"Che sempre l' uomo in cui pensier rampoglia
Sovra pensier, da sè dilunga il segno,
Perchè la foga l' un dell' altro insolla."
"For always he in whom one thought buds forth
Out of another farther puts the goal.
For each has only force to mar the other."
Dante was a profound metaphysician, and as in the first passage he
describes and defines a certain quality of mind, so in the other he tells
us its result in the character and life, namely, indecision and
failure,--the goal _farther_ off at the end than at the beginning. It is
remarkable how close a resemblance of thought, and even of expression,
there is between the former of these quotations and a part of Hamlet's
famous soliloquy:--
"Thus conscience [i.e. consciousness] doth make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action!"
It is an inherent peculiarity of a mind like Hamlet's that it should be
conscious of its own defect. Men of his type are forever analyzing their
own emotions and motives. They cannot do anything, because they always
see two ways of doing it. They cannot determine on any course of action,
because they are always, as it were, standing at the cross-roads, and see
too well the disadvantages of every one of them. It is not that they are
incapable of resolve, but somehow the band between the motive power and
the operative faculties is relaxed and loose. The engine works, but the
machinery it should drive stands still. The imagination is so much in
overplus, that thinking a thing becomes better than doing it, and thought
with its easy perfection, capable of everything because it can accomplish
everything with ideal means, is vastly more attractive and satisfactory
than deed, which must be wrought at best with imperfect instruments, and
always falls short of the conception that went before it. "If to do,"
says Portia in the _Merchant of Venice_,--"if to do were as easy as to
know what 't were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's
cottages princes' palaces." Hamlet knows only too well what 't were good
to do, but he palters with everything in a double sense: he sees the
grain of good there is in evil, and the grain of evil there is in good,
as they exist in the world, and, finding that he can make those
feather-weighted accidents balance each other, infers that there is
little to choose between the essences themselves. He is of Montaigne's
mind, and says expressly that "there is nothing good or ill, but thinking
makes it so." He dwells so exclusively in the world of ideas that the
world of facts seems trifling, nothing is worth the while; and he has
been so long objectless and purposeless, so far as actual life is
concerned, that, when at last an object and an aim are forced upon him,
he cannot deal with them, and gropes about vainly for a motive outside of
himself that shall marshal his thoughts for him and guide his faculties
into the path of action. He is the victim not so much of feebleness of
will as of an intellectual indifference that hinders the will from
working long in any one direction. He wishes to will, but never wills.
His continual iteration of resolve shows that he has no resolution. He is
capable of passionate energy where the occasion presents itself suddenly
from without, because nothing is so irritable as conscious irresolution
with a duty to perform. But of deliberate energy he is not capable; for
there the impulse must come from within, and the blade of his analysis is
so subtile that it can divide the finest hair of motive 'twixt north and
northwest side, leaving him desperate to choose between them. The very
consciousness of his defect is an insuperable bar to his repairing it;
for the unity of purpose, which infuses every fibre of the character with
will available whenever wanted, is impossible where the mind can never
rest till it has resolved that unity into its component elements, and
satisfied itself which on the whole is of greater value. A critical
instinct so insatiable that it must turn upon itself, for lack of
something else to hew and hack, becomes incapable at last of originating
anything except indecision. It becomes infallible in what _not_ to do.
How easily he might have accomplished his task is shown by the conduct of
Laertes. When _he_ has a death to avenge, he raises a mob, breaks into
the palace, bullies the king, and proves how weak the usurper really was.
The world is the victim of splendid parts, and is slow to accept a
rounded whole, because that is something which is long in completing,
still longer in demonstrating its completion. We like to be surprised
into admiration, and not logically convinced that we ought to admire. We
are willing to be delighted with success, though we are somewhat
indifferent to the homely qualities which insure it. Our thought is so
filled with the rocket's burst of momentary splendor so far above us,
that we forget the poor stick, useful and unseen, that made its climbing
possible. One of these homely qualities is continuity of character, and
it escapes present applause because it tells chiefly, in the long run, in
results. With his usual tact, Shakespeare has brought in such a character
as a contrast and foil to Hamlet. Horatio is the only complete _man_ in
the play,--solid, well-knit, and true; a noble, quiet nature, with that
highest of all qualities, judgment, always sane and prompt; who never
drags his anchors for any wind of opinion or fortune, but grips all the
closer to the reality of things. He seems one of those calm,
undemonstrative men whom we love and admire without asking to know why,
crediting them with the capacity of great things, without any test of
actual achievement, because we feel that their manhood is a constant
quality, and no mere accident of circumstance and opportunity. Such men
are always sure of the presence of their highest self on demand. Hamlet
is continually drawing bills on the future, secured by his promise of
himself to himself, which he can never redeem. His own somewhat feminine
nature recognizes its complement in Horatio, and clings to it
instinctively, as naturally as Horatio is attracted by that fatal gift of
imagination, the absence of which makes the strength of his own
character, as its overplus does the weakness of Hamlet's. It is a happy
marriage of two minds drawn together by the charm of unlikeness. Hamlet
feels in Horatio the solid steadiness which he misses in himself; Horatio
in Hamlet that need of service and sustainment to render which gives him
a consciousness of his own value. Hamlet fills the place of a woman to
Horatio, revealing him to himself not only in what he says, but by a
constant claim upon his strength of nature; and there is great
psychological truth in making suicide the first impulse of this quiet,
undemonstrative man, after Hamlet's death, as if the very reason for his
being were taken away with his friend's need of him. In his grief, he for
the first and only time speaks of himself, is first made conscious of
himself by his loss. If this manly reserve of Horatio be true to Nature,
not less so are the communicativeness of Hamlet, and his tendency to
soliloquize. If self-consciousness be alien to the one, it is just as
truly the happiness of the other. Like a musician distrustful of himself,
he is forever tuning his instrument, first overstraining this cord a
little, and then that, but unable to bring them into unison, or to profit
by it if he could.
We do not believe that Horatio ever thought he "was not a pipe for
Fortune's finger to play what stop she please," till Hamlet told him so.
That was Fortune's affair, not his; let her try it, if she liked. He is
unconscious of his own peculiar qualities, as men of decision commonly
are, or they would not be men of decision. When there is a thing to be
done, they go straight at it, and for the time there is nothing for them
in the whole universe but themselves and their object. Hamlet, on the
other hand, is always studying himself. This world and the other, too,
are always present to his mind, and there in the corner is the little
black kobold of a doubt making mouths at him. He breaks down the bridges
before him, not behind him, as a man of action would do; but there is
something more than this. He is an ingrained sceptic; though his is the
scepticism, not of reason, but of feeling, whose root is want of faith in
himself. In him it is passive, a malady rather than a function of the
mind. We might call him insincere: not that he was in any sense a
hypocrite, but only that he never was and never could be in earnest.
Never could be, because no man without intense faith in something ever
can. Even if he only believed in himself, that were better than nothing;
for it will carry a man a great way in the outward successes of life,
nay, will even sometimes give him the Archimedean fulcrum for moving the
world. But Hamlet doubts everything. He doubts the immortality of the
soul, just after seeing his father's spirit, and hearing from its mouth
the secrets of the other world. He doubts Horatio even, and swears him to
secrecy on the cross of his sword, though probably he himself has no
assured belief in the sacredness of the symbol. He doubts Ophelia, and
asks her, "Are you honest?" He doubts the ghost, after he has had a
little time to think about it, and so gets up the play to test the guilt
of the king. And how coherent the whole character is! With what perfect
tact and judgment Shakespeare, in the advice to the players, makes him an
exquisite critic! For just here that part of his character which would be
weak in dealing with affairs is strong. A wise scepticism is the first
attribute of a good critic. He must not believe that the fire-insurance
offices will raise their rates of premium on Charles River, because the
new volume of poems is printing at Riverside or the University Press. He
must not believe so profoundly in the ancients as to think it wholly out
of the question that the world has still vigor enough in its loins to
beget some one who will one of these days be as good an ancient as any of
them.
Another striking quality in Hamlet's nature is his perpetual inclination
to irony. I think this has been generally passed over too lightly, as if
it were something external and accidental, rather assumed as a mask than
part of the real nature of the man. It seems to me to go deeper, to be
something innate, and not merely factitious. It is nothing like the grave
irony of Socrates, which was the weapon of a man thoroughly in
earnest,--the _boomerang_ of argument, which one throws in the opposite
direction of what he means to hit, and which seems to be flying away from
the adversary, who will presently find himself knocked down by it. It is
not like the irony of Timon, which is but the wilful refraction of a
clear mind twisting awry whatever enters it,--or of Iago, which is the
slime that a nature essentially evil loves to trail over all beauty and
goodness to taint them with distrust: it is the half-jest, half-earnest
of an inactive temperament that has not quite made up its mind whether
life is a reality or no, whether men were not made in jest, and which
amuses itself equally with finding a deep meaning in trivial things and a
trifling one in the profoundest mysteries of being, because the want of
earnestness in its own essence infects everything else with its own
indifference. If there be now and then an unmannerly rudeness and
bitterness in it, as in the scenes with Polonius and Osrick, we must
remember that Hamlet was just in the condition which spurs men to sallies
of this kind: dissatisfied, at one neither with the world nor with
himself, and accordingly casting about for something out of himself to
vent his spleen upon. But even in these passages there is no hint of
earnestness, of any purpose beyond the moment; they are mere cat's-paws
of vexation, and not the deep-raking ground-swell of passion, as we see
it in the sarcasm of Lear.
The question of Hamlet's madness has been much discussed and variously
decided. High medical authority has pronounced, as usual, on both sides
of the question. But the induction has been drawn from too narrow
premises, being based on a mere diagnosis of the _case_, and not on an
appreciation of the character in its completeness. We have a case of
pretended madness in the Edgar of _King Lear_; and it is certainly true
that that is a charcoal sketch, coarsely outlined, compared with the
delicate drawing, the lights, shades, and half-tints of the portraiture
in Hamlet. But does this tend to prove that the madness of the latter,
because truer to the recorded observation of experts, is real, and meant
to be real, as the other to be fictitious? Not in the least, as it
appears to me. Hamlet, among all the characters of Shakespeare, is the
most eminently a metaphysician and psychologist. He is a close observer,
continually analyzing his own nature and that of others, letting fall his
little drops of acid irony on all who come near him, to make them show
what they are made of. Even Ophelia is not too sacred, Osrick not too
contemptible for experiment. If such a man assumed madness, he would play
his part perfectly. If Shakespeare himself, without going mad, could so
observe and remember all the abnormal symptoms as to be able to reproduce
them in Hamlet, why should it be beyond the power of Hamlet to reproduce
them in himself? If you deprive Hamlet of reason, there is no truly
tragic motive left. He would be a fit subject for Bedlam, but not for the
stage. We might have pathology enough, but no pathos. Ajax first becomes
tragic when he recovers his wits. If Hamlet is irresponsible, the whole
play is a chaos. That he is not so might be proved by evidence enough,
were it not labor thrown away.
This feigned madness of Hamlet's is one of the few points in which
Shakespeare has kept close to the old story on which he founded his play;
and as he never decided without deliberation, so he never acted without
unerring judgment, Hamlet _drifts_ through the whole tragedy. He never
keeps on one tack long enough to get steerage-way, even if, in a nature
like his, with those electric streamers of whim and fancy forever
wavering across the vault of his brain, the needle of judgment would
point in one direction long enough to strike a course by. The scheme of
simulated insanity is precisely the one he would have been likely to hit
upon, because it enabled him to follow his own bent, and to drift with an
apparent purpose, postponing decisive action by the very means he adopts
to arrive at its accomplishment, and satisfying himself with the show of
doing something that he may escape so much the longer the dreaded
necessity of really doing anything at all. It enables him to _play_ with
life and duty, instead of taking them by the rougher side, where alone
any firm grip is possible,--to feel that he is on the way toward
accomplishing somewhat, when he is really paltering with his own
irresolution. Nothing, I think, could be more finely imagined than this.
Voltaire complains that he goes mad without any sufficient object or
result. Perfectly true, and precisely what was most natural for him to
do, and, accordingly, precisely what Shakespeare meant that he should do.
It was delightful to him to indulge his imagination and humor, to prove
his capacity for something by playing a part: the one thing he could not
do was to bring himself to _act_, unless when surprised by a sudden
impulse of suspicion,--as where he kills Polonius, and there he could not
see his victim. He discourses admirably of suicide, but does not kill
himself; he talks daggers, but uses none. He puts by the chance to kill
the king with the excuse that he will not do it while he is praying, lest
his soul be saved thereby, though it is more than doubtful whether he
believed it himself. He allows himself to be packed off to England,
without any motive except that it would for the time take him farther
from a present duty: the more disagreeable to a nature like his because
it _was_ present, and not a mere matter for speculative consideration.
When Goethe made his famous comparison of the acorn planted in a vase
which it bursts with its growth, and says that in like manner Hamlet is a
nature which breaks down under the weight of a duty too great for it to
bear, he seems to have considered the character too much from one side.
Had Hamlet actually killed himself to escape his too onerous commission,
Goethe's conception of him would have been satisfactory enough. But
Hamlet was hardly a sentimentalist, like Werther; on the contrary, he saw
things only too clearly in the dry north-light of the intellect. It is
chance that at last brings him to his end. It would appear rather that
Shakespeare intended to show us an imaginative temperament brought face
to face with actualities, into any clear relation of sympathy with which
it cannot bring itself. The very means that Shakespeare makes use of to
lay upon him the obligation of acting--the ghost--really seems to make it
all the harder for him to act; for the spectre but gives an additional
excitement to his imagination and a fresh topic for his scepticism.
I shall not attempt to evolve any high moral significance from the play,
even if I thought it possible; for that would be aside from the present
purpose. The scope of the higher drama is to represent life, not everyday
life, it is true, but life lifted above the plane of bread-and-butter
associations, by nobler reaches of language, by the influence at once
inspiring and modulating of verse, by an intenser play of passion
condensing that misty mixture of feeling and reflection which makes the
ordinary atmosphere of existence into flashes of thought and phrase whose
brief, but terrible, illumination prints the outworn landscape of
every-day upon our brains, with its little motives and mean results, in
lines of tell-tale fire. The moral office of tragedy is to show us our
own weaknesses idealized in grander figures and more awful results,--to
teach us that what we pardon in our selves as venial faults, if they seem
to have but slight influence on our immediate fortunes, have arms as long
as those of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe of our lives,
that they are dry-rotting the very fibre of will and conscience, so that,
if we should be brought to the test of a great temptation or a stringent
emergency, we must be involved in a ruin as sudden and complete as that
we shudder at in the unreal scene of the theatre. But the primary
_object_ of a tragedy is not to inculcate a formal moral. Representing
life, it teaches, like life, by indirection, by those nods and winks that
are thrown away on us blind horses in such profusion. We may learn, to be
sure, plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to have
kingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a father's death
to avenge, or to kill our wives from jealousy; but Lear may teach us to
draw the line more clearly between a wise generosity and a loose-handed
weakness of giving; Macbeth, how one sin involves another, and forever
another, by a fatal parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks
forbidden doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, that
may not be so dark as blood, but that will not out; Hamlet, that all the
noblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like sand through the
grasp of an infirm purpose; Othello, that the perpetual silt of some one
weakness, the eddies of a suspicious temper depositing their one
impalpable layer after another, may build up a shoal on which an heroic
life and an otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces. All
this we may learn, and much more, and Shakespeare was no doubt well aware
of all this and more; but I do not believe that he wrote his plays with
any such didactic purpose. He knew human nature too well not to know that
one thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning,--that,
where one man shapes his life by precept and example, there are a
thousand who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances. He
did not mean his great tragedies for scarecrows, as if the nailing of one
hawk to the barn-door would prevent the next from coming down souse into
the hen-yard. No, it is not the poor bleaching victim hung up to moult
its draggled feathers in the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the
hawk-nature as well as the hen-nature; and if he is unequalled in
anything, it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability of
reason, that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune and
misfortune, with the equal eye of the pure artist.
Whether I have fancied anything into Hamlet which the author never
dreamed of putting there I do not greatly concern myself to inquire.
Poets are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we find in their
works; for these fine creations as truly build themselves up in the brain
as they are built up with deliberate forethought. Praise art as we will,
that which the artist did not mean to put into his work, but which found
itself there by some generous process of Nature of which he was as
unaware as the blue river is of its rhyme with the blue sky, has somewhat
in it that snatches us into sympathy with higher things than those which
come by plot and observation. Goethe wrote his _Faust_ in its earliest
form without a thought of the deeper meaning which the exposition of an
age of criticism was to find in it: without foremeaning it, he had
impersonated in Mephistopheles the genius of his century. Shall this
subtract from the debt we owe him? Not at all. If originality were
conscious of itself, it would have lost its right to be original. I
believe that Shakespeare intended to impersonate in Hamlet not a mere
metaphysical entity, but a man of flesh and blood: yet it is certainly
curious how prophetically typical the character is of that introversion
of mind which is so constant a phenomenon of these latter days, of that
over-consciousness which wastes itself in analyzing the motives of action
instead of acting.
The old painters had a rule, that all compositions should be pyramidal in
form,--a central figure, from which the others slope gradually away on
the two sides. Shakespeare probably had never heard of this rule, and, if
he had, would not have been likely to respect it more than he has the
so-called classical unities of time and place. But he understood
perfectly the artistic advantages of gradation, contrast, and relief.
Taking Hamlet as the key-note, we find in him weakness of character,
which, on the one hand, is contrasted with the feebleness that springs
from overweening conceit in Polonius and with frailty of temperament in
Ophelia, while, on the other hand, it is brought into fuller relief by
the steady force of Horatio and the impulsive violence of Laertes, who is
resolute from thoughtlessness, just as Hamlet is irresolute from overplus
of thought.
If we must draw a moral from Hamlet, it would seem to be, that Will is
Fate, and that, Will once abdicating, the inevitable successor in the
regency is Chance. Had Hamlet acted, instead of musing how good it would
be to act, the king might have been the only victim. As it is, all the
main actors in the story are the fortuitous sacrifice of his
irresolution. We see how a single great vice of character at last draws
to itself as allies and confederates all other weaknesses of the man, as
in civil wars the timid and the selfish wait to throw themselves upon the
stronger side.
"In Life's small things be resolute and great
To keep thy muscles trained: know'st thou when Fate
Thy measure takes? or when she'll say to thee,
'I find thee worthy, do this thing for me'?"
I have said that it was doubtful if Shakespeare had any conscious moral
intention in his writings. I meant only that he was purely and primarily
poet. And while he was an English poet in a sense that is true of no
other, his method was thoroughly Greek, yet with this remarkable
difference,--that, while the Greek dramatists took purely national themes
and gave them a universal interest by their mode of treatment, he took
what may be called cosmopolitan traditions, legends of human nature, and
nationalized them by the infusion of his perfectly Anglican breadth of
character and solidity of understanding. Wonderful as his imagination and
fancy are, his perspicacity and artistic discretion are more so. This
country tradesman's son, coming up to London, could set high-bred wits,
like Beaumont, uncopiable lessons in drawing gentlemen such as are seen
nowhere else but on the canvas of Titian; he could take Ulysses away from
Homer and expand the shrewd and crafty islander into a statesman whose
words are the pith of history. But what makes him yet more exceptional
was his utterly unimpeachable judgment, and that poise of character which
enabled him to be at once the greatest of poets and so unnoticeable a
good citizen as to leave no incidents for biography. His material was
never far-sought; (it is still disputed whether the fullest head of which
we have record were cultivated beyond the range of grammar-school
precedent!) but he used it with a poetic instinct which we cannot
parallel, identified himself with it, yet remained always its born and
questionless master. He finds the Clown and Fool upon the stage,--he
makes them the tools of his pleasantry, his satire, and even his pathos;
he finds a fading rustic superstition, and shapes out of it ideal Pucks,
Titanias, and Ariels, in whose existence statesmen and scholars believe
forever. Always poet, he subjects all to the ends of his art, and gives
in Hamlet the churchyard ghost, but with the cothurnus on,--the messenger
of God's revenge against murder; always philosopher, he traces in Macbeth
the metaphysics of apparitions, painting the shadowy Banquo only on the
o'erwrought brain of the murderer, and staining the hand of his
wife-accomplice (because she was the more refined and higher nature) with
the disgustful blood-spot that is not there. We say he had no moral
intention, for the reason, that, as artist, it was not his to deal with
the realities, but only with the shows of things; yet, with a temperament
so just, an insight so inevitable as his, it was impossible that the
moral reality, which underlies the _mirage_ of the poet's vision, should
not always be suggested. His humor and satire are never of the
destructive kind; what he does in that way is suggestive only,--not
breaking bubbles with Thor's hammer, but puffing them away with the
breath of a Clown, or shivering them with the light laugh of a genial
cynic. Men go about to prove the existence of a God! Was it a bit of
phosphorus, that brain whose creations are so real, that, mixing with
them, we feel as if we ourselves were but fleeting magic-lantern shadows?
But higher even than the genius we rate the character of this unique man,
and the grand impersonality of what he wrote. What has he told us of
himself? In our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melancholy
liver-complaint, how serene and high he seems! If he had sorrows, he has
made them the woof of everlasting consolation to his kind; and if, as
poets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting
air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the many
windows of that self-centred and cheerful soul.
Footnotes:
[119] As where Ben Jonson is able to say,--
"Man may securely sin, but safely never."
[120] "Vulgarem locutionem anpellamus cam qua infantes adsuefiunt ab
adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt: vel, quod
brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus _quam sine omni
regula, nutricem imitantes accepimus_." Dantes, _de Vulg. Eloquio_,
Lib I. cap. i.
[121] Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that "nothing
was done so well as at the first concoction,"--adding, as a reason,
"We think in words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakespeare had
not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense,--and cited in
proof of it the verse,
"Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands,
and Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in
consequence of Jonson's criticism. This is very probable; but we
suspect that the pen that blotted them was in the hand of Master
Heminge or his colleague. The moral confusion in the idea was surely
admirably characteristic of the general who had just accomplished a
successful _coup d'etat_, the condemnation of which he would fancy
that he read in the face of every honest man he met, and which he
would therefore be forever indirectly palliating.
[122] We use the word _Latin_ here to express words derived either
mediately or immediately from that language.
[123] The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory
(translating from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of
Bacon, Browne, Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's
_Shepherd's Calendar_ (1679) explains words of Teutonic and Romanic
root in about equal proportions. The parallel but independent
development of Scotch is not to be forgotten.
[124] I believe that for the last two centuries the Latin radicals of
English have been more familiar and homelike to those who use them
than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor Crail,
in his _English of Shakespeare_, derives _head_, through the German
_haupt_, from the Latin _caput_! I trust that its genealogy is
nobler, and that it is of kin with _coelum, tueri_, rather than with
the Greek [kephalae], if Suidas be right in tracing the origin of
that to a word meaning _vacuity_. Mr. Craik suggests, also, that
_quick_ and _wicked_ may be etymologically identical, _because_ he
fancies a relationship between _busy_ and the German _böse_, though
_wicked_ is evidently the participial form of A. S. _wacan_, (German
_weichen_,) _to bend, to yield_, meaning _one who has given way to
temptation_, while _quick_ seems as clearly related to _wegan_,
meaning _to move_, a different word, even if radically the same. In
the "London Literary Gazette" for November 13,1858, I find an extract
from Miss Millington's "Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance," in
which, speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales,--_De par Houmaut
ich diene_,--she says; "The precise meaning of the former word
[_Houmout_] has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly
the German _Hochmuth_, and the whole would read, _De par (Aus)
Hochmuth ich diene_,--"Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost
is the Saxon meaning of the word _knave_, (A. S. _cnava_, German
_knabe_,) that the name _navvie_, assumed by railway-laborers, has
been transmogrified into _navigator_. I believe that more people
could tell why the month of July was so called than could explain the
origin of the names for our days of the week, and that it is oftener
the Saxon than the French words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern
reader.
[125] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, Lib. II. cap. i. _ad finem_. I quote this
treatise as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manifestly his; though
I believe that in its present form it is an abridgment by some
transcriber, who sometimes copies textually, and sometimes
substitutes his own language for that of the original.
[126] Vol. III. p. 348, _note_. He grounds his belief, not on the
misprinting of words, but on the misplacing of whole paragraphs. We
were struck with the same thing in the original edition of Chapman's
"Biron's Conspiracy and Tragedy." And yet, in comparing two copies of
this edition, I have found corrections which only the author could
have made. One of the misprints which Mr. Spedding notices affords
both a hint and a warning to the conjectural emendator. In the
edition of "The Advancement of Learning" printed in 1605 occurs the
word _dusinesse_. In a later edition this was conjecturally changed
to _business_; but the occurrence of _vertigine_ in the Latin
translation enables Mr. Spedding to print rightly, _dizziness_.
[127] "At first sight, Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists
seem to write in styles much alike; nothing so easy as to fall into
that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced
one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakespearian idiom. I
suppose it is because Shakespeare is universal, and, in fact, has no
_manner_."--_Coleridge's Tabletalk_, 214.
[128] Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired
thumb, because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless sweep a
grace of curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others.
[129] The best instance I remember is in the _Frogs_, where Bacchus
pleads his inexperience at the oar, and says he is
[Greek: apeiros, athalattotos, asalaminios,]
which might be rendered,
Unskilled, unsea-soned, and un-Salamised.
[130] So Euripides (copied by Theocritus, Id. xxvii.):--
[Greek: Pentheus d' opos mae penthos eisoisei domois] (_Bacchae_,
363.)
[Greek: _Esophronaesen ouk echousa sophronein_]. (_Hippol_., 1037.)