Great Homer’s birth sev’n rival cities claim,

Too mighty such monopoly of Fame;

Yet not to birth alone did Homer owe

His wondrous worth; what Egypt could bestow,

With all the schools of Greece and Asia join’d,

Enlarg’d th’ immense expansion of his mind.

Nor yet unrival’d the Mæonian strain,

The British Eagle and the Mantuan Swan

Tow’r equal heights. But happier Stratford, thou

With incontested laurels deck thy brow:

Thy bard was thine _unschool’d_, and from thee brought

More than all Egypt, Greece, or Asia taught.

Not Homer’s self such matchless honours won;

The Greek has rivals, but thy Shakespeare none.

Dodsley’s _Collection of Poems by Several Hands_.

1782, ii. p. 315.

“The British Eagle,” _i.e._ Milton.

WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES, 1794

(1762-1850)

“_On Shakespeare._”

O sovereign master, who with lovely state

Dost rule as in some isle’s enchanted land,

On whom soft airs and shadowy spirits wait,

Whilst scenes of faerie bloom at thy command!

On thy wild shores forgetful could I lie,

And list, till earth dissolved, to thy sweet minstrelsy!

Called by thy magic from the hoary deep,

Aërial forms should in bright troops ascend,

And then a wondrous masque before me sweep;

While sounds _that the earth owned not_, seem to blend

Their stealing melodies, that when the strain

Ceased, _I should weep, and would so dream again_!

The charm is wound: I see an aged form,

In white robes, on the winding sea-shore stand;

O’er the careering surge he waves his wand:

Upon the black rock bursts the bidden storm.

Now from bright opening clouds I hear a lay,

_Come to these yellow sands, fair stranger, come away_.

Saw ye pass by the weird sisters pale?

Marked ye the lowering castle on the heath?

Hark! hark! is the deed done? the deed of death!

The deed is done—hail, king of Scotland, hail!

I see no more;—to many a fearful sound

The bloody cauldron sinks, and all is dark around.

Pity! touch the trembling strings,

A maid, a beauteous maniac, wildly sings:

“They laid him in the ground so cold,

Upon his breast the earth is thrown;

High is heaped the grassy mould,

_Oh! he is dead and gone_.

The winds of the winter blow o’er his cold breast,

But pleasant shall be his rest.”

The song is ceased. Ah! who, pale shade, art thou,

Sad raving to the rude tempestuous night?

Sure thou hast had much wrong, so stern thy brow;

So piteous thou dost tear thy tresses white;

So wildly thou dost cry, “_Blow, bitter wind,

Ye elements, I call not _you_ unkind_.”

Beneath the shade of nodding branches grey,

And rude romantic woods, and glens forlorn,

The merry hunters wear the hours away;

Rings the deep forest to the joyous horn!

Joyous to all, but him who with sad look

Hangs idly musing by the brawling brook.

But mark the merry elves of fairy land!

To the high moon’s gleamy glance,

They with shadowy morris dance;

Soft music dies along the desert sand;

Soon at peep of cold-eyed day

Soon the numerous lights decay;

Merrily, now merrily,

After the dewy moon they fly.

Let rosy laughter now advance,

And wit with sparkling eye,

Where quaint powers lurking lie

Bright fancy, the queen of the revels, shall dance,

And point to the frolicsome train

And antic forms that flit unnumbered o’er the plain.

O sovereign master! at whose sole command

We start with terror, or with pity weep;

O! where is now thy all-creating wand?

Buried ten thousand fathoms in the deep.

The staff is broke, the powerful spell is fled,

And never earthly guest shall in thy circle tread.

_Sonnets, with other Poems._ 3rd edition.

1794, pp. 67-70.

This poem appears in later editions of Bowle’s sonnets in a

different form. Stanza 9 is omitted, and the remaining stanzas

are arranged thus: 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 3, 4, 5, 10:

“Come to these yellow sands.” Ferdinand. See _The Tempest_.

“The weird sisters.” See _Macbeth_.

“A beauteous maniac.” Ophelia. See _Hamlet_.

“Blow, bitter wind.” See _King Lear_.

“Him, who with sad look.” Jacques. See _As You Like It_.

“Elves of fairy land.” See _Midsummer Night’s Dream_.

THE THIRD PERIOD

NINETEENTH CENTURY

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1802

(1770-1850)

It is not to be thought of that the flood

Of British freedom, which, to the open sea

Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity

Hath flowed “with pomp of waters unwithstood,”

Roused though it be full often to a mood

Which spurns the check of salutary bands,

That this most famous stream in bogs and sands

Should perish; and to evil and to good

Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung

Armoury of the invincible knights of old:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold

Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung

Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.

“Sonnets dedicated to Liberty.” _Poems._ 1807.

FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS, 1804

(1793-1835)

“_Shakespeare._”

I love to rove o’er history’s page,

Recall the hero and the sage;

Revive the actions of the dead,

And memory of ages fled:

Yet it yields me greater pleasure

To read the poet’s pleasing measure.

Led by Shakespeare, bard inspired,

The bosom’s energies are fired;

We learn to shed the generous tear

O’er poor Ophelia’s sacred bier;

To love the merry moonlit scene,

With fairy elves in valleys green;

Or borne on fancy’s heavenly wings,

To listen while sweet Ariel sings.

How sweet the native wood notes wild

Of him, the Muse’s favourite child!

Of him whose magic lays impart

Each various feeling to the heart.

_Poems._ By Felicia Dorothea Browne, 1808, p. 48.

One of Mrs. Hemans’ earliest tastes—relates her sister in her

_Memoirs_—was a passion for Shakespeare, which she read as her

choicest recreation at six years old. The above lines were

written when she was eleven years of age.

SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1814

(1771-1832)

The English stage might be considered as equally without rule and

without model when Shakespeare arose. The effect of the genius of an

individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius, in

its turn, is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period

when it comes into existence. Such was the case with Shakespeare. With

an education more extensive, and a taste refined by the classical

models, it is probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient

drama, might have mistaken the form for the essence, and subscribed to

those rules which had produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately

for the full exertion of a genius as comprehensive and versatile,

as intense and powerful, Shakespeare had no access to any models of

which the commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own

exertions. He followed the path which a nameless crowd of obscure

writers had trodden before him; but he moved in it with the grace and

majestic step of a being of a superior order, and vindicated for ever

the British theatre from a pedantic restriction to classical rule.

Nothing went before Shakespeare which in any respect was fit to fix

and stamp the character of a national drama; and certainly no one will

succeed him, capable of establishing by mere authority, a form more

restricted than that which Shakespeare used.

Article on “Drama,” _Encyclopædia Britannica_.

4th ed. 1814. 6th ed. vol. viii. p. 157.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1817

(1772-1834)

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a

profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy

of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions,

language. In Shakespeare’s POEMS, the creative power, and the

intellectual energy, wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess

of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length

in the DRAMA they were reconciled, and fought each with its

shield before the breast of the other. Or, like two rapid streams, that

at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive

to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon

finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate,

and flow on in one current and with one voice. The “Venus and Adonis”

did not, perhaps, allow the display of the deeper passions. But the

story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand their intensest

workings. And yet we find in _Shakespeare’s_ management of the tale,

neither pathos, nor any other _dramatic_ quality. There is the same

minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid

colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and

diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative

and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a

yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and, lastly, with the

same perfect dominion, often _domination_, over the whole world of

language. What then shall we say? even this: that—

Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no

passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing

it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely,

till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his

habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power,

by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to

that power, which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits

of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not rival. While

the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human

character and passion, to one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the

other attracts all forms and things to himself, in the unity of his

own IDEAL. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the

being of MILTON; while SHAKESPEARE becomes all things, yet for ever

remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England! my

country!

_Biographia Literaria._ 1817, chap. xv.

The following is from Coleridge’s _Literary Remains_, ed.

Henry Nelson Coleridge, 1867, ii. pp. 68-69:—I greatly dislike

beauties and selections in general; but as proof positive of

his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakespeare

by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the

human faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the

feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling _sui generis

et demonstratio demonstrationum_) called the conscience,

the understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination,

judgment,—and then of the objects on which these are to be

employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming

caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that

is, the actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived

as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or in

guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation;

and then compare with Shakespeare under each of these heads

all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever

lived! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result? And

ask your own hearts,—ask your own common-sense—to conceive the

possibility of this man being—I say not, the drunken savage

of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame,

have honoured before their elder and better worthies,—but

the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily

criticism! What! are we to have miracles in sport? Or, I speak

reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine

truths to man?

For a passage on Shakespeare as a “philosophical aristocrat”

who “never promulgates any party tenets,” see “Notes on the

_Tempest_.”

FRANCIS LORD JEFFREY, 1817

(1773-1850)

More full of wisdom and ridicule and sagacity, than all the moralists

and satirists that ever existed—he [Shakespeare] is more wild, airy and

inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all

regions and ages of the world:—and has all those elements so happily

mixed up in him, and bears his high faculties so temperately, that

the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or

of reason—nor the most sensitive for defect of ornament or ingenuity.

Every thing in him is in unmeasured abundance, and unequalled

perfection—but everything so balanced and kept in subordination, as not

to jostle or disturb or take the place of another. The most exquisite

poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions are given with such

brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn, without

loading the sense they accompany. Although his sails are purple and

perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage,

not less, but more rapidly and directly than if they had been composed

of baser materials. All his excellences, like those of Nature herself,

are thrown out together; and instead of interfering with, support and

recommend each other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his

fruits crushed into baskets—but spring living from the soil, in all the

dew and freshness of youth; while the graceful foliage in which they

lurk, and the ample branches, the rough and vigorous stem, and the

wide-spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them,

and share, in their places, the equal care of their Creator.

_The Edinburgh Review_, August 1817. Art. IX.

“Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, by

William Hazlitt.” Vol. xxviii. p. 474.

WILLIAM HAZLITT, 1818

(1778-1830)

The striking peculiarity of Shakespeare’s mind was its generic quality,

its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a

universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar

bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any

other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an

egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but

he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only

had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could

follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable

ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion,

or turn of thought. He had “a mind reflecting ages past,” and

present:—All the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect

of persons with him. His genius alone shone equally on the evil and on

the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: “All

corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay,

the secrets of the grave,” are hardly hid from his searching glance.

He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at

pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the

globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men,

and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns,

passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those

that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to

themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the

toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his

bidding. Harmless fairies nodded to him, and did him curtesies: and the

night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of “his so potent art.”

The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and

women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as

of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could

be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes

them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing,

with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a

character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its

thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a

secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, “subject to

the same skyey influences,” the same local, outward, and unforeseen

accidents which would occur in reality.

“On Shakespeare and Milton,” _Lectures on The

English Poets_. 1818, pp. 91-3.

For a comment on this passage by William Minto, see p. 189.

* * * * *

The following occurs in Hazlitt’s essay “On Dryden and Pope”

(_ib._, pp. 137-38):—The poet of nature is one who, from

the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own

breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and

impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate

appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so

that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony

of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul

of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record

the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are

liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power

over the minds of his readers, that nature does. He sees things

in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels

them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they

affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such

was Homer, such was Shakespeare, whose works will last as long

as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms

and everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom

as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the

hand of their maker. The power of the imagination in them, is

the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in

the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe.

See also _The Round Table_, 1817—“On Posthumous Fame—whether

Shakespeare was influenced by a love of it.”

JOHN KEATS, _c._ 1818

(1795-1821)

The genius of Shakespeare was an innate universality—wherefore he

had the utmost achievement of human intellect prostrate beneath his

indolent and kingly gaze. He could do easily Man’s utmost. His plans

of tasks to come were not of this world—if what he purposed to do

hereafter would not in his own Idea “answer the aim,” how tremendous

must have been his Conception of Ultimates!

_Note on Troilus and Cressida_, I. iii. Marginalia

from the Shakespeare Folio of 1808. (_Works_,

ed. H. Buxton Forman. 1901, iii. p. 254.)

_c._ 1818

“_Sonnet on sitting down to read KING LEAR once again._”

O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute!

Fair-plumed Syren, Queen of far-away!

Leave melodising on this wintry day,

Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:

Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute

Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay

Must I burn through; once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit:

Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,

Begetters of our deep eternal theme!

When through the old oak Forest I am gone,

Let me not wander in a barren dream,

But, when I am consumed in the fire,

Give me new Phœnix wings to fly at my desire.

_Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats_,

edited by Richard Monckton Milnes. Vol. i. p.

96.

JOHN WILSON, 1819

(1785-1854)

Shakespeare is of no age. He speaks a language which thrills in our

blood in spite of the separation of two hundred years. His thoughts,

passions, feelings, strains of fancy, all are of this day, as they were

of his own—and his genius may be contemporary with the mind of every

generation for a thousand years to come. He, above all poets, looked

upon man, and lived for mankind. His genius, universal in intellect,

could find, in no more bounded circumference, its proper sphere. It

could not bear exclusion from any part of human existence. Whatever

in nature and life was given to man, was given in contemplation and

poetry to him also, and over the undimmed mirror of his mind passed

all the shadows of our mortal world. Look through his plays and tell

what form of existence, what quality of spirit, he is most skilful to

delineate. Which of all the manifold beings he has drawn, lives before

our thoughts, our eyes, in most unpictured reality? Is it Othello,

Shylock, Falstaff, Lear, the wife of Macbeth, Imogen, Hamlet, Ariel? In

none of the other great dramatists do we see anything like a perfected

art. In their works, everything, it is true, exists in some shape or

other, which can be required in a drama taking for its interest the

absolute interest of human life and nature; but, after all, may not

the very best of their works be looked on as sublime masses of chaotic

confusion, through which the elements of our moral being appear? It

was Shakespeare, the most unlearned of all our writers, who first

exhibited on the stage perfect models, perfect images of all human

characters, and all human events. We cannot conceive any skill that

could from his great characters remove any defect, or add to their

perfect composition. Except in him, we look in vain for the entire

fulness, the self-consistency, and self-completeness of perfect art.

“A few words on Shakespeare, May 1819.” _Essays

Critical and Imaginative._ 1866, vol. iii.

pp. 420-21.

CHARLES SPRAGUE, 1824

(1791-1875)

Who now shall grace the glowing throne,

Where, all unrivall’d, all alone,

Bold Shakespeare sat, and look’d creation through,

The minstrel monarch of the worlds he drew?

That throne is cold—that lyre in death unstrung,

On whose proud note delighted Wonder hung.

Yet old Oblivion, as in wrath he sweeps,

One spot shall spare—the grave where Shakespeare sleeps.

Rulers and ruled in common gloom may lie,

But Nature’s laureate bards shall never die.

Art’s chisell’d boast and glory’s trophied shore

Must live in numbers or can live no more.

While sculptured Jove some nameless waste may claim,

Still roars the Olympic car in Pindar’s fame:

Troy’s doubtful walls, in ashes pass’d away,

Yet frown on Greece in Homer’s deathless lay;

Rome, slowly sinking in her crumbling fanes,

Stands all immortal in her Maro’s strains;

So, too, yon giant empress of the isles,

On whose broad sway the sun for ever smiles,

To Time’s unsparing rage one day must bend,

And all her triumphs in her Shakespeare end!

O thou! to whose creative power

We dedicate the festal hour,

While Grace and Goodness round the altar stand,

Learning’s anointed train, and Beauty’s rose-lipp’d band—

Realms yet unborn, in accents now unknown,

Thy song shall learn, and bless it for their own.

Deep in the west, as Independence roves,

His banners planting round the land he loves,

Where Nature sleeps in Eden’s infant grace,

In Time’s full hour shall spring a glorious race:

Thy name, thy verse, thy language shall they bear,

And deck for thee the vaulted temple there.

Our Roman-hearted fathers broke

Thy parent empire’s galling yoke,

But thou, harmonious monarch of the mind,

Around their sons a gentler chain shall bind;

Still o’er our land shall Albion’s sceptre wave,

And what her mighty Lion lost, her mightier Swan shall save.

Prize Ode recited at the representation of the

Shakespeare Jubilee, Boston, February 13,

1824.

CHARLES LAMB, 1824

(1775-1834)

In “sad civility” once Garrick sate

To see a play, mangled in form and state;

Plebeian Shakespeare must the words supply,—

The actors all were fools—of Quality.

The scenes—the dresses—were above rebuke;—

Scarce a performer there below a Duke.

He sate, and mused how in his Shakespeare’s mind

The idea of old nobility enshrined

Should thence a grace and a refinement have

Which passed these living Nobles to conceive—

Who with such apish, base gesticulation,

Remnants of starts, and dregs of playhouse passion,

So foul belied their great forefathers’ fashion!

He saw—and true nobility confessed

Less in the high-born blood, than lowly poet’s breast.

“Epilogue to an amateur Performance of Richard II.,”

ll. 10-24. _Works of Charles and Mary Lamb._

Ed. E. V. Lucas, 1903-4. Vol. v. p. 128.

JULIUS CHARLES HARE, 1827

(1795-1855)

Shakespeare “glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.”

All Nature ministers to him, as gladly as a mother to her child.

Whether he wishes her to tune her myriad-voiced organ to Romeo’s

love, or to Miranda’s innocence, or to Perdita’s simplicity, or

to Rosalind’s playfulness, or to the sports of the Fairies, or to

Timon’s misanthropy, or to Macbeth’s desolating ambition, or to Lear’s

heart-broken frenzy—he has only to ask, and she puts on every feeling

and every passion with which he desires to invest her.

* * * * *

No poet comes near Shakespeare in the number of bosom lines,—of lines

that we may cherish in our bosoms, and that seem almost as if they

had grown there,—of lines that, like bosom friends, are ever at hand

to comfort, counsel, and gladden us, under all the vicissitudes of

life,—of lines that, according to Bacon’s expression, “come home to our

business and bosoms,” and open the door for us to look in, and see what

is nestling and brooding there.

_Guesses at Truth._ 1827.

JAMES HOGG, 1831

(1770-1835)

“_To the Genius of Shakespeare._”

Spirit all limitless,

Where is thy dwelling-place?

Spirit of him whose high name we revere,

Come on thy seraph wings,

Come from thy wanderings,

And smile on thy votaries, who sigh for thee here!

Come, O thou spark divine,

Rise from thy hallowed shrine;

Here in the windings of Forth thou shalt see

Hearts true to nature’s call

Spirits congenial,

Proud of their country, yet bowing to thee.

Here with rapt heart and tongue,

While our fond minds were young,

Oft thy bold numbers we poured in our mirth;

Now in our hall for aye

This shall be holiday,

Bard of all Nature, to honour thy birth.

Whether thou tremblest o’er

Green grave of Elsinore,

Stayest o’er the hill of Dunsinnan to hover,

Bosworth, or Shrewsbury,

Egypt or Philippi;

Come from thy roamings the universe over.

Whether thou journey’st far

On by the morning star,

Dream’st on the shadowy brows of the moon,

Or linger’st in fairyland,

’Mid lovely elves to stand,

Singing thy carols unearthly and boon;—

Here thou art called upon,

Come thou to Caledon!

Come to the land of the ardent and free!

The land of the love recess,

Mountain and wilderness,

This is the land, thou wild meteor, for thee!

Oh, never since time had birth,

Rose from the pregnant earth

Gems such as late have in Scotia sprung;—

Gems that in future day,

When ages pass away,

Like thee shall be honoured, like thee shall be sung!

Then here, by the sounding sea,

Forest, and greenwood tree,

Here to solicit thee cease shall we never:

Yes, thou effulgence bright,

Here must thy flame relight,

Or vanish from Nature for ever and ever!

_Songs._ By the Ettrick Shepherd. Now first

collected. 1831, p. 304.

CHARLES LAMB, 1833

(1775-1834)

I am jealous of the combination of the sister arts. Let them sparkle

apart. What injury (short of the theatres) did Boydell’s Shakespeare

Gallery do me with Shakespeare?—to have Opie’s Shakespeare, Northcote’s

Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli’s Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney’s

Shakespeare, wooden-headed West’s Shakespeare (though he did the

best in “Lear”), deaf-headed Reynolds’s Shakespeare, instead of my,

and everybody’s Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of

Juliet! To have Imogen’s portrait! To confine the illimitable!

Letter to Samuel Rogers, December 21, 1833.

_Works of Charles and Mary Lamb._ Ed.

E. V. Lucas, 1903-4. Vol. vii.

HARTLEY COLERIDGE, 1833

(1796-1849)

“_To Shakespeare._”

The soul of man is larger than the sky,

Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark

Of the unfathom’d centre. Like that Ark,

Which in its sacred hold uplifted high,

O’er the drown’d hills, the human family,

And stock reserved of every living kind,

So in the compass of the single mind

The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie,

That make all worlds. Great Poet, ’twas thy art

To know thyself, and in thyself to be

Whate’er love, hate, ambition, destiny,

Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart,

Can make of Man. Yet thou wert still the same,

Serene of thought, unhurt by thy own flame.

_Poems._ Sonnet XXVIII. 1833, p. 28.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1838

(1785-1859)

In the great world of woman, as the interpreter of the shifting phases

and the lunar varieties of that mighty changeable planet, that lovely

satellite of man, Shakespeare stands not the first only, not the

original only, but is yet the sole authentic oracle of truth. Woman,

therefore, the beauty of the female mind, _this_ is one great field of

his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, _that_

is another.... In all Christendom, who, let us ask, who, who but

Shakespeare has found the power for effectually working this mysterious

mode of being?

. . . . . . .

A third fund of Shakespeare’s peculiar power lies in his teeming

fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. From his works alone might

be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts, the deepest, subtilest,

most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelligible; the

most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person,

the situation, and the case, yet, at the same time, applicable to

the circumstances of every human being, under all the accidents of

life, and all vicissitudes of fortune. But this subject offers so

vast a field of observation, it being so eminently the prerogative of

Shakespeare to have thought more finely and more extensively than all

other poets combined, that we cannot wrong the dignity of such a theme

by doing more, in our narrow limits, than simply noticing it as one of

the emblazonries upon Shakespeare’s shield.

Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case, _barely_

indicate, without attempting in so vast a field to offer any adequate

illustrations) one mode of Shakespeare’s dramatic excellence, which

hitherto has not attracted any special or separate notice. We allude

to the forms of life, and natural human passion, as apparent in the

structure of his dialogue. Among the many defects and infirmities

of the French and of the Italian drama, indeed, we may say of the

Greek, the dialogue proceeds always by independent speeches, replying

indeed to each other, but never modified in its several terminal forms

immediately preceding. Now, in Shakespeare, who first set an example

of that most important innovation, in all his impassioned dialogues,

each reply or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech.

Every form of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints

of ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous passion; every form

of hasty interrogative, ardent reiteration when a question has been

evaded; every form of scornful repetition of the hostile words; every

impatient continuation of the hostile statement; in short, all modes

and formulæ by which anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn, impatience,

or excitement under any movement whatever, can disturb or modify or

dislocate the formal bookish style of commencement,—these are as rife

in Shakespeare’s dialogue as in life itself; and how much vivacity,

how profound a verisimilitude, they add to the scenic effect as an

imitation of human passion and real life, we need not say. A volume

might be written, illustrating the vast varieties of Shakespeare’s art

and power in this one field of improvement; another volume might be

dedicated to the exposure of the lifeless and unnatural result from the

opposite practice in the foreign stages of France and Italy. And we may

truly say, that were Shakespeare distinguished from them by this single

feature of nature and propriety, he would on that account alone have

merited a great immortality.

_Encyclopædia Britannica._ 7th edition, 1838.

Article on Shakespeare.

The following fine apostrophe to Shakespeare occurs at the

end of De Quincey’s essay “On the knocking at the gate in

_Macbeth_”:—O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other

men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like

the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars

and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hailstorm

and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of

our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there

can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert,—but

that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we

shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement

where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident.

JOHN STERLING, 1839

(1806-1844)

“_Shakespeare._”

How little fades from earth when sink to rest

The hours and cares that moved a great man’s breast!

Though nought of all we saw the grave may spare,

His life pervades the world’s impregnate air;

Though Shakespeare’s dust beneath our footsteps lies,

His spirit breathes amid his native skies;

With meaning won from him for ever glows

Each air that England feels, and star it knows;

His whispered words from many a mother’s voice

Can make her sleeping child in dreams rejoice,

And gleams from spheres he first conjoined to earth

Are blent with rays of each new morning’s birth.

Amid the sights and tales of common things,

Leaf, flower, and bird, and wars, and deaths of kings,

Of shore, and sea, and nature’s daily round,

Of life that tills, and tombs that load the ground,

His visions mingle, swell, command, pace by,

And haunt with living presence heart and eye;

And tones from him by other bosoms caught

Awaken flush and stir of mounting thought,

And the long sigh, and deep impassioned thrill,

Rouse custom’s trance, and spur the faltering will.

Above the goodly land more his than ours

He sits supreme enthroned in skyey towers,

And sees the heroic brood of his creation

Teach larger life to his ennobled nation.

O! shaping brain! O! flashing fancy’s hues!

O! boundless heart kept fresh by pity’s dews!

O! wit humane and blythe! O! sense sublime

For each dim oracle of mantled Time!

Transcendent Form of Man! in whom we read

Mankind’s whole tale of impulse, thought, and deed;

Amid the expanse of years beholding thee,

We know how vast our world of life may be;

Wherein, perchance, with aims as pure as thine,

Small tasks and strengths may be no less divine.

_Poems._ 1839, p. 151.

HENRY HALLAM, 1839

(1777-1859)

Of William Shakespeare, whom, through the mouths of those whom he has

inspired to body forth the modifications of his immense mind, we seem

to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we

scarcely know anything. We see him, so far as we do see him, not in

himself, but in a reflex image from the objectivity in which he was

manifested: he is Falstaff, and Mercutio, and Malvolio, and Jaques, and

Portia, and Imogen, and Lear, and Othello; but to us he is scarcely

a determined person, a substantial reality of past time, the man

Shakespeare. The two greatest names in poetry are to us little more

than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that

of “the blind old man of Scios’ rocky isle,” an improvement in critical

acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel

the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was

afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to

his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear,

as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. All that

insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected

about Shakespeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than to

furnish the slightest illustration of his character.

_Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the

Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth

Centuries._ 1839, ii. 382-3.

—— JOHNSTONE, 1840

Some men can only acquire knowledge by a careful process of painstaking

investigation, while the minds of others descend at once, and with a

swoop, as it were, upon the truth of which they are in search. Others,

again, can not only do this, but having grasped the truth, they soar

upward with it to the highest pinnacles of imaginative loftiness, or

beyond these even, to the empyrean of thought, where the minds of

ordinarily gifted men may not follow them. Of this last class was

Shakespeare, the most wonderful of mere men that we know to have ever

lived.

_The Table Talker, or Brief Essays on Society and

Literature._ 1840, vol. i. p. 183.

THOMAS CARLYLE, 1840

(1795-1881)

“_The Hero as Poet._”

It is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and

things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great. All the greatness

of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that

calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at

reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart and generic

secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns

the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said; poetic creation, what

is this too but _seeing_ the thing sufficiently? The _word_ that will

describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of

the thing. And is not Shakespeare’s _morality_, his valour, candour,

tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness,

which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great

as the world! No _twisted_, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting

all objects with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly

_level_ mirror;—that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man

justly related to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly

spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a

Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us

in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all.

_Novum Organum_, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a

quite secondary order; earthly, material, poor in comparison with this.

Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same

rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of

him too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may say what he himself

says of Shakespeare: “His characters are like watches with dial-plates

of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the

inward mechanism also is all visible.”

_On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History._

Ed. H. D. Traill. 1898, pp. 104-5.

In Carlyle’s essay on “Corn Law Rhymes” (_Edinburgh Review_,

July, 1832, p. 342) occurs the following:—Foolish Pedant,

that sittest there compassionately descanting on the Learning

of Shakespeare! Shakespeare had penetrated into innumerable

things; far into Nature with her divine Splendours and infernal

Terrors, her Ariel Melodies, and mystic mandragora Moans; far

into man’s workings with Nature, into man’s Art and Artifice;

Shakespeare knew (_Kenned_, which in those days still partially

meant _Can-ned_) innumerable things; what men are, and what

the world is, and how and what men aim at there, from the Dame

Quickly of modern Eastcheap to the Cæsar of ancient Rome, over

many countries, over many centuries: of all this he had the

clearest understanding and constructive comprehension; all this

was his Learning and Insight.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1841

(1770-1850)

“_Shakespeare and Goethe._”

He (Goethe) does not seem to me to be a great poet in either of the

classes of poets. At the head of the first class I would place Homer

and Shakespeare, whose universal minds are able to reach every variety

of thought and feeling without bringing their own individuality before

the reader. They infuse, they breathe life into every object they

approach, but you never find _themselves_. At the head of the second

class, those whom you can trace individually in all they write, I would

place Spenser and Milton. In all that Spenser writes you can trace

the gentle affectionate spirit of the man; in all that Milton writes

you find the exalted sustained being that he was. Now, in what Goethe

writes, who aims to be of the first class, the _universal_, you find

the man himself, the artificial man where he should not be found; so

that I consider him a very artificial writer, aiming to be universal,

and yet constantly exposing his individuality, which his character

was not of a kind to dignify. He had not sufficiently clear moral

perceptions to make him anything but an artificial writer.

_Memoirs of William Wordsworth_, by Christopher

Wordsworth. 1851, vol. ii. pp. 437-8.

The value of this estimate of Goethe is somewhat discounted

by a remark made at another time by Wordsworth: “I have tried

to read Goethe. I never could succeed.... I am not intimately

acquainted with them [his poems] generally.” _Memoirs_, ii. p.

478.

THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY, 1843

(1800-1859)

Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of

dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of

nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters

of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we

receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned

by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found

which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should

call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly notion that

every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known,

unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in

the plays of Shakespeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a

crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern

him in turn. What is Hamlet’s ruling passion? Or Othello’s? Or Harry

the Fifth’s? Or Wolsey’s? Or Lear’s? Or Shylock’s? Or Benedick’s? Or

Macbeth’s? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might

go on for ever. Take a single example, Shylock. Is he so eager for

money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be

indifferent to money? Or so bent on both together as to be indifferent

to the honour of his nation and the law of Moses? All his propensities

are mingled with each other, so that, in trying to apportion to each

its proper part, we find the same difficulty which constantly meets us

in real life. A superficial critic may say, that hatred is Shylock’s

ruling passion. But how many passions have amalgamated to form that

hatred? It is partly the result of wounded pride: Antonio has called

him dog. It is partly the result of covetousness: Antonio has hindered

him of half a million; and, when Antonio is gone, there will be no

limit to the gains of usury. It is partly the result of national and

religious feeling: Antonio has spit on the Jewish gabardine; and the

oath of revenge has been sworn by the Jewish Sabbath. We might go

through all the characters which we have mentioned, and through fifty

more in the same way; for it is the constant manner of Shakespeare to

represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion

of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a

hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he is in all parts

of his art, we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a

greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put

together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.

Essay on “Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay,”

_Edinburgh Review_, Jan. 1843. Art. IX. vol.

lxxvi. pp. 560-1.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1844

(1803-1882)

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can

tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most

apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod,

and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents

extricated, analysed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;

and now read one of those skiey sentences—aerolites,—which seem to

have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man

within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they

match, if the former account in any manner for the latter: or, which

gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare

for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the

information which is material, that which describes character and

fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with

him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions

on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,—on life and

death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and

the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the

influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those

mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet

interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Whoever

read the volume of the Sonnets, without finding that the poet had

there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the

lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most

susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What

trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern,

in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, that forms and

humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in large

hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio

the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakespeare’s

being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history,

known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of

philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not

settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What

office, or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered?

What king has he not taught State, as Talma taught Napoleon? What

maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he

not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not

instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?

“Shakespeare; or, the Poet.” _Representative

Men._ 1844, p. 154.

FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON, 1850

(1816-1853)

What I admire in Shakspeare, however, is that his loves are all

human—no earthliness hiding itself from itself in sentimental

transcendentalism—no loves of the angels, which are the least angelic

things, I believe, that float in the clouds, though they do look down

upon mortal feelings with contempt, just as the dark volumes of smoke

which issue from the long chimney of a manufactory might brood very

sublimely over the town which they blacken, and fancy themselves far

more ethereal than those vapours which steam up from the earth by day

and night. Yet these are pure water, and those are destined to condense

in black soot. So are the transcendentalisms of affection. Shakspeare

is healthy, true to Humanity in this: and for that reason I pardon him

even his earthly coarseness. You always know that you are on an earth

which has to be refined, instead of floating in the empyrean with wings

of wax. Therein he is immeasurably greater than Shelley. Shelleyism is

very sublime, sublimer a good deal than God, for God’s world is all

wrong and Shelley is all right—much purer than Christ, for Shelley can

criticise Christ’s heart and life—nevertheless, Shelleyism is only

atmospheric profligacy, to coin a Montgomeryism. I believe this to

be one of Shakespeare’s most wondrous qualities—the humanity of his

nature and heart. There is a spirit of sunny endeavour about him, and

an acquiescence in things as they are—not incompatible with a cheerful

resolve to make them better.

_Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson, M.A._

Edited by Stopford A. Brooke, M.A. 1886,

vol. i. p. 289, Letter LX.

LEIGH HUNT, 1851

(1784-1859)

“_Associations with Shakespeare._”

How naturally the idea of Shakespeare can be made to associate itself

with anything which is worth mention! Take Christmas for instance:

“Shakespeare and Christmas”; the two ideas fall as happily together

as “wine and walnuts,” or heart and soul. So you may put together

“Shakespeare and May,” or “Shakespeare and June,” and twenty passages

start into your memory about spring and violets. Or you may say

“Shakespeare and Love,” and you are in the midst of a bevy of bright

damsels, as sweet as rosebuds; or “Shakespeare and Death,” and all

graves, and thoughts of graves, are before you; or “Shakespeare and

Life,” and you have the whole world of youth, and spirit, and Hotspur,

and life itself; or you may say even, “Shakespeare and Hate,” and he

will say all that can be said for hate, as well as against it, till you

shall take Shylock himself into your Christian arms, and tears shall

make you of one faith.

_Table Talk._ 1851, p. 154.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, 1852

(1818-1894)

We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of Shakespeare’s

characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can imitate,

and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the poet, who

has outstripped nature in his creations. But we are misunderstanding

the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness to

it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as the spirit of

nature created around him, working in him as it worked abroad in those

among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he saw

and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the ordinary

conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh and

with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found

the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios,

his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we

can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are

satisfied that Shakespeare’s great poetry is no more than the rhythmic

echo of the life which it depicts.

_Short Studies on Great Subjects._ First Series.

“England’s Forgotten Worthies.” 1878, i.

445-6, reprinted from _Westminster Review_.

1852.

DAVID MASSON, 1853

(_b._ 1822)

Shakespeare is as astonishing for the exuberance of his genius in

abstract notions, and for the depth of his analytic and philosophic

insight, as for the scope and minuteness of his poetic imagination.

It is as if into a mind poetical in _form_ there had been poured all

the _matter_ that existed in the mind of his contemporary Bacon. In

Shakespeare’s plays we have thought, history, exposition, philosophy,

all within the round of the poet. The only difference between him and

Bacon sometimes is that Bacon writes an essay and calls it his own,

while Shakespeare writes a similar essay and puts it into the mouth of

a Ulysses or a Polonius.

_Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other Essays._ 1874.

Essay V. p. 242, reprinted from _North British

Review_. 1853.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1853

(1822-1888)

“_Shakespeare._”

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,

Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,

Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,

Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,

Spares but the cloudy border of his base

To the foil’d searching of mortality;

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,

Self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure,

Didst tread on earth unguessed at.—Better so!

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,

All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,

Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

_Poems._ 1853.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, 1853

(1775-1864)

“_Shakespeare and Milton._”

The tongue of England, that which myriads

Have spoken and will speak, were paralysed

Hereafter, but two mighty men stand forth

Above the flight of ages, two alone;

One crying out,

_All nations spoke thro’ me_.

The other:

True; and thro’ this trumpet burst

God’s word; the fall of Angels, and the doom

First of immortal, then of mortal, Man,

Glory! be glory! not to me, to God.

_The Lost Fruit off an old Tree._ No. LVII.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, 1858

(1801-1890)

A great author, gentlemen, is not one who merely has a _copia

verborum_, whether in prose or verse, and can, as it were, turn on at

his will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences; but he

is one who has something to say and knows how to say it. I do not claim

for him, as such, any great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or

philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human nature, or experience

of human life, though these additional gifts he may have, and the

more he has of them the greater he is; but I ascribe to him, as his

characteristic gift, in a large sense the faculty of Expression. He

is master of the twofold Logos, the thought and the word, distinct,

but inseparable from each other. He may, if so be, elaborate his

compositions, or he may pour out his improvisations, but in either

case he has but one aim, which he keeps steadily before him, and is

conscientious and single-minded in fulfilling. That aim is to give

forth what he has within him; and from his very earnestness it comes to

pass that, whatever be the splendour of his diction or the harmony of

his periods, he has with him the charm of an incommunicable simplicity.

Whatever be his subject, high or low, he treats it suitably and for its

own sake. If he is a poet, “nil molitur _inepte_.” If he is an orator,

then too he speaks, not only “distincte” and “splendide,” but also

“apte.” His page is the lucid mirror of his mind and life:

“Quo fit, ut omnis

Votivâ pateat veluti descripta labellâ

Vita senis.”

He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because

he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too

serious to be otiose; he can analyse his subject, and therefore he is

rich; he embraces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is

consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous;

when his imagination wells up, it overflows its ornament; when his

heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right

word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it

is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each

word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of

his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say; and his

sayings pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become

household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated

with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the

marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern

palaces.

Such pre-eminently is Shakespeare among ourselves; such pre-eminently

is Virgil among the Latins; such in their degree are all those writers

who in every nation go by the name of Classics.

“The Idea of a University defined and illustrated.”

_Literature_, ix. 1873, pp. 291-3.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, _c._ 1858

(1819-1891)

Only Shakespeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature

whose point of rest was midway between the imagination and the

understanding,—that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all

objects with almost inhuman impartiality,—that outlook whose range was

ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and action,—that

power of verisimilar conception which could take away Richard

III. from History, and Ulysses from Homer,—and that creative

faculty whose equal touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear.

He alone never seeks in abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the

risks and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a

jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is never, like many

of his fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of

his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given

a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or

make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are

tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights

together as “great dramatists,”—as if Shakespeare did not differ from

them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were; but

though imagination and the power of poetic expression are, singly, not

uncommon gifts, and even in combination not without secular examples,

yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena to find them joined with

those faculties of perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in

the loving union which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible.

We suspect that Shakespeare will long continue the only specimen of

the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what

they call “a humour” till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes,

like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language.

In their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson,

or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too

often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the

putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of

Shakespeare’s standpoint as poet and artist.

_Library of Old Authors._ 1858-64.

For an interesting note on Shakespeare’s “artistic discretion”

and the “impersonality” of his writings, see “Shakespeare once

more” (_Among My Books._ 1870, pp. 226-7).

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1863

(1804-1864)

Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth,

adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many

phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative

mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided

you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of

his symbols; and a thousand years hence, a world of new readers will

possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in these

volumes old already.

_Our Old Home._ 1863, i. 171.

In _Our Old Home_ (i. 158-60) Hawthorne records his impressions

on visiting Shakespeare’s house.

BISHOP CHARLES WORDSWORTH, 1864

(1806-1892)

Take the entire range of English literature; put together our best

authors, who have written upon subjects not professedly religious or

theological, and we shall not find, I believe, in them _all united_,

so much evidence of the Bible having been read and used, as we have

found in Shakespeare _alone_. This is a phenomenon which admits of

being looked at from several points of view; but I shall be content to

regard it solely in connection with the undoubted fact, that of all our

authors, Shakespeare is also, by general confession, the greatest and

the best. According to the testimony of Charles Lamb, a most competent

judge in regard to all the literary elements of the question, our poet,

“in his divine mind and manners, surpassed not only the great men his

contemporaries, but all mankind.” And, looking at this superiority from

my own point of view, I cannot but remark that, while most of the great

laymen of that great Elizabethan age—Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh,

the poet Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burleigh, Ben Jonson—have

paid homage to Christianity, if not always in their practice, yet in

the conviction of their understanding, none of them has done this so

fully or so effectively as Shakespeare.

“_On Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the

Bible._” 1864, pp. 291-2.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 1864

(1809-1894)

O land of Shakespeare! ours with all thy past,

Till these last years that make the sea so wide,

Think not the jar of battle’s trumpet-blast

Has dulled our aching sense to joyous pride

In every noble word thy sons bequeathed

The air our fathers breathed!

War-wasted, haggard, panting from the strife,

We turn to other days and far-off lands,

Live o’er in dreams the Poet’s faded life,

Come with fresh lilies in our fevered hands

To wreathe his bust, and scatter purple flowers,—

Not his the need, but ours!

We call those poets who are first to mark

Through earth’s dull mist the coming of the dawn,—

Who see in twilight’s gloom the first pale spark,

While others only note that day is gone;

For him the Lord of light the curtain rent

That veils the firmament . . .

With no vain praise we mock the stone-carved name

Stamped once on dust that moved with pulsed breath,

As thinking to enlarge that amplest fame

Whose undimmed glories gild the night of death:

We praise not star or sun; in these we see

Thee, Father, only Thee!

Thy gifts are beauty, wisdom, power, and love:

We read, we reverence on this human soul,—

Earth’s clearest mirror of the light above,—

Plain as the record on Thy prophet’s scroll,

When o’er his page the effluent splendours poured,

Thine own, “Thus saith the Lord!”

This player was a prophet from on high,

Thine own elected. Statesman, poet, sage,

For him Thy sovereign pleasure passed them by;

Sidney’s fair youth, and Raleigh’s ripened age,

Spenser’s chaste soul, and his imperial mind

Who taught and shamed mankind.

“Shakespeare Tercentennial Celebration, 23 April

1864.” _Songs of Many Seasons._ 1875.

CARDINAL WISEMAN, 1865

(1802-1865)

We may compare the mind of Shakespeare to a diamond, pellucid, bright,

and untinted, cut into countless polished facets, which, in constant

movement, at every smallest change of direction or of angle, caught a

new reflection, so that not one of its brilliant mirrors could be for a

moment idle, but by a power beyond its control was ever busy with the

reflection of innumerable images, either distinct or running into one

another, or repeated each so clearly as to allow him, when he chose, to

fix it in his memory.

_William Shakespeare._ 1865, p. 50.

ARCHBISHOP RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, 1865

(1807-1886)

A counsellor well fitted to advise

In daily life, and at whose lips no less

Men may inquire or nations, when distress

Of sudden doubtful danger may arise,

Who, though his head be hidden in the skies,

Plants his firm foot upon our common earth,

Dealing with thoughts which everywhere have birth,—

This is the poet, true of heart and wise:

No dweller in a baseless world of dream,

Which is not earth nor heaven: his words have passed

Into man’s common thought and week-day phrase;

This is the poet and his verse will last.

Such was our Shakespeare once, and such doth seem

One who redeems our later gloomier days.

_Poems collected and arranged anew._ 1865, p. 83.

FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE, 1865

(1824-1897)

Only three or four generations of fairly long-lived men lie between

us and Shakespeare; literature in his own time had reached a high

development; his grandeur and sweetness were freely recognised; within

seventy years of his death his biography was attempted; yet we know

little more of Shakespeare himself than we do of Homer. Like several of

the greatest men,—Lucretius, Virgil, Tacitus, Dante,—a mystery never

to be dispelled hangs over his life. He has entered into the cloud.

With a natural and an honourable diligence, other men have given their

lives to the investigation of his, and many external circumstances,

mostly of a minor order, have been thus collected: yet of “the man

Shakespeare,” in Mr. Hallam’s words, we know nothing. Something which

seems more than human in immensity of range and calmness of insight

moves before us in the Plays; but, from the nature of dramatic writing,

the author’s personality is inevitably veiled; no letter, no saying

of his, or description by an intimate friend, has been preserved: and

even when we turn to the _Sonnets_, though each is an autobiographical

confession, we find ourselves equally foiled. These revelations of

the poet’s innermost nature appear to teach us less of the man than

the tone of mind which we trace, or seem to trace, in _Measure for

Measure_, _Hamlet_, and the _Tempest_: the strange imagery of passion

which passes over the magic mirror has no tangible existence before or

behind it:—the great artist, like Nature herself, is still latent in

his works; diffused through his own creation.

. . . . . .

Yet there is, after all, nothing more remarkable or fascinating in

English poetry than these personal revelations of the mind of our

greatest poet. We read them again and again, and find each time some

new proof of his almost superhuman insight into human nature; of his

unrivalled mastery over all the tones of love.

_Songs and Sonnets of William Shakespeare._ Edited

by Francis Turner Palgrave. 1865, pp. 238-9

and 243.

FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE, 1866

(1809-1893)

“_To Shakespeare._”

Shelter and succour such as common men

Afford the weaker partners of their fate,

Have I derived from thee—from thee, most great

And powerful genius! whose sublime control

Still from thy grave governs each human soul,

That reads the wondrous record of thy pen.

From sordid sorrows thou hast set me free,

And turned from want’s grim ways my tottering feet,

And to sad empty hours, given royally,

A labour, than all leisure far more sweet.

The daily bread, for which we humbly pray,

Thou gavest me as if I were a child,

And still with converse noble, wise, and mild,

Charmed with despair my sinking soul away;

Shall I not bless the need, to which was given

Of all the angels in the host of heaven,

Thee, for my guardian, spirit strong and bland!

Lord of the speech of my dear native land!

_Poems._ 1866, p. 61.

JOHN RUSKIN, 1868

(1819-1900)

It does not matter how little, or how much, any of us have read,

either of Homer, or Shakespeare: everything round us, in substance,

or in thought, has been moulded by them. All Greek gentlemen were

educated under Homer. All Roman gentlemen by Greek literature. All

Italian, and French, and English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and

by its principles. Of the scope of Shakespeare, I will say only, that

the intellectual measure of every man since born, in the domains of

creative thought, may be assigned to him, according to the degree in

which he has been taught by Shakespeare.

_The Mystery of Life and its Arts._ Afternoon

Lectures on Literature and Art, delivered

at Royal College of Science, St.

Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 1867 and 1868.

1869, p. 109.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, 1871

(1828-1882)

“_On the Site of a Mulberry-Tree._”

_Planted by William Shakespeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell._

This tree, here fall’n, no common birth or death

Shared with its kind. The world’s enfranchised son,

Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,

Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.

Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath

Rank also singly—the supreme unhung?

Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue,

This viler thief’s unsuffocated breath!

We’ll search thy glossary, Shakespeare! whence almost,

And whence alone, some name shall be reveal’d

For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of years

Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres;

Whose soul is carrion now,—too mean to yield

Some Starveling’s ninth allotment of a ghost.

_Academy_, 15 Feb. 1871.[185:1] _Collected Works._ Ed.

W. M. Rossetti. 1886, vol. i. p. 285.

FOOTNOTES:

[185:1] The last line in the earlier version—that printed in the

_Academy_—has “tailor’s” for “Starveling’s.” Rossetti made the

alteration from fear of offending sensitive members of the tailoring

profession.

BAYARD TAYLOR, 1872

(1825-1878)

“_Shakespeare’s Statue, Central Park, New York, 23 May 1872._”

Here, in his right, he stands!

No breadth of earth-dividing seas can bar

The breeze of morning, or the morning star,

From visiting our lands:

His wit the breeze, his wisdom as the star,

Shone where our earliest life was set, and blew

To freshen hope and plan

In brains American,—

To urge, resist, encourage, and subdue!

He came, a household ghost we could not ban:

He sat, on winter nights, by cabin fires;

His summer fairies linked their hands

Along our yellow sands;

He preached within the shadow of our spires;

And when the certain Fate drew nigh, to cleave

The birth-cord, and a separate being leave,

He, in our ranks of patient-hearted men,

Wrought with the boundless forces of his fame,

Victorious, and became

The Master of our thought, the land’s first Citizen!

If, here, his image seem

Of softer scenes and grayer skies to dream,

Thatched cot and rustic tavern, ivied hall,

The cuckoo’s April call

And cowslip-meads beside the Avon stream,

He shall not fail that other home to find

We could not leave behind!

The forms of Passion, which his fancy drew,

In us their ancient likenesses beget:

So, from our lives for ever born anew,

He stands amid his own creations yet!

Here comes lean Cassius, of conventions tired;

Here, in his coach, luxurious Antony

Beside his Egypt, still of men admired;

And Brutus plans some purer liberty!

A thousand Shylocks, Jew and Christian, pass;

A hundred Hamlets, by their times betrayed;

And sweet Anne Page comes tripping o’er the grass,

And awkward Falstaff pants beneath the shade.

Here toss upon the wanton summer wind

The locks of Rosalind;

Here some gay glove the damned spot conceals

Which Lady Macbeth feels:

His ease here smiling smooth Iago takes,

And outcast Lear gives passage to his woe,

And here some foiled Reformer sadly breaks

His wand of Prospero!

In liveried splendour, side by side,

Nick Bottom and Titania ride,

And Portia, flushed with cheers of men,

Disdains dear faithful Imogen;

And Puck beside the form of Morse,

Stops on his forty-minute course;

And Ariel from his swinging bough

A blossom casts on Bryant’s brow,

Until, as summoned from his brooding brain,

He sees his children all again,

In us, as on our lips, each fresh, immortal strain!

_Poetical Works._ Stanzas II.-III. 1880, p. 224.

WILLIAM MINTO, 1874

(1845-1893)

It is a favourite way with some eulogists of Shakespeare to deny him

all individuality whatsoever. He was not one man, they say, but an

epitome of all men. His mind, says Hazlitt, “had no one peculiar bias

or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other

man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist

that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all

that others were or that they could become.” Against such a degradation

of Shakespeare’s character, or of any man’s character, it is our duty

to protest. On trying to make Shakespeare more than human, the reckless

panegyrist makes him considerably less than human: instead of the man

whose prudence made him rich, whose affectionate nature made him loved

almost to idolatry, and whose genius has been the wonder of the world,

we are presented with plasticity in the abstract, an object not more

interesting than a quarry of potter’s clay.

“William Shakespeare, his Life and Character.”

_Characteristics of English Poets._ 1874,

p. 350.

See the passage from Hazlitt’s _Lectures on the English Poets_,

p. 135.

EDWARD DOWDEN, 1875

(_b._ 1843)

There are certain problems which Shakespeare at once pronounces

insoluble. He does not, like Milton, propose to give any account of

the origin of evil. He does not, like Dante, pursue the soul of man

through circles of unending torture, or spheres made radiant by the

eternal presence of God. Satan, in Shakespeare’s poems, does not come

voyaging on gigantic vans across Chaos to find the earth. No great

deliverer of mankind descends from the heavens. Here, upon the earth,

evil _is_—such was Shakespeare’s declaration in the most emphatic

accent. Iago actually exists. There is also in the earth a sacred

passion of deliverance, a pure redeeming ardour. Cordelia exists. This

Shakespeare can tell for certain. But how Iago can be, and why Cordelia

lies strangled across the breast of Lear—are these questions which

you go on to ask? Something has been already said of the severity of

Shakespeare. It is a portion of his severity to decline all answers

to such questions as these. Is ignorance painful? Well, then, it is

painful. Little solutions of your large difficulties can readily be

obtained from priest or _philosopher_. Shakespeare prefers to let you

remain in the solemn presence of a mystery. He does not invite you into

his little church or his little library brilliantly illuminated by

philosophical or theological rushlights. You remain in the darkness.

But you remain in the vital air. And the great night is overhead.

_Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art._

1875, p. 226.

GEORGE MEREDITH, 1877

(_b._ 1828)

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the

comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be

found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they

are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great

poetic imagination. They are, as it were—I put it to suit my present

comparison—creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not

grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of

society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of clowns,

Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen—marvellous Welshmen!—Benedict

[_sic_] and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special

study in the poetically comic.

_On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic

Spirit._ A lecture delivered at the London

Institution, 1 Feb. 1877. Published 1897.

FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL, 1877

(_b._ 1825)

Altogether “a manly man” (as Chaucer says) this Shakespeare, strong,

tender, humourful, sensitive, impressionable, the truest friend,

the foe of none but narrow minds and base. And as we track his work

from the lightness and fun of its rise, through the fairy fancy, the

youthful passion, the rich imaginings, the ardent patriotism, the

brilliant sunshine, of his first and second times, through the tender

affection of his Sonnets, the whirlwind of passions in his Tragedies,

and then to the lovely sunset of his latest plays, what can we do but

bless his name, and be thankful that he came to be a delight, a lift

and strength, to us and our children’s children to all time—a bond that

shall last for ever between all English-speaking, English-reading men,

the members of that great Teutonic brotherhood which shall yet long

lead the world in the fight for freedom and for truth!

Introduction to _The Leopold Shakspere_.

1877, p. cxvi.

WALTER HORATIO PATER, 1878

(1839-1894)

As happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most

part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain

of his characters in which we feel that there is something of

self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and

ingenious creations that we feel this—in “Hamlet” and “King Lear”—as

in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while

far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar

happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which

possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no man

but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of art

which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wrought

of the choicest material. Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet,” belongs to

this group of Shakespeare’s characters—versatile, mercurial people,

such as make good actors, and in whom the

“Nimble spirits of the arteries,”

the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate.

A careful delineation of minor yet expressive traits seems to mark

them out as the characters of his predilection; and it is hard not

to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in “Love’s

Labour’s Lost,” is perhaps the most striking member of this group.

In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a

perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we

see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become

able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry.

“Love’s Labour’s Lost.” _Appreciations with an

Essay on Style._ 1889, pp. 174-5.

See also “Shakspere’s English Kings,” _ib._, pp. 201-2.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1879

(1822-1888)

Let me have the pleasure of quoting a sentence about Shakespeare, which

I met with by accident not long ago in the _Correspondant_, a French

review which not a dozen English people, I suppose, look at. The writer

is praising Shakespeare’s prose. “With Shakespeare,” he says, “prose

comes in whenever the subject, being more familiar, is unsuited to the

majestic English iambic.” And he goes on: “Shakespeare is the king of

poetic rhythm and style, as well as the king of the realm of thought;

along with his dazzling prose, Shakespeare has succeeded in giving us

the most varied, the most harmonious verse which has ever sounded upon

the human ear since the verse of the Greeks.” M. Henry Cochin, the

writer of this sentence, deserves our gratitude for it; it would not

be easy to praise Shakespeare, in a single sentence, more justly. And

when a foreigner and a Frenchman writes thus of Shakespeare, and when

Goethe says of Milton, in whom there was so much to repel Goethe rather

than to attract him, that “nothing has ever been done so entirely in

the sense of the Greeks as _Samson Agonistes_,” and that “Milton is

in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all reverence,” then we

understand what constitutes a European recognition of poets and poetry

as contradistinguished from a merely national recognition, and that

in favour both of Milton and of Shakespeare the judgment of the high

court of appeal has finally gone.

_Essays in Criticism._ Second Series: Wordsworth.

1888, pp. 129-31. Reprinted from Preface to

_The Poems of Wordsworth_, chosen and edited

by Matthew Arnold. 1879.

For a comment on Shakespeare’s double faculty of interpreting

the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and the

ideas and laws of man’s moral and spiritual nature, see _Essays

in Criticism_, 1865, p. 108.

ANONYMOUS ?_c._ 1880

So much has been written, so much spoken about Shakespeare, that it

would seem a needless, almost a presumptuous superfluity to say more,

and yet from another point of view, the man is as strange to us to-day

as though we had never heard his name. Johnson and Pope, Warburton,

Steevens, Malone and Theobald, Chalmers, Dyce, and a host of foreign

exegetes, have edited and annotated, emendated and obelised; but the

figure of Shakespeare is clothed in mist, and whilst we laugh and

wonder at the vanity and versatility of a Cicero, and stroll lovingly

with a Horace about his Sabine farm, dead both of them two millennia,

we still grope about in the dark for the meaning, the character,

and the inner life of our wondrous poet. Like the ghost in Hamlet,

he arose, and, having uttered his pregnant message, disappeared,

unregarded at the time but by a few, and still unrealised by the many.

. . . . . . .

There is a grandeur about the poets of the world, and a reward for

those that study them aright. Amid the hurricane of battle and the

crash of empires, the calm pulse of life and the glories of the drama

remain the same. Men are inclined to gaze upon the outward symbols of

existence as though they were primary causes, when they are only the

emblems of a deeper power. We have had our Constitution-builders, but

where are they? Our Tamerlanes and our Attilas, but whither are they

departed? The intellect that revolves a kingdom pales before a heart

that speaks to the soul of man. All nations turn their faces toward

a Hamlet, a Lear, or a Catherine of Aragon. The influence of these

through the genius of the poet will spread and yield abundant fruit,

when the havoc of a Cannæ or an Austerlitz is but dimly discernible in

the skeleton of history.

The study of our finer literature is therefore the study of the soul;

and the progress made will be upward and inward, and the result

a purifying of the ideals and a chastening of the chords of man.

Shakespeare gives us all this, he is ennobling as well as instructive;

without paying homage in a measure to his memory by the maintenance of

a certain form of excellence, no poet since his time has succeeded in

being appreciated as great. For they all bear his mark, and although

much below him, all dramatic writers since his day are modelled upon

his plan.

Manuscript Note inserted before fly-leaf of copy

of the 1602 quarto of _Merry Wives of

Windsor_, now in Rowfant Library. Printed in

_A Catalogue of the Printed Books, etc.,

collected since 1886 by the late Frederick

Locker Lampson_. 1900, pp. 28-30.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1880

(_b._ 1837)

In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet no deeper into

the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before him; and

in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line with

steadier hand than he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of

human pain and mortal passion no soul could search than his who first

rendered into speech the aspirations and the agonies of a ruined and

revolted spirit. And until Shakespeare found in himself the strength of

eyesight to read, and the cunning of handiwork to render those wider

diversities of emotion and those further complexities of character

which lay outside the range of Marlowe, he certainly cannot be said

to have outrun the winged feet, outstripped the fiery flight of his

forerunner. In the heaven of our tragic song, the first-born star on

the forehead of its herald god was not outshone till the full midsummer

meridian of that greater godhead before whom he was sent to prepare

a pathway for the sun. Through all the forenoon of our triumphant

day, till the utter consummation and ultimate ascension of dramatic

poetry incarnate and transfigured in the master-singer of the world,

the quality of his tragedy was as that of Marlowe’s, broad, single,

and intense; large of hand, voluble of tongue, direct of purpose.

With the dawn of its latter epoch a new power comes upon it, to find

clothing and expression in new forms of speech and after a new style.

The language has put off its foreign decorations of lyric and elegiac

ornament; it has found already its infinite gain in the loss of those

sweet superfluous graces which encumbered the march and enchained the

utterance of its childhood. The figures which it invests are now no

more types of a single passion, the incarnations of a single thought.

They now demand a scrutiny which tests the power of a mind and tries

the value of a judgment; they appeal to something more than the instant

apprehension which sufficed to respond to the immediate claim of those

that went before them. Romeo and Juliet were simply lovers, and their

names bring back to us no further thought than of their love and the

lovely sorrow of its end; Antony and Cleopatra shall be before all

things lovers, but the thought of their love and its triumphant tragedy

shall recall other things beyond number—all the forces and all the

fortunes of mankind, all the chance and all the consequence that waited

on their imperial passion, all the infinite variety of qualities and

powers wrought together and welded into the frame and composition of

that love which shook from end to end all nations and kingdoms of the

earth.

_A Study of Shakespeare._ 1880, pp. 77-9.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1882

(_b._ 1837)

“_William Shakespeare._”

Not if men’s tongues and angels’ all in one

Spake, might the word be said that might speak thee.

Streams, winds, woods, flowers, fields, mountains, yea the sea,

What power is in them all to praise the sun?

His praise is this,—he can be praised of none.

Man, woman, child, praise God for him; but he

Exults not to be worshipped, but to be.

He is; and, being, beholds his work well done.

All joy, all glory, all sorrow, all strength, all mirth,

Are his: without him, day were night on earth.

Time knows not his from time’s own period.

All lutes, all harps, all viols, all flutes, all lyres,

Fall dumb before him ere one string suspires.

All stars are angels; but the sun is God.

_Tristram of Lyonesse and other Poems._

1882, p. 280.

See also Mr. Swinburne’s _An Autumn Vision, October 31, 1889_.

GEORGE MEREDITH, 1883

(_b._ 1828)

“_The Spirit of Shakespeare._”

Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured

He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell

Of human passions, but of love deflowered

His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well.

Thence came the honeyed corner of his lips,

The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails

Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips,

Yet full of speech and intershifting tales,

Close mirrors of us: thence had he the laugh

We feel is thine: broad as ten thousand beeves

At pasture! thence thy songs, that winnow chaff

From grain, bid sick Philosophy’s last leaves

Whirl, if they have no recompense—they enforced

To fatten Earth when from her soul divorced.

How smiles he at a generation ranked

In gloomy noddings over life! They pass.

Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked,

Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass.

But he can spy that little twist of brain

Which moved some mighty leader of the blind,

Unwitting ’twas the goad of personal pain,

To view in curst eclipse our Mother’s mind,

And show us of some rigid harridan

The wretched bondman till the end of time.

O lived the Master now to paint us Man,

That little twist of brain would ring a chime

Of whence it came and what it caused, to start

Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.

_Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth._

1883, pp. 161-2.

ROBERT BROWNING, 1884

(1812-1889)

“_The Names._”

Shakespeare!—to such name’s sounding, what succeeds

Fitly as a silence? Falter forth the spell,—

Act follows word, the speaker knows full well,

Nor tampers with its magic more than needs.

Two names there are: That which the Hebrew reads

With his soul only: if from lips it fell,

Echo, back thundered by earth, heaven and hell,

Would own, “Thou didst create us!” Nought impedes

We voice the other name, man’s most of might,

Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love

Mutely await their working, leave to sight

All of the issue as below—above—

Shakespeare’s creation rises: one remove

Though dread—this finite from that infinite.

_Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert

Browning._ Cambridge edition, U.S.A.

1895.

Browning wrote this sonnet as a contribution to the

_Shakespearean Show-Book_ issued at the “Shakespearean Show”

held in the Albert Hall, London, 29-31 May 1884, in aid of the

Hospital for Women in Fulham Road. The sonnet is dated 12 March

1884.

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY, 1886

(_b._ 1819)

“_The Mighty Makers._”

Whose are those forms august that, in the press

And busy blames and praises of to-day,

Stand so serene above life’s fierce affray

With ever youthful strength and loveliness?

Those are the mighty makers, whom no stress

Of time can shame, nor fashion sweep away,

Whom Art begot on Nature in the play

Of healthy passion, scorning base excess.

Rising perchance in mists, and half obscure

When up the horizon of their age they came,

Brighter with years they shine in steadier light,

Great constellations that will aye endure,

Though myriad meteors of ephemeral fame

Across them flash, to vanish into night.

Such was our Chaucer in the early prime

Of English verse, who held to Nature’s hand

And walked serenely through its morning land,

Gladsome and hale, brushing its dewy rime.

And such was Shakespeare, whose strong soul could climb

Steeps of sheer terror, sound the ocean grand

Of passions deep, or over Fancy’s strand

Trip with his fairies, keeping step and time.

His too the power to laugh out full and clear,

With unembittered joyance, and to move

Along the silent, shadowy paths of love

As tenderly as Dante, whose austere

Stern spirit through the worlds below, above,

Unsmiling strode, to tell their tidings here.

_Poems._ 1886, vol. ii. pp. 273-4.

THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES, 1886

(1823-1887)

Shakespeare’s work alone can be said to possess the organic strength

and infinite variety, the throbbing fulness, vital complexity, and

breathing truth of Nature herself. In points of artistic resource and

technical ability—such as copious and expressive diction, freshness and

pregnancy of verbal combination, richly modulated verse, and structural

skill in the handling of incident and action—Shakespeare’s supremacy

is indeed sufficiently assured. But, after all, it is of course in the

spirit and substance of his work, his power of piercing to the hidden

centres of character, of touching the deepest springs of impulse and

passion, out of which are the issues of life, and of evolving those

issues dramatically with a flawless strength, subtlety, and truth,

which raises him so immensely above and beyond not only the best of

the playwrights who went before him, but the whole line of illustrious

dramatists that came after him. It is Shakespeare’s unique distinction

that he has an absolute command over all the complexities of thought

and feeling that prompt to action and bring out the dividing lines of

character. He sweeps with the hand of a master the whole gamut of human

experience, from the lowest note to the very top of its compass, from

the sportive childish treble of Mamilius, and the pleading boyish tones

of Prince Arthur, up to the spectre-haunted terrors of Macbeth, the

tropical passion of Othello, the agonised sense and tortured spirit

of Hamlet, the sustained elemental grandeur, the Titanic force, the

utterly tragical pathos of Lear.

_Encyclopædia Britannica._ 9th edition. Art.

“Shakespeare.” Vol. xxi. 1886, p. 763.

GERALD MASSEY, 1888

(_b._ 1828)

Our Prince of Peace in glory hath gone,

With no Spear shaken, no Sword drawn,

No Cannon fired, no flag unfurled,

To make his conquest of the World.

For him no Martyr-fires have blazed,

No limbs been racked, no scaffolds raised;

For him no life was ever shed,

To make the Victor’s pathway red.

And for all time he wears the Crown

Of lasting, limitless renown:

He reigns, whatever Monarchs fall;

His Throne is in the heart of all.

_The Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets._ 1888.

WALT WHITMAN, 1890

(1819-1892)

The inward and outward characteristics of Shakespeare are his vast and

rich variety of persons and themes, with his wondrous delineation of

each and all—not only limitless funds of verbal and pictorial resource,

but great excess, superfœtation—mannerism, like a fine aristocratic

perfume, holding a touch of musk (Euphues, his mark)—with boundless

sumptuousness and adornment, real velvet and gems, not shoddy nor

paste—but a good deal of bombast and fustian—(certainly some terrific

mouthing in Shakespeare!).

Superb and inimitable as all is, it is mostly an objective and

physiological kind of power and beauty the soul finds in Shakespeare—a

style supremely grand of the sort, but in my opinion stopping short of

the grandest sort, at any rate for fulfilling and satisfying modern

and scientific and democratic American purposes. Think, not of growths

as forests primeval, or Yellowstone geysers, or Colorado ravines, but

of costly marble palaces, and palace rooms, and the noblest fixings

and furniture, and noble owners and occupants to correspond—think of

carefully built gardens from the beautiful but sophisticated gardening

art at its best, with walks and bowers and artificial lakes, and

appropriate statue groups, and the finest cultivated roses and lilies

and japonicas in plenty—and you have the tally of Shakespeare. The

low characters, mechanics, even the loyal henchmen—all in themselves

nothing—serve as capital foils to the aristocracy. The comedies

(exquisite as they certainly are), bringing in admirably portrayed

common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made

for the divertisement only of the élite of the castle, and from its

point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America

and Democracy.

But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and choose from the

riches Shakespeare has left us—to criticise his infinitely royal,

multiform quality—to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his

sun-like beams.

From _Poet-Lore_, July 1890. _Complete Prose Works._

Boston, Mass., 1898, p. 394.

Walt Whitman, when he says that “the comedies are altogether

non-acceptable to America and Democracy,” states rather what

he considers ought to be, than what actually is. In his essay,

“Poetry To-day in America,” he says of Shakespeare, “In

portraying mediæval European lords and barons, the arrogant

poet, so dear to the inmost human heart (pride! pride! dearest,

perhaps, of all—touching us, too, of the States closest of

all—closer than love), he stands alone, and I do not wonder he

so witches the world.”—_Prose Works_, Boston, 1898, p. 283.

RICHARD WATSON GILDER, 1891

(_b._ 1844)

“_The Twenty-Third of April._”

A little English earth and breathèd air

Made Shakespeare the divine; so is his verse

The broidered soil of every blossom fair;

So doth his song all sweet bird-songs rehearse.

But tell me, then, what wondrous stuff did fashion

That part of him which took those wilding flights

Among imagined worlds; whence the white passion

That burned three centuries through the days and nights!

Not heaven’s four winds could make, nor round the earth,

The soul wherefrom the soul of Hamlet flamed;

Nor anything of merely mortal birth

Could lighten as when Shakespeare’s name is named.

How was his body bred we know full well,

But that high soul’s engendering who may tell!

“Five Books of Song.” IV. _The Two Worlds._

1894, p. 154.

MATHILDE BLIND, _c._ 1894

(1841-1896)

“_Shakespeare._”

Yearning to know herself for all she was,

Her passionate clash of warring good and ill,

Her new life ever ground in Death’s old mill,

With every delicate detail and _en masse_,—

Blind Nature strove. Lo, then it came to pass,

That Time, to work out her unconscious will,

Once wrought the mind which she had groped to fill,

And she beheld herself as in a glass.

The world of men, unrolled before our sight,

Showed like a map, where stream and waterfall,

And village-cradling vale and cloud-capped height

Stand faithfully recorded, great and small,

For Shakespeare was, and at his touch with light

Impartial as the sun’s, revealed the All.

“Shakespeare Sonnets, VII.” _Poetical Works._ Ed.

Arthur Symons. 1900, p. 443.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, BEFORE 1892

(1809-1892)

There are three repartees in Shakespeare which always bring tears to my

eyes from their simplicity.

One is in _King Lear_, when Lear says to Cordelia, “So young and so

untender,” and Cordelia lovingly answers, “So young, my lord, and

true.” And in _The Winter’s Tale_, when Florizel takes Perdita’s hand

to lead her to the dance, and says, “So turtles pair that never mean

to part,” and the little Perdita answers, giving her hand to Florizel,

”I’ll swear for ’em.” And in _Cymbeline_, when Imogen in tender rebuke

says to her husband:

“Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?

Think that you are upon a rock; and now,

Throw me again!”

and Posthumus does not ask forgiveness, but answers, kissing her:

“Hang there like fruit, my soul,

Till the tree die.”

_Life and Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson._ Ed.

Hallam, Lord Tennyson. 1898, vol. iv. pp.

39 _et seq._

See also _ib._, pp. 39-43.

SIDNEY LEE, 1899

(_b._ 1859)

Shakespeare’s mind, as Hazlitt suggested, contained within itself the

germs of all faculty and feeling. He knew intuitively how every faculty

and feeling would develop in any conceivable change of fortune. Men

and women—good or bad, old or young, wise or foolish, merry or sad,

rich or poor—yielded their secrets to him, and his genius enabled him

to give being in his pages to all the shapes of humanity that present

themselves on the highway of life. Each of his characters gives voice

to thought or passion with an individuality and a naturalness that

rouse in the intelligent playgoer and reader the illusion that they are

overhearing men and women speak unpremeditatingly among themselves,

rather than that they are reading written speeches or hearing written

speeches recited. The more closely the words are studied, the completer

the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination—fairies, ghosts,

witches—are delineated with a like potency, and the reader or spectator

feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak,

feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. The creative

power of poetry was never manifested to such effect as in the corporeal

semblances in which Shakespeare clad the spirits of the air.

So mighty a faculty sets at nought the common limitations of

nationality, and in every quarter of the globe to which civilised life

has penetrated, Shakespeare’s power is recognised. All the world over,

language is applied to his creations that ordinarily applies to beings

of flesh and blood. Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff and

Shylock, Brutus and Romeo, Ariel and Caliban are studied in almost

every civilised tongue as if they were historic personalities, and the

chief of the impressive phrases that fall from their lips are rooted

in the speech of civilised humanity. To Shakespeare the intellect of

the world, speaking in divers accents, applies with one accord his own

words: “How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in apprehension

how like a god!”

_Life of William Shakespeare._ 1899, chap. xxi.