Work a close investigation of them will infallibly leave on any thoughtful reader, as to the characteristic personal qualities of as that mind, the larger and more factitious emanations from expressio which still cover and astonish the world. The general and aggregate effect, then, of these sonnets, af person as contributing to our knowledge of Shakespeare as a man, is to antiquate, or at least to reduce very much in value, the common idea of him implied in such phrases as William the Calm, William the Cheerful, and the like. These phrases are true, when understood in a certain very obvious sense; but if we were to select that designation which would, as we think, express Shakespeare in his most intimate and private relations to man and nature, we should rather say, William the Meditative, William the Metaphysical, or William the Melancholy. Let not the reader who is full of the just idea of Shakespeare's wonderful concreteness as a poet, be staggered by the second of these phrases. The phrase is a good phrase; etymologically, it is perhaps the best phrase we could here use; and whatever of inappropriateness there may seem to be in it, proceeds from false associations, and will vanish, we hope, before we have done with it. Nor let it be supposed that, in using, as nearly synonymous, the word Melancholy, we mean anything so absurd as that the author of Falstaff was a Werther. What we mean is, that there is evidence in the sonnets, corroborated by other proof on all hands, that the mind of Shakespeare, when left to itself, was apt to sink into that state in which thoughts of what is sad and mysterious in the universe most easily come and go. ality. делена impressi At no time, except during sleep, is the mind of any human being completely idle. All men have some natural and congenial mood into which they fall when they are left to talk with themselves. One man recounts the follies of the past day, renewing the relish of them by the recollection; another uses his leisure to hate his enemy and to scheme his discomfiture; a third rehearses in imagination, in order to be prepared, the part which he is to perform on the morrow. Now, at such moments, as we believe, it was the habit of Shakespeare's mind, obliged thereto by the necessity of its 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. 66 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 any other poet. 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, Of mouthed graves will give thee memory; "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 what we fear of Death." C |