will;" that is, as we interpret, when he is borne on in a certain noble direction in all that he does by the very structure of his mind, while, at his option, he may keep planting this fixed path or not with a sportive and flowery border. By the necessity of his nature, Shakespeare was compelled in a certain earnest direction in all that he did; and it is our part to search through the thickets of imagery and gratuitous fiction amid which he spent his life, that this path may be discovered. As the lion, or the limpid stream, or the overshadowing tree, into which Proteus turned himself, was not a real lion, or a real stream, or a real tree, but only Proteus as the one or as the other; so, involved in each of Shakespeare's characters,in Hamlet, in Falstaff, or in Romeo,-involved in some deep manner in each of these diverse characters, is Shakespeare's own nature. If Shakespeare had not been precisely and wholly Shakespeare, and not any other man actual or conceivable, could Hamlet or Falstaff, or any other of his creations, have been what they are? But how to evolve Shakespeare from his works, how to compel this Proteus into his proper and native form, is still the question. It is a problem of the highest difficulty. Something, indeed, of the poet's personal character and views we cannot help gathering, as we read his dramas. Passages again and again occur there, of which, from their peculiar effect upon ourselves, from their conceivable reference to what we know of the poet's circumstances, or from their evident superfluousness and warmth, we do not hesitate to aver, "There speaks the poet's own heart." But to show generally how much of the man has passed into the poet, and how it is that his personal bent and peculiarities are to be surely detected inhering in writings whose essential character it is to be arbitrary and universal, is a task from which a critic might well shrink, were he left merely to the ordinary resources of critical ingenuity, without any positive and ascertained clue. In this case, however, all the world ought to know, there is a positive and ascertained clue. Shakespeare has left to us not merely a collection of dramas, the exercises of his creative phantasy in a world of ideal matter, but also certain poems structure, to ponder ceaselessly those questions relating to man, his origin, and his destiny, in familiarity with which consists what is called the spiritual element in human nature. It was Shakespeare's use, as it seems to us, to revert often, when alone, to that ultimate mood of the soul, in which one hovers wistfully on the borders of the finite, vainly pressing against the barriers that separate it from the unknown; that mood in which even what is common and under foot seems part of a vast current mystery, and in which, like Arabian Job of old, one looks by turns at the heaven above, the earth beneath, and one's own moving body between, interrogating whence it all is, why it all is, and whither it all tends. And this, we say, is Melancholy. It is more. It is that mood of man, which, most of all moods, is thoroughly, grandly, specifically human. That which is the essence of all worth, all beauty, all humour, all genius, is open or secret reference to the supernatural; and this is sorrow. The attitude of a finite creature, contemplating the infinite, can only be that of an exile—grief and wonder blending in a wistful longing for an unknown home. As we consider this frame of mind to have been characteristic of Shakespeare, so we find that he has not forgotten to represent it as a poet. We have always fancied Hamlet to be a closer translation of Shakespeare's own character than any other of his personations. The same meditativeness, the same morbid reference at all times to the supernatural, the same inordinate development of the speculative faculty, the same intellectual melancholy, that are seen in the Prince of Denmark, seem to have distinguished Shakespeare. Nor is it possible here to forget that minor and lower form of the same fancy-the ornament of As you like it, the melancholy Jaques. "Jaques. More, more, I pr'ythee, more! Amiens. It will make you melancholy, Monsieur Jaques. Jaques. I thank it. More, I pr'ythee, more! I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More, I pr'ythee, more! Amiens. My voice is rugged; I know I cannot please you. Jaques. I do not desire you to please me; I desire you to sing. Rosalind. Those that are in extremity of either are abominable fellows, and betray themselves to every modern censure, worse than drunkards. Jaques. Why, 'tis good to be sad, and say nothing. Rosalind. Why, then, 'tis good to be a post. Jaques. I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects; and, indeed, the sundry 'contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me, is a most humorous sadness." Jaques is not Shakespeare; but in writing this description of Jaques, Shakespeare drew from his knowledge of himself. His also was a "melancholy of his own," a "humorous sadness in which his often rumination wrapt him." In that declared power of Jaques of "sucking melancholy out of a song,' the reference of Shakespeare to himself seems almost direct. Nay, more, as Rosalind, in rating poor Jaques, tells him on one occasion, that he is so abject a fellow, that she verily believes he is "out of love with his nativity, and almost chides God for making him of that countenance that he is;" so Shakespeare's melancholy, in one of his sonnets, takes exactly the same form of self-dissatisfaction. "When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising, Think of that, reader! That mask of Shakespeare's face, which we have been discussing, Shakespeare himself did not like; and there were moments in which he was so abject as actually to wish that he had received from Nature another man's physical features! If Shakespeare's melancholy was, like that of Jaques, a complex melancholy-a melancholy "compounded of many simples," extracted perhaps at first from some root of bitter experience in his own life, and then fed, as his sonnets clearly state, by a habitual sense of his own outcast" condition in society, and by the sight of a hundred social wrongs around him, into a kind of abject dissatisfaction with himself and his fate; yet, in the end, and in its highest form, it was rather, as we have already hinted, the melancholy of Hamlet—a meditative, contemplative melancholy, embracing human life as a whole; the melancholy of a mind incessantly tending from the real (τα φυσικα) to the metaphysical (τα μετα τα φυσικα), and only brought back by external occasion from the metaphysical to the real. Do not let us quarrel about the words, if we can agree about the thing. Let any competent person whatever read the Sonnets, and then, with their impression on him, pass to the plays, and he will inevitably become aware of Shakespeare's personal fondness for certain themes or trains of thought, particularly that of the speed and destructiveness of time. Death, vicissitude, the march and tramp of generations across life's stage, the rotting of human bodies in the earththese and all the other forms of the same thought were familiar to Shakespeare to a degree beyond what is to be seen in the case of other poet. any It seems to have been a habit of his mind, when left to its own tendency, ever to indulge by preference in that oldest of human meditations, which is not yet trite—“ Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; he cometh forth as a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth as a shadow, and continueth not." Let us cite a few examples from the sonnets : "When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment; That this huge state presenteth nought but shows, Whereon the stars in secret influence comment."-Sonnet 15. "If thou survive my well-contented clay, When that churl, Death, my bones with dust shall cover."-Sonnet 32. "No longer mourn for me, when I am dead, Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with viler worms to dwell."-Sonnet 71. "The wrinkles, which thy glass will truly show, "Or shall I live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten?"-Sonnet 81. These are but one or two out of many such passages, occurring in the sonnets. Indeed, it may be said, that wherever Shakespeare pronounces the words time, age, death, &c., it is with a deep and cutting personal emphasis, quite different from the usual manner of poets in their stereotyped allusions to mortality. Time, in particular, seems to have tenanted his imagination as a kind of grim and hideous personal existence, cruel out of mere malevolence of nature. Death, too, had become to him a kind of actual being or fury, morally unamiable, and deserving of reproach,—" that churl, Death." If we turn to the plays of Shakespeare, we shall find that in them, too, the same morbid sensitiveness to all associations with mortality is continually breaking out. The vividness, for example, with which Juliet describes the interior of a charnel-house, partakes of a spirit of revenge, as if Shakespeare were retaliating, through her, upon an object horrible to himself. "Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house, O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones, More distinctly revengeful is Romeo's ejaculation at the tomb. "Thou détestable maw, thou womb of Death, And who does not remember the famous passage in Measure for Measure?— "Claudio. Death is a fearful thing. Isabella. And shaméd life is hateful. Claudio. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where- To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot! This sensible warm motion to become To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, To what we fear of Death." C |