"No man is the lord of any thing,
Till he communicate his parts to others:
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
Till he behold them formed in the applause,
Where they're extended! which like an arch reverberates
The voice again, or like a gate of steel,
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
Its figure and its heat."
Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice.
"Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane
Be shook to air,"
Shakspeare's language and versification are like the rest of him. He has a
magic power over words: they come winged at his bidding; and seem to know
their places. They are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the occasion,
and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an actual impression
of the objects. His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown
off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion.
His language is hieroglyphical. It translates thoughts into visible
images. It abounds in sudden transitions and elliptical expressions. This
is the source of his mixed metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of
speech. These, however, give no pain from long custom. They have, in fact,
become idioms in the language. They are the building, and not the
scaffolding to thought. We take the meaning and effect of a well-known
passage entire, and no more stop to scan and spell out the particular
words and phrases, than the syllables of which they are composed. In
trying to recollect any other author, one sometimes stumbles, in case of
failure, on a word as good. In Shakspeare, any other word but the true
one, is sure to be wrong. If any body, for instance, could not recollect
the words of the following description,
"--Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,"
he would be greatly at a loss to substitute others for them equally
expressive of the feeling. These remarks, however, are strictly applicable
only to the impassioned parts of Shakspeare's language, which flowed from
the warmth and originality of his imagination, and were his own. The
language used for prose conversation and ordinary business is sometimes
technical, and involved in the affectation of the time. Compare, for
example, Othello's apology to the senate, relating "his whole course of
love," with some of the preceding parts relating to his appointment, and
the official dispatches from Cyprus. In this respect, "the business of the
state does him offence."--His versification is no less powerful, sweet,
and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of sullen intricacy,
crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiest expansion--from
the ease and familiarity of measured conversation to the lyrical sounds
"--Of ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower,
With ravishing division to her lute."
It is the only blank verse in the language, except Milton's, that for
itself is readable. It is not stately and uniformly swelling like his, but
varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass over in
its uncertain course,
"And so by many winding nooks it strays,
With willing sport to the wild ocean."
It remains to speak of the faults of Shakspeare. They are not so many or
so great as they have been represented; what there are, are chiefly owing
to the following causes:--The universality of his genius was, perhaps, a
disadvantage to his single works; the variety of his resources sometimes
diverting him from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might
be said to combine the powers of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and
Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he would
perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and indifference of his
temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than he might have been. He is
relaxed and careless in critical places; he is in earnest throughout only
in Timon, Macbeth, and Lear. Again, he had no models of acknowledged
excellence constantly in view to stimulate his efforts, and by all that
appears, no love of fame. He wrote for the "great vulgar and the small,"
in his time, not for posterity. If Queen Elizabeth and the maids of honour
laughed heartily at his worst jokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were
silent at his best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next
night well. He did not trouble himself about Voltaire's criticisms. He was
willing to take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things; and
if his plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very
facility of production would make him set less value on his own
excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well
or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above
half a dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography, not
against poetry. As to the unities, he was right in setting them at
defiance. He was fonder of puns than became so great a man. His barbarisms
were those of his age. His genius was his own. He had no objection to
float down with the stream of common taste and opinion: he rose above it
by his own buoyancy, and an impulse which he could not keep under, in
spite of himself or others, and "his delights did shew most
dolphin-like."
He had an equal genius for comedy and tragedy; and his tragedies are
better than his comedies, because tragedy is better than comedy. His
female characters, which have been found fault with as insipid, are the
finest in the world. Lastly, Shakspeare was the least of a coxcomb of any
one that ever lived, and much of a gentleman.