Women, too, whose voice in literature counts as well as that of men, and in a light literature counts for more than that of men, women, such as we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever prefer a delicate unreality to a true or firm art. A dressy literature, an exaggerated literature, seem to be fated to us. These are our curses, as other times had theirs. "And yet

Think not the living times forget.
Ages of heroes fought and fell,

That Homer in the end might tell;
O'er groveling generations past
Upstood the Doric fane at last;

And countless hearts on countless years
Had wasted thoughts and hopes and fears,
Rude laughter and unmeaning tears,
Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others, I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown,
The dead forgotten and unknown."*

* Arthur Hugh Clough. (“Come, Poet, Come!")

SHAKESPEARE - THE MAN.*

(1853.)

THE greatest of English poets, it is often said, is but a name. "No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fullness by a contemporary," have been extracted by antiquaries from the piles of rubbish which they have sifted. Yet of no person is there a clearer picture in the popular fancy. You seem to have known Shakespeare, to have seen Shakespeare, to have been friends with Shakespeare. We would attempt a slight delineation of the popular idea which has been formed: not from loose tradition or remote research, not from what some one says some one else said that the poet said, but from data which are at least undoubted,from the sure testimony of his certain works.

Some extreme skeptics, we know, doubt whether it is possible to deduce anything as to an author's character from his works. Yet surely people do not keep a tame steam-engine to write their books; and if those books were really written by a man, he must have been a man who could write them; he must have had the thoughts which they express, have acquired the knowledge they contain, have possessed the style in which we read them. The difficulty is a defect of the critics. A person who knows nothing of an

1852.

*Shakespeare et son Temps: Étude Littéraire. Par M. Guizot. Paris.

Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare's Plays from early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632, in the possession of R. Payne Collier, Esq., F. S. A. London. 1853.

author he has read will not know much of an author whom he has seen.

First of all, it may be said that Shakespeare's works could only be produced by a first-rate imagination working on a first-rate experience. It is often difficult to make out whether the author of a poetic creation is drawing from fancy or drawing from experience; but for art on a certain scale, the two must concur. Out of nothing, nothing can be created. Some plastic power is required, however great may be the material. And when such a work as "Hamlet" or "Othello"- still more, when both of them and others not unequal have been created by a single mind, it may be fairly said that not only a great imagination, but a full conversancy with the world, was necessary to their production. The whole powers of man, under the most favorable circumstances, are not too great for such an effort. We may assume that Shakespeare had a great experience.

To a great experience one thing is essential,- an experiencing nature. It is not enough to have opportunity, it is essential to feel it. Some occasions come to all men; but to many they are of little use, and to some they are none. What, for example, has experience done for the distinguished Frenchman the name of whose essay is prefixed to this paper? M. Guizot is the same man that he was in 1820, or, we believe, as he was in 1814. Take up one of his lectures published before he was a practical statesman: you will be struck with the width of view, the amplitude and the solidity of the reflections; you will be amazed that a mere literary teacher could produce anything so wise but take up afterwards an essay published since his fall, and you will be amazed to find no more. Napoleon I. is come and gone, the Bourbons of the old régime have come and gone, the Bourbons of the new régime have had their turn. M. Guizot has been first minister of a citizen king; he has led a great party; he has pronounced many a great discours

that was well received by the second elective assembly in the world. But there is no trace of this in his writings. No one would guess from them that their author had ever left the professor's chair. It is the same, we are told, with small matters: when M. Guizot walks the street, he seems to see nothing; the head is thrown back, the eye fixed, and the mouth working. His mind is no doubt at work, but it is not stirred by what is external. Perhaps it is the internal activity of mind that overmasters the perceptive power. Anyhow, there might have been an émeute in the street and he would not have known it; there have been revolutions in his life and he is scarcely the wiser. Among the most frivolous and fickle of civilized nations he is alone. They pass from the game of war to the game of peace, from the game of science to the game of art, from the game of liberty to the game of slavery, from the game of slavery to the game of license; he stands like a schoolmaster in the play-ground, without sport and without pleasure, firm and sullen, slow and awful.

A man of this sort is a curious mental phenomenon. He appears to get early-perhaps to be born with a kind of dry schedule or catalogue of the universe; he has a ledger in his head, and has a title to which he can refer any transaction; nothing puzzles him, nothing comes amiss to him, but he is not in the least the wiser for anything. Like the bookkeeper, he has his heads of account, and he knows them, but he is no wiser for the particular items. After a busy day and after a slow day, after a few entries and after many, his knowledge is exactly the same: take his opinion of Baron Rothschild, he will say, "Yes, he keeps an account with us"; of Humphrey Brown, "Yes, we have that account, too." Just so with the class of minds which we are speaking of, and in greater matters. Very early in life they come to a certain and considerable acquaintance with the world; they learn very quickly all they can learn,

and naturally they never in any way learn any more. Mr. Pitt is in this country the type of the character. Mr. Alison, in a well-known passage, * makes it a matter of wonder that he was fit to be a Chancellor of the Exchequer at twenty-three, and it is a great wonder; but it is to be remembered that he was no more fit at forty-three. As somebody said, he did not grow, he was cast. Experience taught him nothing, and he did not believe that he had anything to learn. The habit of mind in smaller degrees is not very rare, and might be illustrated without end. Hazlitt tells a story of West, the painter, that is in point: when some one asked him if he had ever been to Greece, he answered, "No, I have read a descriptive catalogue of the principal objects in that country, and I believe I am as well conversant with them as if I had visited it." No doubt he was just as well conversant, and so would be any doctrinaire.

But Shakespeare was not a man of this sort. If he walked down a street, he knew what was in that street. His mind did not form in early life a classified list of all the objects in the universe, and learn no more about the universe ever after. From a certain fine sensibility of nature, it is plain that hel took a keen interest not only in the general and coarse outlines of objects, but in their minutest particulars and gentlest gradations. You may open Shakespeare and find the clearest proofs of this. Take the following:

"When last the young Orlando parted from you,

He left a promise to return again

Within an hour; and pacing through the forest,
Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy,

Lo, what befell! he threw his eye aside,

And mark what object did present itself:

Under an oak, whose boughs were mossed with age

And high top bald with dry antiquity,

"History of Europe," Vol. ii., page 366.

+Roughly from "The Old Age of Artists," in the "Plain Speaker"; also note to "A Landscape of Nicolas Poussin," in the "Table Talk.”

VOL. I.-17