that matter, to make it for his single need, he would have used or made it without hesitation. Yet his intuitive knowledge of the peculiar value of words of various derivation is continuously manifest. That he was keenly sensible of the ludicrous effect of long Latin words in certain situations is manifest, not only from such instances as Costard's conclusion that remuneration' is "the Latin word for three farthings," and Bardolph's definition of accommodated,' "That is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is being - whereby he may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excellent thing," but from such usage as that in Sir Toby Belch's rejoinder to Maria's remonstrance against his roistering behavior, "Tilly vally, am I not consanguineous?" where the use of the Latin word and the abstract idea has a humor which would have been lost had he said, "Am I not her kinsman?" Shakespeare's freedom in the use of words was but a part of that conscious irresponsibility to critical rule which had such an important influence upon the development of his whole dramatic style. To the working of his genius under this entire unconsciousness of restraint we owe the grandest and the most delicate beautics of his poetry, his most poignant expressions of emotion, and his richest and subtlest passages of humor. For the superiority of his work is just in proportion to his irresponsibility to literary criticism. His poems, the least excellent of his writings, were written for the literary world; and it is upon them that his contemporaries, in passing literary judgment, found his reputation. His sonnets, which occupy a middle place, were written for himself or for his private friends, and were obtained for publication in some indirect way. His plays w mere entertainments for the general public, written not to be read, but spoken; written as business, just as were Rogers wrote money circulars, or as Bryant writes leading articles. This freedom was suited to the unparalleled richness and spontaneousness of his thought, of which it was, in fact, partly the result, and itself partly the condition. Ben Jonson had these traits of his friend's genius in his mind when he wrote that passage in which he tells us that he "had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility that it was sometimes necessary he should be stopped. Sufflaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too." We, with our dictionaries, and our books of synonymes, our thesauruses of words and phrases, to facilitate literary composition, our Blairs and our Kameses, may think, some of us, that we have smoothed the road to literary distinction, when we have but cumbered our movement and distracted our attention. After all, the secret of the art of writing is to have somewhat to say, and to say just that and no other. We think in words, and when we lack fit words we lack fit thoughts. When we strive to write finely for the sake of doing so, we become bombastic or inane. Oldisworth, quoted by Dr. Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, says of Edmund Neale, (known under the assumed name of Smith,) who had a great reputation in his own day, "Writing with ease what could easily be written moved his indignation. When he was writing upon a subject he would seriously consider what Demosthenes, Homer, Virgil, or Horace, if alive, would say upon that occasion, which whetted him to exceed himself as well as others." Which, I take it, is one principal reason why, although the world yet hears something of Demosthenes, of Homer, of Virgil, and of Horace, it has long ceased to hear any thing of Neale. It must not be supposed, however, that Shake speare, in the composition of his plays, was guided by no written law because in his day, in England, no literary law had yet been written. In The Garden of Eloquence, by Henry Peacham, published in 1577, there are forms and figures of speech described, and classified, and named to the number of two hundred and more, with apt rules to use them withal. But not seeking to square his work by these rules, Shakespeare wrote in his marvellous fashion, because, if he wrote at all, it was just as easy for him to write in that way as in any other. When Lear says, Down, thou climbing sorrow; Thy element's below," the critics of the last century, walking through the clipped verdure and formal alleys of the Garden of Eloquence, point out, with dignified complacency, that "here is a most remarkable prosopopœia." So there is, if they must have it so. But it comes from Shakespeare's pen as a matter of course; as if no other thought, no other words, could have occurred to him on that occasion. And what cared he what Homer or what Virgil would have said? But it is always thus with him. Unlike other great writers, he does not seem to scatter his riches with a lavish hand; they drop from him like fatness from the clouds of heaven; as if with the intellectual riches of a god he had a godlike serenity in their possession and their bestowal. Notwithstanding Shakespeare's copiousness of thought and affluence of imagery, no remark upon his style could be more erroneous than that so often made by his critics, that he does not repeat himself. It has even been attempted to regulate his text upon this assumption. But Shakespeare did not hesitate to repeat either his own thoughts or words, or, for that matter, those of other writers, when to do so served his present purpose. Examples are scattered all through his plays. He In no respect was Shakespeare's art classical. was essentially a Goth, and his style corresponded entirely to the character of his mind. English is a Gothic language; yet there can be classical English, as we have been shown by Addison and Goldsmith. In the former of these eminent writers we find the perfection of ease, clearness, harmony, and dignity. So we do in Shakespeare, except that some passages, from compression of many thoughts, from neglect of elaboration, and sometimes from corruption, lack clearness. But it is not thus that Shakespeare's style is to be defined. It is not to be defined at all: it is a mystery. Addison's sound sense, the eminently graceful character of his mind, and his lambent humor, were individual qualities which marked his thought; but as to his style, it can be easily analyzed; its elements can be detected, and their proportions declared. But you cannot take certain qualities of style and combine them in certain proportions, and by certain rules, and make your Shakespeare's mixture. A nameless something not grace, not harmony, not strength-which yet mingles with them all in Shakespeare, would be lacking. Addison's perfect style has been perfectly imitated. There have been men, there might be many men, who could produce not what would properly be called an imitation of it, but the thing itself. But the man has never yet written, except Shakespeare, who could produce ten lines having that quality, which, for lack of other name, we call Shakespearian. It is, however, not only in this nameless charm and happy audacity that Shakespeare differs from those writers of our language whose style may be regarded as models of correctness. He is often undeniably incorrect, in consequence, partly, of the syntactical usage of his day, which, upon minor points, had not yet attained a complete logical conformity to the very principles then recognized, and partly of his own neglect to revise carefully that which he wrote so fluently. His occasional errors which are not of the former kind appear only in his plays; they are not found in the poems, which he wrote for perusal. There is, however, a vagueness in some passages of Shakespeare's poetry which is intentional, and which is a result of the highest art — a vagueness which magnifies an image, generally of terror, which would be belittled by being drawn with sharper outline. This is a trait of Gothic art, and is not peculiar to Shakespeare, or indeed to poetry, for it finds its place in Gothic architecture. Schiller has been much praised, and somewhat over-praised, for his use of the indefinite neuter pronoun it,' in his ballad The Diver, to indicate the fabled polypus, which, however, he immediately describes.* Shakespeare, who seems to have been beforehand with most modern poets in all their happiest devices, had in this effect anticipated and surpassed Schiller, and had availed himself of our indefinite dread of unknown horrors in the recesses of the sea, not only, like Schiller, to leave upon the mind a vague image of the unknown creature itself, but to heighten our dread of, and aversion to, unnatural crime. How indefinite the comparison when Lear exclaims, "Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child But What is the sea-monster? Yet how much more of It saw a hundred-armed creature-its prey." Sir E. Bulwer Lyttım's Translation. |