Our idolatry of Shakespeare (not to say our admiration) ceases with his
plays. In his other productions he was a mere author, though not a
common author. It was only by representing others, that he became
himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra;
but in his own person, he appeared to be always waiting for the
prompter's cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed
inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic. The licence of an
assumed character was necessary to restore his genius to the privileges
of nature, and to give him courage to break through the tyranny of
fashion, the trammels of custom. In his plays, he was 'as broad and
casing as the general air'; in his poems, on the contrary, he appears to
be 'cooped, and cabined in' by all the technicalities of art, by all the
petty intricacies of thought and language, which poetry had learned from
the controversial jargon of the schools, where words had been made a
substitute for things. There was, if we mistake not, something of
modesty, and a painful sense of personal propriety at the bottom of
this. Shakespeare's imagination, by identifying itself with the
strongest characters in the most trying circumstances, grappled at once
with nature, and trampled the littleness of art under his feet: the
rapid changes of situation, the wide range of the universe, gave him
life and spirit, and afforded full scope to his genius; but returned
into his closet again, and having assumed the badge of his profession,
he could only labour in his vocation, and conform himself to existing
models. The thoughts, the passions, the words which the poet's pen,
'glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven', lent to others,
shook off the fetters of pedantry and affectation; while his own
thoughts and feelings, standing by themselves, were seized upon as
lawful prey, and tortured to death according to the established rules
and practice of the day. In a word, we do not like Shakespeare's poems,
because we like his plays: the one, in all their excellences, are just
the reverse of the other. It has been the fashion of late to cry up our
author's poems, as equal to his plays: this is the desperate cant of
modern criticism. We would ask, was there the slightest comparison
between Shakespeare, and either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets? Not
any.--The two poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and of TARQUIN AND LUCRECE
appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as
glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of
his verses, and not of his subject,--not of what his characters would
feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must happen in all such cases,
he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the
last to think of, and which it shows the greatest ingenuity in him to
find out. The whole is laboured, up-hill work. The poet is perpetually
singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his
strength and skill in wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials
of them as if his mastery over them were doubted. The images, which are
often striking, are generally applied to things which they are the least
like: so that they do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon it,
like splendid patchwork, or remain quite distinct from it, like detached
substances, painted and varnished over. A beautiful thought is sure to
be lost in an endless commentary upon it. The speakers are like persons
who have both leisure and inclination to make riddles on their own
situation, and to twist and turn every object or incident into acrostics
and anagrams. Everything is spun out into allegory; and a digression is
always preferred to the main story. Sentiment is built up upon plays of
words; the hero or heroine feels, not from the impulse of passion, but
from the force of dialectics. There is besides, a strange attempt to
substitute the language of painting for that of poetry, to make us SEE
their feelings in the faces of the persons; and again, consistently with
this, in the description of the picture in TARQUIN AND LUCRECE, those
circumstances are chiefly insisted on, which it would be impossible to
convey except by words. The invocation to Opportunity in the TARQUIN AND
LUCRECE is full of thoughts and images, but at the same time it is
overloaded by them. The concluding stanza expresses all our objections
to this kind of poetry:
Oh! idle words, servants to shallow fools;
Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators;
Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools;
Debate when leisure serves with dull debaters;
To trembling clients be their mediators:
For me I force not argument a straw,
Since that my case is past all help of law.
The description of the horse in VENUS AND ADONIS has been
particularly admired, and not without reason:
Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eyes, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.
Now this inventory of perfections shows great knowledge of the
horse; and is good matter-of-fact poetry. Let the reader but compare
it with a speech in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM where Theseus
describes his hounds--
And their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew--
and he will perceive at once what we mean by the difference between
Shakespeare's own poetry, and that of his plays. We prefer the
PASSIONATE PILGRIM very much to the LOVER'S COMPLAINT. It has been
doubted whether the latter poem is Shakespeare's.
Of the Sonnets we do not well know what to say. The subject of them
seems to be somewhat equivocal; but many of them are highly
beautiful in themselves, and interesting as they relate to the state
of the personal feelings of the author. The following are some of
the most striking: