than ever fell on the old white head of that child-changed father. But
at least he is destroyed by the stroke of a mightier hand than theirs who
struck down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest man of man's
making, Iago is the most perfect evildoer, the most potent demi-devil. It
is of course the merest commonplace to say as much, and would be no less
a waste of speech to add the half comfortable reflection that it is in
any case no shame to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest and
strangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires some closer than
common scrutiny. Coleridge has admirably described the first great
soliloquy which opens to us the pit of hell within as "the motive-hunting
of a motiveless malignity." But subtle and profound and just as is this
definitive appreciation, there is more in the matter yet than even this.
It is not only that Iago, so to speak, half tries to make himself half
believe that Othello has wronged him, and that the thought of it gnaws
him inly like a poisonous mineral: though this also be true, it is not
half the truth--nor half that half again. Malignant as he is, the very
subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature is not even
malignity. It is the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an
inarticulate poet. In his immortal study on the affair of the diamond
necklace, the most profound and potent humourist of his country in his
century has unwittingly touched on the mainspring of Iago's
character--"the very pulse of the machine." He describes his Circe de la
Mothe-Valois as a practical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu
of play-writer: while indicating how and wherefore, with all her
constructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers so
differs from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have
written a _Hamlet_. Neither could Iago have written an _Othello_. (From
this theorem, by the way, a reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to
prefer articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fair
Vittoria Colonna to a "foul Circe-Megaera," and even such a strategist as
Homer to such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illogically
draw such conclusions or infer such corollaries as might result in
opinions hardly consonant with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of the
preacher who supplied him with his thesis.) "But what he can do, that he
will": and if it be better to make a tragedy than to write one, to act a
poem than to sing it, we must allow to Iago a station in the hierarchy of
poets very far in advance of his creator's. None of the great
inarticulate may more justly claim place and precedence. With all his
poetic gift, he has no poetic weakness. Almost any creator but his would
have given him some grain of spite or some spark of lust after Desdemona.
To Shakespeare's Iago she is no more than is a rhyme to another and
articulate poet. {179} His stanza must at any rate and at all costs be
polished: to borrow the metaphor used by Mr. Carlyle in apologetic
illustration of a royal hero's peculiar system of levying recruits for
his colossal brigade. He has within him a sense or conscience of power
incomparable: and this power shall not be left, in Hamlet's phrase, "to
fust in him unused." A genuine and thorough capacity for human lust or
hate would diminish and degrade the supremacy of his evil. He is almost
as far above or beyond vice as he is beneath or beyond virtue. And this
it is that makes him impregnable and invulnerable. When once he has said
it, we know as well as he that thenceforth he never will speak word. We
could smile almost as we can see him to have smiled at Gratiano's most
ignorant and empty threat, being well assured that torments will in no
wise ope his lips: that as surely and as truthfully as ever did the
tortured philosopher before him, he might have told his tormentors that
they did but bruise the coating, batter the crust, or break the shell of
Iago. Could we imagine a far other lost spirit than Farinata degli
Uberti's endowed with Farinata's might of will, and transferred from the
sepulchres of fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we might conceive something
of Iago's attitude in hell--of his unalterable and indomitable posture
for all eternity. As though it were possible and necessary that in some
one point the extremities of all conceivable good and of all imaginable
evil should meet and mix together in a new "marriage of heaven and hell,"
the action in passion of the most devilish among all the human damned
could hardly be other than that of the most godlike among all divine
saviours--the figure of Iago than a reflection by hell-fire of the figure
of Prometheus.
Between Iago and Othello the position of Desdemona is precisely that
defined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English
byword--"between the devil and the deep sea." Deep and pure and strong
and adorable always and terrible and pitiless on occasion as the sea is
the great soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given herself; and
what likeness of man's enemy from Satan down to Mephistopheles could be
matched for danger and for dread against the good bluff soldierly
trustworthy figure of honest Iago? The rough license of his tongue at
once takes warrant from his good soldiership and again gives warrant for
his honesty: so that in a double sense it does him yeoman's service, and
that twice told. It is pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the show
like a member--and a very inefficient member--of the secret police. But
it would seem impossible for actors to understand that he is not a would-
be detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq, a candidate for
the laurels of a Vautrin: that he is no less than Lepidus, or than
Antony's horse, "a tried and valiant soldier." It is perhaps natural
that the two deepest and subtlest of all Shakespeare's intellectual
studies in good and evil should be the two most painfully misused and
misunderstood alike by his commentators and his fellows of the stage: it
is certainly undeniable that no third figure of his creation has ever
been on both sides as persistently misconceived and misrepresented with
such desperate pertinacity as Hamlet and Iago.
And it is only when Iago is justly appreciated that we can justly
appreciate either Othello or Desdemona. This again should surely be no
more than the truism that it sounds; but practically it would seem to be
no less than an adventurous and audacious paradox. Remove or deform or
diminish or modify the dominant features of the destroyer, and we have
but the eternal and vulgar figures of jealousy and innocence, newly
vamped and veneered and padded and patched up for the stalest purposes of
puppetry. As it is, when Coleridge asks "which do we pity the most" at
the fall of the curtain, we can surely answer, Othello. Noble as are the
"most blessed conditions" of "the gentle Desdemona," he is yet the nobler
of the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than she could
suffer in life or in death.
But if _Othello_ be the most pathetic, _King Lear_ the most terrible,
_Hamlet_ the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in
abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is _Macbeth_. There needs no
ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell us
this. But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthed
regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to
have upon it some glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of a
brand-new lie. Have not certain wise men of the east of
England--Cantabrigian Magi, led by the star of their goddess Mathesis
("mad Mathesis," as a daring poet was once ill-advised enough to dub her
doubtful deity in defiance of scansion rather than of truth)--have they
not detected in the very heart of this tragedy the "paddling palms and
pinching fingers" of Thomas Middleton?
To the simpler eyes of less learned Thebans than these--Thebes, by the
way, was Dryden's irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursing mother of
"his green unknowing youth," when that "renegade" was recreant enough to
compliment Oxford at her expense as the chosen Athens of "his riper
age"--the likelihood is only too evident that the sole text we possess of
_Macbeth_ has not been interpolated but mutilated. In their version of
_Othello_, remarkably enough, the "player-editors," contrary to their
wont, have added to the treasure-house of their text one of the most
precious jewels that ever the prodigal afterthought of a great poet
bestowed upon the rapture of his readers. Some of these, by way of
thanksgiving, have complained with a touch of petulance that it was out
of place and superfluous in the setting: nay, that it was incongruous
with all the circumstances--out of tone and out of harmony and out of
keeping with character and tune and time. In other lips indeed than
Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant agony, the rush of
imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his eyes and ears the
lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea might seem a thing
less natural than sublime. But Othello has the passion of a poet closed
in as it were and shut up behind the passion of a hero. For all his
practical readiness of martial eye and ruling hand in action, he is also
in his season "of imagination all compact." Therefore it is that in the
face and teeth of all devils akin to Iago that hell could send forth to
hiss at her election, we feel and recognise the spotless exaltation, the
sublime and sun-bright purity, of Desdemona's inevitable and invulnerable
love. When once we likewise have seen Othello's visage in his mind, we
see too how much more of greatness is in this mind than in another
hero's. For such an one, even a boy may well think how thankfully and
joyfully he would lay down his life. Other friends we have of
Shakespeare's giving whom we love deeply and well, if hardly with such
love as could weep for him all the tears of the body and all the blood of
the heart: but there is none we love like Othello.
I must part from his presence again for a season, and return to my topic
in the text of _Macbeth_. That it is piteously rent and ragged and
clipped and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, the rough construction
and the poltfoot metre, lame sense and limping verse, each maimed and
mangled subject of players' and printers' most treasonable tyranny,
contending as it were to seem harsher than the other, combine in this
contention to bear indisputable and intolerable witness. Only where the
witches are, and one more potent and more terrible than all witches and
all devils at their beck, can we be sure that such traitors have not
robbed us of one touch from Shakespeare's hand. The second scene of the
play at least bears marks of such handling as the brutal Shakespearean
Hector's of the "mangled Myrmidons"; it is too visibly "noseless,
handless, hacked and chipped" as it comes to us, crying on Hemings and
Condell. And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criticism has not
unsuccessfully sought for the gravest faults of language and manner to be
found in Shakespeare. For certainly it cannot be cleared from the charge
of a style stiffened and swollen with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast.
But against the weird sisters, and her who sits above them and apart,
more awful than Hecate's very self, no mangling hand has been stretched
forth; no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen upon the
words which interpret and expound the hidden things of their evil will.
To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shakespeare's, the casual or the
natural union of especial popularity with especial simplicity in
selection and in treatment of character makes it as superfluous as it
would be difficult to attempt any application of analytical criticism.
There is nothing in them of a nature so compound or so complex as to call
for solution or resolution into its primal elements. Here there is some
genuine ground for the generally baseless and delusive opinion of self-
complacent sciolism that he who runs may read Shakespeare. These two
plays it is hardly worth while to point out by name: all probable readers
will know them at once for _Macbeth_ and _As You Like It_. There can
hardly be a single point of incident or of character on which the
youngest reader will not find himself at one with the oldest, the dullest
with the brightest among the scholars of Shakespeare. It would be an
equal waste of working hours or of playtime if any of these should devote
any part of either a whole-schoolday or a holiday to remark or to
rhapsody on the character of Macbeth or of Orlando, of Rosalind or of
Lady Macbeth. He that runs, let him read: and he that has ears, let him
hear.
I cannot but think that enough at least of time has been spent if not
wasted by able and even by eminent men on examination of _Coriolanus_
with regard to its political aspect or bearing upon social questions. It
is from first to last, for all its turmoil of battle and clamour of
contentious factions, rather a private and domestic than a public or
historical tragedy. As in _Julius Caesar_ the family had been so wholly
subordinated to the state, and all personal interests so utterly
dominated by the preponderance of national duties, that even the sweet
and sublime figure of Portia passing in her "awful loveliness" was but as
a profile half caught in the background of an episode, so here on the
contrary the whole force of the final impression is not that of a
conflict between patrician and plebeian, but solely that of a match of
passions played out for life and death between a mother and a son. The
partisans of oligarchic or democratic systems may wrangle at their will
over the supposed evidences of Shakespeare's prejudice against this creed
and prepossession in favour of that: a third bystander may rejoice in the
proof thus established of his impartial indifference towards either: it
is all nothing to the real point in hand. The subject of the whole play
is not the exile's revolt, the rebel's repentance, or the traitor's
reward, but above all it is the son's tragedy. The inscription on the
plinth of this tragic statue is simply to Volumnia Victrix.
A loftier or a more perfect piece of man's work was never done in all the
world than this tragedy of _Coriolanus_: the one fit and crowning epithet
for its companion or successor is that bestowed by Coleridge--"the most
wonderful." It would seem a sign or birthmark of only the greatest among
poets that they should be sure to rise instantly for awhile above the
very highest of their native height at the touch of a thought of
Cleopatra. So was it, as we all know, with William Shakespeare: so is
it, as we all see, with Victor Hugo. As we feel in the marvellous and
matchless verses of _Zim-Zizimi_ all the splendour and fragrance and
miracle of her mere bodily presence, so from her first imperial dawn on
the stage of Shakespeare to the setting of that eastern star behind a
pall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and the terror and the
mystery of her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with
how much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, that
his friend's first "confounded book" of thin prurient jingle ("we call it
a mellisonant tingle-tangle," as Randolph's mock Oberon says of a stolen
sheep-bell) had been the first cause of all his erratic or erotic
frailties: it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may remember
that to their own innocent infantine perceptions the first obscure
electric revelation of what Blake calls "the Eternal Female" was given
through a blind wondering thrill of childish rapture by a lightning on
the baby dawn of their senses and their soul from the sunrise of
Shakespeare's Cleopatra.
Never has he given such proof of his incomparable instinct for abstinence
from the wrong thing as well as achievement of the right. He has utterly
rejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by means of any
lesser foil than all the glory of the world with all its empires. And we
need not Antony's example to show us that these are less than straws in
the balance.
Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient a la fois
Il hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix.
Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so has
Shakespeare's self let go for awhile his greater world of imagination,
with all its all but infinite variety of life and thought and action, for
love of that more infinite variety which custom could not stale. Himself
a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world,
and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for
her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator
of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the
sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom
"Phoebus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black," nor "wrinkled deep in
time"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," to whom at
the very last
The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch,
That hurts, and is desired.
To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, this creature of his own hand
might have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest among all her
sisters of his begetting,
with her modest eyes
And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour,
Demurring upon me.
To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in ideal incarnation the
perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect
mistress, or the perfect maiden: here only once for all he has given us
the perfect and the everlasting woman.
And what a world of great men and great things, "high actions and high
passions," is this that he has spread under her for a footcloth or hung
behind her for a curtain! The descendant of that other his ancestral
Alcides, late offshoot of the god whom he loved and who so long was loth
to leave him, is here as in history the visible one man revealed who
could grapple for a second with very Rome and seem to throw it, more
lightly than he could cope with Cleopatra. And not the Roman Landor
himself could see or make us see more clearly than has his fellow
provincial of Warwickshire that first imperial nephew of her great first
paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such a foil and counterfeit
and perverse and prosperous parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais of
Saint-Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio. For Shakespeare
too, like Landor, had watched his "sweet Octavius" smilingly and
frowningly "draw under nose the knuckle of forefinger" as he looked out
upon the trail of innocent blood after the bright receding figure of his
brave young kinsman. The fair-faced false "present God" of his poetic
parasites, the smooth triumphant patron and preserver with the heart of
ice and iron, smiles before us to the very life. It is of no account now
to remember that
he at Philippi kept
His sword even like a dancer:
for the sword of Antony that struck for him is in the renegade hand of
Dercetas.
I have said nothing of Enobarbus or of Eros, the fugitive once ruined by
his flight and again redeemed by the death-agony of his dark and doomed
repentance, or the freedman transfigured by a death more fair than
freedom through the glory of the greatness of his faith: for who can
speak of all things or of half that are in Shakespeare? And who can
speak worthily of any?
I am come now to that strange part of a task too high for me, where I
must needs speak not only (as may indeed well be) unworthily, but also
(as may well seem) unlovingly, of some certain portions in the mature and
authentic work of Shakespeare. "Though it be honest, it is never good"
to do so: yet here I cannot choose but speak plainly after my own poor
conscience, and risk all chances of chastisement as fearful as any once
threatened for her too faithful messenger by the heart-stricken wrath of
Cleopatra.
In the greater part of this third period, taking a swift and general view
of it for contrast or comparison of qualities with the second, we
constantly find beauty and melody, transfigured into harmony and
sublimity; an exchange unquestionably for the better: but in certain
stages, or only perhaps in a single stage of it, we frequently find
humour and reality supplanted by realism and obscenity; an exchange
undeniably for the worse. The note of his earliest comic style was often
a boyish or a birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties and
levities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the lip or bosom of his
mistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio: and indeed there
is a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running throughout the golden
youth of the two plays which connects _Love's Labour's Lost_ with _Romeo
and Juliet_ as by a thread of floss silk not always "most excellently
ravelled," nor often unspotted or unentangled. In the second period this
gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a
boy's merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time it
would seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced
and ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh
photograph. This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and
brutification of speech we do not find in the lighter interludes of great
and perfect tragedy: for the porter in _Macbeth_ makes hardly an
exception worth naming. It is when we come upon the singular little
group of two or three plays not accurately definable at all but roughly
describable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as
tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the due
catastrophe--it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightnings
of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless
disappearance from the stage of _King Lear_ seems for once a sure sign of
inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so
nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry
of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have leave to say that the coincidence
of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by
men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "Eternal
Cesspools" over which the first of living humourists holds as it were for
ever an everlasting nose--or rather, in one sense, does not hold but
expand it for the fuller inhalation of their too congenial fumes with an
apparent relish which will always seem the most deplorable to those who
the most gratefully and reasonably admire that high heroic genius, for
love of which the wiser sort of men must finally forgive all the noisy
aberrations of his misanthropy and philobulgary, anti-Gallican and
Russolatrous insanities of perverse and morbid eloquence.
The three detached or misclassified plays of Shakespeare in which alone a
reverent and reasonable critic might perhaps find something rationally
and really exceptionable have also this far other quality in common, that
in them as in his topmost tragedies of the same period either the
exaltation of his eloquence touches the very highest point of expressible
poetry, or his power of speculation alternately sounds the gulfs and
scales the summits of all imaginable thought. In all three of them the
power of passionate and imaginative eloquence is not only equal in spirit
or essence but identical in figure or in form: in those two of them which
deal almost as much with speculative intelligence as with poetic action
and passion, the tones and methods, types and objects of thought, are
also not equal only but identical. An all but absolute brotherhood in
thought and style and tone and feeling unites the quasi-tragedy of
_Troilus and Cressida_ with what in the lamentable default of as apt a
phrase in English I must call by its proper designation in French the
_tragedie manquee_ of _Measure for Measure_. In the simply romantic
fragment of the Shakespearean _Pericles_, where there was no call and no
place for the poetry of speculative or philosophic intelligence, there is
the same positive and unmistakable identity of imaginative and passionate
style.
I cannot but conjecture that the habitual students of Shakespeare's
printed plays must have felt startled as by something of a shock when the
same year exposed for the expenditure of their sixpences two reasonably
correct editions of a play unknown to the boards in the likeness of
_Troilus and Cressida_, side by side or cheek by jowl with a most
unreasonably and unconscionably incorrect issue of a much older stage
favourite, now newly beautified and fortified, in _Pericles Prince of
Tyre_. Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem, and its
instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers to courtesans under a
somewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success,--'vrai succes de
scandale s'il en fut'--even the potent influence and unequivocal example
of Rabelais had never once even in passing or in seeming affected or
infected the progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare with a taint
or touch of anything offensive to healthier and cleanlier organs of
perception than such as may belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan.
But on taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic pamphlets
which might first attract him either by its double novelty as a never
acted play or by a title of yet more poetic and romantic associations
than its fellow's, such a purchaser as I have supposed, with his mind
full of the sweet rich fresh humour which he would feel a right to expect
from Shakespeare, could hardly have undergone less than a qualm or a pang
of strong disrelish and distaste on finding one of the two leading comic
figures of the play break in upon it at his entrance not even with "a
fool-born jest," but with full-mouthed and foul-mouthed effusion of such
rank and rancorous personalities as might properly pollute the lips even
of some emulous descendant or antiquarian reincarnation of Thersites, on
application or even apprehension of a whip cracked in passing over the
assembled heads of a pseudocritical and mock-historic society. In either
case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a
beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of
Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of
Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon--I am speaking of
Shakespeare's Thersites--has no touch of humour in all his currish
composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such
dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even what
Coleridge with such exquisite happiness defined as being the
quintessential property of Swift--"_anima Rabelaesii habitans in
sicco_--the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place." It is the fallen
soul of Swift himself at its lowest, dwelling in a place yet drier: the
familiar spirit or less than Socratic daemon of the Dean informing the
genius of Shakespeare. And thus for awhile infected and possessed, the
divine genius had not power to re-inform and re-create the daemonic
spirit by virtue of its own clear essence. This wonderful play, one of
the most admirable among all the works of Shakespeare's immeasurable and
unfathomable intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high place
among the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and as
naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be as easy and as
profitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating
chimaera with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving
sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, as to read the
riddle of Shakespeare's design in the procreation of this yet more
mysterious and magnificent monster of a play. That on its production in
print it was formally announced as "a new play never staled with the
stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar," we know; must
we infer or may we suppose that therefore it was not originally written
for the stage? Not all plays were which even at that date appeared in
print: yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play,
written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professional
work of Shakespeare: and yet again it would seem stranger that he should
have designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme genius
for the public stage: and strangest of all, if so, that he should have so
designed it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any German or
Germanising commentary on the subject would be the simple and summary
ejaculation of Celia--"O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful
wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!"
The perplexities of the whole matter seem literally to crowd and thicken
upon us at every step. What ailed the man or any man to write such a
manner of dramatic poem at all? and having written, to keep it beside him
or let it out of his hands into stranger and more slippery keeping,
unacted and unprinted? A German will rush in with an answer where an
Englishman (_non angelus sed Anglus_) will naturally fear to tread.
Alike in its most palpable perplexities and in its most patent
splendours, this political and philosophic and poetic problem, this
hybrid and hundred-faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and
derides all definitive comment. This however we may surely and
confidently say of it, that of all Shakespeare's offspring it is the one
whose best things lose least by extraction and separation from their
context. That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain--and
possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia--we
might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from
examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how
much is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and
Hyblaean eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's
tooth! Shakespeare, as under the guidance at once for good and for evil
of his alternately Socratic and Swiftian familiar, has set himself as if
prepensely and on purpose to brutalise the type of Achilles and
spiritualise the type of Ulysses. The former is an enterprise never to
be utterly forgiven by any one who ever loved from the very birth of his
boyhood the very name of the son of the sea-goddess in the glorious words
of Mr. Browning's young first-born poem,
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
And bound [his] forehead with Proserpine's hair.
It is true, if that be any little compensation, that Hector and
Andromache fare here hardly better than he: while of the momentary
presentation of Helen on the dirtier boards of a stage more miry than the
tub of Diogenes I would not if I could and I must not though I would say
so much as one single proper word. The hysterics of the eponymous hero
and the harlotries of the eponymous heroine remove both alike beyond the
outer pale of all rational and manly sympathy; though Shakespeare's self
may never have exceeded or equalled for subtle and accurate and bitter
fidelity the study here given of an utterly light woman, shallow and
loose and dissolute in the most literal sense, rather than perverse or
unkindly or unclean; and though Keats alone in his most perfect mood of
lyric passion and burning vision as full of fragrance as of flame could
have matched and all but overmatched those passages in which the rapture
of Troilus makes pale and humble by comparison the keenest raptures of
Romeo.
The relative disfavour in which the play of _Measure for Measure_ has
doubtless been at all times generally held is not in my opinion simply
explicable on the theory which of late years has been so powerfully and
plausibly advanced and advocated on the highest poetic or judicial
authority in France or in the world, that in the land of many-coloured
cant and many-coated hypocrisy the type of Angelo is something too much a
prototype or an autotype of the huge national vice of England. This
comment is in itself as surely just and true as it is incisive and
direct: but it will not cover by any manner of means the whole question.
The strong and radical objection distinctly brought forward against this
play, and strenuously supported by the wisest and the warmest devotee
among all the worshippers of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the
Puritan Angelo is exposed: it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished.
In the very words of Coleridge, it is that by his pardon and his marriage
"the strong indignant claim of justice" is "baffled." The expression is
absolutely correct and apt: justice is not merely evaded or ignored or
even defied: she is both in the older and the newer sense of the word
directly and deliberately baffled; buffeted, outraged, insulted, struck
in the face. We are left hungry and thirsty after having been made to
thirst and hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteous
and too long retarded retribution: we are tricked out of our dole,
defeated of our due, lured and led on to look for some equitable and
satisfying upshot, defrauded and derided and sent empty away.
That this play is in its very inmost essence a tragedy, and that no
sleight of hand or force of hand could give it even a tolerable show of
coherence or consistency when clipped and docked of its proper and
rightful end, the mere tone of style prevalent throughout all its better
parts to the absolute exclusion of any other would of itself most amply
suffice to show. Almost all that is here worthy of Shakespeare at any
time is worthy of Shakespeare at his highest: and of this every touch,
every line, every incident, every syllable, belongs to pure and simple
tragedy. The evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission
of Mariana has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity but
ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the distinctive
quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower school than the
school of Shakespeare. In short and in fact, the whole elaborate
machinery by which the complete and completely unsatisfactory result of
the whole plot is attained is so thoroughly worthy of such a contriver as
"the old fantastical duke of dark corners" as to be in a moral sense, if
I dare say what I think, very far from thoroughly worthy of the wisest
and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius of
creative poetry.
I have one more note to add in passing which touches simply on a musical
point in lyric verse; and from which I would therefore give any biped who
believes that ears "should be long to measure Shakespeare" all timely
warning to avert the length of his own. A very singular question, and
one to me unaccountable except by a supposition which on charitable
grounds I should be loth to entertain for a moment--namely, that such
ears are commoner than I would fain believe on heads externally or
ostensibly human,--has been raised with regard to the first immortal song
of Mariana in the moated grange. This question is whether the second
verse appended by Fletcher to that divine Shakespearean fragment may not
haply have been written by the author of the first. The visible and
audible evidence that it cannot is of a kind which must at once leap into
sight of all human eyes and conviction of all human ears. The metre of
Shakespeare's verse, as written by Shakespeare, is not the metre of
Fletcher's. It can only seem the same to those who hear by finger and
not by ear: a class now at all events but too evidently numerous enough
to refute Sir Hugh's antiquated objection to the once apparently
tautologous phrase of Pistol. {205}
It is of course inexplicable, but it is equally of course undeniable,
that the mention of Shakespeare's _Pericles_ would seem immediately and
invariably to recall to a virtuous critical public of nice and nasty mind
the prose portions of the fourth act, the whole of the prose portions of
the fourth act, and nothing but the prose portions of the fourth act. To
readers and writers of books who readily admit their ineligibility as
members of a Society for the Suppression of Shakespeare or Rabelais, of
Homer or the Bible, it will seem that the third and fifth acts of this
ill-fated and ill-famed play, and with them the poetical parts of the
fourth act, are composed of metal incomparably more attractive. But the
virtuous critic, after the alleged nature of the vulturine kind, would
appear to have eyes and ears and nose for nothing else. It is true that
somewhat more of humour, touched once and again with subtler hints of
deeper truth, is woven into the too realistic weft of these too lifelike
scenes than into any of the corresponding parts in _Measure for Measure_
or in _Troilus and Cressida_; true also that in the hands of imitators,
in hands so much weaker than Shakespeare's as were Heywood's or
Davenport's (who transplanted this unlovely episode from _Pericles_ into
a play of his own), these very scenes or such as they reappear unredeemed
by any such relief in all the rank and rampant ugliness of their raw
repulsive realism: true, again, that Fletcher has once equalled them in
audacity, while stripping off the nakedness of his subject the last
ragged and rude pretence at a moral purpose, and investing it instead
with his very brightest robe of gay parti-coloured humour: but after all
it remains equally true that to senses less susceptible of attraction by
carrion than belong to the vultures of critical and professional virtue
they must always remain as they have always been, something very
considerably more than unattractive. I at least for one must confess
myself insufficiently virtuous to have ever at any time for any moment
felt towards them the very slightest touch of any feeling more attractive
than repulsion. And herewith I hasten to wash my hands of the only
unattractive matter in the only three of Shakespeare's plays which offer
any such matter to the perceptions of any healthy-minded and reasonable
human creature.
But what now shall I say that may not be too pitifully unworthy of the
glories and the beauties, the unsurpassable pathos and sublimity inwoven
with the imperial texture of this very play? the blood-red Tyrian purple
of tragic maternal jealousy which might seem to array it in a worthy
attire of its Tyrian name; the flower-soft loveliness of maiden
lamentation over the flower-strewn seaside grave of Marina's old
sea-tossed nurse, where I am unvirtuous enough (as virtue goes among
moralists) to feel more at home and better at ease than in the atmosphere
of her later lodging in Mitylene? What, above all, shall be said of that
storm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which ushered into a world
of such wonders and strange chances the daughter of the wave-worn and
world-wandering prince of Tyre? Nothing but this perhaps, that it
stands--or rather let me say that it blows and sounds and shines and
rings and thunders and lightens as far ahead of all others as the
burlesque sea-storm of Rabelais beyond all possible storms of comedy. The
recent compiler of a most admirably skilful and most delicately
invaluable compendium of Pantagruel or manual by way of guidebook to
Rabelais has but too justly taken note of the irrefragable evidence there
given that the one prose humourist who is to Aristophanes as the human
twin-star Castor to Pollux the divine can never have practically
weathered an actual gale; but if I may speak from a single experience of
one which a witness long inured to Indian storm as well as Indian battle
had never seen matched out of the tropics if ever overmatched within
them, I should venture to say, were the poet in question any other mortal
man than Shakespeare, to whom all things were better known by instinct
than ever they can be to others by experience, that the painter of the
storm in _Pericles_ must have shared the adventure and relished the
rapture of such an hour. None other most assuredly than himself alone
could have mingled with the material passion of the elements such human
passion of pathos as thrills in such tenderly sublime undertone of an
agony so nobly subdued through the lament of Pericles over Thaisa. As in
his opening speech of this scene we heard all the clangour and resonance
of warring wind and sea, so now we hear a sound of sacred and spiritual
music as solemn as the central monochord of the inner main itself.
That the three last acts of _Pericles_, with the possible if not over
probable exception of the so-called Chorus, {210} are wholly the work of
Shakespeare in the ripest fullness of his latter genius, is a position
which needs exactly as much proof as does his single-handed authorship of
_Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth_, and _Othello_. In the fifth act is a remarkable
instance of a thing remarkably rare with him; the recast or repetition in
an improved and reinvigorated form of a beautiful image or passage
occurring in a previous play. The now only too famous metaphor of
"patience on a monument smiling at grief"--too famous we might call it
for its own fame--is transfigured as from human beauty to divine, in its
transformation to the comparison of Marina's look with that of "Patience
gazing on kings' graves, and smiling Extremity out of act." A precisely
similar parallel is one to which I have referred elsewhere; that between
the two passages respectively setting forth the reciprocal love of Helena
and Hermia, of Emilia and Flavina. The change of style and spirit in
either case of reiteration is the change from a simpler to a sublimer
form of beauty.
In the two first acts of _Pericles_ there are faint and rare but evident
and positive traces of a passing touch from the hasty hand of
Shakespeare: even here too we may say after Dido:--
Nec tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe.
It has been said that those most unmistakable verses on "the blind mole"
are not such as any man could insert into another man's work, or slip in
between the lines of an inferior poet: and that they occur naturally
enough in a speech of no particular excellence. I take leave decisively
to question the former assertion, and flatly to contradict the latter.
The pathetic and magnificent lines in dispute do not occur naturally
enough, or at all naturally, among the very poor, flat, creeping verses
between which they have been thrust with such over freehanded
recklessness. No purple patch was ever more pitifully out of place.
There is indeed no second example of such wanton and wayward liberality;
but the generally lean and barren style of these opening acts does not
crawl throughout on exactly the same low level.
The last of the only three plays with which I venture to find any fault
on the score of moral taste is the first on my list of the only three
plays belonging to this last period on which, as they now stand, I trace
the indisputable track of another touch than Shakespeare's. But in the
two cases remaining our general task of distinction should on the whole
be simple and easy enough for the veriest babes and sucklings in the
lower school of Shakespeare.
That the two great posthumous fragments we possess of Shakespeare's
uncompleted work are incomplete simply because the labour spent on either
was cut short by his timeless death is the first natural assumption of
any student with an eye quick enough to catch the point where the traces
of his hand break off; but I should now be inclined to guess rather that
on reconsideration of the subjects chosen he had rejected or dismissed
them for a time at least as unfit for dramatic handling. It could have
needed no great expenditure of reasoning or reflection to convince a man
of lesser mind and less experience than Shakespeare's that no subject
could possibly be more unmanageable, more indomitably improper for such a
purpose, than he had selected in _Timon of Athens_. How he came ever to
fall across such a subject, to hit upon such a choice, we can spend no
profitable time or pains in trying to conjecture. It is clear, however,
that at all events there was a season when the inexplicable attraction of
it was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody in
palpable form, to array in dramatic raiment, to invest with imaginative
magnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdom
of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type
than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable
superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves
merely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than the
whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitless
as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on
the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark
dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine byways
of life and visionary crossroads of character, it is yet surely no blind
assumption to accept the plain evidence in both so patent before us, that
he too like other men had his dark seasons of outer or of inner life, and
like other poets found them or made them fruitful as well as bitter,
though it might be but of bitter fruit. And of such there is here enough
to glut the gorge of all the monks in monkery, or strengthen for a forty
days' fast any brutallest unwashed theomaniac of the Thebaid. The most
unconscionably unclean of all foul-minded fanatics might have been
satisfied with the application to all women from his mother upwards of
the monstrous and magnificent obloquy found by Timon as insufficient to
overwhelm as his gold was inadequate to satisfy one insatiable and
indomitable "brace of harlots." In _Troilus and Cressida_ we found too
much that Swift might have written when half inspired by the genius of
Shakespeare; in the great and terrible fourth act of _Timon_ we find such
tragedy as Juvenal might have written when half deified by the spirit of
AEschylus.
There is a noticeable difference between the case of _Timon_ and the two
other cases (diverse enough between themselves) of late or mature work
but partially assignable to the hand of Shakespeare. In _Pericles_ we
may know exactly how much was added by Shakespeare to the work of we know
not whom; in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ we can tell sometimes to a hair's
breadth in a hemistich by whom how much was added to the posthumous text
of Shakespeare; in _Timon_ we cannot assert with the same confidence in
the same accuracy that just so many scenes and no more, just so many
speeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of some other
hand. Throughout the first act his presence lightens on us by flashes,
as his voice peals out by fits, from behind or above the too meanly
decorated altar of tragic or satiric song: in the second it is more
sensibly continuous; in the third it is all but utterly eclipsed; in the
fourth it is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the
dark divine service of a darker Commination Day: in the fifth it
predominates generally over the sullen and brooding atmosphere with the
fierce imperious glare of a "bloody sun" like that which the wasting
shipmen watched at noon "in a hot and copper sky." There is here no more
to say of a poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of Ezekiel, of
Juvenal, and of Dante.
I can imagine no reason but that already suggested why Shakespeare should
in a double sense have taken Chaucer for his model or example in leaving
half told a story which he had borrowed from the father and master of our
narrative poetry. Among all competent scholars and all rational students
of Shakespeare there can have been, except possibly with regard to three
of the shorter scenes, no room for doubt or perplexity on any detail of
the subject since the perfect summary and the masterly decision of Mr.
Dyce. These three scenes, as no such reader will need to be told or
reminded, are the two first soliloquies of the Gaoler's Daughter after
the release of Palamon, and the scene of the portraits, as we may in a
double sense call it, in which Emilia, after weighing against each other
in solitude the likenesses of the cousins, receives from her own kinsfolk
a full and laboured description of their leading champions on either
side. Even setting apart for once and for a moment the sovereign
evidence of mere style, we must recognise in this last instance a
beautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving fidelity to
the minor passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all possible
occasions of such comparison so markedly and vividly distinguishes the
work of Shakespeare's from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilent
abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the perhaps already
superfluous hints or sketches by Shakespeare for an episodical underplot,
in his transmutation of Palamon's love-stricken and luckless deliverer
into the disgusting burlesque of a mock Ophelia, I have happily no need
as I should certainly have no patience to speak. {217}
After the always immitigable gloom of _Timon_ and the sometimes
malodorous exhalations of the three preceding plays, it is nothing less
than "very heaven" to find and feel ourselves again in the midmost
Paradise, the central Eden, of Shakespeare's divine discovery--of his
last sweet living invention. Here again is air as pure blowing over
fields as fragrant as where Dante saw Matilda or Milton saw Proserpine
gathering each as deathless flowers. We still have here to disentwine or
disentangle his own from the weeds of glorious and of other than glorious
feature with which Fletcher has thought fit to interweave them; even in
the close of the last scene of all we can say to a line, to a letter,
where Shakespeare ends and Fletcher begins. That scene is opened by
Shakespeare in his most majestic vein of meditative or moral verse,
pointed and coloured as usual with him alone by direct and absolute
aptitude to the immediate sentiment and situation of the speaker and of
no man else: then either Fletcher strikes in for a moment with a touch of
somewhat more Shakespearean tone than usual, or possibly we have a
survival of some lines' length, not unretouched by Fletcher, from
Shakespeare's first sketch for a conclusion of the somewhat calamitous
and cumbrous underplot, which in any case was ultimately left for
Fletcher to expand into such a shape and bring by such means to such an
end as we may safely swear that Shakespeare would never have admitted:
then with the entrance and ensuing narrative of Pirithous we have none
but Shakespeare before us again, though it be Shakespeare undoubtedly in
the rough, and not as he might have chosen to present himself after due
revision, with rejection (we may well suppose) of this point and
readjustment of that: then upon the arrival of the dying Arcite with his
escort there follows a grievous little gap, a flaw but pitifully patched
by Fletcher, whom we recognise at wellnigh his worst and weakest in
Palamon's appeal to his kinsman for a last word, "if his heart, _his
worthy, manly heart_" (an exact and typical example of Fletcher's
tragically prosaic and prosaically tragic dash of incurable commonplace),
"be yet unbroken," and in the flaccid and futile answer which fails so
signally to supply the place of the most famous and pathetic passage in
all the masterpiece of Chaucer; a passage to which even Shakespeare could
have added but some depth and grandeur of his own giving, since neither
he nor Dante's very self nor any other among the divinest of men could
have done more or better than match it for tender and pure simplicity of
words more "dearly sweet and bitter" than the bitterest or the sweetest
of men's tears. Then, after the duly and properly conventional
engagement on the parts of Palamon and Emilia respectively to devote the
anniversary "to tears" and "to honour," the deeper note returns for one
grand last time, grave at once and sudden and sweet as the full choral
opening of an anthem: the note which none could ever catch of
Shakespeare's very voice gives out the peculiar cadence that it alone can
give in the modulated instinct of a solemn change or shifting of the
metrical emphasis or _ictus_ from one to the other of two repeated
words:--
That nought could buy
Dear love; but loss of dear love!
That is a touch beyond the ear or the hand of Fletcher: a chord sounded
from Apollo's own harp after a somewhat hoarse and reedy wheeze from the
scrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan. Last of all, in words worthy
to be the latest left of Shakespeare's, his great and gentle Theseus
winds up the heavenly harmonies of his last beloved great poem.
And now, coming at length within the very circle of Shakespeare's
culminant and crowning constellation, bathing my whole soul and spirit
for the last and (if I live long enough) as surely for the first of many
thousand times in the splendours of the planet whose glory is the light
of his very love itself, standing even as Dante
in the clear
Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere,
what shall I say of thanksgiving before the final feast of Shakespeare?
The grace must surely be short enough if it would at all be gracious.
Even were Shakespeare's self alive again, or he now but fifteen years
since gone home to Shakespeare, {220} of whom Charles Lamb said well that
none could have written his book about Shakespeare but either himself
alone or else he of whom the book was written, yet could we not hope that
either would have any new thing to tell us of the _Tempest_, the
_Winter's Tale_, and _Cymbeline_. And for ourselves, what else could we
do but only ring changes on the word beautiful as Celia on the word
wonderful in her laughing litany of love? or what better or what more can
we do than in the deepest and most heartfelt sense of an old conventional
phrase, thank God and Shakespeare? for how to praise either for such a
gift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely that none will know
for ever.
True or false, and it would now seem something less than likely to be
true, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be
likewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespeare was
equally in either case at once natural and graceful. There is but one
figure sweeter than Miranda's and sublimer than Prospero's in all the
range of heaven on which the passion of our eyes could rest at parting.
And from one point of view there is even a more heavenly quality
perceptible in the light of this than of its two twin stars. In no nook
or corner of the island as we leave it is any savour left or any memory
lingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio and
Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence of
their pardoned crimes as is made by those which cost the life of
Mamillius and the labours of Imogen. Poor Caliban is left in such
comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in the favourable aspect of
Setebos; and his comrades go by us "reeling ripe" and "gilded" not by
"grand liquor" only but also by the summer lightning of men's laughter:
blown softly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the
breath of the song of Ariel.
The wild wind of the _Winter's Tale_ at its opening would seem to blow us
back into a wintrier world indeed. And to the very end I must confess
that I have in me so much of the spirit of Rachel weeping in Ramah as
will not be comforted because Mamillius is not. It is well for those
whose hearts are light enough, to take perfect comfort even in the
substitution of his sister Perdita for the boy who died of "thoughts high
for one so tender." Even the beautiful suggestion that Shakespeare as he
wrote had in mind his own dead little son still fresh and living at his
heart can hardly add more than a touch of additional tenderness to our
perfect and piteous delight in him. And even in her daughter's embrace
it seems hard if his mother should have utterly forgotten the little
voice that had only time to tell her just eight words of that ghost story
which neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one but
Shakespeare would have sought to make pathetic profit out of the child by
the easy means of showing him if but once again as changed and stricken
to the death for want of his mother and fear for her and hunger and
thirst at his little high heart for the sight and touch of her:
Shakespeare only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper chord to
strike, by giving us our last glimpse of him as he laughed and chattered
with her "past enduring," to the shameful neglect of those ladies in the
natural blueness of whose eyebrows as well as their noses he so stoutly
declined to believe. And at the very end (as aforesaid) it may be that
we remember him all the better because the father whose jealousy killed
him and the mother for love of whom he died would seem to have forgotten
the little brave sweet spirit with all its truth of love and tender sense
of shame as perfectly and unpardonably as Shakespeare himself at the
close of _King Lear_ would seem to have forgotten one who never had
forgotten Cordelia.
But yet--and here for once the phrase abhorred by Cleopatra does not
"allay the good" but only the bad "precedence"--if ever amends could be
made for such unnatural show of seeming forgetfulness ("out on the
seeming! I will write against it"--or would, had I not written enough
already), the poet most assuredly has made such amends here. At the
sunrise of Perdita beside Florizel it seems as if the snows of sixteen
winters had melted all together into the splendour of one unutterable
spring. They "smell April and May" in a sweeter sense than it could be
said of "young Master Fenton": "nay, which is more," as his friend and
champion Mistress Quickly might have added to mine host's commendatory
remark, they speak all April and May; because April is in him as
naturally as May in her, by just so many years' difference before the
Mayday of her birth as went to make up her dead brother's little lot of
living breath, which in Beaumont's most lovely and Shakespeare-worthy
phrase "was not a life; was but a piece of childhood thrown away." Nor
can I be content to find no word of old affection for Autolycus, who
lived, as we may not doubt, though but a hint or promise be vouchsafed us
for all assurance that he lived by favour of his "good masters" once more
to serve Prince Florizel and wear three-pile for as much of his time as
it might please him to put on "robes" like theirs that were "gentlemen
born," and had "been so any time these four hours." And yet another and
a graver word must be given with all reverence to the "grave and good
Paulina," whose glorious fire of godlike indignation was as warmth and
cordial to the innermost heart while yet bruised and wrung for the yet
fresh loss of Mamillius.
The time is wellnigh come now for me to consecrate in this book my good
will if not good work to the threefold and thrice happy memory of the
three who have written of Shakespeare as never man wrote, nor ever man
may write again; to the everlasting praise and honour and glory of
Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor;
"wishing," I hardly dare to say, "what I write may be read by their
light." The play of plays, which is _Cymbeline_, remains alone to
receive the last salute of all my love.
I think, as far as I can tell, I may say I have always loved this one
beyond all other children of Shakespeare. The too literal egoism of this
profession will not be attributed by any candid or even commonly honest
reader to the violence of vanity so much more than comical as to make me
suppose that such a record or assurance could in itself be matter of
interest to any man: but simply to the real and simple reason, that I
wish to show cause for my choice of this work to wind up with, beyond the
mere chance of its position at the close of the chaotically inconsequent
catalogue of contents affixed to the first edition. In this casualty--for
no good thing can reasonably be ascribed to design on the part of the
first editors--there would seem to be something more than usual of what
we may call, if it so please us, a happy providence. It is certain that
no studious arrangement could possibly have brought the book to a happier
end. Here is depth enough with height enough of tragic beauty and
passion, terror and love and pity, to approve the presence of the most
tragic Master's hand; subtlety enough of sweet and bitter truth to attest
the passage of the mightiest and wisest scholar or teacher in the school
of the human spirit; beauty with delight enough and glory of life and
grace of nature to proclaim the advent of the one omnipotent Maker among
all who bear that name. Here above all is the most heavenly triad of
human figures that ever even Shakespeare brought together; a diviner
three, as it were a living god-garland of the noblest earth-born brothers
and loveworthiest heaven-born sister, than the very givers of all grace
and happiness to their Grecian worshippers of old time over long before.
The passion of Posthumus is noble, and potent the poison of Iachimo;
Cymbeline has enough for Shakespeare's present purpose of "the
king-becoming graces"; but we think first and last of her who was "truest
speaker" and those who "called her brother, when she was but their
sister; she them brothers, when they were so indeed." The very crown and
flower of all her father's daughters,--I do not speak here of her human
father, but her divine--the woman above all Shakespeare's women is
Imogen. As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the woman
everlasting, so in Imogen we find half glorified already the immortal
godhead of womanhood. I would fain have some honey in my words at
parting--with Shakespeare never, but for ever with these notes on
Shakespeare; and I am therefore something more than fain to close my book
upon the name of the woman best beloved in all the world of song and all
the tide of time; upon the name of Shakespeare's Imogen.