spite of his miraculous faculty of expression, he never found wonderful phrases for the virile virtues or virile vices For courage, revenge, self-assertion, and alish than any that Shakespeare coined In this field Chapman, Milton, Byron, Carlyle, and even Bunyan are his masters

Of course, as a e, and an adave hie

Dr Brandes declares that Shakespeare has only depicted physical courage, the courage of the swordsman; but that is beside the truth: Dr

Brandes has evidently forgotten the passage in ”Antony and Cleopatra,”

when Caesar conteonist as an ”old ruffian” Enobarbus, too, sneers at Antony's proposed duel:

”Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show Against a sworder”

Unhelped by uessed that Shakespeare would exhaust the obvious at first glance But the soul of courage to Shakespeare is, as we have seen, a love of honour working on quick generous blood--a feminine rather than a masculine view of the inal virtue With the fanatic's trust in God his Luther will go to Worh it rain devils”; and when in his own person Carlyle spoke of the small, honest h opposed by a huge hostile majority of fools and the insincere, he found one of the finest expressions for courage in all our literature The vast host shall be to us, he cried, as ”stubble is to fire” It ious faith rather than of courage pure and sienesis of courage is peculiarly English, and the courage so forhest Every one reory: ”I fought till ether, as if a sword grew out of ht withof the desperate resolution of Croe is not in Shakespeare, neither are its ancillary qualities--cruelty, hatred, ae Whenever he talks on these themes, he talks from the teeth outwards, as one without experience of their violent delights His Gloucester rants about a word Hatred and revenge Shakespeare only studied superficially, and cruelty he shudders fro how ill-endowed Shakespeare was on the side of manliness His intellect was so fine, his power of expression so ical, the men about him, his models, so brave--founders as they were of the British empire and sea-tyranny--that he is able to use his Hotspurs and Harrys to hide froeneral the poverty of his tereatest of poets, a miraculous artist, too, when he liked; but he was not a hero, and manliness was not his _forte_: he was by nature a neuropath and a lover

He was a master of passion and pity, and it astonishes one to notice hoillingly he passed always to that extre but his exquisite choice of words and i into the silly For example, in ”titus Andronicus,” with its crude, unmotived horrors, titus calls Marcus a murderer, and when Marcus replies: ”Alas, my lord, I have but killed a fly,” titus answers:

”But how, if that fly had a father and s, And buzz las in the air?

Poor har melody, Came here to make us merry! and thou hast killed him”

Even in his earliest plays in the noontide of lusty youth, when the heat of the blood makes most men cruel, or at least heedless of others'

sorrows, Shakespeare was full of syentle soul ith the stricken deer and suffered through the killing of a fly Just as Ophelia turned ”thought and affliction, passion, hell itself” to ”favour and to prettiness,” so Shakespeare's genius turned the afflictions and passions of man to pathos and to pity

CHAPTER VII SHAKESPEARE AS LYRIC POET: ”TWELFTH NIGHT”

Shakespeare began the work of life as a lyric poet It was to be expected therefore that when he took up playwriting he would use the play from time to time as an opportunity for a lyric, and in fact this was his constant habit Fro to the end of his career he was as much a lyric poet as a dramatist His first co and the lyrical sweetness is everywhere predominant His apprenticeshi+p period edy, ”Romeo and Juliet” I am usually content to follow Mr Furnival's ”Trial Table of the order of Shakspere's Plays,” in which ”Richard II,” ”Richard III,” and ”King John” are all placed later than ”Romeo and Juliet,” and yet included in the first period that stretches from 1585 to 1595 But ”Romeo and Juliet” seeenius than any of these histories; it is not only a finer work of art than any of theher promise, but in its lyrical sweetness far more truly representative of Shakespeare's youth than any of the early comedies or historical plays

Whatever their fors, ”Venus and Adonis,” ”Lucrece,” ”Love's Labour's Lost,” ”The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and he may be said to have ended his apprenticeshi+p with the iedy of first love ”Romeo and Juliet”

In the years froht the lyric eleed to free hi Mr Swinburne has written of Shakespeare's use of rhye and sympathy that leaves little to be desired He coht, and doubts cogently whether Shakespeare ever attained such mastery of rhyme as Marlowe in ”Hero and Leander” But I like to think that Shakespeare's singing quickly became too sincere in its emotion and too complex in its harmonies to tolerate the definite limits set by rhyme In any case by 1595 Shakespeare had learned to prefer blank verse to rhyreat step towards a superb knowledge of his instrument

The period of Shakespeare's maturity defines itself sharply; it stretches from 1595 to 1608 and falls naturally into two parts; the first part includes the trilogy ”Henry IV” and ”Henry V” and his golden comedies; the second, froedies The characteristic of this period so far as regards the instrument is that Shakespeare has come to understand the proper function of prose He sees first that it is the only language suited to broad cooes on to use it in moments of sudden excitement, or when dramatic truth to character seems to him all important At his best he uses blank verse when souage of life, the language of surprise, laughter, strife, and of all the co these twelve or fourteen years the lyric note is not obtrusive; it is usually subordinated to character and suited to action

His third and last period begins with ”Pericles” and ends with the ”Tempest”; it is characterized, as we shall see later, by bodily weakness and by a certain contee of the instrument once acquired never left Shakespeare It is true that the lyric note becoly clear in his late comedies; but prose too is used by him with the same mastery that he showed in his maturity

In the first period Shakespeare was often unable to give his puppets individual life; in maturity he was interested in the puppets themselves and used therown a little weary of them and in ”The Tempest” showed himself inclined, just as Goethe in later life was inclined, to turn his characters into syht” is as clearly marked in Shakespeare's works as ”Ro line between his light, joyous coedies; it was all done at the topht of happy hours, but there are hints in it which we shall have to notice later, which show that riting it Shakespeare had already looked into the valley of disillusion which he was about to tread But ”Twelfth Night” is written in the spirit of ”As You Like It” or ”Much Ado,” only it is still enuous and less dramatic than these; it is, indeed, a lyric of love and the joy of living

There is no intenser delight to a lover of letters than to find Shakespeare singing, with happy unconcern, of the things he loved best--not the Shakespeare of Haements of men and of life, and whose heart we are fain to divine froht indications; nor Shakespeare the draive life to puppets like Coriolanus and Iago, hom he had little sympathy; but Shakespeare the poet, Shakespeare the lover, Shakespeare whoentle,” Shakespeare the sweet-hearted singer, as he lived and suffered and enjoyed If I were asked to coiven to us by Shakespeare of hie, I should certainly choose the first words of the Duke in ”Twelfth Night” I h it will be in every reader's remembrance; for it contains the completest, the s ever given in a few lines:

”If music be the food of love, play on; GiveThe appetite ain;--it had a dying fall: Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour--Enough! no more 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before”