"Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled";
and Milton after him, or, more likely, after the Greek:--
"Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved."[129]
I mention these trifles, in passing, because they have interested me, and
therefore may interest others. I lay no stress upon them, for, if once
the conductors of Shakespeare's intelligence had been put in connection
with those Attic brains, he would have reproduced their message in a form
of his own. They would have inspired, and not enslaved him. His
resemblance to them is that of consanguinity, more striking in expression
than in mere resemblance of feature. The likeness between the
Clytemnestra--[Greek: gunaikos androboulon elpizon kear]--of Aeschylus
and the Lady Macbeth of Shakespeare was too remarkable to have escaped
notice. That between the two poets in their choice of epithets is as
great, though more difficult of proof. Yet I think an attentive student
of Shakespeare cannot fail to be reminded of something familiar to him in
such phrases as "flame-eyed fire," "flax-winged ships," "star-neighboring
peaks," the rock Salmydessus,
"Rude jaw of the sea,
Harsh hostess of the seaman, step-mother
Of ships,"
and the beacon with its "_speaking eye_ of fire." Surely there is more
than a verbal, there is a genuine, similarity between the [Greek:
anaerithmon gelasma] and "the unnumbered beach" and "multitudinous sea."
Aeschylus, it seems to me, is willing, just as Shakespeare is, to risk
the prosperity of a verse upon a lucky throw of words, which may come up
the sices of hardy metaphor or the ambsace of conceit. There is such a
difference between far-reaching and far-fetching! Poetry, to be sure, is
always that daring one step beyond, which brings the right man to
fortune, but leaves the wrong one in the ditch, and its law is, Be bold
once and again, yet be not over-bold. It is true, also, that masters of
language are a little apt to play with it. But whatever fault may be
found with Shakespeare in this respect will touch a tender spot in
Aeschylus also. Does he sometimes overload a word, so that the language
not merely, as Dryden says, bends under him, but fairly gives way, and
lets the reader's mind down with the shock as of a false step in taste?
He has nothing worse than [Greek: pelagos anthoun nekrois]. A criticism,
shallow in human nature, however deep in Campbell's Rhetoric, has blamed
him for making persons, under great excitement of sorrow, or whatever
other emotion, parenthesize some trifling play upon words in the very
height of their passion. Those who make such criticisms have either never
felt a passion or seen one in action, or else they forget the exaltation
of sensibility during such crises, so that the attention, whether of the
senses or the mind, is arrested for the moment by what would be
overlooked in ordinary moods. The more forceful the current, the more
sharp the ripple from any alien substance interposed. A passion that
looks forward, like revenge or lust or greed, goes right to its end, and
is straightforward in its expression; but a tragic passion, which is in
its nature unavailing, like disappointment, regret of the inevitable, or
remorse, is reflective, and liable to be continually diverted by the
suggestions of fancy. The one is a concentration of the will, which
intensifies the character and the phrase that expresses it; in the other,
the will is helpless, and, as in insanity, while the flow of the mind
sets imperatively in one direction, it is liable to almost ludicrous
interruptions and diversions upon the most trivial hint of involuntary
association. I am ready to grant that Shakespeare sometimes allows his
characters to spend time, that might be better employed, in carving some
cherry-stone of a quibble;[130] that he is sometimes tempted away from
the natural by the quaint; that he sometimes forces a partial, even a
verbal, analogy between the abstract thought and the sensual image into
an absolute identity, giving us a kind of serious pun. In a pun our
pleasure arises from a gap in the logical nexus too wide for the reason,
but which the ear can bridge in an instant. "Is that your own hare, or a
wig?" The fancy is yet more tickled where logic is treated with a mock
ceremonial of respect.
"His head was turned, _and so_ he chewed
His pigtail till he died."
Now when this kind of thing is done in earnest, the result is one of
those ill-distributed syllogisms which in rhetoric are called conceits.
"Hard was the hand that struck the blow,
Soft was the heart that bled."
I have seen this passage from Warner cited for its beauty, though I
should have thought nothing could be worse, had I not seen General
Morris's
"Her heart and morning broke together
In tears."