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+Project Gutenberg's Oxford Lectures on Poetry, by Andrew Cecil Bradley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Oxford Lectures on Poetry
+
+Author: Andrew Cecil Bradley
+
+Release Date: July 17, 2011 [EBook #36773]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD LECTURES ON POETRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marius Masi, Suzanne Shell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  _BY A. C. BRADLEY, LL.D., LITT.D._
+
+  SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
+
+  LECTURES ON
+  HAMLET, OTHELLO, KING LEAR, MACBETH
+
+  MACMILLAN & CO LTD.
+
+
+
+
+  OXFORD LECTURES
+  ON POETRY
+
+  BY
+
+  A. C. BRADLEY
+  LL.D., LITT.D.
+
+  FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
+  AND FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE
+
+
+  MACMILLAN
+
+  London ˇ Melbourne ˇ Toronto
+
+  ST MARTIN'S PRESS
+  New York
+  1965
+
+
+_This book is copyright in all countries which are signatories of the
+Berne Convention_
+
+First Edition, May 1909. Second Edition, November 1909 Reprinted 1911,
+1914, 1917, 1919, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1934, 1941, 1950, 1955, 1959, 1962,
+1963, 1965
+
+
+  MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED
+  _St Martin's Street London WC2
+  also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne_
+
+  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
+  _70 Bond Street Toronto 2_
+
+  ST MARTIN'S PRESS INC
+  _175 Fifth Avenue New York 10010 NY_
+
+
+  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+
+
+
+  TO
+  MY OXFORD FRIENDS
+  1869-1909
+
+_'They have seemed to be together, though absent, shook hands, as over a
+vast; and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds.'_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This volume consists of lectures delivered during my tenure of the Chair
+of Poetry at Oxford and not included in _Shakespearean Tragedy_. Most of
+them have been enlarged, and all have been revised. As they were given
+at intervals, and the majority before the publication of that book, they
+contained repetitions which I have not found it possible wholly to
+remove. Readers of a lecture published by the University of Manchester
+on _English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth_ will
+pardon also the restatement of some ideas expressed in it.
+
+The several lectures are dated, as I have been unable to take account of
+most of the literature on their subjects published since they were
+delivered.
+
+They are arranged in the order that seems best to me, but it is of
+importance only in the case of the four which deal with the poets of
+Wordsworth's time.
+
+I am indebted to the Delegates of the University Press, and to the
+proprietors and editors of the _Hibbert Journal_ and the _Albany_,
+_Fortnightly_, and _Quarterly Reviews_, respectively, for permission to
+republish the first, third, fifth, eighth, and ninth lectures. A like
+acknowledgment is due for leave to use some sentences of an article on
+Keats contributed to _Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature_
+(1903).
+
+In the revision of the proof-sheets I owed much help to a sister who has
+shared many of my Oxford friendships.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION
+
+
+This edition is substantially identical with the first; but it and its
+later impressions contain a few improvements in points of detail, and,
+thanks to criticisms by my brother, F. H. Bradley, I hope to have made
+my meaning clearer in some pages of the second lecture.
+
+There was an oversight in the first edition which I regret. In adding
+the note on p. 247 I forgot that I had not referred to Professor Dowden
+in the lecture on "Shakespeare the Man." In everything that I have
+written on Shakespeare I am indebted to Professor Dowden, and certainly
+not least in that lecture.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                         PAGE
+  POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE                  3
+
+  THE SUBLIME                              37
+
+  HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY                69
+
+  WORDSWORTH                               99
+
+  SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY                151
+
+  THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH  177
+
+  THE LETTERS OF KEATS                    209
+
+  THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF               247
+
+  SHAKESPEARE'S 'ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA'    279
+
+  SHAKESPEARE THE MAN                     311
+
+  SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE      361
+
+
+
+
+POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE
+
+
+POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE[1]
+
+(INAUGURAL LECTURE)
+
+
+One who, after twenty years, is restored to the University where he was
+taught and first tried to teach, and who has received at the hands of
+his Alma Mater an honour of which he never dreamed, is tempted to speak
+both of himself and of her. But I remember that you have come to listen
+to my thoughts about a great subject, and not to my feelings about
+myself; and of Oxford who that holds this Professorship could dare to
+speak, when he recalls the exquisite verse in which one of his
+predecessors described her beauty, and the prose in which he gently
+touched on her illusions and protested that they were as nothing when
+set against her age-long warfare with the Philistine? How, again,
+remembering him and others, should I venture to praise my predecessors?
+It would be pleasant to do so, and even pleasanter to me and you if,
+instead of lecturing, I quoted to you some of their best passages. But I
+could not do this for five years. Sooner or later, my own words would
+have to come, and the inevitable contrast. Not to sharpen it now, I
+will be silent concerning them also; and will only assure you that I do
+not forget them, or the greatness of the honour of succeeding them, or
+the responsibility which it entails.
+
+The words 'Poetry for poetry's sake' recall the famous phrase 'Art for
+Art.' It is far from my purpose to examine the possible meanings of that
+phrase, or all the questions it involves. I propose to state briefly
+what I understand by 'Poetry for poetry's sake,' and then, after
+guarding against one or two misapprehensions of the formula, to consider
+more fully a single problem connected with it. And I must premise,
+without attempting to justify them, certain explanations. We are to
+consider poetry in its essence, and apart from the flaws which in most
+poems accompany their poetry. We are to include in the idea of poetry
+the metrical form, and not to regard this as a mere accident or a mere
+vehicle. And, finally, poetry being poems, we are to think of a poem as
+it actually exists; and, without aiming here at accuracy, we may say
+that an actual poem is the succession of experiences--sounds, images,
+thoughts, emotions--through which we pass when we are reading as
+poetically as we can.[2] Of course this imaginative experience--if I may
+use the phrase for brevity--differs with every reader and every time of
+reading: a poem exists in innumerable degrees. But that insurmountable
+fact lies in the nature of things and does not concern us now.
+
+What then does the formula 'Poetry for poetry's sake' tell us about this
+experience? It says, as I understand it, these things. First, this
+experience is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, has
+an intrinsic value. Next, its _poetic_ value is this intrinsic worth
+alone. Poetry may have also an ulterior value as a means to culture or
+religion; because it conveys instruction, or softens the passions, or
+furthers a good cause; because it brings the poet fame or money or a
+quiet conscience. So much the better: let it be valued for these reasons
+too. But its ulterior worth neither is nor can directly determine its
+poetic worth as a satisfying imaginative experience; and this is to be
+judged entirely from within. And to these two positions the formula
+would add, though not of necessity, a third. The consideration of
+ulterior ends, whether by the poet in the act of composing or by the
+reader in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic value. It does
+so because it tends to change the nature of poetry by taking it out of
+its own atmosphere. For its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a copy,
+of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase), but to be a
+world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous; and to possess it
+fully you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore for the
+time the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in
+the other world of reality.
+
+Of the more serious misapprehensions to which these statements may give
+rise I will glance only at one or two. The offensive consequences often
+drawn from the formula 'Art for Art' will be found to attach not to the
+doctrine that Art is an end in itself, but to the doctrine that Art is
+the whole or supreme end of human life. And as this latter doctrine,
+which seems to me absurd, is in any case quite different from the
+former, its consequences fall outside my subject. The formula 'Poetry is
+an end in itself' has nothing to say on the various questions of moral
+judgment which arise from the fact that poetry has its place in a
+many-sided life. For anything it says, the intrinsic value of poetry
+might be so small, and its ulterior effects so mischievous, that it had
+better not exist. The formula only tells us that we must not place in
+antithesis poetry and human good, for poetry is one kind of human good;
+and that we must not determine the intrinsic value of this kind of good
+by direct reference to another. If we do, we shall find ourselves
+maintaining what we did not expect. If poetic value lies in the
+stimulation of religious feelings, _Lead, kindly Light_ is no better a
+poem than many a tasteless version of a Psalm: if in the excitement of
+patriotism, why is _Scots, wha hae_ superior to _We don't want to
+fight?_ if in the mitigation of the passions, the Odes of Sappho will
+win but little praise: if in instruction, Armstrong's _Art of preserving
+Health_ should win much.
+
+Again, our formula may be accused of cutting poetry away from its
+connection with life. And this accusation raises so huge a problem that
+I must ask leave to be dogmatic as well as brief. There is plenty of
+connection between life and poetry, but it is, so to say, a connection
+underground. The two may be called different forms of the same thing:
+one of them having (in the usual sense) reality, but seldom fully
+satisfying imagination; while the other offers something which satisfies
+imagination but has not full 'reality.' They are parallel developments
+which nowhere meet, or, if I may use loosely a word which will be
+serviceable later, they are analogues. Hence we understand one by help
+of the other, and even, in a sense, care for one because of the other;
+but hence also, poetry neither is life, nor, strictly speaking, a copy
+of it. They differ not only because one has more mass and the other a
+more perfect shape, but because they have different _kinds_ of
+existence. The one touches us as beings occupying a given position in
+space and time, and having feelings, desires, and purposes due to that
+position: it appeals to imagination, but appeals to much besides. What
+meets us in poetry has not a position in the same series of time and
+space, or, if it has or had such a position, it is taken apart from much
+that belonged to it there;[3] and therefore it makes no direct appeal
+to those feelings, desires, and purposes, but speaks only to
+contemplative imagination--imagination the reverse of empty or
+emotionless, imagination saturated with the results of 'real'
+experience, but still contemplative. Thus, no doubt, one main reason why
+poetry has poetic value for us is that it presents to us in its own way
+something which we meet in another form in nature or life; and yet the
+test of its poetic value for us lies simply in the question whether it
+satisfies our imagination; the rest of us, our knowledge or conscience,
+for example, judging it only so far as they appear transmuted in our
+imagination. So also Shakespeare's knowledge or his moral insight,
+Milton's greatness of soul, Shelley's 'hate of hate' and 'love of love,'
+and that desire to help men or make them happier which may have
+influenced a poet in hours of meditation--all these have, as such, no
+poetical worth: they have that worth only when, passing through the
+unity of the poet's being, they reappear as qualities of imagination,
+and then are indeed mighty powers in the world of poetry.
+
+I come to a third misapprehension, and so to my main subject. This
+formula, it is said, empties poetry of its meaning: it is really a
+doctrine of form for form's sake. 'It is of no consequence what a poet
+says, so long as he says the thing well. The _what_ is poetically
+indifferent: it is the _how_ that counts. Matter, subject, content,
+substance, determines nothing; there is no subject with which poetry may
+not deal: the form, the treatment, is everything. Nay, more: not only is
+the matter indifferent, but it is the secret of Art to "eradicate the
+matter by means of the form,"'--phrases and statements like these meet
+us everywhere in current criticism of literature and the other arts.
+They are the stock-in-trade of writers who understand of them little
+more than the fact that somehow or other they are not 'bourgeois.' But
+we find them also seriously used by writers whom we must respect,
+whether they are anonymous or not; something like one or another of them
+might be quoted, for example, from Professor Saintsbury, the late R. A.
+M. Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe himself; and they are the watchwords of a
+school in the one country where Aesthetics has flourished. They come, as
+a rule, from men who either practise one of the arts, or, from study of
+it, are interested in its methods. The general reader--a being so
+general that I may say what I will of him--is outraged by them. He feels
+that he is being robbed of almost all that he cares for in a work of
+art. 'You are asking me,' he says, 'to look at the Dresden Madonna as if
+it were a Persian rug. You are telling me that the poetic value of
+_Hamlet_ lies solely in its style and versification, and that my
+interest in the man and his fate is only an intellectual or moral
+interest. You allege that, if I want to enjoy the poetry of _Crossing
+the Bar_, I must not mind what Tennyson says there, but must consider
+solely his way of saying it. But in that case I can care no more for a
+poem than I do for a set of nonsense verses; and I do not believe that
+the authors of _Hamlet_ and _Crossing the Bar_ regarded their poems
+thus.'
+
+These antitheses of subject, matter, substance on the one side, form,
+treatment, handling on the other, are the field through which I
+especially want, in this lecture, to indicate a way. It is a field of
+battle; and the battle is waged for no trivial cause; but the cries of
+the combatants are terribly ambiguous. Those phrases of the so-called
+formalist may each mean five or six different things. Taken in one sense
+they seem to me chiefly true; taken as the general reader not
+unnaturally takes them, they seem to me false and mischievous. It would
+be absurd to pretend that I can end in a few minutes a controversy
+which concerns the ultimate nature of Art, and leads perhaps to problems
+not yet soluble; but we can at least draw some plain distinctions which,
+in this controversy, are too often confused.
+
+In the first place, then, let us take 'subject' in one particular sense;
+let us understand by it that which we have in view when, looking at the
+title of an un-read poem, we say that the poet has chosen this or that
+for his subject. The subject, in this sense, so far as I can discover,
+is generally something, real or imaginary, as it exists in the minds of
+fairly cultivated people. The subject of _Paradise Lost_ would be the
+story of the Fall as that story exists in the general imagination of a
+Bible-reading people. The subject of Shelley's stanzas _To a Skylark_
+would be the ideas which arise in the mind of an educated person when,
+without knowing the poem, he hears the word 'skylark'. If the title of a
+poem conveys little or nothing to us, the 'subject' appears to be either
+what we should gather by investigating the title in a dictionary or
+other book of the kind, or else such a brief suggestion as might be
+offered by a person who had read the poem, and who said, for example,
+that the subject of _The Ancient Mariner_ was a sailor who killed an
+albatross and suffered for his deed.
+
+Now the subject, in this sense (and I intend to use the word in no
+other), is not, as such, inside the poem, but outside it. The contents
+of the stanzas _To a Skylark_ are not the ideas suggested by the work
+'skylark' to the average man; they belong to Shelley just as much as the
+language does. The subject, therefore, is not the matter _of_ the poem
+at all; and its opposite is not the _form_ of the poem, but the whole
+poem. The subject is one thing; the poem, matter and form alike, another
+thing. This being so, it is surely obvious that the poetic value cannot
+lie in the subject, but lies entirely in its opposite, the poem. How
+can the subject determine the value when on one and the same subject
+poems may be written of all degrees of merit and demerit; or when a
+perfect poem may be composed on a subject so slight as a pet sparrow,
+and, if Macaulay may be trusted, a nearly worthless poem on a subject so
+stupendous as the omnipresence of the Deity? The 'formalist' is here
+perfectly right. Nor is he insisting on something unimportant. He is
+fighting against our tendency to take the work of art as a mere copy or
+reminder of something already in our heads, or at the best as a
+suggestion of some idea as little removed as possible from the familiar.
+The sightseer who promenades a picture-gallery, remarking that this
+portrait is so like his cousin, or that landscape the very image of his
+birthplace, or who, after satisfying himself that one picture is about
+Elijah, passes on rejoicing to discover the subject, and nothing but the
+subject, of the next--what is he but an extreme example of this
+tendency? Well, but the very same tendency vitiates much of our
+criticism, much criticism of Shakespeare, for example, which, with all
+its cleverness and partial truth, still shows that the critic never
+passed from his own mind into Shakespeare's; and it may be traced even
+in so fine a critic as Coleridge, as when he dwarfs the sublime struggle
+of Hamlet into the image of his own unhappy weakness. Hazlitt by no
+means escaped its influence. Only the third of that great trio, Lamb,
+appears almost always to have rendered the conception of the composer.
+
+Again, it is surely true that we cannot determine beforehand what
+subjects are fit for Art, or name any subject on which a good poem might
+not possibly be written. To divide subjects into two groups, the
+beautiful or elevating, and the ugly or vicious, and to judge poems
+according as their subjects belong to one of these groups or the other,
+is to fall into the same pit, to confuse with our pre-conceptions the
+meaning of the poet. What the thing is in the poem he is to be judged
+by, not by the thing as it was before he touched it; and how can we
+venture to say beforehand that he cannot make a true poem out of
+something which to us was merely alluring or dull or revolting? The
+question whether, having done so, he ought to publish his poem; whether
+the thing in the poet's work will not be still confused by the
+incompetent Puritan or the incompetent sensualist with the thing in
+_his_ mind, does not touch this point: it is a further question, one of
+ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders of 'Art for art's sake' will
+generally be in favour of the courageous course, of refusing to
+sacrifice the better or stronger part of the public to the weaker or
+worse; but their maxim in no way binds them to this view. Rossetti
+suppressed one of the best of his sonnets, a sonnet chosen for
+admiration by Tennyson, himself extremely sensitive about the moral
+effect of poetry; suppressed it, I believe, because it was called
+fleshly. One may regret Rossetti's judgment and at the same time respect
+his scrupulousness; but in any case he judged in his capacity of
+citizen, not in his capacity of artist.
+
+So far then the 'formalist' appears to be right. But he goes too far, I
+think, if he maintains that the subject is indifferent and that all
+subjects are the same to poetry. And he does not prove his point by
+observing that a good poem might be written on a pin's head, and a bad
+one on the Fall of Man. That truth shows that the subject _settles_
+nothing, but not that it counts for nothing. The Fall of Man is really a
+more favourable subject than a pin's head. The Fall of Man, that is to
+say, offers opportunities of poetic effects wider in range and more
+penetrating in appeal. And the fact is that such a subject, as it exists
+in the general imagination, has some aesthetic value before the poet
+touches it. It is, as you may choose to call it, an inchoate poem or
+the débris of a poem. It is not an abstract idea or a bare isolated
+fact, but an assemblage of figures, scenes, actions, and events, which
+already appeal to emotional imagination; and it is already in some
+degree organized and formed. In spite of this a bad poet would make a
+bad poem on it; but then we should say he was unworthy of the subject.
+And we should not say this if he wrote a bad poem on a pin's head.
+Conversely, a good poem on a pin's head would almost certainly transform
+its subject far more than a good poem on the Fall of Man. It might
+revolutionize its subject so completely that we should say, 'The subject
+may be a pin's head, but the substance of the poem has very little to do
+with it.'
+
+This brings us to another and a different antithesis. Those figures,
+scenes, events, that form part of the subject called the Fall of Man,
+are not the substance of _Paradise Lost_; but in _Paradise Lost_ there
+are figures, scenes, and events resembling them in some degree. These,
+with much more of the same kind, may be described as its substance, and
+may then be contrasted with the measured language of the poem, which
+will be called its form. Subject is the opposite not of form but of the
+whole poem. Substance is within the poem, and its opposite, form, is
+also within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis at present,
+but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically
+the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama,
+and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example,
+in examining _Paradise Lost_ considers in order the fable, the
+characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he
+considers the language, that is, the style and numbers; this will be the
+form. In like manner, the substance or meaning of a lyric may be
+distinguished from the form.
+
+Now I believe it will be found that a large part of the controversy we
+are dealing with arises from a confusion between these two distinctions
+of substance and form, and of subject and poem. The extreme formalist
+lays his whole weight on the form because he thinks its opposite is the
+mere subject. The general reader is angry, but makes the same mistake,
+and gives to the subject praises that rightly belong to the
+substance[4]. I will read an example of what I mean. I can only explain
+the following words of a good critic by supposing that for the moment he
+has fallen into this confusion: 'The mere matter of all poetry--to wit,
+the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men--being
+unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will
+depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme,
+cadence, and what not, to this invariable material.' What has become
+here of the substance of _Paradise Lost_--the story, scenery,
+characters, sentiments, as they are in the poem? They have vanished
+clean away. Nothing is left but the form on one side, and on the other
+not even the subject, but a supposed invariable material, the
+appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men. Is it
+surprising that the whole value should then be found in the form?
+
+So far we have assumed that this antithesis of substance and form is
+valid, and that it always has one meaning. In reality it has several,
+but we will leave it in its present shape, and pass to the question of
+its validity. And this question we are compelled to raise, because we
+have to deal with the two contentions that the poetic value lies wholly
+or mainly in the substance, and that it lies wholly or mainly in the
+form. Now these contentions, whether false or true, may seem at least to
+be clear; but we shall find, I think, that they are both of them false,
+or both of them nonsense: false if they concern anything outside the
+poem, nonsense if they apply to something in it. For what do they
+evidently imply? They imply that there are in a poem two parts, factors,
+or components, a substance and a form; and that you can conceive them
+distinctly and separately, so that when you are speaking of the one you
+are not speaking of the other. Otherwise how can you ask the question,
+In which of them does the value lie? But really in a poem, apart from
+defects, there are no such factors or components; and therefore it is
+strictly nonsense to ask in which of them the value lies. And on the
+other hand, if the substance and the form referred to are not in the
+poem, then both the contentions are false, for its poetic value lies in
+itself.
+
+What I mean is neither new nor mysterious; and it will be clear, I
+believe, to any one who reads poetry poetically and who closely examines
+his experience. When you are reading a poem, I would ask--not analysing
+it, and much less criticizing it, but allowing it, as it proceeds, to
+make its full impression on you through the exertion of your recreating
+imagination--do you then apprehend and enjoy as one thing a certain
+meaning or substance, and as another thing certain articulate sounds,
+and do you somehow compound these two? Surely you do not, any more than
+you apprehend apart, when you see some one smile, those lines in the
+face which express a feeling, and the feeling that the lines express.
+Just as there the lines and their meaning are to you one thing, not two,
+so in poetry the meaning and the sounds are one: there is, if I may put
+it so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance. If you read the line,
+'The sun is warm, the sky is clear,' you do not experience separately
+the image of a warm sun and clear sky, on the one side, and certain
+unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the other; nor yet do you experience
+them together, side by side; but you experience the one _in_ the other.
+And in like manner, when you are really reading _Hamlet_, the action and
+the characters are not something which you conceive apart from the
+words; you apprehend them from point to point _in_ the words, and the
+words as expressions of them. Afterwards, no doubt, when you are out of
+the poetic experience but remember it, you may by analysis decompose
+this unity, and attend to a substance more or less isolated, and a form
+more or less isolated. But these are things in your analytic head, not
+in the poem, which is _poetic_ experience. And if you want to have the
+poem again, you cannot find it by adding together these two products of
+decomposition; you can only find it by passing back into poetic
+experience. And then what you recover is no aggregate of factors, it is
+a unity in which you can no more separate a substance and a form than
+you can separate living blood and the life in the blood. This unity has,
+if you like, various 'aspects' or 'sides,' but they are not factors or
+parts; if you try to examine one, you find it is also the other. Call
+them substance and form if you please, but these are not the
+reciprocally exclusive substance and form to which the two contentions
+_must_ refer. They do not 'agree,' for they are not apart: they are one
+thing from different points of view, and in that sense identical. And
+this identity of content and form, you will say, is no accident; it is
+of the essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry, and of all art in so
+far as it is art. Just as there is in music not sound on one side and a
+meaning on the other, but expressive sound, and if you ask what is the
+meaning you can only answer by pointing to the sounds; just as in
+painting there is not a meaning _plus_ paint, but a meaning _in_ paint,
+or significant paint, and no man can really express the meaning in any
+other way than in paint and in _this_ paint; so in a poem the true
+content and the true form neither exist nor can be imagined apart. When
+then you are asked whether the value of a poem lies in a substance got
+by decomposing the poem, and present, as such, only in reflective
+analysis, or whether the value lies in a form arrived at and existing in
+the same way, you will answer, 'It lies neither in one, nor in the
+other, nor in any addition of them, but in the poem, where they are
+not.'
+
+We have then, first, an antithesis of subject and poem. This is clear
+and valid; and the question in which of them does the value lie is
+intelligible; and its answer is, In the poem. We have next a distinction
+of substance and form. If the substance means ideas, images, and the
+like taken alone, and the form means the measured language taken by
+itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of
+things not in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them. If
+substance and form mean anything _in_ the poem, then each is involved in
+the other, and the question in which of them the value lies has no
+sense. No doubt you may say, speaking loosely, that in this poet or poem
+the aspect of substance is the more noticeable, and in that the aspect
+of form; and you may pursue interesting discussions on this basis,
+though no principle or ultimate question of value is touched by them.
+And apart from that question, of course, I am not denying the usefulness
+and necessity of the distinction. We cannot dispense with it. To
+consider separately the action or the characters of a play, and
+separately its style or versification, is both legitimate and valuable,
+so long as we remember what we are doing. But the true critic in
+speaking of these apart does not really think of them apart; the whole,
+the poetic experience, of which they are but aspects, is always in his
+mind; and he is always aiming at a richer, truer, more intense
+repetition of that experience. On the other hand, when the question of
+principle, of poetic value, is raised, these aspects _must_ fall apart
+into components, separately conceivable; and then there arise two
+heresies, equally false, that the value lies in one of two things, both
+of which are outside the poem, and therefore where its value cannot lie.
+
+On the heresy of the separable substance a few additional words will
+suffice. This heresy is seldom formulated, but perhaps some unconscious
+holder of it may object: 'Surely the action and the characters of
+_Hamlet_ are in the play; and surely I can retain these, though I have
+forgotten all the words. I admit that I do not possess the whole poem,
+but I possess a part, and the most important part.' And I would answer:
+'If we are not concerned with any question of principle, I accept all
+that you say except the last words, which do raise such a question.
+Speaking loosely, I agree that the action and characters, as you perhaps
+conceive them, together with a great deal more, are in the poem. Even
+then, however, you must not claim to possess all of this kind that is in
+the poem; for in forgetting the words you must have lost innumerable
+details of the action and the characters. And, when the question of
+value is raised, I must insist that the action and characters, as you
+conceive them, are not in _Hamlet_ at all. If they are, point them out.
+You cannot do it. What you find at any moment of that succession of
+experiences called _Hamlet_ is words. In these words, to speak loosely
+again, the action and characters (more of them than you can conceive
+apart) are focussed; but your experience is not a combination of them,
+as ideas, on the one side, with certain sounds on the other; it is an
+experience of something in which the two are indissolubly fused. If you
+deny this, to be sure I can make no answer, or can only answer that I
+have reason to believe that you cannot read poetically, or else are
+misinterpreting your experience. But if you do not deny this, then you
+will admit that the action and characters of the poem, as you separately
+imagine them, are no part of it, but a product of it in your reflective
+imagination, a faint analogue of one aspect of it taken in detachment
+from the whole. Well, I do not dispute, I would even insist, that, in
+the case of so long a poem as _Hamlet_, it may be necessary from time to
+time to interrupt the poetic experience, in order to enrich it by
+forming such a product and dwelling on it. Nor, in a wide sense of
+"poetic," do I question the poetic value of this product, as you think
+of it apart from the poem. It resembles our recollections of the heroes
+of history or legend, who move about in our imaginations, "forms more
+real than living man," and are worth much to us though we do not
+remember anything they said. Our ideas and images of the "substance" of
+a poem have this poetic value, and more, if they are at all adequate.
+But they cannot determine the poetic value of the poem, for (not to
+speak of the competing claims of the "form") nothing that is outside the
+poem can do that, and they, as such, are outside it.'[5]
+
+Let us turn to the so-called form--style and versification. There is no
+such thing as mere form in poetry. All form is expression. Style may
+have indeed a certain aesthetic worth in partial abstraction from the
+particular matter it conveys, as in a well-built sentence you may take
+pleasure in the build almost apart from the meaning. Even so, style is
+expressive--presents to sense, for example, the order, ease, and
+rapidity with which ideas move in the writer's mind--but it is not
+expressive of the meaning of that particular sentence. And it is
+possible, interrupting poetic experience, to decompose it and abstract
+for comparatively separate consideration this nearly formal element of
+style. But the aesthetic value of style so taken is not considerable;[6]
+you could not read with pleasure for an hour a composition which had no
+other merit. And in poetic experience you never apprehend this value by
+itself; the style is here expressive also of a particular meaning, or
+rather is one aspect of that unity whose other aspect is meaning. So
+that what you apprehend may be called indifferently an expressed meaning
+or a significant form. Perhaps on this point I may in Oxford appeal to
+authority, that of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, the latter at any
+rate an authority whom the formalist will not despise. What is the gist
+of Pater's teaching about style, if it is not that in the end the one
+virtue of style is truth or adequacy; that the word, phrase, sentence,
+should express perfectly the writer's perception, feeling, image, or
+thought; so that, as we read a descriptive phrase of Keats's, we
+exclaim, 'That is the thing itself'; so that, to quote Arnold, the words
+are 'symbols equivalent with the thing symbolized,' or, in our technical
+language, a form identical with its content? Hence in true poetry it is,
+in strictness, impossible to express the meaning in any but its own
+words, or to change the words without changing the meaning. A
+translation of such poetry is not really the old meaning in a fresh
+dress; it is a new product, something like the poem, though, if one
+chooses to say so, more like it in the aspect of meaning than in the
+aspect of form.
+
+No one who understands poetry, it seems to me, would dispute this, were
+it not that, falling away from his experience, or misled by theory, he
+takes the word 'meaning' in a sense almost ludicrously inapplicable to
+poetry. People say, for instance, 'steed' and 'horse' have the same
+meaning; and in bad poetry they have, but not in poetry that _is_
+poetry.
+
+  'Bring forth the horse!' The horse was brought:
+  In truth he was a noble steed!
+
+says Byron in _Mazeppa_. If the two words mean the same here, transpose
+them:
+
+  'Bring forth the steed!' The steed was brought:
+  In truth he was a noble horse!
+
+and ask again if they mean the same. Or let me take a line certainly
+very free from 'poetic diction':
+
+  To be or not to be, that is the question.
+
+You may say that this means the same as 'What is just now occupying my
+attention is the comparative disadvantages of continuing to live or
+putting an end to myself.' And for practical purposes--the purpose, for
+example, of a coroner--it does. But as the second version altogether
+misrepresents the speaker at that moment of his existence, while the
+first does represent him, how can they for any but a practical or
+logical purpose be said to have the same sense? Hamlet was well able to
+'unpack his heart with words,' but he will not unpack it with our
+paraphrases.
+
+These considerations apply equally to versification. If I take the
+famous line which describes how the souls of the dead stood waiting by
+the river, imploring a passage from Charon:
+
+  Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore;
+
+and if I translate it, 'and were stretching forth their hands in longing
+for the further bank,' the charm of the original has fled. Why has it
+fled? Partly (but we have dealt with that) because I have substituted
+for five words, and those the words of Virgil, twelve words, and those
+my own. In some measure because I have turned into rhythmless prose a
+line of verse which, as mere sound, has unusual beauty. But much more
+because in doing so I have also changed the _meaning_ of Virgil's line.
+What that meaning is _I_ cannot say: Virgil has said it. But I can see
+this much, that the translation conveys a far less vivid picture of the
+outstretched hands and of their remaining outstretched, and a far less
+poignant sense of the distance of the shore and the longing of the
+souls. And it does so partly because this picture and this sense are
+conveyed not only by the obvious meaning of the words, but through the
+long-drawn sound of 'tendebantque,' through the time occupied by the
+five syllables and therefore by the idea of 'ulterioris,' and through
+the identity of the long sound 'or' in the penultimate syllables of
+'ulterioris amore'--all this, and much more, apprehended not in this
+analytical fashion, nor as _added_ to the beauty of mere sound and to
+the obvious meaning, but in unity with them and so as expressive of the
+poetic meaning of the whole.
+
+It is always so in fine poetry. The value of versification, when it is
+indissolubly fused with meaning, can hardly be exaggerated. The gift for
+feeling it, even more perhaps than the gift for feeling the value of
+style, is the _specific_ gift for poetry, as distinguished from other
+arts. But versification, taken, as far as possible, all by itself, has a
+very different worth. Some aesthetic worth it has; how much, you may
+experience by reading poetry in a language of which you do not
+understand a syllable.[7] The pleasure is quite appreciable, but it is
+not great; nor in actual poetic experience do you meet with it, as such,
+at all. For, I repeat, it is not _added_ to the pleasure of the meaning
+when you read poetry that you do understand: by some mystery the music
+is then the music _of_ the meaning, and the two are one. However fond
+of versification you might be, you would tire very soon of reading
+verses in Chinese; and before long of reading Virgil and Dante if you
+were ignorant of their languages. But take the music as it is _in_ the
+poem, and there is a marvellous change. Now
+
+  It gives a very echo to the seat
+  Where love is throned;
+
+or 'carries far into your heart,' almost like music itself, the sound
+
+  Of old, unhappy, far-off things
+      And battles long ago.
+
+What then is to be said of the following sentence of the critic quoted
+before: 'But when any one who knows what poetry is reads--
+
+  Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+  Of the eternal silence,
+
+he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, ... there is one note
+added to the articulate music of the world--a note that never will leave
+off resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it' must think that
+the writer is deceiving himself. For I could quite understand his
+enthusiasm, if it were an enthusiasm for the music of the meaning; but
+as for the music, 'quite independently of the meaning,' so far as I can
+hear it thus (and I doubt if any one who knows English can quite do so),
+I find it gives some pleasure, but only a trifling pleasure. And indeed
+I venture to doubt whether, considered as mere sound, the words are at
+all exceptionally beautiful, as Virgil's line certainly is.
+
+When poetry answers to its idea and is purely or almost purely poetic,
+we find the identity of form and content; and the degree of purity
+attained may be tested by the degree in which we feel it hopeless to
+convey the effect of a poem or passage in any form but its own. Where
+the notion of doing so is simply ludicrous, you have quintessential
+poetry. But a great part even of good poetry, especially in long works,
+is of a mixed nature; and so we find in it no more than a partial
+agreement of a form and substance which remain to some extent distinct.
+This is so in many passages of Shakespeare (the greatest of poets when
+he chose, but not always a conscientious poet); passages where something
+was wanted for the sake of the plot, but he did not care about it or was
+hurried. The conception of the passage is then distinct from the
+execution, and neither is inspired. This is so also, I think, wherever
+we can truly speak of merely decorative effect. We seem to perceive that
+the poet had a truth or fact--philosophical, agricultural,
+social--distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in
+metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative, didactic, or satiric
+poems are partly of this kind; and in imaginative poems anything which
+is really a mere 'conceit' is mere decoration. We often deceive
+ourselves in this matter, for what we call decoration has often a new
+and genuinely poetic content of its own; but wherever there is mere
+decoration, we judge the poetry to be not wholly poetic. And so when
+Wordsworth inveighed against poetic diction, though he hurled his darts
+rather wildly, what he was rightly aiming at was a phraseology, not the
+living body of a new content, but the mere worn-out body of an old
+one.[8]
+
+In pure poetry it is otherwise. Pure poetry is not the decoration of a
+preconceived and clearly defined matter: it springs from the creative
+impulse of a vague imaginative mass pressing for development and
+definition. If the poet already knew exactly what he meant to say, why
+should he write the poem? The poem would in fact already be written. For
+only its completion can reveal, even to him, exactly what he wanted.
+When he began and while he was at work, he did not possess his meaning;
+it possessed him. It was not a fully formed soul asking for a body: it
+was an inchoate soul in the inchoate body of perhaps two or three vague
+ideas and a few scattered phrases. The growing of this body into its
+full stature and perfect shape was the same thing as the gradual
+self-definition of the meaning.[9] And this is the reason why such poems
+strike us as creations, not manufactures, and have the magical effect
+which mere decoration cannot produce. This is also the reason why, if we
+insist on asking for the meaning of such a poem, we can only be answered
+'It means itself.'
+
+And so at last I may explain why I have troubled myself and you with
+what may seem an arid controversy about mere words. It is not so. These
+heresies which would make poetry a compound of two factors--a matter
+common to it with the merest prose, _plus_ a poetic form, as the one
+heresy says: a poetical substance _plus_ a negligible form, as the other
+says--are not only untrue, they are injurious to the dignity of poetry.
+In an age already inclined to shrink from those higher realms where
+poetry touches religion and philosophy, the formalist heresy encourages
+men to taste poetry as they would a fine wine, which has indeed an
+aesthetic value, but a small one. And then the natural man, finding an
+empty form, hurls into it the matter of cheap pathos, rancid sentiment,
+vulgar humour, bare lust, ravenous vanity--everything which, in
+Schiller's phrase,[10] the form should extirpate, but which no mere form
+can extirpate. And the other heresy--which is indeed rather a practice
+than a creed--encourages us in the habit so dear to us of putting our
+own thoughts or fancies into the place of the poet's creation. What he
+meant by _Hamlet_, or the _Ode to a Nightingale_, or _Abt Vogler_, we
+say, is this or that which we knew already; and so we lose what he had
+to tell us. But he meant what he said, and said what he meant.
+
+Poetry in this matter is not, as good critics of painting and music
+often affirm, different from the other arts; in all of them the content
+is one thing with the form. What Beethoven meant by his symphony, or
+Turner by his picture, was not something which you can name, but the
+picture and the symphony. Meaning they have, but _what_ meaning can be
+said in no language but their own: and we know this, though some strange
+delusion makes us think the meaning has less worth because we cannot put
+it into words. Well, it is just the same with poetry. But because poetry
+is words, we vainly fancy that some other words than its own will
+express its meaning. And they will do so no more--or, if you like to
+speak loosely, only a trifle more--than words will express the meaning
+of the Dresden Madonna.[11] Something a little like it they may indeed
+express. And we may find analogues of the meaning of poetry outside it,
+which may help us to appropriate it. The other arts, the best ideas of
+philosophy or religion, much that nature and life offer us or force upon
+us, are akin to it. But they are only akin. Nor is it the expression of
+them. Poetry does not present to imagination our highest knowledge or
+belief, and much less our dreams and opinions; but it, content and form
+in unity, embodies in its own irreplaceable way something which embodies
+itself also in other irreplaceable ways, such as philosophy or religion.
+And just as each of these gives a satisfaction which the other cannot
+possibly give, so we find in poetry, which cannot satisfy the needs they
+meet, that which by their natures they cannot afford us. But we shall
+not find it fully if we look for something else.
+
+And now, when all is said, the question will still recur, though now in
+quite another sense, What does poetry mean?[12] This unique expression,
+which cannot be replaced by any other, still seems to be trying to
+express something beyond itself. And this, we feel, is also what the
+other arts, and religion, and philosophy are trying to express: and that
+is what impels us to seek in vain to translate the one into the other.
+About the best poetry, and not only the best, there floats an atmosphere
+of infinite suggestion. The poet speaks to us of one thing, but in this
+one thing there seems to lurk the secret of all. He said what he meant,
+but his meaning seems to beckon away beyond itself, or rather to expand
+into something boundless which is only focussed in it; something also
+which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination, but the whole of
+us; that something within us, and without, which everywhere
+
+                  makes us seem
+  To patch up fragments of a dream,
+  Part of which comes true, and part
+  Beats and trembles in the heart.
+
+Those who are susceptible to this effect of poetry find it not only,
+perhaps not most, in the ideals which she has sometimes described, but
+in a child's song by Christina Rossetti about a mere crown of
+wind-flowers, and in tragedies like _Lear_, where the sun seems to have
+set for ever. They hear this spirit murmuring its undertone through the
+_Aeneid_, and catch its voice in the song of Keats's nightingale, and
+its light upon the figures on the Urn, and it pierces them no less in
+Shelley's hopeless lament, _O world, O life, O time_, than in the
+rapturous ecstasy of his _Life of Life_. This all-embracing perfection
+cannot be expressed in poetic words or words of any kind, nor yet in
+music or in colour, but the suggestion of it is in much poetry, if not
+all, and poetry has in this suggestion, this 'meaning,' a great part of
+its value. We do it wrong, and we defeat our own purposes, when we try
+to bend it to them:
+
+  We do it wrong, being so majestical,
+  To offer it the show of violence;
+  For it is as the air invulnerable,
+  And our vain blows malicious mockery.
+
+It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our
+bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our
+master.
+
+1901
+
+
+  NOTE A
+
+The purpose of this sentence was not, as has been supposed, to give a
+definition of poetry. To define poetry as something that goes on in us
+when we read poetically would be absurd indeed. My object was to suggest
+to my hearers in passing that it is futile to ask questions about the
+end, or substance, or form of poetry, if we forget that a poem is
+neither a mere number of black marks on a white page, nor such
+experience as is evoked in us when we read these marks as we read, let
+us say, a newspaper article; and I suppose my hearers to know,
+sufficiently for the purpose of the lecture, how that sort of reading
+differs from poetical reading.
+
+The truths thus suggested are so obvious, when stated, that I thought a
+bare reminder of them would be enough. But in fact the mistakes we make
+about 'subject,' 'substance,' 'form,' and the like, are due not solely
+to misapprehension of our poetic experience, but to our examining what
+is not this experience. The whole lecture may be called an expansion of
+this statement.
+
+The passage to which the present note refers raises difficult questions
+which any attempt at a 'Poetics' ought to discuss. I will mention three.
+(1) If the experience called a poem varies 'with every reader and every
+time of reading' and 'exists in innumerable degrees,' what is the poem
+itself, if there is such a thing? (2) How does a series of successive
+experiences form _one_ poem? (3) If the object in the case of poetry and
+music ('arts of hearing') is a succession somehow and to some extent
+unified, how does it differ in this respect from the object in 'arts of
+sight'--a building, a statue, a picture?
+
+
+  NOTE B
+
+A lyric, for example, may arise from 'real' emotions due to transitory
+conditions peculiar to the poet. But these emotions and conditions,
+however interesting biographically, are poetically irrelevant. The poem,
+what the poet _says_, is universal, and is appropriated by people who
+live centuries after him and perhaps know nothing of him and his life;
+and if it arose from mere imagination it is none the worse (or the
+better) for that. So far as it cannot be appropriated without a
+knowledge of the circumstances in which it arose, it is probably, so
+far, faulty (probably, because the difficulty _may_ come from our
+distance from the whole mental world of the poet's time and country).
+
+What is said in the text applies equally to all the arts. It applies
+also to such aesthetic apprehension as does not issue in a work of art.
+And it applies to this apprehension whether the object belongs to
+'Nature' or to 'Man.' A beautiful landscape is not a 'real' landscape.
+Much that belongs to the 'real' landscape is ignored when it is
+apprehended aesthetically; and the painter only carries this unconscious
+idealisation further when he deliberately alters the 'real' landscape in
+further ways.
+
+All this does not in the least imply that the 'real' thing, where there
+is one (personal emotion, landscape, historical event, etc.), is of
+small importance to the aesthetic apprehension or the work of art. But
+it is relevant only as it appears _in_ that apprehension or work.
+
+If an artist alters a reality (_e.g._ a well-known scene or historical
+character) so much that his product clashes violently with our familiar
+ideas, he may be making a mistake: not because his product is untrue to
+the reality (this by itself is perfectly irrelevant), but because the
+'untruth' may make it difficult or impossible for others to appropriate
+his product, or because this product may be aesthetically inferior to
+the reality even as it exists in the general imagination.
+
+
+  NOTE C
+
+For the purpose of the experiment you must, of course, know the sounds
+denoted by the letters, and you must be able to make out the rhythmical
+scheme. But the experiment will be vitiated if you get some one who
+understands the language to read or recite to you poems written in it,
+for he will certainly so read or recite as to convey to you something of
+the meaning through the sound (I do not refer of course to the logical
+meaning).
+
+Hence it is clear that, if by 'versification taken by itself' one means
+the versification of a _poem_, it is impossible under the requisite
+conditions to get at this versification by itself. The versification of
+a poem is always, to speak loosely, influenced by the sense. The bare
+metrical scheme, to go no further, is practically never followed by the
+poet. Suppose yourself to know no English, and to perceive merely that
+in its general scheme
+
+  It gives a very echo to the seat
+
+is an iambic line of five feet; and then read the line as you would have
+to read it; and then ask if _that_ noise is the sound of the line _in
+the poem_.
+
+In the text, therefore, more is admitted than in strictness should be
+admitted. For I have assumed for the moment that you can hear the sound
+of poetry if you read poetry which you do not in the least understand,
+whereas in fact that sound cannot be produced at all except by a person
+who knows something of the meaning.
+
+
+  NOTE D
+
+This paragraph has not, to my knowledge, been adversely criticised, but
+it now appears to me seriously misleading. It refers to certain kinds of
+poetry, and again to certain passages in poems, which we feel to be less
+poetical than some other kinds or passages. But this difference of
+degree in poeticalness (if I may use the word) is put as a difference
+between 'mixed' and 'pure' poetry; and that distinction is, I think,
+unreal and mischievous. Further, it is implied that in less poetical
+poetry there necessarily is only a partial unity of content and form.
+This (unless I am now mistaken) is a mistake, and a mistake due to
+failure to hold fast the main idea of the lecture. Naturally it would be
+most agreeable to me to re-write the paragraph, but if I reprint it and
+expose my errors the reader will perhaps be helped to a firmer grasp of
+that idea.
+
+It is true that where poetry is most poetic we feel most decidedly how
+impossible it is to separate content and form. But where poetry is less
+poetic and does not make us feel this unity so decidedly, it does not
+follow that the unity is imperfect. Failure or partial failure in this
+unity is always (as in the case of Shakespeare referred to) a failure on
+the part of the _poet_ (though it is not always due to the same causes).
+It does not lie of necessity in the nature of a particular kind of
+poetry (_e.g._ satire) or in the nature of a particular passage. All
+poetry cannot be equally poetic, but _all_ poetry ought to maintain the
+unity of content and form, and, in that sense, to be 'pure.' Only in
+certain kinds, and in certain passages, it is more difficult for the
+poet to maintain it than in others.
+
+Let us take first the 'passages' and suppose them to occur in one of the
+more poetic kinds of poetry. In certain parts of any epic or tragedy
+matter has to be treated which, though necessary to the whole, is not in
+itself favourable to poetry, or would not in itself be a good 'subject.'
+But it is the business of the poet to do his best to make this matter
+poetry, and pure poetry. And, if he succeeds, the passage, though it
+will probably be less poetic than the bulk of the poem, will exhibit the
+complete unity of content and form. It will not strike us as a mere
+bridge between other passages; it will be enjoyable for itself; and it
+will not occur to us to think that the poet was dealing with an
+un-poetic 'matter' and found his task difficult or irksome. Shakespeare
+frequently does not trouble himself to face this problem and leaves an
+imperfect unity. The conscientious artists, like Virgil, Milton,
+Tennyson, habitually face, it and frequently solve it.[13] And when they
+wholly or partially fail, the fault is still _theirs_. It is, in one
+sense, due to the 'matter,' which set a hard problem; but they would be
+the first to declare that _nothing_ in the poem ought to be only mixedly
+poetic.
+
+In the same way, satire is not in its nature a highly poetic kind of
+poetry, but it ought, in its own kind, to be poetry throughout, and
+therefore ought not to show a merely partial unity of content and form.
+If the satirist makes us exclaim 'This is sheer prose wonderfully well
+disguised,' that is a fault, and _his_ fault (unless it happens to be
+ours). The idea that a tragedy or lyric could really be reproduced in a
+form not its own strikes us as ridiculous; the idea that a satire could
+so be reproduced seems much less ridiculous; but if it were true the
+satire would not be poetry at all.
+
+The reader will now see where, in my judgment, the paragraph is wrong.
+Elsewhere it is, I think, right, though it deals with a subject far too
+large for a paragraph. This is also true of the next paragraph, which
+uses the false distinction of 'pure' and 'mixed,' and which will hold in
+various degrees of poetry in various degrees poetical.
+
+It is of course possible to use a distinction of 'pure' and 'mixed' in
+another sense. Poetry, whatever its kind, would be pure as far as it
+preserved the unity of content and form; mixed, so far as it failed to
+do so--in other words, failed to be poetry and was partly prosaic.
+
+
+  NOTE E
+
+It is possible therefore that the poem, as it existed at certain stages
+in its growth, may correspond roughly with the poem as it exists in the
+memories of various readers. A reader who is fond of the poem and often
+thinks of it, but remembers only half the words and perhaps fills up the
+gaps with his own words, may possess something like the poem as it was
+when half-made. There are readers again who retain only what they would
+call the 'idea' of the poem; and the poem _may_ have begun from such an
+idea. Others will forget all the words, and will not profess to remember
+even the 'meaning,' but believe that they possess the 'spirit' of the
+poem. And what they possess may have, I think, an immense value. The
+poem, of course, it is not; but it may answer to the state of
+imaginative feeling or emotional imagination which was the germ of the
+poem. This is, in one sense, quite definite: it would not be the germ of
+a decidedly different poem: but in another sense it is indefinite,
+comparatively structureless, more a 'stimmung' than an idea.
+
+Such correspondences, naturally, must be very rough, if only because the
+readers have been at one time in contact with the fully grown poem.
+
+
+  NOTE F
+
+I should be sorry if what is said here and elsewhere were taken to imply
+depreciation of all attempts at the interpretation of works of art. As
+regards poetry, such attempts, though they cannot possibly express the
+whole meaning of a poem, may do much to facilitate the poetic
+apprehension of that meaning. And, although the attempt is still more
+hazardous in the case of music and painting, I believe it may have a
+similar value. That its results _may_ be absurd or disgusting goes
+without saying, and whether they are ever of use to musicians or the
+musically educated I do not know. But I see no reason why an exceedingly
+competent person should not try to indicate the emotional tone of a
+composition, movement, or passage, or the changes of feeling within it,
+or even, very roughly, the 'idea' he may suppose it to embody (though he
+need not imply that the composer had any of this before his mind). And I
+believe that such indications, however inadequate they must be, may
+greatly help the uneducated lover of music to hear more truly the music
+itself.
+
+
+  NOTE G
+
+This new question has 'quite another sense' than that of the question,
+What is the meaning or content expressed by the form of a poem? The new
+question asks, What is it that the _poem_, the unity of this content and
+form, is trying to express? This 'beyond' is beyond the content as well
+as the form.
+
+Of course, I should add, it is not _merely_ beyond them or outside of
+them. If it were, they (the poem) could not 'suggest' it. They are a
+partial manifestation of it, and point beyond themselves to it, both
+because they _are_ a manifestation and because this is partial.
+
+The same thing is true, not only (as is remarked in the text) of the
+other arts and of religion and philosophy, but also of what is commonly
+called reality. This reality is a manifestation of a different order
+from poetry, and in certain important respects a much more imperfect
+manifestation. Hence, as was pointed out (pp. 6, 7, note B), poetry is
+not a copy of it, but in dealing with it idealises it, and in doing so
+produces in certain respects a fuller manifestation. On the other hand,
+that imperfect 'reality' has for us a character in which poetry is
+deficient,--the character in virtue of which we call it 'reality.' It
+is, we feel, thrust upon us, not made by us or by any other man. And in
+this respect it seems more akin than poetry to that 'beyond,' or
+absolute, or perfection, which we want, which partially expresses itself
+in both, and which could not be perfection and could not satisfy us if
+it were not real (though it cannot be real in the same sense as that
+imperfect 'reality'). This seems the ultimate ground of the requirement
+that poetry, though no copy of 'reality,' should not be mere 'fancy,'
+but should refer to, and interpret, that 'reality.' For that reality,
+however imperfectly it reveals perfection, is at least no mere fancy.
+(Not that the merest fancy can fail to reveal something of perfection.)
+
+The lines quoted on p. 26 are from a fragment of Shelley's beginning 'Is
+it that in some brighter sphere.'
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The lecture, as printed in 1901, was preceded by the following
+    note: "This Lecture is printed almost as it was delivered. I am aware
+    that, especially in the earlier pages, difficult subjects are treated
+    in a manner far too summary, but they require an exposition so full
+    that it would destroy the original form of the Lecture, while a
+    slight expansion would do little to provide against
+    misunderstandings." A few verbal changes have now been made, some
+    notes have been added, and some of the introductory remarks omitted.
+
+  [2] Note A.
+
+  [3] Note B.
+
+  [4] What is here called 'substance' is what people generally mean
+    when they use the word 'subject' and insist on the value of the
+    subject. I am not arguing against this usage, or in favour of the
+    usage which I have adopted for the sake of clearness. It does not
+    matter which we employ, so long as we and others know what we mean.
+    (I use 'substance' and 'content' indifferently.)
+
+  [5] These remarks will hold good, _mutatis mutandis_, if by
+    'substance' is understood the 'moral' or the 'idea' of a poem,
+    although perhaps in one instance out of five thousand this may be
+    found in so many words in the poem.
+
+  [6] On the other hand, the absence, or worse than absence, of style,
+    in this sense, is a serious matter.
+
+  [7] Note C.
+
+  [8] This paragraph is criticized in Note D.
+
+  [9]: Note E.
+
+  [10] Not that to Schiller 'form' meant mere style and versification.
+
+  [11] Note F.
+
+  [12] Note G.
+
+  [13] In Schiller's phrase, they have extirpated the mere 'matter.' We
+    often say that they do this by dint of style. This is roughly true,
+    but in strictness it means, as we have seen, not that they decorate
+    the mere 'matter' with a mere 'form,' but that they produce a new
+    content-form.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUBLIME
+
+
+THE SUBLIME[1]
+
+
+Coleridge used to tell a story about his visit to the Falls of Clyde;
+but he told it with such variations that the details are uncertain, and
+without regard to truth I shall change it to the shape that suits my
+purpose best. After gazing at the Falls for some time, he began to
+consider what adjective would answer most precisely to the impression he
+had received; and he came to the conclusion that the proper word was
+'sublime.' Two other tourists arrived, and, standing by him, looked in
+silence at the spectacle. Then, to Coleridge's high satisfaction, the
+gentleman exclaimed, 'It is sublime.' To which the lady responded, 'Yes,
+it is the prettiest thing I ever saw.'
+
+This poor lady's incapacity (for I assume that Coleridge and her husband
+were in the right) is ludicrous, but it is also a little painful.
+Sublimity and prettiness are qualities separated by so great a distance
+that our sudden attempt to unite them has a comically incongruous
+effect. At the same time the first of these qualities is so exalted that
+the exhibition of entire inability to perceive it is distressing.
+Astonishment, rapture, awe, even self-abasement, are among the emotions
+evoked by sublimity. Many would be inclined to pronounce it the very
+highest of all the forms assumed by beauty, whether in nature or in
+works of imagination.
+
+I propose to make some remarks on this quality, and even to attempt some
+sort of answer to the question what sublimity is. I say 'some sort of
+answer,' because the question is large and difficult, and I can deal
+with it only in outline and by drawing artificial limits round it and
+refusing to discuss certain presuppositions on which the answer rests.
+What I mean by these last words will be evident if I begin by referring
+to a term which will often recur in this lecture--the term 'beauty.'
+
+When we call sublimity a form of beauty, as I did just now, the word
+'beauty' is obviously being used in the widest sense. It is the sense
+which the word bears when we distinguish beauty from goodness and from
+truth, or when 'beautiful' is taken to signify anything and everything
+that gives aesthetic satisfaction, or when 'Aesthetics' and 'Philosophy
+of the Beautiful' are used as equivalent expressions. Of beauty, thus
+understood, sublimity is one particular kind among a number of others,
+for instance prettiness. But 'beauty' and 'beautiful' have also another
+meaning, narrower and more specific, as when we say that a thing is
+pretty but not beautiful, or that it is beautiful but not sublime. The
+beauty we have in view here is evidently not the same as beauty in the
+wider sense; it is only, like sublimity or prettiness, a particular kind
+or mode of that beauty. This ambiguity of the words 'beauty' and
+'beautiful' is a great inconvenience, and especially so in a lecture,
+where it forces us to add some qualification to the words whenever they
+occur: but it cannot be helped. (Now that the lecture is printed I am
+able to avoid these qualifications by printing the words in inverted
+commas where they bear the narrower sense.)[2]
+
+Now, obviously, all the particular kinds or modes of beauty must have,
+up to a certain point, the same nature. They must all possess that
+character in virtue of which they are called beautiful rather than good
+or true. And so a philosopher, investigating one of these kinds, would
+first have to determine this common nature or character; and then he
+would go on to ascertain what it is that distinguishes the particular
+kind from its companions. But here we cannot follow such a method. The
+nature of beauty in general is so much disputed and so variously defined
+that to discuss it here by way of preface would be absurd; and on the
+other hand it would be both presumptuous and useless to assume the truth
+of any one account of it. Our only plan, therefore, must be to leave it
+entirely alone, and to consider merely the distinctive character of
+sublimity. Let beauty in general be what it may, what is it that marks
+off _this_ kind of beauty from others, and what is there peculiar in our
+state of mind when we are moved to apply to anything the specific
+epithet 'sublime'?--such is our question. And this plan is not merely
+the only possible one, but it is, I believe, quite justifiable, since,
+so far as I can see, the answer to our particular question, unless it is
+pushed further than I propose to go, is unaffected by the differences
+among theories of repute concerning beauty in general. At the same time,
+it is essential to realise and always to bear in mind one consequence of
+this plan; which is that our account of what is peculiar to sublimity
+will not be an account of sublimity in its full nature. For sublimity is
+not those peculiar characteristics alone, it is that _beauty_ which is
+distinguished by them, and a large part of its effect is due to that
+general nature of beauty which it shares with other kinds, and which we
+leave unexamined.
+
+In considering the question thus defined I propose to start from our
+common aesthetic experience and to attempt to arrive at an answer by
+degrees. It will be understood, therefore, that our first results may
+have to be modified as we proceed. And I will venture to ask my hearers,
+further, to ignore for the time any doubts they may feel whether I am
+right in saying, by way of illustration, that this or that thing is
+sublime. Such differences of opinion scarcely affect our question, which
+is not whether in a given case the epithet is rightly applied, but what
+the epithet signifies. And it has to be borne in mind that, while no two
+kinds of beauty can be quite the same, a _thing_ may very well possess
+beauty of two different kinds.
+
+Let us begin by placing side by side five terms which represent five of
+the many modes of beauty--sublime, grand, 'beautiful,' graceful, pretty.
+'Beautiful' is here placed in the middle. Before it come two terms,
+sublime and grand; and beyond it lie two others, graceful and pretty.
+Now is it not the case that the first two, though not identical, still
+seem to be allied in some respect; that the last two also seem to be
+allied in some respect; that in this respect, whatever it may be, these
+two pairs seem to stand apart from one another, and even to stand in
+contrast; that 'beauty,' in this respect, seems to hold a neutral
+position, though perhaps inclining rather to grace than to grandeur; and
+that the extreme terms, sublime and pretty, seem in this respect to be
+the most widely removed; so that this series of five constitutes, in a
+sense, a descending series,--descending not necessarily in value, but in
+some particular respect not yet assigned? If, for example, in the lady's
+answer, 'Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw,' you substitute for
+'prettiest' first 'most graceful,' and then 'most beautiful,' and then
+'grandest,' you will find that your astonishment at her diminishes at
+each step, and that at the last, when she identifies sublimity and
+grandeur, she is guilty no longer of an absurdity, but only of a slight
+anti-climax. If, I may add, she had said 'majestic,' the anti-climax
+would have been slighter still, and, in fact, in one version of the
+story Coleridge says that 'majestic' was the word he himself chose.
+
+What then is the 'respect' in question here,--the something or other in
+regard to which sublimity and grandeur seemed to be allied with one
+another, and to differ decidedly from grace and prettiness? It appears
+to be greatness. Thousands of things are 'beautiful,' graceful, or
+pretty, and yet make no impression of greatness, nay, this impression in
+many cases appears to collide with, and even to destroy, that of grace
+or prettiness, so that if a pretty thing produced it you would cease to
+call it pretty. But whatever strikes us as sublime produces an
+impression of greatness, and more--of exceeding or even overwhelming
+greatness. And this greatness, further, is apparently no mere
+accompaniment of sublimity, but essential to it: remove the greatness in
+imagination, and the sublimity vanishes. Grandeur, too, seems always to
+possess greatness, though not in this superlative degree; while 'beauty'
+neither invariably possesses it nor tends, like prettiness and grace, to
+exclude it. I will try, not to defend these statements by argument, but
+to develop their meaning by help of illustrations, dismissing from view
+the minor differences between these modes of beauty, and, for the most
+part, leaving grandeur out of account.
+
+We need not ask here what is the exact meaning of that 'greatness' of
+which I have spoken: but we must observe at once that the greatness in
+question is of more than one kind. Let us understand by the term, to
+begin with, greatness of extent,--of size, number, or duration; and let
+us ask whether sublime things are, in this sense, exceedingly great.
+Some certainly are. The vault of heaven, one expanse of blue, or dark
+and studded with countless and prodigiously distant stars; the sea that
+stretches to the horizon and beyond it, a surface smooth as glass or
+breaking into innumerable waves; time, to which we can imagine no
+beginning and no end,--these furnish favourite examples of sublimity;
+and to call them great seems almost mockery, for they are images of
+immeasurable magnitude. When we turn from them to living beings, of
+course our standard of greatness changes;[3] but, using the standard
+appropriate to the sphere, we find again that the sublime things have,
+for the most part, great magnitude. A graceful tree need not be a large
+one; a pretty tree is almost always small; but a sublime tree is almost
+always large. If you were asked to mention sublime animals, you would
+perhaps suggest, among birds, the eagle; among fishes, if any, the
+whale; among beasts, the lion or the tiger, the python or the elephant.
+But you would find it hard to name a sublime insect; and indeed it is
+not easy, perhaps not possible, to feel sublimity in any animal smaller
+than oneself, unless one goes beyond the special kind of greatness at
+present under review. Consider again such facts as these: that a human
+being of average, or even of less than average, stature and build may be
+graceful and even 'beautiful,' but can hardly, in respect of stature and
+build, be grand or sublime; that we most commonly think of flowers as
+little things, and also most commonly think of them as 'beautiful,'
+graceful, pretty, but rarely as grand, and still more rarely as
+sublime, and that in these latter cases we do not think of them as
+small; that a mighty river may well be sublime, but hardly a stream; a
+towering or far-stretching mountain, but hardly a low hill; a vast
+bridge, but hardly one of moderate span; a great cathedral, but hardly a
+village church; that a model of a sublime building is not sublime,
+unless in imagination you expand it to the dimensions of its original;
+that a plain, though flat, may be sublime if its extent is immense; that
+while we constantly say 'a pretty little thing,' or even 'a beautiful
+little thing,' nobody ever says 'a sublime little thing.' Examples like
+these seem to show clearly--not that bigness is sublimity, for bigness
+need have no beauty, while sublimity is a mode of beauty--but that this
+particular mode of beauty is frequently connected with, and dependent
+on, exceeding greatness of extent.
+
+Let us now take a further step. Can there be sublimity when such
+greatness is absent? And, if there can, is greatness of some other sort
+always present in such cases, and essential to the sublime effect? The
+answer to the first of these questions is beyond doubt. Children have no
+great extension, and what Wordsworth calls 'a six-years' darling of a
+pigmy size' is (if a darling) generally called pretty but not sublime;
+for it _is_ 'of a pigmy size.' Yet it certainly _may_ be sublime, and it
+is so to the poet who addresses it thus:
+
+  Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie
+    Thy soul's immensity....
+  Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
+  On whom those truths do rest
+  Which we are toiling all our lives to find.
+
+A baby is still smaller, but a baby too may be sublime. The starry sky
+is not more sublime than the babe on the arm of the Madonna di San
+Sisto. A sparrow is more diminutive still; but that it is possible for a
+sparrow to be sublime is not difficult to show. This is a translation
+of a prose poem by Tourgénieff:
+
+  I was on my way home from hunting, and was walking up the garden
+  avenue. My dog was running on in front of me.
+
+  Suddenly he slackened his pace, and began to steal forward as though
+  he scented game ahead.
+
+  I looked along the avenue; and I saw on the ground a young sparrow,
+  its beak edged with yellow, and its head covered with soft down. It
+  had fallen from the nest (a strong wind was blowing, and shaking the
+  birches of the avenue); and there it sat and never stirred, except to
+  stretch out its little half-grown wings in a helpless flutter.
+
+  My dog was slowly approaching it, when suddenly, darting from the tree
+  overhead, an old black-throated sparrow dropt like a stone right
+  before his nose, and, all rumpled and flustered, with a plaintive
+  desperate cry flung itself, once, twice, at his open jaws with their
+  great teeth.
+
+  It would save its young one; it screened it with its own body; the
+  tiny frame quivered with terror; the little cries grew wild and
+  hoarse; it sank and died. It had sacrificed itself.
+
+  What a huge monster the dog must have seemed to it! And yet it could
+  not stay up there on its safe bough. A power stronger than its own
+  will tore it away.
+
+  My dog stood still, and then slunk back disconcerted. Plainly he too
+  had to recognise that power. I called him to me; and a feeling of
+  reverence came over me as I passed on.
+
+  Yes, do not laugh. It was really reverence I felt before that little
+  heroic bird and the passionate outburst of its love.
+
+  Love, I thought, is verily stronger than death and the terror of
+  death. By love, only by love, is life sustained and moved.
+
+This sparrow, it will be agreed, is sublime. What, then, makes it so?
+Not largeness of size, assuredly, but, we answer, its love and courage.
+Yes; but what do we mean by '_its_ love and courage'? We often meet with
+love and courage, and always admire and approve them; but we do not
+always find them sublime. Why, then, are they sublime in the sparrow?
+From their extraordinary greatness. It is not in the quality alone, but
+in the quantity of the quality, that the sublimity lies. And this may be
+readily seen if we imagine the quantity to be considerably reduced,--if
+we imagine the parent bird, after its first brave effort, flinching and
+flying away, or if we suppose the bird that sacrifices itself to be no
+sparrow but a turkey. In either case love and courage would remain, but
+sublimity would recede or vanish, simply because the love and courage
+would no longer possess the required immensity.[4]
+
+The sublimity of the sparrow, then, no less than that of the sky or sea,
+depends on exceeding or overwhelming greatness--a greatness, however,
+not of extension but rather of strength or power, and in this case of
+spiritual power. 'Love is _stronger_ than death,' quotes the poet; 'a
+power _stronger_ than its own tore it away.' So it is with the dog of
+whom Scott and Wordsworth sang, whose master had perished among the
+crags of Helvellyn, and who was found three months after by his master's
+body,
+
+  How nourished here through such long time
+  He knows who gave that love sublime,
+  And gave that strength of feeling, great
+  Above all human estimate.[5]
+
+And if we look further we shall find that these cases of sublimity are,
+in this respect, far from being exceptions: 'thy soul's _immensity_,'
+says Wordsworth to the child; '_mighty_ prophet' he calls it. We shall
+find, in fact, that in the sublime, when there is not greatness of
+extent, there is another greatness, which (without saying that the
+phrase is invariably the most appropriate) we may call greatness of
+power and which in these cases is essential.
+
+We must develop this statement a little. Naturally the power, and
+therefore the sublimity, will differ in its character in different
+instances, and therefore will affect us variously. It may be--to
+classify very roughly--physical, or vital, or (in the old wide sense of
+the word) moral, like that of the sparrow and the dog. And physical
+force will appeal to the imagination in one way, and vital in another,
+and moral or spiritual in another. But it is still power of some kind
+that makes a thing sublime rather than graceful, and immensity of power
+that makes it sublime rather than merely grand. For example, the lines
+of the water in a thin cascade may be exquisitely graceful, but such a
+cascade has not power enough to be sublime. Flickering fire in a grate
+is often 'beautiful,' but it is not sublime; the fire of a big bonfire
+is on the way to be so; a 'great fire' frequently is so, because it
+gives the impression of tremendous power. The ocean, in those stanzas of
+_Childe Harold_ which no amount of familiarity or of defect can deprive
+of their sublimity, is the untameable monster which engulfs men as
+lightly as rain-drops and shatters fleets like toys. The sublimity of
+Behemoth and Leviathan in the _Book of Job_ lies in the contrast of
+their enormous might with the puny power of man; that of the horse in
+the fiery energy of his courage and strength. Think of sublime figures
+or ideas in the world of fiction or of history, and you find that,
+whether they are radiant or gloomy, violent or peaceful, terrible or
+adorable, they all impress the imagination by their immense or even
+irresistible might. It is so with Achilles, standing alone beyond the
+wall, with the light of the divine flame soaring from his head, while he
+sends across the trench that shout at whose far-off sound the hearts of
+the Trojans die within them; or with Odysseus, when the moment of his
+vengeance has come, and he casts off his rags, and leaps onto the
+threshold with his bow, and pours his arrows down at his feet, and looks
+down the long hall at the doomed faces of his feasting enemies. Milton's
+Satan is sublime when he refuses to accept defeat from an omnipotent
+foe; he ceases to be so in tempting Eve, because here he shows not power
+but cunning, and we feel not the strength of his cunning but the
+weakness of his victim. In the bust of Zeus in the Vatican, in some of
+the figures of the Medici Chapel, in 'The horse and his rider,' we feel
+again sublimity, because we feel gigantic power, put forth or held in
+reserve. Fate or Death, imagined as a lurking assassin, is not sublime,
+but may become so when imagined as inevitable, irresistible,
+_ineluctabile fatum_. The eternal laws to which Antigone appeals, like
+that Duty which preserves the strength and freshness of the most ancient
+heavens, are sublime. Prometheus, the saviour of mankind, opposing a
+boundless power of enduring pain to a boundless power of inflicting it;
+Regulus returning unmoved to his doom; Socrates, serene and even joyous
+in the presence of injury and death and the lamentations of his friends,
+are sublime. The words 'I have overcome the world' are among the most
+sublime on record, and they are also the expression of the absolute
+power of the spirit.[6]
+
+It seems clear, then, that sublimity very often arises from an
+overwhelming greatness of power. So abundant, indeed, are the instances
+that one begins to wonder whether it ever arises from any other kind of
+greatness, and whether we were right in supposing that mere magnitude of
+extension can produce it. Would such magnitude, however prodigious, seem
+to us sublime unless we insensibly construed it as the sign of power? In
+the case of living things, at any rate, this doubt seems to be well
+founded. A tree is sublime not because it occupies a large extent of
+empty space or time, but from the power in it which raises aloft and
+spreads abroad a thousand branches and a million leaves, or which has
+battled for centuries with buffeting storms and has seen summers and
+winters arise and pass like the hours of our day. It is not the mere
+bulk of the lion or the eagle that wins them their title as king of
+beasts or of birds, but the power exhibited in the gigantic head and arm
+or the stretch of wing and the piercing eye. And even when we pass from
+the realm of life our doubt remains. Would a mountain, a river, or a
+building be sublime to us if we did not read their masses and lines as
+symbols of force? Would even the illimitable extent of sea or sky, the
+endlessness of time, or the countlessness of stars or sands or waves,
+bring us anything but fatigue or depression if we did not apprehend
+them, in some way and however vaguely, as expressions of immeasurable
+power--power that created them, or lives in them, or _can_ count them;
+so that what impresses us is not the mere absence of limits, but the
+presence of something that overpowers any imaginable limit? If these
+doubts are justified (as in my opinion they are), the conclusion will
+follow that the exceeding greatness required for sublimity is _always_
+greatness of some kind of power, though in one class of cases the
+impression of this greatness can only be conveyed through immensity of
+extent.
+
+However this question may be decided, our result so far seems to be that
+the peculiarity of the sublime lies in some exceeding and overwhelming
+greatness. But before this result can be considered safe, two obstacles
+must be removed. In the first place, are there no negative instances? Is
+it impossible to find anything sublime which does _not_ show this
+greatness? Naturally I can say no more than that I have conscientiously
+searched for exceptions to the rule and have searched in vain. I can
+find only apparent exceptions which in reality confirm the rule; and I
+will mention only those which look the most formidable. They are cases
+where at first sight there seems to be not merely an inconsiderable
+amount of power or other greatness, but actually the negation of it. For
+example, the silence of night, or the sudden pause in a storm or in
+stormy music, or again the silence and movelessness of death, may
+undoubtedly be sublime; and how, it may be asked, can a mere absence of
+sound and motion be an exhibition of immense greatness? It cannot, I
+answer; but neither can it be sublime. If you apprehend the silence in
+these cases as a mere absence, no feeling of sublimity will arise in
+your mind; and if you do apprehend the silence as sublime, it is to you
+the sign of immense power, put forth or held in reserve. The 'dead pause
+abrupt of mighty winds' is the pause _of_ mighty winds and not of gentle
+breezes; and it is not the absence of mighty winds, but their _pause_
+before they burst into renewed fury; or if their silence is not their
+will, it is a silence imposed on them by something mightier even than
+they. In either case there may be sublimity, but then there is the
+impression of immense power. In the same way the silence of night, when
+it seems sublime, is apprehended not as the absence but as the subdual
+of sound,--the stillness wrought by a power so mighty that at its touch
+all the restless noises of the day fall dumb,--or the brooding of an
+omnipotent peace over the world. And such a peace it is, an unassailable
+peace, that may make the face of death sublime, a stillness which is not
+moveless but immovable.[7]
+
+At present, then, our result seems to stand firm. But another danger
+remains. Granted that in the sublime there is always some exceeding and
+overwhelming greatness, is that _all_ there is? Is there not in every
+case some further characteristic? This question, premising that the
+phrase 'overwhelming greatness' contains important implications which
+have yet to be considered, I can only answer like the last. I do not
+find any other peculiarity that is _always_ present. Several have been
+alleged, and one or two of these will be mentioned later, but none of
+them appears to show itself indubitably wherever sublimity is found. It
+is easy to give a much fuller account of the sublime if you include in
+it everything that impresses you in a sublime baby while you omit to
+consider Behemoth, or if you build upon Socrates and ignore Satan, or if
+you confine yourself to the sublime thunderstorm and forget the sublime
+rainbow or sunrise. But then your account will not answer to the
+instances you have ignored; and when you take them in you will have to
+pare it down until perhaps you end in a result like ours. At any rate we
+had better be content with it for the present, and turn to another
+aspect of the matter.[8]
+
+So far, on the whole, we have been regarding the sublime object as if
+its sublimity were independent of our state of mind in feeling and
+apprehending it. Yet the adjective in the phrase 'overwhelming
+greatness' should at once suggest the truth that this state of mind is
+essential to sublimity. Let us now therefore look inward, and ask how
+this state differs from our state in perceiving or imagining what is
+graceful or 'beautiful.' Since Kant dealt with the subject, most writers
+who have thought about it have agreed that there is a decided
+difference, which I will try to describe broadly, and without pledging
+myself to the entire accuracy of the description.
+
+When, on seeing or hearing something, we exclaim, How graceful! or How
+lovely! or How 'beautiful'! there is in us an immediate outflow of
+pleasure, an unchecked expansion, a delightful sense of harmony between
+the thing and ourselves.
+
+                            The air
+  Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
+  Unto our gentle senses.... The heaven's breath
+  Smells wooingly here.
+
+The thing wins us and draws us towards itself without resistance.
+Something in us hastens to meet it in sympathy or love. Our feeling, we
+may say, is entirely affirmative. For though it is not always untouched
+by pain (for the thing may have sadness in it),[9] this touch of pain or
+sadness does not mean any disharmony between the thing and us, or
+involve any check in our acceptance of it.
+
+In the case of sublimity, on the other hand, this acceptance does not
+seem to be so simple or immediate. There seem, in fact, to be two
+'aspects' or stages in it.[10] First--if only for a fraction of a
+second--there is a sense of being checked, or baffled, or even
+stupefied, or possibly even repelled or menaced, as though something
+were affecting us which we could not receive, or grasp, or stand up to.
+In certain cases we appear to shrink away from it, as though it thrust
+upon us a sense of our own feebleness or insignificance. This we may
+call by the convenient but too strong name of the negative stage. It is
+essential to sublimity; and nothing seems to correspond to it in our
+perception of loveliness or grace except sometimes a sense of surprise
+or wonder, which is wholly pleasant, and which does not necessarily
+qualify the lovely or graceful thing.
+
+But this first stage or aspect clearly does not by itself suffice for
+sublimity. To it there succeeds, it may be instantaneously or more
+gradually, another: a powerful reaction, a rush of self-expansion, or an
+uplifting, or a sense of being borne out of the self that was checked,
+or even of being carried away beyond all checks and limits. These
+feelings, even when the sublime thing might be called forbidding,
+menacing, or terrible, are always positive,--feelings of union with it;
+and, when its nature permits of this, they may amount to rapture or
+adoration. But the mark of the negation from which they have issued, the
+'smell of the fire,' usually remains on them. The union, we may say
+perhaps, has required a self-surrender, and the rapture or adoration is
+often strongly tinged with awe.
+
+Now, this peculiar doubleness in our apprehension of sublimity, this
+presence of two equally necessary stages or phases, a negative and a
+positive, seems to correspond with the peculiarity which we found in the
+sublime object when we were provisionally regarding it by itself. It is
+its overwhelming greatness which for a moment checks, baffles, subdues,
+even repels us or makes us feel our littleness, and which then, forcing
+its way into the imagination and emotions, distends or uplifts them to
+its own dimensions. We burst our own limits, go out to the sublime thing,
+identify ourselves ideally with it, and share its immense greatness. But
+if, and in so far as, we remain conscious of our difference from it, we
+still feel the insignificance of our actual selves, and our glory is
+mingled with awe or even with self-abasement.[11]
+
+In writing thus I was endeavouring simply and without any _arričre
+pensée_ to describe a mode of aesthetic experience. But it must have
+occurred to some of my hearers that the description recalls other kinds
+of experience. And if they find it accurate in the main, they will
+appreciate, even if they do not accept, the exalted claim which
+philosophers, in various forms, have made for the sublime. It awakes in
+us, they say, through the check or shock which it gives to our finitude,
+the consciousness of an infinite or absolute; and this is the reason of
+the kinship we feel between this particular mode of aesthetic experience
+on the one side, and, on the other, morality or religion. For there, by
+the denial of our merely finite or individual selves, we rise into union
+with the law which imposes on us an unconditional demand, or with the
+infinite source and end of our spiritual life.
+
+These are ideas much too large to be considered now, and even later I
+can but touch on them. But the mere mention of them may carry us to the
+last enquiries with which we can deal. For it suggests this question:
+Supposing that high claim to be justified at all, can it really be made
+for _all_ sublimity, or must it not be confined to the very highest
+forms? A similar question must be raised as to various other statements
+regarding the sublime; and I go on to speak of some of these.
+
+(1) Burke asserted that the sublime is always founded on fear; indeed he
+considered this to be its distinguishing characteristic. Setting aside,
+then, the connection of this statement with Burke's general doctrine (a
+doctrine impossible to accept), we may ask, Is it true that the 'check'
+administered by the sublime object is always one of fear? We must
+answer, first, that if this check is part of an aesthetic experience and
+not a mere preliminary to it, it can _never_ be fear in the common
+meaning of that word, or what may be called practical or real fear. So
+far as we are _practically_ afraid of a storm or a mountain, afraid, for
+instance, for ourselves as bodily beings in this particular spatial and
+temporal position, the storm or mountain is not sublime to us, it is
+simply terrible. _That_ fear must be absent, or must not engage
+attention, or must be changed in character, if the object is to be for
+us _sublimely_ terrible, something with which we identify ourselves in
+imaginative sympathy, and which so causes a great self-expansion. But,
+secondly, even if 'fear' is understood rightly as indicating a feature
+in an aesthetic and not a practical experience, our question must
+obviously be answered in the negative. There is fear in the apprehension
+of some sublimity, but by no means in that of all. If there is a
+momentary check, for example, in the case of a rainbow, a glorious
+sunrise, the starry night, Socrates, or Tourgénieff's sparrow, 'fear,'
+unless the meaning of the word is unnaturally extended, is surely not
+the name for this check.
+
+Burke's mistake, however, implies a recognition of the 'negative aspect'
+in sublimity, and it may remind us of a truth. Instances of the sublime
+differ greatly in regard to the prominence and tone of this aspect. It
+is less marked, for example, and less obvious, in the case of a sublime
+rainbow or sunrise than in that of a sublime and 'terrible'
+thunderstorm. And in general we may say that the _distinctive_ nature of
+sublimity appears most clearly where this aspect is most prominent,--so
+prominent, perhaps, that we have a more or less explicit sense of the
+littleness and powerlessness of ourselves, and indeed of the whole
+world of our usual experience. It is here that the object is most
+decidedly more than 'glorious,' or even 'majestic,' and that sublimity
+appears in antithesis to grace. Only we must not give an account of the
+sublime which fully applies to these cases _alone_, or suppose that the
+negative aspect is absent in other cases. If a rainbow or sunrise is
+really sublime, it is overwhelming as well as uplifting. Nor must we
+assume that the most distinctively sublime must also be the most
+sublime. The sunrise witnessed from an immense snowfield in the high
+Alps may be as sublime as an Alpine thunderstorm, though its sublimity
+is different.
+
+(2) Grace and 'beauty,' it has been said, though not of course merely
+sensuous, are yet friendly to sense. It is their essence, in fact, to be
+a harmonious unity of sense and spirit, and so to reconcile powers which
+in much of our experience are conflicting and dissonant. But sublimity
+is harsh and hostile to sense. It makes us feel in ourselves and in the
+world the presence of something irresistibly superior to sense. And this
+is the reason why it does not soothe or delight, but uplifts us.
+
+This statement recalls some of the ideas we have been considering, but
+it may easily mislead. For one thing, it is impossible for any sublimity
+whatever to be _merely_ hostile to 'sense,' since everything aesthetic
+must appeal to sense or sensuous imagination, so that the sublime must
+at least express its hostility to sense by means of sense. And if we
+take the phrase in another meaning, the statement may mislead still, for
+it attributes to sublimity in general what is a characteristic only of
+certain forms of the sublime. Scores of examples could easily be quoted
+which show no hostility to sense: _e.g._ a sublime lion, or bull, or
+tree. And if we think of our old examples of the rainbow and the
+sunrise, or, better still, of a thunderstorm, or 'The horse and his
+rider,' or the 'Sanctus' in Bach's Mass, we find the sublime thing
+actually making a powerful appeal to sense and depending for its
+sublimity on the vehemence or volume of this appeal. Diminish at all
+markedly in these cases the amount of light, colour, or sound, and the
+sublimity would vanish. Of course the appeal here is not merely to
+sense, but it _is_ to sense.
+
+But undoubtedly there is another kind of sublimity; and it is
+particularly interesting. Here, it is true, a sort of despite is done to
+the senses and what speaks to them. As we have seen, the greatness of
+soul in the sparrow is enhanced by contrast with the smallness and
+feebleness of its body, and pours contempt on the visible magnitude of
+the hound; and the stillness of night or death is sublime from its
+active negation of sound and motion. Again, there is a famous passage
+which depends for its effect on this, that, first, sublime things are
+introduced which appeal powerfully to sense, and then something else,
+which does not so appeal, is made to appear even more sublime and to put
+them to shame: first a great and strong wind, an earthquake, a fire; and
+after the fire a still small voice. Sometimes, again, as Burke observed,
+sublimity depends on, or is increased by, darkness, obscurity,
+vagueness,--refusal of satisfaction to the sense of sight. Often in
+these cases the sublime object is terrible, and its terror is increased
+by inability to see or distinguish it. Examples are the image of 'the
+pestilence that walketh in darkness,' or Milton's description of Death,
+or the lines in the _Book of Job_:
+
+  In thoughts from the visions of the night
+  When deep sleep falleth on men,
+  Fear came upon me and trembling,
+  Which made all my bones to shake.
+  Then a spirit passed before my face;
+  The hair of my flesh stood up.
+  It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.
+  An image was before mine eyes.
+  There was silence, and I heard a voice.
+
+It has been observed that attempts to illustrate such passages as these
+dissipate their sublimity by diminishing the obscurity of the object.
+Blake's illustrations of the lines in Milton and in _Job_[12] show this,
+while his design of the morning-stars singing together is worthy even of
+the words.
+
+We may trace this severity towards sense, again, in examples already
+mentioned, the ideas of Fate, of the eternal laws to which Antigone
+appeals, of Duty in Wordsworth's ode. We imagine these powers as removed
+from sight, and indeed wholly immaterial, and yet as exercising
+sovereign dominion over the visible and material world. And their
+sublimity would be endangered if we tried to bring them nearer to sense
+by picturing the means by which they exercise their control.
+
+I will take a last example. It has probably been mentioned in almost
+every account of the sublime since Longinus quoted it in his work on
+Elevation of Style. And it is of special interest here because it
+illustrates at one and the same time the two kinds of sublimity which we
+are engaged in distinguishing. 'God said, Let there be light, and there
+was light.' The idea of the first and instantaneous appearance of light,
+and that the whole light of the whole world, is already sublime; and its
+primary appeal is to sense. The further idea that this transcendently
+glorious apparition is due to mere words, to a breath--our symbol of
+tenuity, evanescence, impotence to influence material bulk--heightens
+enormously the impression of absolutely immeasurable power.
+
+To sum up, then, on this matter. It is not safe to distinguish the
+sublime from the 'beautiful' by its hostility to sense. The sublime may
+impress its overwhelming greatness in either of two ways, by an appeal
+to sense, or by a kind of despite done to it. Nor can we assert, if we
+think of the sunrise, the thunderstorm, or of sublime music, that the
+second of these ways is more distinctive of the sublime than the first.
+But perhaps we may say this. In 'beauty' that which appears in a
+sensuous form seems to rest in it, to be perfectly embodied in it, and
+to have no tendency to pass beyond it. In the sublime, even where no
+such tendency is felt and sublimity is nearest to 'beauty,' we still
+feel the presence of a power held in reserve, which could with ease
+exceed its present expression. In _some_ forms of sublimity, again, the
+sensuous embodiment seems threatening to break in its effort to express
+what appears in it. And in others we definitely feel that the power
+which for a moment intimates its presence to sense is infinite and
+utterly uncontainable by any or all vehicles of its manifestation. Here
+we are furthest (in a way) from sense, and furthest also from 'beauty.'
+
+(3) I come finally and, as it will at first seem, needlessly to an idea
+which has already been touched on. The words 'boundless,' 'illimitable,'
+'infinite,' constantly recur in discussions of sublimity, and it cannot
+be denied that our experience constantly provokes them. The sublime has
+been said to awake in us the consciousness of our own infinity. It has
+been said, again, to represent in all cases the inadequacy of all finite
+forms to express the infinite. And so we may be told that, even if we do
+not adopt some such formula, but continue to speak of 'greatness,' we
+ought at least to go beyond the adjective 'exceeding' or 'overwhelming,'
+and to substitute 'immeasurable' or 'incomparable' or 'infinite.'
+
+Now, at the point we have reached, it would seem we might at once answer
+that a claim is here being made for the sublime in general which really
+holds good only of one kind of sublimity. Sometimes the sublime object
+_is_ apprehended as the Infinite, or again as an expression of it. This
+is, for example, a point of view frequent in Hebrew poetry. Sometimes,
+again, the object (_e.g._ time or the heavens) is apprehended, not
+indeed as _the_ Infinite, but still as infinite or immeasurable. But how
+are we to say that a sublime lion or mountain, or Satan or Lady Macbeth,
+is apprehended as the Infinite, or as infinite, or (usually) as even an
+expression of the Infinite? And how are we to say that the greatness of
+most sublime objects is apprehended as incomparable or immeasurable? It
+is only failure to observe these distinctions that leads to errors like
+one recorded in Coleridge's Table-talk (July 25, 1832): 'Could you ever
+discover anything sublime, in our sense of the word, in the classic
+Greek literature? I never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.'
+
+This reply, however, though sound so far as it goes, does not settle the
+question raised. It may still be maintained that sublimity in all cases,
+and even when we have no idea of infinity before us, does represent the
+inadequacy of all finite forms to express the infinite. And it is
+unfortunately impossible for us to deal fully with this contention. It
+would carry us into the region of metaphysics; and, while believing that
+no theory of the sublime can be complete which stops short of that
+region, I am aiming in this lecture at no such theory, but only at a
+result which may hold good without regard to further developments. All
+that I can do is to add a few words on the question whether, going
+beyond the adjective 'exceeding' or 'overwhelming,' we can say that the
+sublime is the beautiful which has immeasurable, incomparable, or
+infinite greatness. And the answer which I suggest and will go on to
+explain may be put thus: the greatness is only sometimes immeasurable,
+but it is _always_ unmeasured.
+
+We cannot apprehend an object as sublime while we apprehend it as
+comparably, measurably, or finitely great. Let the thing be what it
+may--physical, vital, or spiritual--the moment we say to ourselves, 'It
+is very great, but I know _how_ great,' or 'It is very great, but
+something else is as great or greater,' at that moment it has ceased to
+be sublime. Outside the consciousness of its sublimity we may be
+perfectly well aware that a thing is limited, measurable, equal or
+inferior to something else. But then we are _not_ finding it sublime.
+And when we _are_ so finding it, we are absorbed in _its_ greatness, and
+have no thought either of the limits of that or of its equality or
+inferiority to anything else. The lion of whom we are thinking, 'An
+elephant could kill him,' is no sublime lion. The Falls of Schaffhausen
+are sublime when you are lost in astonishment at them, but not when you
+are saying to yourself 'What must Niagara be!' This seems indubitable,
+and hence we may say that, in one sense, all sublimity has unmeasured
+greatness, and that no greatness is sublime which we apprehend as
+finite.
+
+But the absence of a consciousness of measure or finitude is one thing;
+the presence of a consciousness of immeasurableness or infinity is
+another. The first belongs to all sublimity, the second only to one kind
+of it,--to that where we _attempt_ to measure, or find limits to, the
+greatness of the thing. _If_ we make this attempt, as when we try in
+imagination to number the stars or to find an end to time, then it is
+essential to sublimity that we should fail, and so fail that the idea of
+immeasurability or endlessness emerges. In like manner, _if_ we compare
+things, nothing will appear sublime whose greatness is surpassed or even
+equalled by that of something else; and, if this process of comparison
+is pursued, in the end nothing will be found sublime except the absolute
+totality (however it may be imagined). And this kind of sublimity,
+which arises from attempts to measure or compare, is often exceedingly
+striking. But it is only one kind. For it is an entire delusion--though
+a very common one in theories of the sublime--to suppose that we _must_
+attempt to measure or compare. On the contrary, in the majority of cases
+our impression of overwhelming greatness is accompanied neither by any
+idea that this greatness has a measure, nor by the idea that it is
+immeasurable or infinite.[13]
+
+It will not do, then, to lay it down that the sublime is the beautiful
+which has immeasurable, incomparable, or infinite greatness. But I
+suggest that, after the explanations given, we may conveniently use the
+adjective 'unmeasured,' so long as we remember that this means one thing
+where we do not measure at all, and another thing where we try to
+measure and fail. And, this being so, it seems that we may say that
+_all_ sublimity, and not only that in which the idea of infinite
+greatness or of the Infinite emerges, is an image of infinity; for in
+all, through a certain check or limitation and the overcoming of it, we
+reach the perception or the imaginative idea of something which, on the
+one hand, has a positive nature, and, on the other, is either _not_
+determined as finite or _is_ determined as infinite. But we must not add
+that this makes the sublime superior to the 'beautiful.' For the
+'beautiful' too, though in a different way, is an image of infinity. In
+'beauty,' as we said, that which appears in a sensuous form seems to
+rest in that form, to be wholly embodied in it; it shows no tendency to
+pass beyond it, and intimates no reserve of force that might strain or
+break it. So that the 'beautiful' thing is a whole complete in itself,
+and in moments when beauty fills our souls we know what Wordsworth meant
+when he said 'the least of things seemed infinite,' though each thing,
+being but one of many, must from another point of view, here suppressed,
+be finite. 'Beauty,' then, we may perhaps say, is the image of the total
+presence of the Infinite within any limits it may choose to assume;
+sublimity the image of its boundlessness, and of its rejection of any
+pretension to independence or absoluteness on the part of its finite
+forms; the one the image of its immanence, the other of its
+transcendence.
+
+Within an hour I could attempt no more than an outline of our subject.
+That is inevitable; and so is another defect, which I regret more. In
+analysing any kind of aesthetic experience we have to begin by
+disentangling the threads that meet in it; and when we can only make a
+beginning, no time is left for the further task of showing how they are
+interwoven. We distinguish, for example, one kind of sublimity from
+another, and we must do so; but in the actual experience, the single
+instance, these kinds often melt together. I take one case of this.
+Trying to overlook the field in which sublimity appears, we say that
+there is a sublimity of inorganic things, and of things vital, and of
+things spiritual, and that these kinds differ. And this is true; and
+perhaps it is also true that sometimes we experience one of these kinds,
+so to say, quite pure and unmixed with others. But it is not always,
+perhaps not usually so. More frequently kind mingles with kind, and we
+mutilate the experience when we name it after one of them. In life the
+imagination, touched at one point, tingles all over and responds at all
+points. It is offered an impression of physical or vital greatness, but
+at once it brings from the other end of its world reminiscences of
+quite another order, and fuses the impression with them. Or an appeal is
+made to the sense of spiritual greatness, but there rises before the
+imagination a vision with the outlines and hues of material Nature.
+Offer it a sunset--a mere collection of coloured lines and spots--and
+they become to it regrets and hopes and longings too deep for tears.
+Tell it of souls made perfect in bliss, and it sees an immeasurable
+rose, or city-walls that flash with the light of all the gems on earth.
+The truth that a sparrow and a mountain are different, and that Socrates
+is not Satan, interests it but little. What it cares for is the truth
+that, when they are sublime, they are all the same; for each becomes
+infinite, and it feels in each its own infinity.
+
+1903.
+
+
+  NOTES[14]
+
+I add here a few remarks on some points which it was not convenient to
+discuss in the lecture.
+
+1. We have seen that in the apprehension of sublimity we do not always
+employ comparison or attempt to measure. To feel a thing overwhelmingly
+great it is not necessary to have before the mind either the idea of
+something less great, or any standard of greatness. To argue that this
+must be necessary because 'great' means nothing except as opposed to
+'small,' is like arguing that I cannot have a perception of pride
+without thinking of humility.
+
+This point seems to me quite clear. But a question remains. If we go
+below consciousness, what is it that happens in us? The apprehension of
+sublimity implies that we have received an exceedingly strong
+impression. This as a matter of fact must mean an impression very much
+stronger than something else; and this something else must be, so to
+say, a standard with which the impression is unconsciously compared.
+What then is it?
+
+Stated in the most general terms, it must apparently be the usual or
+average strength of impressions.
+
+But this unconscious standard takes particular concrete forms in various
+classes of cases. Not seldom it seems to be our sense of our own power
+or of average human power. This is especially so where the thing felt to
+be sublime is, in the relevant respect, _in eodem genere_ with
+ourselves. A sublime lion, for example, is immensely superior to us, or
+to the average man, in muscular force and so in dangerousness,
+Tourgénieff's sparrow in courage and love, a god in all sorts of ways.
+And the use of this unconscious standard is probably the reason of the
+fact, noted in the lecture, that it is difficult to feel sublimity, as
+regards vital force, in a creature smaller than ourselves.
+
+But this is not the only standard. A sublime lion is not only immensely
+stronger than we are, but is generally also exceptional among lions; and
+so with a sublime tree or bridge or thunderstorm. So that we seem also
+to use as unconscious standard the idea of the average of the kind to
+which the thing belongs. An average thunderstorm hardly seems sublime,
+and yet it is overwhelmingly superior to us in power.[15]
+
+What, again, is the psychical machinery employed when we attempt to
+measure the shoreless sea, or time, and find them immeasurable? Is there
+any standard of the 'usual' here? I will leave this question to more
+skilled psychologists than myself.
+
+2. Since the impression produced by sublimity is one of very exceptional
+strength, we are not able to feel it continuously for long, though we
+can repeat it after a pause. In this the sublime differs from the
+'beautiful,' on which we like to _dwell_ after our first surprise is
+over. A tragedy or symphony that was sublime from beginning to end could
+not be so experienced. Living among mountains, we feel their beauty more
+or less constantly, their sublimity only by flashes.
+
+3. If our account of the impression produced by sublimity is true, why
+should not any sensation whatever produce this impression merely by
+gaining extraordinary strength? It seems to me it would, supposing at
+its normal strength it conformed to the general requirements of
+aesthetic experience, and supposing the requisite accession of strength
+did not remove this conformity. But this, in one respect at least, it
+would do. It would make the light, sound, smell, physiologically
+painful, and we should feel it as painful or even dangerous. We find
+this in the case of lightning. If it is to be felt as aesthetic it must
+not pass a certain degree of brightness; or, as we sometimes say, it
+must not be too 'near.'
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] I have learned something from many discussions of this subject.
+    In its outline the view I have taken is perhaps nearer to Hartmann's
+    than to any other.
+
+  [2] Popular usage coincides roughly with this sense. Indeed, it can
+    hardly be said to recognise the wider one at all. 'Beauty' and
+    'beautiful,' in that wider sense, are technical terms of Aesthetics.
+    It is a misfortune that the language of Aesthetics should thus differ
+    from the ordinary language of speech and literature; but the
+    misfortune seems to be unavoidable, for there is no word in the
+    ordinary language which means 'whatever gives aesthetic
+    satisfaction,' and yet that idea _must_ have a name in Aesthetics.
+
+  [3] I do not mean to imply that in aesthetic apprehension itself we
+    always, or generally, make conscious use of a standard or, indeed,
+    think of greatness. But here we are _reflecting_ on this
+    apprehension.
+
+  [4] Thus, it may be noticed, the sparrow's size, which is the reverse
+    of sublime, is yet indirectly essential to the sublimity of the
+    sparrow.
+
+  [5] The poet's language here has done our analysis for us.
+
+  [6] A word may be added here on a disputed point as to 'spiritual'
+    sublimity. It has been held that intellect cannot be sublime; but
+    surely in the teeth of facts. Not to speak of intellect as it appears
+    in the sphere of practice, how can it be denied that the intellect of
+    Aristotle or Shakespeare or Newton may produce the impression of
+    sublimity? All that is true is, first, that the intellect must be
+    apprehended imaginatively and not thought abstractly (otherwise it
+    can produce _no_ aesthetic impression), and, secondly, that it
+    appears sublime in virtue not of its quality alone but of the
+    quantity, or force, of that quality.
+
+  [7] The same principle applies to other cases. If, for example, the
+    desolation of a landscape is felt to be sublime, it is so not as the
+    mere negation of life, verdure, etc., but as their _active_ negation.
+
+  [8] The reader will remember that in one sense of the question, Is
+    there no more in the sublime than overwhelming greatness? this
+    question must of course be answered in the affirmative. Sublimity is
+    a mode of beauty: the sublime is not the overwhelmingly great, it is
+    the beautiful which has overwhelming greatness; and it affects us
+    through its whole nature, not by mere greatness.
+
+  [9] I am warning the reader against a mistake which may arise from
+    the complexity of aesthetic experience. We may make a broad
+    distinction between 'glad' and 'sad' modes of beauty; but that does
+    not coincide with the distinction of modes with which we are
+    concerned in this lecture. What is lovely or 'beautiful' may be glad
+    or sad, and so may what is grand or sublime.
+
+  [10] In what follows I have spoken as if the two were always
+    successive stages, and as if these always came in the same order. It
+    is easier to make the matter quickly clear by taking this view, which
+    also seemed to answer to my own experience. But I do not wish to
+    commit myself to an opinion on the point, which is of minor
+    importance. What is essential is to recognise the presence of the two
+    'aspects' or 'stages,' and to see that both are requisite to
+    sublimity.
+
+  [11] 'Ich fühlte mich so klein, so gross,' says Faust, remembering
+    the vision of the Erdgeist, whom he addresses as 'Erhabener Geist.'
+    He was at once overwhelmed and uplifted.
+
+  [12] At least if the 'Vision' is sublime its sublimity is not that of
+    the original. We can 'discern the form thereof' distinctly enough.
+
+  [13] To avoid complication I have passed by the case where we compare
+    the sublime thing with another thing and find it much greater without
+    finding it immeasurably great. Here the greatness, it appears to me,
+    is still unmeasured. That is to say, we do not attempt to determine
+    its amount, and if we did we should lose the impression of sublimity.
+    We may _say_, perhaps, that it is ten, fifty, or a million times, as
+    great; but these words no more represent mathematical calculations
+    than Hamlet's 'forty thousand brothers.'
+
+  [14] I am far from being satisfied with the ideas imperfectly
+    expressed in the first and third of these Notes, but they require
+    more consideration than I can give to them during the printing of the
+    Second Edition. The reader is requested to take them as mere
+    suggestions.
+
+  [15] Hence a creature much less powerful than ourselves _may_, I
+    suppose, be sublime, even from the mere point of view of vital
+    energy. But I doubt if this is so in my own case. I have seen
+    'magnificent' or 'glorious' cocks and cats, but if I called them
+    'sublime' I should say rather more than I feel. I mention cocks,
+    because Ruskin somewhere mentions a sublime cock; but I cannot find
+    the passage, and this cock may have been sublime (if it really was so
+    to Ruskin) from some other than 'vital' greatness.
+
+
+
+
+HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY
+
+
+HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY[1]
+
+
+Since Aristotle dealt with tragedy, and, as usual, drew the main
+features of his subject with those sure and simple strokes which no
+later hand has rivalled, the only philosopher who has treated it in a
+manner both original and searching is Hegel. I propose here to give a
+sketch of Hegel's theory, and to add some remarks upon it. But I cannot
+possibly do justice in a sketch to a theory which fills many pages of
+the _Aesthetik_; which I must tear from its connections with the
+author's general view of poetry, and with the rest of his philosophy[2];
+and which I must try to exhibit as far as possible in the language of
+ordinary literature. To estimate this theory, therefore, from my sketch
+would be neither safe nor just--all the more because, in the interest of
+immediate clearness, I have not scrupled to insert without warning
+various remarks and illustrations for which Hegel is not responsible.
+
+On certain characteristics of tragedy the briefest reminder will
+suffice. A large part of the nature of this form of drama is common to
+the drama in all its forms; and of this nothing need be said. It will be
+agreed, further, that in all tragedy there is some sort of collision or
+conflict--conflict of feelings, modes of thought, desires, wills,
+purposes; conflict of persons with one another, or with circumstances,
+or with themselves; one, several, or all of these kinds of conflict, as
+the case may be. Again, it may be taken for granted that a tragedy is a
+story of unhappiness or suffering, and excites such feelings as pity and
+fear. To this, if we followed the present usage of the term, we should
+add that the story of unhappiness must have an unhappy end; by which we
+mean in effect that the conflict must close with the death of one or
+more of the principal characters. But this usage of the word 'tragedy'
+is comparatively recent; it leaves us without a name for many plays, in
+many languages, which deal with unhappiness without ending unhappily;
+and Hegel takes the word in its older and wider sense.
+
+Passing on from these admitted characteristics of tragedy, we may best
+approach Hegel's peculiar view by observing that he lays particular
+stress on one of them. That a tragedy is a story of suffering is
+probably to many people the most obvious fact about it. Hegel says very
+little of this; partly, perhaps, because it is obvious, but more because
+the essential point to him is not the suffering but its cause, namely,
+the action or conflict. Mere suffering, he would say, is not tragic, but
+only the suffering that comes of a special kind of action. Pity for mere
+misfortune, like fear of it, is not tragic pity or fear. These are due
+to the spectacle of the conflict and its attendant suffering, which do
+not appeal simply to our sensibilities or our instinct of
+self-preservation, but also to our deeper mind or spirit (_Geist_, a
+word which, with its adjective, I shall translate 'spirit,' 'spiritual,'
+because our words 'mind' and 'mental' suggest something merely
+intellectual).
+
+The reason why the tragic conflict thus appeals to the spirit is that it
+is itself a conflict of the spirit. It is a conflict, that is to say,
+between powers that rule the world of man's will and action--his
+'ethical substance.' The family and the state, the bond of parent and
+child, of brother and sister, of husband and wife, of citizen and ruler,
+or citizen and citizen, with the obligations and feelings appropriate to
+these bonds; and again the powers of personal love and honour, or of
+devotion to a great cause or an ideal interest like religion or science
+or some kind of social welfare--such are the forces exhibited in tragic
+action; not indeed alone, not without others less affirmative and
+perhaps even evil, but still in preponderating mass. And as they form
+the substance of man, are common to all civilised men, and are
+acknowledged as powers rightfully claiming human allegiance, their
+exhibition in tragedy has that interest, at once deep and universal,
+which is essential to a great work of art.
+
+In many a work of art, in many a statue, picture, tale, or song, such
+powers are shown in solitary peace or harmonious co-operation. Tragedy
+shows them in collision. Their nature is divine, and in religion they
+appear as gods; but, as seen in the world of tragic action, they have
+left the repose of Olympus, have entered into human wills, and now meet
+as foes. And this spectacle, if sublime, is also terrible. The
+essentially tragic fact is the self-division and intestinal warfare of
+the ethical substance, not so much the war of good with evil as the war
+of good with good. Two of these isolated powers face each other, making
+incompatible demands. The family claims what the state refuses, love
+requires what honour forbids. The competing forces are both in
+themselves rightful, and so far the claim of each is equally justified;
+but the right of each is pushed into a wrong, because it ignores the
+right of the other, and demands that absolute sway which belongs to
+neither alone, but to the whole of which each is but a part.
+
+And one reason why this happens lies in the nature of the characters
+through whom these claims are made. It is the nature of the tragic hero,
+at once his greatness and his doom, that he knows no shrinking or
+half-heartedness, but identifies himself wholly with the power that
+moves him, and will admit the justification of no other power. However
+varied and rich his inner life and character may be, in the conflict it
+is all concentrated in one point. Antigone _is_ the determination to do
+her duty to her dead brother; Romeo is not a son or a citizen as well as
+a lover, he is lover pure and simple, and his love is the whole of him.
+
+The end of the tragic conflict is the denial of both the exclusive
+claims. It is not the work of chance or blank fate; it is the act of the
+ethical substance itself, asserting its absoluteness against the
+excessive pretensions of its particular powers. In that sense, as
+proceeding from an absolute right which cancels claims based on right
+but pushed into wrong, it may be called the act of 'eternal justice.'
+Sometimes it can end the conflict peacefully, and the tragedy closes
+with a solution. Appearing as a divine being, the spiritual unity
+reconciles by some adjustment the claims of the contending powers
+(_Eumenides_); or at its bidding one of them softens its demand
+(_Philoctetes_); or again, as in the more beautiful solution of the
+_Oedipus Coloneus_, the hero by his own self-condemnation and inward
+purification reconciles himself with the supreme justice, and is
+accepted by it. But sometimes the quarrel is pressed to extremes; the
+denial of the one-sided claims involves the death of one or more of the
+persons concerned; and we have a catastrophe. The ultimate power thus
+appears as a destructive force. Yet even here, as Hegel insists, the end
+is not without an aspect of reconciliation. For that which is denied is
+not the rightful powers with which the combatants have identified
+themselves. On the contrary, those powers, and with them the only thing
+for which the combatants cared, are affirmed. What is denied is the
+exclusive and therefore wrongful assertion of their right.
+
+Such in outline is Hegel's main view. It may be illustrated more fully
+by two examples, favourites of his, taken from Aeschylus and Sophocles.
+Clytemnestra has murdered Agamemnon, her husband and king. Orestes,
+their son, is impelled by filial piety to avenge his father, and is
+ordered by Apollo to do so. But to kill a mother is to sin against
+filial piety. The spiritual substance is divided against itself. The
+sacred bond of father and son demands what the equally sacred bond of
+son and mother forbids. When, therefore, Orestes has done the deed, the
+Furies of his murdered mother claim him for their prey. He appeals to
+Apollo, who resists their claim. A solution is arrived at without a
+catastrophe. The cause is referred to Athene, who institutes at Athens a
+court of sworn judges. The votes of this court being equally divided,
+Athene gives her casting-vote for Orestes; while the Furies are at last
+appeased by a promise of everlasting honour at Athens.
+
+In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, to Hegel the 'perfect exemplar of
+tragedy,' the solution is negative. The brother of Antigone has brought
+against his native city an army of foreigners bent on destroying it. He
+has been killed in the battle, and Creon, the ruler of the city, has
+issued an edict forbidding anyone on pain of death to bury the corpse.
+In so doing he not only dishonours the dead man, but violates the rights
+of the gods of the dead. Antigone without hesitation disobeys the
+edict, and Creon, despite the remonstrance of his son, who is affianced
+to her, persists in exacting the penalty. Warned by the prophet
+Teiresias, he gives way, but too late. Antigone, immured in a rocky
+chamber to starve, has anticipated her death. Her lover follows her
+example, and his mother refuses to survive him. Thus Antigone has lost
+her life through her absolute assertion of the family against the state;
+Creon has violated the sanctity of the family, and in return sees his
+own home laid in ruins. But in this catastrophe neither the right of the
+family nor that of the state is denied; what is denied is the
+absoluteness of the claim of each.
+
+The danger of illustrations like these is that they divert attention
+from the principle illustrated to questions about the interpretation of
+particular works. So it will be here. I cannot stay to discuss these
+questions, which do not affect Hegel's principle; but it will be well,
+before going further, to remove a misunderstanding of it which is
+generally to be found in criticisms of his treatment of the _Eumenides_
+and the _Antigone_. The main objection may be put thus: 'Hegel talks of
+equally justified powers or claims. But Aeschylus never meant that
+Orestes and the Furies were equally justified; for Orestes was
+acquitted. Nor did Sophocles mean that Antigone and Creon were equally
+right. And how can it have been equally the duty of Orestes to kill his
+mother and not to kill her?' But, in the first place, it is most
+important to observe that Hegel is not discussing at all what we should
+generally call the moral quality of the acts and persons concerned, or,
+in the ordinary sense, what it was their duty to do. And, in the second
+place, when he speaks of 'equally justified' powers, what he means, and,
+indeed, sometimes says, is that these powers are _in themselves_ equally
+justified. The family and the state, the bond of father and son, the
+bond of mother and son, the bond of citizenship, these are each and all,
+one as much as another, powers rightfully claiming human allegiance. It
+is tragic that observance of one should involve the violation of
+another. These are Hegel's propositions, and surely they are true. Their
+truth is quite unaffected by the fact (assuming it is one) that in the
+circumstances the act combining this observance of one and violation of
+another was morally right, or by the fact (if so it is) that one such
+act (say Antigone's) was morally right, and another (say Creon's) was
+morally wrong. It is sufficient for Hegel's principle that the violation
+should take place, and that we should feel its weight. We do feel it. We
+may approve the act of Antigone or Orestes, but in approving it we still
+feel that it is no light matter to disobey the law or to murder a
+mother, that (as we might say) there is much justice in the pleas of the
+Furies and of Creon, and that the _tragic_ effect depends upon these
+facts. If, again, it is objected that the underlying conflict in the
+_Antigone_ is not between the family and the state, but between divine
+and human law, that objection, if sound, might touch Hegel's
+interpretation,[3] but it would not affect his principle, except for
+those who recognise no obligation in human law; and it will scarcely be
+contended that Sophocles is to be numbered among them. On the other
+hand, it is, I think, a matter for regret that Hegel employed such words
+as 'right,' 'justified,' and 'justice.' They do not mislead readers
+familiar with his writings, but to others they suggest associations with
+criminal law, or our everyday moral judgments, or perhaps the theory of
+'poetic justice'; and these are all out of place in a discussion on
+tragedy.
+
+Having determined in outline the idea or principle of tragedy, Hegel
+proceeds to give an account of some differences between ancient and
+modern works. In the limited time at our disposal we shall do best to
+confine ourselves to a selection from his remarks on the latter. For in
+speaking of ancient tragedy Hegel, who finds something modern in
+Euripides, makes accordingly but little use of him for purposes of
+contrast, while his main point of view as to Aeschylus and Sophocles has
+already appeared in the illustrations we have given of the general
+principle. I will only add, by way of preface, that the pages about to
+be summarised leave on one, rightly or wrongly, the impression that to
+his mind the principle is more adequately realised in the best classical
+tragedies than in modern works. But the question whether this really was
+his deliberate opinion would detain us too long from weightier
+matters.[4]
+
+Hegel considers first the cases where modern tragedy resembles ancient
+in dealing with conflicts arising from the pursuit of ends which may be
+called substantial or objective and not merely personal. And he points
+out that modern tragedy here shows a much greater variety. Subjects are
+taken, for example, from the quarrels of dynasties, of rivals for the
+throne, of kings and nobles, of state and church. Calderon shows the
+conflict of love and honour regarded as powers imposing obligations.
+Schiller in his early works makes his characters defend the rights of
+nature against convention, or of freedom of thought against
+prescription--rights in their essence universal. Wallenstein aims at the
+unity and peace of Germany; Karl Moor attacks the whole arrangement of
+society; Faust seeks to attain in thought and action union with the
+Absolute. In such cases the end is more than personal; it represents a
+power claiming the allegiance of the individual; but, on the other
+hand, it does not always or generally represent a great _ethical_
+institution or bond like the family or the state. We have passed into a
+wider world.
+
+But, secondly, he observes, in regard to modern tragedy, that in a
+larger number of instances such public or universal interests either do
+not appear at all, or, if they appear, are scarcely more than a
+background for the real subject. The real subject, the impelling end or
+passion, and the ensuing conflict, is personal,--these particular
+characters with their struggle and their fate. The importance given to
+subjectivity--this is the distinctive mark of modern sentiment, and so
+of modern art; and such tragedies bear its impress. A part at least of
+Hegel's meaning may be illustrated thus. We are interested in the
+personality of Orestes or Antigone, but chiefly as it shows itself in
+one aspect, as identifying itself with a certain ethical relation; and
+our interest in the personality is inseparable and indistinguishable
+from our interest in the power it represents. This is not so with
+Hamlet, whose position so closely resembles that of Orestes. What
+engrosses our attention is the whole personality of Hamlet in his
+conflict, not with an opposing spiritual power, but with circumstances
+and, still more, with difficulties in his own nature. No one could think
+of describing Othello as the representative of an ethical family
+relation. His passion, however much nobility he may show in it, is
+personal. So is Romeo's love. It is not pursued, like Posa's freedom of
+thought, as something universal, a right of man. Its right, if it could
+occur to us to use the term at all, is Romeo's right.
+
+On this main characteristic of modern tragedy others depend. For
+instance, that variety of subject to which reference has just been made
+depends on it. For when so much weight is attached to personality,
+almost any fatal collision in which a sufficiently striking character is
+involved may yield material for tragedy. Naturally, again,
+characterisation has become fuller and more subtle, except in dramas
+which are more or less an imitation of the antique. The characters in
+Greek tragedy are far from being types or personified abstractions, as
+those of classical French tragedy tend to be: they are genuine
+individuals. But still they are comparatively simple and easy to
+understand, and have not the intricacy of the characters in Shakespeare.
+These, for the most part, represent simply themselves; and the loss of
+that interest which attached to the Greek characters from their
+identification with an ethical power, is compensated by an extraordinary
+subtlety in their portrayal, and also by their possession of some
+peculiar charm or some commanding superiority. Finally, the interest in
+personality explains the freedom with which characters more or less
+definitely evil are introduced in modern tragedy. Mephistopheles is as
+essentially modern as Faust. The passion of Richard or Macbeth is not
+only personal, like that of Othello; it is egoistic and anarchic, and
+leads to crimes done with a full knowledge of their wickedness; but to
+the modern mind the greatness of the personality justifies its
+appearance in the position of hero. Such beings as Iago and Goneril,
+almost portents of evil, are not indeed made the heroes of tragedies;
+but, according to Hegel, they would not have been admitted in Greek
+tragedy at all. If Clytemnestra had been cited in objection as a
+parallel to Lady Macbeth, he would have replied that Lady Macbeth had
+not the faintest ground of complaint against Duncan, while in reading
+the _Agamemnon_ we are frequently reminded that Clytemnestra's husband
+was the sacrificer of their child. He might have added that Clytemnestra
+is herself an example of the necessity, where one of the principal
+characters inspires hatred or horror, of increasing the subtlety of the
+drawing or adding grandeur to the evil will.
+
+It remains to compare ancient and modern tragedy in regard to the issue
+of the conflict. We have seen that Hegel attributes this issue in the
+former to the ethical substance or eternal justice, and so accounts for
+such reconciliation as we feel to be present even where the end is a
+catastrophe. Now, in the catastrophe of modern tragedy, he says, a
+certain justice is sometimes felt to be present; but even then it
+differs from the antique justice. It is in some cases more 'abstract':
+the end pursued by the hero, though it is not egoistic, is still
+presented rather as his particular end than as something rightful though
+partial; and hence the catastrophe appears as the reaction, not of an
+undivided ethical totality, but merely of the universal turning against
+a too assertive particular.[5] In cases, again, where the hero (Richard
+or Macbeth) openly attacks an ethical power and plunges into evil, we
+feel that he meets with justice, and only gets what he deserves; but
+then this justice is colder and more 'criminalistic' than that of
+ancient tragedy. Thus even when the modern work seems to resemble the
+ancient in its issue, the sense of reconciliation is imperfect. And
+partly for this reason, partly from the concentration of our interest on
+individuality as such, we desire to see in the individual himself some
+sort of reconciliation with his fate. What shape this will take depends,
+of course, on the story and the character of the hero. It may appear in
+a religious form, as his feeling that he is exchanging his earthly being
+for an indestructible happiness; or again, in his recognition of the
+justice of his fall; or at least he may show us that, in face of the
+forces that crush him to death, he maintains untouched the freedom and
+strength of his own will.
+
+But there remain, says Hegel, many modern tragedies where we have to
+attribute the catastrophe not to any kind of justice, but to unhappy
+circumstances and outward accidents. And then we can only feel that the
+individual whose merely personal ends are thwarted by mere particular
+circumstances and chances, pays the penalty that awaits existence in a
+scene of contingency and finitude. Such a feeling cannot rise above
+sadness, and, if the hero is a noble soul, it may become the impression
+of a dreadful external necessity. This impression can be avoided only
+when circumstance and accident are so depicted that they are felt to
+coincide with something in the hero himself, so that he is not simply
+destroyed by an outward force. So it is with Hamlet. 'This bank and
+shoal of time' is too narrow for his soul, and the death that seems to
+fall on him by chance is also within him. And so in _Romeo and Juliet_
+we feel that the rose of a love so beautiful is too tender to bloom in
+the storm-swept valley of its birth. But such a feeling of
+reconciliation is still one of pain, an unhappy blessedness.[6] And if
+the situation displayed in a drama is of such a kind that we feel the
+issue to depend _simply_ on the turn the dramatist may choose to give to
+the course of events, we are fully justified in our preference for a
+happy ending.
+
+In this last remark (or rather in the pages misrepresented by it) Hegel,
+of course, is not criticising Shakespeare. He is objecting to the
+destiny-dramas of his own time, and to the fashionable indulgence in
+sentimental melancholy. Strongly as he asserted the essential function
+of negation throughout the universe, the affirmative power of the
+spirit, even in its profoundest divisions, was for him the deepest truth
+and the most inspiring theme. And one may see this even in his
+references to Shakespeare. He appreciated Shakespeare's representation
+of extreme forms of evil, but, even if he was fully satisfied of its
+justification, his personal preference lay in another direction, and
+while I do not doubt that he thought _Hamlet_ a greater work than
+_Iphigenie_, I suspect he loved Goethe's play the best.
+
+Most of those who have thought about this subject will agree that the
+ideas I have tried to sketch are interesting and valuable; but they
+suggest scores of questions. Alike in the account of tragedy in general,
+and in that of the differences between ancient and modern tragedy,
+everyone will find statements to doubt and omissions to regret; and
+scarcely one of Hegel's interpretations of particular plays will escape
+objection. It is impossible for me to touch on more than a few points;
+and to the main ideas I owe so much that I am more inclined to dwell on
+their truth than to criticise what seem to be defects. But perhaps after
+all an attempt to supplement and amend may be the best way of throwing
+some part of Hegel's meaning more into relief. And I will begin with the
+attempt to supplement.
+
+He seems to be right in laying emphasis on the action and conflict in
+tragedy rather than on the suffering and misfortune. No mere suffering
+or misfortune, no suffering that does not spring in great part from
+human agency, and in some degree from the agency of the sufferer, is
+tragic, however pitiful or dreadful it may be. But, sufficient
+connection with these agencies being present, misfortune, the fall from
+prosperity to adversity, with the suffering attending it, at once
+becomes tragic; and in many tragedies it forms a large ingredient, as
+does the pity for it in the tragic feeling. Hegel, I think, certainly
+takes too little notice of it; and by this omission he also withdraws
+attention from something the importance of which he would have admitted
+at once; I mean the way in which suffering is borne. Physical pain, to
+take an extreme instance, is one thing: Philoctetes, bearing it, is
+another. And the noble endurance of pain that rends the heart is the
+source of much that is best worth having in tragedy.
+
+Again, there is one particular kind of misfortune _not_ obviously due to
+human agency, which undoubtedly may affect us in a tragic way. I mean
+that kind which suggests the idea of fate. Tragedies which represent man
+as the mere plaything of chance or a blank fate or a malicious fate, are
+never really deep: it is satisfactory to see that Maeterlinck, a man of
+true genius, has now risen above these ideas. But, where those factors
+of tragedy are present which Hegel emphasises, the impression of
+something fateful in what we call accident, the impression that the hero
+not only invites misfortune by his exceptional stature and exceptional
+daring, but is also, if I may so put it, strangely and terribly unlucky,
+is in many plays a genuine ingredient in tragic effect. It is so, for
+example, in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_. It is so even in dramas like
+Shakespeare's, which exemplify the saying that character is destiny.
+Hegel's own reference to the prominence of accident in the plot of
+_Hamlet_ proves it. Othello would not have become Iago's victim if his
+own character had been different; but still, as we say, it is an
+extraordinary fatality which makes him the companion of the one man in
+the world who is at once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough to
+ensnare him. In the _Antigone_ itself, and in the very catastrophe of
+it, accident plays its part: we can hardly say that it depends solely on
+the characters of Creon and Antigone that the one yields just too late
+to save the life of the other. Now, it may be said with truth that
+Hegel's whole account of the ultimate power in tragedy is a
+rationalisation of the idea of fate, but his remarks on this particular
+aspect of fate are neither sufficient nor satisfactory.
+
+His insistence on the need for some element of reconciliation in a
+tragic catastrophe, and his remarks on the various forms it assumes,
+have the greatest value; but one result of the omissions just noticed is
+that he sometimes exaggerates it, and at other times rates it too low.
+When he is speaking of the kind of tragedy he most approves, his
+language almost suggests that our feeling at the close of the conflict
+is, or should be, one of complete reconciliation. This it surely neither
+is nor can be. Not to mention the suffering and death we have witnessed,
+the very existence of the conflict, even if a supreme ethical power is
+felt to be asserted in its close, remains a painful fact, and, in large
+measure, a fact not understood. For, though we may be said to see, in
+one sense, how the opposition of spiritual powers arises, something in
+us, and that the best, still cries out against it. And even the
+perception or belief that it must needs be that offences come would not
+abolish our feeling that the necessity is terrible, or our pain in the
+woe of the guilty and the innocent. Nay, one may conjecture, the feeling
+and the pain would not vanish if we fully understood that the conflict
+and catastrophe were by a rational necessity involved in the divine and
+eternally accomplished purpose of the world. But this exaggeration in
+Hegel's language, if partly due to his enthusiasm for the affirmative,
+may be mainly, like some other defects, an accident of lecturing. In the
+_Philosophy of Religion_, I may add, he plainly states that in the
+solution even of tragedies like the _Antigone_ something remains
+unresolved (ii. 135).
+
+On the other hand, his treatment of the aspect of reconciliation in
+modern tragedy is in several respects insufficient. I will mention only
+one. He does not notice that in the conclusion of not a few tragedies
+pain is mingled not merely with acquiescence, but with something like
+exultation. Is there not such a feeling at the close of _Hamlet_,
+_Othello_, and _King Lear_; and that although the end in the last two
+cases touches the limit of legitimate pathos? This exultation appears to
+be connected with our sense that the hero has never shown himself so
+great or noble as in the death which seals his failure. A rush of
+passionate admiration, and a glory in the greatness of the soul, mingle
+with our grief; and the coming of death, so far from destroying these
+feelings, appears to leave them untouched, or even to be entirely in
+harmony with them. If in such dramas we may be said to feel that the
+ultimate power is no mere fate, but a spiritual power, then we also feel
+that the hero was never so near to this power as in the moment when it
+required his life.
+
+The last omission I would notice in Hegel's theory is that he underrates
+the action in tragedy of what may be called by a rough distinction moral
+evil rather than defect. Certainly the part played by evil differs
+greatly in different cases, but it is never absent, not even from
+tragedies of Hegel's favourite type. If it does not appear in the main
+conflict, it appears in its occasion. You may say that, while Iago and
+Macbeth have evil purposes, neither the act of Orestes nor the vengeance
+of the Furies, neither Antigone's breach of the edict nor even Creon's
+insistence on her punishment, springs from evil in them; but the
+situation with which Orestes or Antigone has to deal, and so in a sense
+the whole tragedy, arises from evil, the murder of Agamemnon, and the
+attempt of Polyneices to bring ruin on his native city. In fact, if we
+confine the title 'tragedy' to plays ending with a catastrophe, it will
+be found difficult to name great tragedies, ancient or modern, in which
+evil has not directly or indirectly a prominent part. And its presence
+has an important bearing on the effect produced by the catastrophe. On
+the one hand, it deepens the sense of painful awe. The question why
+affirmative spiritual forces should collide is hard enough; but the
+question why, together with them, there should be generated violent evil
+and extreme depravity is harder and more painful still. But, on the
+other hand, the element of reconciliation in the catastrophe is
+strengthened by recognition of the part played by evil in bringing it
+about; because our sense that the ultimate power cannot endure the
+presence of such evil is implicitly the sense that this power is at
+least more closely allied with good. If it rejects the exaggerated
+claims of its own isolated powers, that which provokes from it a much
+more vehement reaction must be still more alien to its nature. This
+feeling is forcibly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies, and in many Greek
+dramas it is directly appealed to by repeated reminders that what is at
+work in the disasters is the unsleeping Ate which follows an ancestral
+sin. If Aristotle did not in some lost part of the _Poetics_ discuss
+ideas like this, he failed to give a complete rationale of Greek
+tragedy.
+
+I come lastly to the matter I have most at heart. What I take to be the
+central idea in Hegel's theory seems to me to touch the essence of
+tragedy. And I will not assert that his own statement of it fails to
+cover the whole field of instances. For he does not teach, as he is
+often said to do, that tragedy portrays only the conflict of such
+ethical powers as the family and the state. He adds to these, as we have
+seen, others, such as love and honour, together with various universal
+ends; and it may even be maintained that he has provided in his general
+statement for those numerous cases where, according to himself, no
+substantial or universal ends collide, but the interest is centred on
+'personalities.' Nevertheless, when these cases come to be considered
+more fully--and, in Hegel's view, they are the most characteristically
+modern cases--we are not satisfied. They naturally tend to appear as
+declensions from the more ideal ancient form; for how can a personality
+which represents only itself claim the interest of one which represents
+something universal? And further, they are sometimes described in a
+manner which strikes the reader, let us say, of Shakespeare, as both
+insufficient and misleading. Without raising, then, unprofitable
+questions about the comparative merits of ancient and modern tragedy, I
+should like to propose a restatement of Hegel's general principle which
+would make it more obviously apply to both.
+
+If we omit all reference to ethical or substantial powers and interests,
+what have we left? We have the more general idea--to use again a formula
+not Hegel's own--that tragedy portrays a self-division and self-waste of
+spirit, or a division of spirit involving conflict and waste. It is
+implied in this that on _both_ sides in the conflict there is a
+spiritual value. The same idea may be expressed (again, I think, not in
+Hegel's own words) by saying that the tragic conflict is one not merely
+of good with evil, but also, and more essentially, of good with good.
+Only, in saying this, we must be careful to observe that 'good' here
+means anything that has spiritual value, not moral goodness alone,[7]
+and that 'evil' has a similarly wide sense.
+
+Now this idea of a division of spirit involving conflict and waste
+covers the tragedies of ethical and other universal powers, and it
+covers much besides. According to it the collision of such powers would
+be one kind of tragic collision, but only one. _Why_ are we tragically
+moved by the conflict of family and state? Because we set a high value
+on family and state. Why then should not the conflict of anything else
+that has sufficient value affect us tragically? It does. The value must
+be sufficient--a moderate value will not serve; and other
+characteristics must be present which need not be considered here. But,
+granted these conditions, _any_ spiritual conflict involving spiritual
+waste is tragic. And it is just one greatness of modern art that it has
+shown the tragic fact in situations of so many and such diverse kinds.
+These situations have not the peculiar effectiveness of the conflicts
+preferred by Hegel, but they may have an equal effectiveness peculiar to
+themselves.
+
+Let me attempt to test these ideas by choosing a most unfavourable
+instance--unfavourable because the play seems at first to represent a
+conflict simply of good and evil, and so, according both to Hegel's
+statement and the proposed restatement, to be no tragedy at all: I mean
+_Macbeth_. What is the conflict here? It will be agreed that it does not
+lie between two ethical powers or universal ends, and that, as Hegel
+says, the main interest is in personalities. Let us take it first, then,
+to lie between Macbeth and the persons opposing him, and let us ask
+whether there is not spiritual value or good on both sides--not an equal
+amount of good (that is not necessary), but enough good on each to give
+the impression of spiritual waste. Is there not such good in Macbeth? It
+is not a question merely of moral goodness, but of good. It is not a
+question of the use made of good, but of its presence. And such bravery
+and skill in war as win the enthusiasm of everyone about him; such an
+imagination as few but poets possess; a conscience so vivid that his
+deed is to him beforehand a thing of terror, and, once done, condemns
+him to that torture of the mind on which he lies in restless ecstasy; a
+determination so tremendous and a courage so appalling that, for all
+this torment, he never dreams of turning back, but, even when he has
+found that life is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,
+will tell it out to the end though earth and heaven and hell are leagued
+against him; are not these things, in themselves, good, and gloriously
+good? Do they not make you, for all your horror, admire Macbeth,
+sympathise with his agony, pity him, and see in him the waste of forces
+on which you place a spiritual value? It is simply on this account that
+he is for you, not the abstraction called a criminal who merely 'gets
+what he deserves' (art, like religion, knows no such thing), but a
+tragic hero, and that his war with other forces of indubitable spiritual
+worth is a tragic war.[8]
+
+It is required by the restatement of Hegel's principle to show that in
+the external conflict of persons there is good on both sides. It is not
+required that this should be true, secondly, of both sides in the
+conflict within the hero's soul; for the hero is only a part of the
+tragedy. Nevertheless in almost all cases, if not in all, it is true. It
+is obviously so where, as in the hero and also the heroine of the _Cid_,
+the contending powers in this internal struggle are love and honour.
+Even when love is of a quality less pure and has a destructive force, as
+in Shakespeare's Antony, it is clearly true. And it remains true even
+where, as in Hamlet and Macbeth, the contest seems to lie, and for most
+purposes might conveniently be said to lie, between forces simply good
+and simply the reverse. This is not really so, and the tragic effect
+depends upon the fact. It depends on our feeling that the elements in
+the man's nature are so inextricably blended that the good in him, that
+which we admire, instead of simply opposing the evil, reinforces it.
+Macbeth's imagination deters him from murder, but it also makes the
+vision of a crown irresistibly bright. If he had been less determined,
+nay, if his conscience had been less maddening in its insistence that he
+had thrown the precious jewel of his soul irretrievably away, he might
+have paused after his first deed, might even have repented. Yet his
+imagination, his determination, and his conscience were things good.
+Hamlet's desire to do his duty is a good thing, but what opposes this
+desire is by no means simply evil. It is something to which a
+substantial contribution is made by the qualities we most admire in him.
+Thus the nature of tragedy, as seen in the external conflict, repeats
+itself on each side of this conflict, and everywhere there is a
+spiritual value in both the contending forces.
+
+In showing that _Macbeth_, a tragedy as far removed as possible from the
+_Antigone_ as understood by Hegel, is still of one nature with it, and
+equally answers to the account of tragedy proposed, it has been
+necessary to ignore the great difference between the two plays. But when
+once the common essence of all tragedies has been determined, their
+differences become the interesting subject. They could be distinguished
+according to the character of the collisions on which they are built, or
+of the main forces which move the principal agents. And it may well be
+that, other things being equal (as they never are), the tragedy in which
+the hero is, as we say, a good man, is more tragic than that in which he
+is, as we say, a bad one. The more spiritual value, the more tragedy in
+conflict and waste. The death of Hamlet or Othello is, so far, more
+tragic than that of Macbeth, that of Macbeth than that of Richard. Below
+Richard stands Iago, a figure still tragic, but unfit for the hero's
+part; below him persons like Regan or, in the very depth, Oswald,
+characters no longer (at least in the dramatic sense) tragic at all.
+Moral evil, that is to say, so greatly diminishes the spiritual value we
+ascribe to the personality that a very large amount of good of some kind
+is required to bring this personality up to the tragic level, the
+destruction of evil as such being in no degree tragic. And again, it may
+well be that, other things being equal, the more nearly the contending
+forces approach each other in goodness, the more tragic is the conflict;
+that the collision is, so far, more tragic in the _Antigone_ than in
+_Macbeth_, and Hamlet's internal conflict than his struggle with outward
+enemies and obstacles. But it is dangerous to describe tragedy in terms
+that even appear to exclude _Macbeth_, or to describe _Macbeth_, even
+casually or by implication, in terms which imply that it portrays a
+conflict of mere evil with mere good.
+
+The restatement of Hegel's main principle as to the conflict would
+involve a similar restatement as to the catastrophe (for we need not
+consider here those 'tragedies' which end with a solution). As before,
+we must avoid any reference to ethical or universal ends, or to the work
+of 'justice' in the catastrophe. We might then simply say that, as the
+tragic action portrays a self-division or intestinal conflict of spirit,
+so the catastrophe displays the violent annulling of this division or
+conflict. But this statement, which might be pretty generally accepted,
+would represent only half of Hegel's idea, and perhaps nothing of what
+is most characteristic and valuable in it. For the catastrophe (if I may
+put his idea in my own way) has two aspects, a negative and an
+affirmative, and we have ignored the latter. On the one hand it is the
+act of a power immeasurably superior to that of the conflicting agents,
+a power which is irresistible and unescapable, and which overbears and
+negates whatever is incompatible with it. So far, it may be called, in
+relation to the conflicting agents,[9] necessity or fate; and unless a
+catastrophe affects us in ways corresponding with this aspect it is not
+truly tragic. But then if this were all and this necessity were merely
+infinite, characterless, external force, the catastrophe would not only
+terrify (as it should), it would also horrify, depress, or at best
+provoke indignation or rebellion; and these are not tragic feelings. The
+catastrophe, then, must have a second and affirmative aspect, which is
+the source of our feelings of reconciliation, whatever form they may
+assume. And this will be taken into account if we describe the
+catastrophe as the violent self-restitution of the divided spiritual
+unity. The necessity which acts and negates in it, that is to say, is
+yet of one substance with both the agents. _It_ is divided against
+itself in them; they are _its_ conflicting forces; and in restoring its
+unity through negation it affirms them, so far as they are compatible
+with that unity. The qualification is essential, since the hero, for all
+his affinity with that power, is, as the living man we see before us,
+not so compatible. He must die, and his union with 'eternal justice'
+(which is more than 'justice') must itself be 'eternal' or ideal. But
+the qualification does not abolish what it qualifies. This is no
+occasion to ask how in particular, and in what various ways in various
+works, we feel the effect of this affirmative aspect in the catastrophe.
+But it corresponds at least with that strange double impression which is
+produced by the hero's death. He dies, and our hearts die with him; and
+yet his death matters nothing to us, or we even exult. He is dead; and
+he has no more to do with death than the power which killed him and with
+which he is one.
+
+I leave it to students of Hegel to ask whether he would have accepted
+the criticisms and modifications I have suggested. Naturally I think he
+would, as I believe they rest on truth, and am sure he had a habit of
+arriving at truth. But in any case their importance is trifling,
+compared with that of the theory which they attempt to strengthen and to
+which they owe their existence.
+
+1901.
+
+
+  NOTE
+
+Why did Hegel, in his lectures on Aesthetics, so treat of tragedy as to
+suggest the idea that the kind of tragedy which he personally preferred
+(let us for the sake of brevity call it 'ancient') is also the most
+adequate embodiment of the idea of tragedy? This question can be
+answered, I think, only conjecturally, but some remarks on it may have
+an interest for readers of Hegel (they are too brief to be of use to
+others).
+
+One answer might be this. Hegel did not really hold that idea. But he
+was lecturing, not writing a book. He thought the principle of tragedy
+was more clearly and readily visible in ancient works than in modern;
+and so, for purposes of exposition, he emphasised the ancient form. And
+this fact, with his personal enthusiasm for certain Greek plays, leads
+the reader of the _Aesthetik_ to misconstrue him.
+
+Again, we must remember the facts of Hegel's life. He seems first to
+have reflected on tragedy at a time when his enthusiasm for the Greeks
+and their 'substantial' ethics was combined, not only with a
+contemptuous dislike for much modern 'subjectivity' (this he never
+ceased to feel), but with a certain hostility to the individualism and
+the un-political character of Christian morality. His first view of
+tragedy was thus, in effect, a theory of Aeschylean and Sophoclean
+tragedy; and it appears in the early essay on _Naturrecht_ and more
+fully in the _Phaenomenologie_. Perhaps, then, when he came to deal with
+the subject more generally, he insensibly regarded the ancient form as
+the typical form, and tended to treat the modern rather as a
+modification of this type than as an alternative embodiment of the
+general idea of tragedy. The note in the _Rechtsphilosophie_ (p. 196)
+perhaps favours this idea.
+
+But, whether it is correct or no, I believe that the impression produced
+by the _Aesthetik_ is a true one, and that Hegel did deliberately
+consider the ancient form the more satisfactory. It would not follow, of
+course, from that opinion that he thought the advantage was all on one
+side, or considered this or that ancient poet greater than this or that
+modern, or wished that modern poets had tried to write tragedies of the
+Greek type. Tragedy would, in his view, be in somewhat the same position
+as Sculpture. Renaissance sculpture, he might say, has qualities in
+which it is superior to Greek, and Michael Angelo may have been as great
+an artist as Pheidias; but all the same for certain reasons Greek
+sculpture is, and probably will remain, sculpture _par excellence_. So,
+though not to the same extent, with tragedy.
+
+And such a view would cohere with his general view of Art. For he taught
+that, in a sense, Classical Art is Art _par excellence_, and that in
+Greece beauty held a position such as it never held before and will not
+hold again. To explain in a brief note how this position bears upon his
+treatment of modern tragedy would be impossible: but if the student of
+Hegel will remember in what sense and on what grounds he held it; that
+he describes Beauty as the '_sinnliches_ Scheinen der Idee'; that for
+him the new idea that distinguished Christianity and Romantic Art from
+Greek religion and Classical Art is that '_unendliche_ Subjektivität'
+which implies a negative, though not merely negative, relation to sense;
+and that in Romantic Art this idea is not only exhibited in the
+religious sphere, but appears in the position given to personal honour,
+love, and loyalty, and indirectly in what Hegel calls 'die formelle
+Selbstständigkeit der individuellen Besonderheiten,' and in the fuller
+admission of common and un-beautiful reality into the realm of
+Beauty,--he will see how all this is connected with those
+characteristics of modern tragedy which Hegel regards as necessary and
+yet as, in part, drawbacks. This connection, which Hegel has no occasion
+to work out, will be apparent even from consideration of the
+introductory chapter on 'die romantische Kunstform,' _Aesthetik_, ii.
+120-135.
+
+There is one marked difference, I may add, between ancient and modern
+tragedy, which should be considered with reference to this subject, and
+which Hegel, I think, does not explicitly point out. Speaking roughly,
+we may say that the former includes, while the latter tends to ignore,
+the accepted religious ideas of the time. The ultimate reason of this
+difference, on Hegel's view, would be that the Olympian gods are
+themselves the '_sinnliches_ Scheinen der Idee,' and so are in the same
+element as Art, while this is, on the whole, not so with modern
+religious ideas. One result would be that Greek tragedy represents the
+total Greek mind more fully than modern tragedy can the total modern
+mind.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] See, primarily, _Aesthetik_, iii. 479-581, and especially
+    525-581. There is much in _Aesthetik_, i. 219-306, and a good deal in
+    ii. 1-243, that bears on the subject. See also the section on Greek
+    religion in _Religionsphilosophie_, ii. 96-156, especially 131-6,
+    152-6; and the references to the death of Socrates in _Geschichte der
+    Philosophie_, ii. 81 ff., especially 102-5. The works so far cited
+    all consist of posthumous redactions of lecture-notes. Among works
+    published by Hegel himself, the early essay on 'Naturrecht' (_Werke_,
+    i. 386 ff.), and _Phaenomenologie d. Geistes_, 320-348, 527-542, deal
+    with or bear on _Greek_ tragedy. See also _Rechtsphilosophie_, 196,
+    note. There is a note on _Wallenstein_ in _Werke_, xvii. 411-4. These
+    references are to the second edition of the works cited, where there
+    are two editions.
+
+  [2] His theory of tragedy is connected with his view of the function
+    of negation in the universe. No statement therefore which ignores his
+    metaphysics and his philosophy of religion can be more than a
+    fragmentary account of that theory.
+
+  [3] I say 'might,' because Hegel himself in the _Phaenomenologie_
+    uses those very terms 'divine' and 'human law' in reference to the
+    _Antigone_.
+
+  [4] See Note at end of lecture.
+
+  [5] This interpretation of Hegel's 'abstract' is more or less
+    conjectural and doubtful.
+
+  [6] Hegel's meaning does not fully appear in the sentences here
+    condensed. The 'blessedness' comes from the sense of greatness or
+    beauty in the characters.
+
+  [7] Hegel himself expressly guards against this misconception.
+
+  [8] The same point may be put thus, in view of that dangerous word
+    'personality.' Our interest in Macbeth may be called interest in a
+    personality; but it is not an interest in some bare form of
+    self-consciousness, nor yet in a person in the legal sense, but in a
+    personality full of matter. This matter is not an ethical or
+    universal end, but it must in a sense be universal--human nature in a
+    particular form--or it would not excite the horror, sympathy, and
+    admiration it does excite. Nor, again, could it excite these feelings
+    if it were not composed largely of qualities on which we set a high
+    value.
+
+  [9] In relation to _both_ sides in the conflict (though it may not
+    need to negate life in both). For the ultimate agent in the
+    catastrophe is emphatically not the finite power of one side. It is
+    beyond both, and, at any rate in relation to them, boundless.
+
+
+
+
+WORDSWORTH
+
+
+WORDSWORTH[1]
+
+
+'Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that
+every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or
+original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished;
+he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.... My ears are
+stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to
+these petty stings.' These sentences, from a letter written by
+Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common
+attitude of his reviewers in the dozen years when most of his best
+poetry was produced. A century has gone by, and there is now no English
+poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of
+criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say more
+reverential. Some of this later criticism might have satisfied even that
+sense of wonder, awe, and solemn responsibility with which the poet
+himself regarded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and
+if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really
+astonishing number of excellent guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold,
+Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,--how easy to add to
+this list of them! Only the other day there came another, Mr. Walter
+Raleigh. And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for
+some years should be a study of Wordsworth is just what might have been
+expected. The whirligig of time has brought him a full revenge.
+
+I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures another study, or
+even an estimate, of Wordsworth. My purpose is much more limited. I
+think that in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the notions
+of his poetry prevalent among general readers, a disproportionate
+emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And
+I should like to offer some words of warning as to this tendency, and
+also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached. I
+will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last moment to
+omit it, and simply to refer you to Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book
+has practised what I am about to preach.
+
+
+  1.
+
+There have been greater poets than Wordsworth, but none more original.
+He saw new things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally, this would
+have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if
+his new perception had been superficial. But that was not so. If it had
+been, Wordsworth might have won acceptance more quickly, but he would
+not have gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it is, those in
+whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to
+love him (and in each generation they are not a few), never let him go.
+Their love for him is of the kind that he himself celebrated, a settled
+passion, perhaps 'slow to begin,' but 'never ending,' and twined around
+the roots of their being. And the reason is that they find his way of
+seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his
+'criticism of life,' to be something deep, and therefore something that
+will hold. It continues to bring them joy, peace, strength, exaltation.
+It does not thin out or break beneath them as they grow older and wiser;
+nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their
+sorest need. And yet--to return to our starting-point--it continues to
+strike them as original, and something more. It is not like
+Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both,
+peculiar. They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a
+cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood what
+made him write this poem or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling,
+though now familiar and beloved, still brings them not only peace,
+strength, exaltation, but a 'shock of mild surprise'; and his paradoxes,
+long known by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.
+
+If this is so, the road into Wordsworth's mind must be through his
+strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them. I do not mean that
+they are everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak of
+occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult;
+and some of this may be as valuable as that which is audacious or
+strange. But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth's
+centre; and, if we have not a most unusual affinity to him, we cannot
+get hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt
+the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for example, two or three of his
+statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a
+philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or
+symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth. He said that the
+meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too
+deep for tears. He said, in a poem not less solemn, that Nature was the
+soul of all his moral being; and also that she can so influence us that
+nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is
+full of blessings. After making his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale
+of Margaret, he makes him say that the beauty and tranquillity of her
+ruined cottage had once so affected him
+
+  That what we feel of sorrow and despair
+  From ruin and from change, and all the grief
+  The passing shows of Being leave behind,
+  Appeared an idle dream, that could not live
+  Where meditation was.
+
+He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the
+clouds unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him
+breathed immortality. He said to 'Almighty God,'
+
+  But thy most dreaded instrument
+  For working out a pure intent
+  Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter;
+  Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.
+
+This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit
+more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we assume that we
+are familiar with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we
+translate 'the soul of all my moral being' into 'somehow concordant with
+my moral feelings,' or convert 'all that we behold' into 'a good deal
+that we behold,' or transform the Wanderer's reading of the silent faces
+of the clouds into an argument from 'design.' But this is the road round
+Wordsworth's mind, not into it.[2]
+
+Again, with all Wordsworth's best poems, it is essential not to miss the
+unique tone of his experience. This doubtless holds good of any true
+poet, but not in the same way. With many poems there is little risk of
+our failing either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to
+appropriate what he says. What is characteristic, for example, in
+Byron's lines, _On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year_, or in
+Shelley's _Stanzas written in dejection near Naples_, cannot escape
+discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood
+expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is
+constantly present in some degree. Take, for instance, one of the most
+popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake. It is
+popular partly because it remains a pretty thing even to those who
+convert it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth. And it is
+comparatively easy, too, to perceive and to reproduce in imagination a
+good deal that _is_ distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the
+sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the breeze in their glee, and
+the Wordsworthian 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' expressed in the
+lines (written by his wife),
+
+  They flash upon that inward eye
+  Which is the bliss of solitude.
+
+But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:
+
+  I wandered lonely as a Cloud
+  That floats on high o'er vales and hills.
+
+It is thrust into the reader's face, for these are the opening lines.
+But with many readers it passes unheeded, because it is strange and
+outside their own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential to the
+effect of the poem.
+
+This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised, would remain,
+as I said, a pretty thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our
+point is best illustrated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most
+earned ridicule, the ballad poems. They arose almost always from some
+incident which, for him, had a novel and arresting character and came on
+his mind with a certain shock; and if we do not get back to this through
+the poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course, get back to this and
+yet consider the poem to be more or less a failure. There is here
+therefore room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr. Swinburne
+sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of _The Idiot
+Boy_ and _The Thorn_, yet he calls them 'doleful examples of
+eccentricity in dullness,' while Coleridge's judgment, though he
+criticised both poems, was very different. I believe (if I may venture
+into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote _Goody
+Blake and Harry Gill_ and the _Anecdote for Fathers_, and yet I doubt if
+he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected
+the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in
+a selection from which he excluded _The Sailor's Mother_.[3] Indeed, of
+all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has
+not been praised by some excellent judge. But they were ridiculed by
+men who judged them without attempting first to get inside them. And
+this is fatal.
+
+I may bring out the point by referring more fully to one of them. _Alice
+Fell_ was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles
+Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that it was excluded 'in
+policy' from edition after edition of Wordsworth's Poems; many still who
+admire _Lucy Gray_ see nothing to admire in _Alice Fell_; and you may
+still hear the question asked, What could be made of a child crying for
+the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of a man poking
+his stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking
+questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject
+of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me illustrate
+this individuality methodically. A child crying for the loss of her
+cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an imagination, and
+who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling in the wheel-spokes
+of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesome roads through
+a night of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was alone, and,
+having to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise,
+and her cloak was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and
+motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called _Alice Fell, or
+Poverty_) is so extreme that for the loss of her weather-beaten rag she
+does not 'cry'; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent
+heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side
+and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob
+after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself
+for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost
+her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart. It was
+_this_ poverty and _this_ grief that Wordsworth described with his
+reiterated hammering blows. Is it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was
+more. To him grief like this is sublime. It is the agony of a soul from
+which something is torn away that was made one with its very being. What
+does it matter whether the thing is a woman, or a kingdom, or a tattered
+cloak? It is the passion that counts. Othello must not agonise for a
+cloak, but 'the little orphan Alice Fell' has nothing else to agonise
+for. Is all this insignificant? And then--for this poem about a child is
+right to the last line--next day the storm and the tragedy have
+vanished, and the new cloak is bought, of duffil grey, as warm a cloak
+as man can sell; and the child is as pleased as Punch.[4]
+
+
+  2.
+
+I pass on from this subject to another, allied to it, but wider. In
+spite of all the excellent criticism of Wordsworth, there has gradually
+been formed, I think, in the mind of the general reader a partial and
+misleading idea of the poet and his work. This partiality is due to
+several causes: for instance, to the fact that personal recollections of
+Wordsworth have inevitably been, for the most part, recollections of his
+later years; to forgetfulness of his position in the history of
+literature, and of the restricted purpose of his first important poems;
+and to the insistence of some of his most influential critics, notably
+Arnold, on one particular source of his power--an insistence perfectly
+just, but accompanied now and then by a lack of sympathy with other
+aspects of his poetry. The result is an idea of him which is mainly true
+and really characteristic, but yet incomplete, and so, in a sense,
+untrue; a picture, I might say, somewhat like Millais' first portrait of
+Gladstone, which renders the inspiration, the beauty, the light, but
+not the sternness or imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire.
+Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless to say, I do not
+attribute, in the shape here given to it, to anyone in particular.
+
+It was not Wordsworth's function to sing, like most great poets, of war,
+or love, or tragic passions, or the actions of supernatural beings. His
+peculiar function was 'to open out the soul of little and familiar
+things,' alike in nature and in human life. His 'poetry is great because
+of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in
+nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and
+duties.' His field was therefore narrow; and, besides, he was deficient
+in romance, his moral sympathies were somewhat limited, and he tended
+also to ignore the darker aspects of the world. But in this very
+optimism lay his strength. The gulf which for Byron and Shelley yawned
+between the real and the ideal, had no existence for him. For him the
+ideal was realised, and Utopia a country which he saw every day, and
+which, he thought, every man might see who did not strive, nor cry, nor
+rebel, but opened his heart in love and thankfulness to sweet influences
+as universal and perpetual as the air. The spirit of his poetry was also
+that of his life--a life full of strong but peaceful affections; of a
+communion with nature in keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect
+devotion to the mission with which he held himself charged; and of a
+natural piety gradually assuming a more distinctively religious tone.
+Some verses of his own best describe him, and some verses of Matthew
+Arnold his influence on his readers. These are his own words (from _A
+Poet's Epitaph_):
+
+  But who is he, with modest looks,
+  And clad in homely russet brown?
+  He murmurs near the running brooks
+  A music sweeter than their own.
+
+
+  He is retired as noontide dew,
+  Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
+  And you must love him, ere to you
+  He will seem worthy of your love.
+
+  The outward shows of sky and earth,
+  Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
+  And impulses of deeper birth
+  Have come to him in solitude.
+
+  In common things that round us lie
+  Some random truths he can impart,
+  --The harvest of a quiet eye
+  That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
+
+  But he is weak; both man and boy,
+  Hath been an idler in the land:
+  Contented if he might enjoy
+  The things which others understand.
+
+And these are the words from Arnold's _Memorial Verses_:
+
+  He too upon a wintry clime
+  Had fallen--on this iron time
+  Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears
+  He found us when the age had bound
+  Our souls in its benumbing round--
+  He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
+  He laid us as we lay at birth
+  On the cool flowery lap of earth;
+  Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
+  The hills were round us, and the breeze
+  Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
+  Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
+  Our youth returned: for there was shed
+  On spirits that had long been dead,
+  Spirits dried up and closely furled,
+  The freshness of the early world.
+
+  Ah, since dark days still bring to light
+  Man's prudence and man's fiery might,
+  Time may restore us in his course
+  Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
+  But where will Europe's latter hour
+  Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
+  Others will teach us how to dare,
+  And against fear our breast to steel;
+  Others will strengthen us to bear--
+  But who, ah who, will make us feel?
+  The cloud of mortal destiny,
+  Others will front it fearlessly--
+  But who, like him, will put it by?
+
+  Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
+  O Rotha! with thy living wave.
+  Sing him thy best! for few or none
+  Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.
+
+Those last words are enough to disarm dissent. No, that voice will never
+again be heard quite right now Wordsworth is gone. Nor is it, for the
+most part, dissent that I wish to express. The picture we have been
+looking at, though we may question the accuracy of this line or that,
+seems to me, I repeat, substantially true. But is there nothing missing?
+Consider this picture, and refuse to go beyond it, and then ask if it
+accounts for all that is most characteristic in Wordsworth. How did the
+man in the picture ever come to write the Immortality _Ode_, or
+_Yew-trees_, or why should he say,
+
+  For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
+  Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
+  To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil?
+
+How, again, could he say that Carnage is God's daughter, or write the
+_Sonnets dedicated to National Liberty and Independence_, or the tract
+on the Convention of Cintra? Can it be true of him that many of his
+best-known poems of human life--perhaps the majority--deal with painful
+subjects, and not a few with extreme suffering? Should we expect him to
+make an 'idol' of Milton, or to show a 'strong predilection for such
+geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo'? He might easily be 'reserved,'
+but is it not surprising to find him described as haughty, prouder than
+Lucifer, inhumanly arrogant? Why should his forehead have been marked by
+the 'severe worn pressure of thought,' or his eyes have looked so
+'supernatural ... like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a
+sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two
+caverns'? In all this there need be nothing inconsistent with the
+picture we have been looking at; but that picture fails to suggest it.
+In that way the likeness it presents is only partial, and I propose to
+emphasise some of the traits which it omits or marks too faintly.[5]
+
+And first as to the restriction of Wordsworth's field. Certainly his
+field, as compared with that of some poets, is narrow; but to describe
+it as confined to external nature and peasant life, or to little and
+familiar things, would be absurdly untrue, as a mere glance at his Table
+of Contents suffices to show. And its actual restriction was not due to
+any false theory, nor mainly to any narrowness of outlook. It was due,
+apart from limitation of endowment, on the one hand to that diminution
+of poetic energy which in Wordsworth began comparatively soon, and on
+the other, especially in his best days, to deliberate choice; and we
+must not assume without question that he was inherently incapable of
+doing either what he would not do, or what, in his last five and thirty
+years, he could no longer do.
+
+There is no reason to suppose that Wordsworth undervalued or objected to
+the subjects of such poets as Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Spenser,
+Shakespeare and Milton. And when, after writing his part of the _Lyrical
+Ballads_, he returned from Germany and settled in the Lake Country, the
+subjects he himself revolved for a great poem were not concerned with
+rural life or humble persons. Some old 'romantic' British theme, left
+unsung by Milton; some tale of Chivalry, dire enchantments, war-like
+feats; vanquished Mithridates passing north and becoming Odin; the
+fortunes of the followers of Sertorius; de Gourgues' journey of
+vengeance to Florida; Gustavus; Wallace and his exploits in the war for
+his country's independence,--these are the subjects he names first. And,
+though his 'last and favourite aspiration' was towards
+
+               Some philosophic song
+  Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,
+
+--that song which was never completed--yet, some ten years later, he
+still hoped, when it should be finished, to write an epic. Whether at
+any time he was fitted for the task or no, he wished to undertake it;
+and his addiction, by no means entire even in his earlier days, to
+little and familiar things was due, not at all to an opinion that they
+are the only right subjects or the best, nor merely to a natural
+predilection for them, but to the belief that a particular kind of
+poetry was wanted at that time to counteract its special evils. There
+prevailed, he thought, a 'degrading thirst after outrageous
+stimulation.' The violent excitement of public events, and 'the
+increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
+occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
+rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies,' had induced a
+torpor of mind which only yielded to gross and sensational effects--such
+effects as were produced by 'frantic novels,' of the Radcliffe or Monk
+Lewis type, full of mysterious criminals, gloomy castles and terrifying
+spectres. He wanted to oppose to this tendency one as far removed from
+it as possible; to write a poetry even _more_ alien to it than
+Shakespeare's tragedies or Spenser's stories of knights and dragons; to
+show men that wonder and beauty can be felt, and the heart be moved,
+even when the rate of the pulse is perfectly normal. In the same way, he
+grieved Coleridge by refusing to interest himself in the Somersetshire
+fairies, and declared that he desired for his scene no planet but the
+earth, and no region of the earth stranger than England and the lowliest
+ways in England. And, being by no means merely a gentle shepherd, but a
+born fighter who was easily provoked and could swing his crook with
+uncommon force, he asserted his convictions defiantly and carried them
+out to extremes. And so in later days, after he had somewhat narrowed,
+when in the Seventh Book of the _Excursion_ he made the Pastor protest
+that poetry was not wanted to multiply and aggravate the din of war, or
+to propagate the pangs and turbulence of passionate love, he did this
+perhaps because the world which would not listen to him[6] was
+enraptured by _Marmion_ and the earlier poems of Byron.
+
+How great Wordsworth's success might have been in fields which he
+deliberately avoided, it is perhaps idle to conjecture. I do not suppose
+it would have been very great, but I see no reason to believe that he
+would have failed. With regard, for instance, to love, one cannot read
+without a smile his reported statement that, had he been a writer of
+love-poetry, it would have been natural to him to write it with a degree
+of warmth which could hardly have been approved by his principles, and
+which might have been undesirable for the reader. But one may smile at
+his naďveté without disbelieving his statement. And, in fact, Wordsworth
+neither wholly avoided the subject nor failed when he touched it. The
+poems about Lucy are not poems of passion, in the usual sense, but they
+surely are love-poems. The verses _'Tis said that some have died for
+love_, excluded from Arnold's selection but praised by Ruskin, are
+poignant enough. And the following lines from _Vaudracour and Julia_
+make one wonder how this could be to Arnold the only poem of
+Wordsworth's that he could not read with pleasure:
+
+  Arabian fiction never filled the world
+  With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
+  Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring;
+  Life turned the meanest of her implements,
+  Before his eyes, to price above all gold;
+  The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine;
+  Her chamber-window did surpass in glory
+  The portals of the dawn; all paradise
+  Could, by the simple opening of a door,
+  Let itself in upon him:--pathways, walks,
+  Swarmed with enchantment, till his spirit sank,
+  Surcharged, within him, overblest to move
+  Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world
+  To its dull round of ordinary cares;
+  A man too happy for mortality!
+
+As a whole, _Vaudracour and Julia_ is a failure, but these lines haunt
+my memory, and I cannot think them a poor description of that which they
+profess to describe. This is not precisely 'passion,' and, I admit, they
+do not prove Wordsworth's capacity to deal with passion. The main reason
+for doubting whether, if he had made the attempt, he would have reached
+his highest level, is that, so far as we can see, he did not strongly
+feel--perhaps hardly felt at all--that the _passion_ of love is a way
+into the Infinite; and a thing must be no less than this to Wordsworth
+if it is to rouse all his power. Byron, it seemed to him, had
+
+                                     dared to take
+  Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake;[7]
+
+and he utterly repudiated that. 'The immortal mind craves objects that
+endure.'
+
+Then there is that 'romance' which Wordsworth abjured. In using the word
+I am employing the familiar distinction between two tendencies of the
+Romantic Revival, one called naturalistic and one called, in a more
+special sense, romantic, and signalised, among other ways, by a love of
+the marvellous, the supernatural, the exotic, the worlds of mythology.
+It is a just and necessary distinction: the _Ancient Mariner_ and
+_Michael_ are very dissimilar. But, like most distinctions of the kind,
+it becomes misleading when it is roughly handled or pushed into an
+antithesis; and it would be easy to show that these two tendencies
+exclude one another only in their inferior examples, and that the better
+the example of either, the more it shows its community with the other.
+There is not a great deal of truth to nature in _Lalla Rookh_, but there
+is plenty in the _Ancient Mariner_: in certain poems of Crabbe there is
+little romance, but there is no want of it in _Sir Eustace Grey_ or in
+_Peter Grimes_. Taking the distinction, however, as we find it, and
+assuming, as I do, that it lay beyond Wordsworth's power to write an
+_Ancient Mariner_, or to tell us of
+
+         magic casements opening on the foam
+  Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,
+
+we are not therefore to conclude that he was by nature deficient in
+romance and incapable of writing well what he refused to write. The
+indications are quite contrary. Not to speak here of his own peculiar
+dealings with the supernatural, his vehement defence (in the _Prelude_)
+of fairy-tales as food for the young is only one of many passages which
+show that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted only by the
+supernatural powers of nature. He delighted in 'Arabian fiction.' The
+'Arabian sands' (_Solitary Reaper_) had the same glamour for him as for
+others. His dream of the Arab and the two books (_Prelude_, v.) has a
+very curious romantic effect, though it is not romance _in excelsis_,
+like _Kubla Khan_. His love of Spenser; his very description of him,
+
+  Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
+  With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace;
+
+the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual attitude, in which he
+praises the Osmunda fern as
+
+       lovelier, in its own retired abode
+  On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side
+  Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere
+  Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,[8]
+
+--these, and a score of other passages, all point the same way. He would
+not carry his readers to the East, like Southey and Moore and Byron,
+nor, like Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it suited his
+purpose, as in _Ruth_, he could write well enough of un-English scenery:
+
+  He told of the magnolia, spread
+  High as a cloud, high overhead,
+  The cypress and her spire;
+  Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam
+  Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
+  To set the hills on fire.
+
+He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for a subject, for he was
+determined to speak of what Englishmen may see every day; but what he
+wrote of Greek religion in the _Excursion_ is full of imagination and
+brought inspiration to Keats, and the most famous expression in English
+of that longing for the perished glory of Greek myth which appears in
+much Romantic poetry came from Wordsworth's pen:
+
+             Great God! I'd rather be
+  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
+  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
+  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
+  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
+  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
+
+As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor at all approved, that
+elementary love of fighting which, together with much nobler things, is
+gratified by some great poetry. And assuredly he could not, even if he
+would, have rivalled the last canto of _Marmion_, nor even the best
+passages in the _Siege of Corinth_. But he is not to be judged by his
+intentional failures. The martial parts of the _White Doe of Rylstone_
+are, with few exceptions, uninteresting, if not painfully tame. The
+former at least they were meant to be. The _Lay of the Last Minstrel_
+was on every tongue. The modest poet was as stiff-necked a person as
+ever walked the earth; and he was determined that no reader of his poem
+who missed its spiritual interest should be interested in anything else.
+Probably he overshot his mark. For readers who could understand him the
+effect he aimed at would not have been weakened by contrast with an
+outward action narrated with more spirit and sympathy. But, however that
+may be, he did what he meant to do. In the _Song at the Feast of
+Brougham Castle_, again, the war-like close of the Song was not written
+for its own sake. It was designed with a view to the transition to the
+longer metre, the thought of peace in communion with nature, and the
+wonderful stanza 'Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.' But,
+for the effect of this transition, it was necessary for Wordsworth to
+put his heart into the martial close of the Song; and surely it has
+plenty of animation and glory. Its author need not have shrunk from the
+subject of war if he had wished to handle it _con amore_.
+
+The poet whose portrait we drew when we began might have been the author
+of the _White Doe_, and perhaps of _Brougham Castle_, and possibly of
+the _Happy Warrior_. He could no more have composed the _Poems dedicated
+to National Independence and Liberty_ than the political sonnets of
+Milton. And yet Wordsworth wrote nothing more characteristic than these
+Poems, which I am not going to praise, since Mr. Swinburne's praise of
+them is, to my mind, not less just than eloquent. They are
+characteristic in many ways. The later are, on the whole, decidedly
+inferior to the earlier. Even in this little series, which occupies the
+first fifteen years of the century, the decline of Wordsworth's poetic
+power and the increasing use of theological ideas are clearly visible.
+The Odes, again, are much inferior to the majority of the Sonnets. And
+this too is characteristic. The entire success of the _Ode to Duty_ is
+exceptional, and it is connected with the fact that the poem is written
+in regular stanzas of a simple metrical scheme. The irregular Odes are
+never thus successful. Wordsworth could not command the tone of
+sustained rapture, and where his metrical form is irregular his ear is
+uncertain. The Immortality Ode, like _King Lear_, is its author's
+greatest product, but not his best piece of work. The Odes among the
+_Poems_ which we are now considering are declamatory, even violent, and
+yet they stir comparatively little emotion, and they do not sing. The
+sense of massive passion, concentrated, and repressing the utterance it
+permits itself, is that which most moves us in his political verse. And
+the Sonnet suited this.
+
+The patriotism of these _Poems_ is equally characteristic. It
+illustrates Wordsworth's total rejection of the Godwinian ideas in which
+he had once in vain sought refuge, and his belief in the necessity and
+sanctity of forms of association arising from natural kinship. It is
+composed, we may say, of two elements. The first is the simple love of
+country raised to a high pitch, the love of 'a lover or a child'; the
+love that makes it for some men a miserable doom to be forced to live in
+a foreign land, and that makes them feel their country's virtues and
+faults, and joys and sorrows, like those of the persons dearest to them.
+We talk as if this love were common. It is very far from common; but
+Wordsworth felt it.[9] The other element in his patriotism I must call
+by the dreaded name of 'moral,' a name which Wordsworth did not dread,
+because it meant for him nothing stereotyped or narrow. His country is
+to him the representative of freedom, left, as he writes in 1803,
+
+                     the only light
+  Of Liberty that yet remains on earth.
+
+This Liberty is, first, national independence; and that requires
+military power, the maintenance of which is a primary moral duty.[10]
+But neither military power nor even national independence is of value in
+itself; and neither could be long maintained without that which gives
+value to both. This is the freedom of the soul, plain living and high
+thinking, indifference to the externals of mere rank or wealth or power,
+domestic affections not crippled (as they may be) by poverty. Wordsworth
+fears for his country only when he doubts whether this inward freedom is
+not failing;[11] but he seldom fears for long. England, in the war
+against Napoleon, is to him almost what the England of the Long
+Parliament and the Commonwealth was to Milton,--an elect people, the
+chosen agent of God's purpose on the earth. His ideal of life, unlike
+Milton's in the stress he lays on the domestic affections and the
+influence of nature, is otherwise of the same Stoical cast. His country
+is to him, as to Milton,
+
+  An old and haughty nation, proud in arms.[12]
+
+And his own pride in it is, like Milton's, in the highest degree
+haughty. It would be calumnious to say that it recalls the description
+of the English given by the Irishman Goldsmith,
+
+  Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
+  I see the lords of human kind pass by;
+
+for Wordsworth had not the faintest wish to see his countrymen the lords
+of human kind, nor is there anything vulgar in his patriotism; but there
+_is_ pride in his port and defiance in his eye. And, lastly, the
+character of his ideal and of this national pride, with him as with
+Milton, is connected with personal traits,--impatience of constraint,
+severity, a certain austere passion, an inclination of imagination to
+the sublime.
+
+
+  3.
+
+These personal traits, though quite compatible with the portrait on
+which I am commenting, are not visible in it. Nor are others, which
+belong especially, but not exclusively, to the younger Wordsworth. He
+had a spirit so vehement and affections so violent (it is his sister's
+word) as to inspire alarm for him. If he had been acquainted with that
+excuse for impotent idleness and selfishness, 'the artistic
+temperament,' he might have made out a good claim to it. He was from the
+beginning self-willed, and for a long time he appeared aimless. He would
+not work at the studies of his university: he preferred to imagine a
+university in which he _would_ work. He had a passion for wandering
+which was restrained only by want of means, and which opened his heart
+to every pedlar or tramp whom he met. After leaving Cambridge he would
+not fix on a profession. He remained, to the displeasure of his
+relatives, an idler in the land or out of it; and as soon as he had Ł900
+of capital left to him he determined _not_ to have a profession.
+Sometimes he worked hard at his poetry, even heroically hard; but he did
+not work methodically, and often he wrote nothing for weeks, but loafed
+and walked and enjoyed himself. He was not blind like Milton, but the
+act of writing was physically disagreeable to him, and he made his
+woman-kind write to his dictation. He would not conform to rules, or
+attend to the dinner-bell, or go to church (he made up for this neglect
+later). 'He wrote his _Ode to Duty_,' said one of his friends, 'and then
+he had done with that matter.' He never 'tired' of his 'unchartered
+freedom.' In age, if he wanted to go out, whatever the hour and whatever
+the weather, he must have his way. 'In vain one reminded him that a
+letter needed an answer or that the storm would soon be over. It was
+very necessary for him to do what he liked.' If the poetic fit was on
+him he could attend to nothing else. He was passionately fond of his
+children, but, when the serious illness of one of them coincided with an
+onset of inspiration, it was impossible to rouse him to a sense of
+danger. At such times he was as completely possessed as any wild poet
+who ruins the happiness of everyone dependent on him. But he has himself
+described the tyranny of inspiration, and the reaction after it, in his
+_Stanzas written in Thomson's Castle of Indolence_. It is almost beyond
+doubt, I think, that the first portrait there is that of himself; and
+though it is idealised it is probably quite as accurate as the portrait
+in _A Poet's Epitaph_. In the _Prelude_ he tells us that, though he
+rarely at Cambridge betrayed by gestures or looks his feelings about
+nature, yet, when he did so, some of his companions said he was mad.
+Hazlitt, describing his manner of reading his own poetry in much later
+years, says, 'It is clear that he is either mad or inspired.'
+
+Wordsworth's lawlessness was of the innocuous kind, but it is a
+superstition to suppose that he was a disgustingly well-regulated
+person. It is scarcely less unjust to describe his poetic sympathies as
+narrow and his poetic morality as puritanical. The former, of course,
+had nothing like the range of minds like Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or
+Browning, or the great novelists. Wordsworth's want of humour would by
+itself have made that impossible; and, in addition, though by no means
+wanting in psychological curiosity, he was not much interested in
+complex natures. Simple souls, and especially simple souls that are also
+deep, were the natures that attracted him: and in the same way the
+passions he loved to depict are not those that storm themselves out or
+rush to a catastrophe, but those that hold the soul in a vice for long
+years. But, these limitations admitted, it will not be found by anyone
+who reviews the characters in the smaller poems and the _Excursion_
+(especially Book vii.), that Wordsworth's poetic sympathies are narrow.
+They are wider than those of any imaginative writer of his time and
+country except Scott and perhaps Crabbe.
+
+Nor is his morality narrow. It is serious, but it is human and kindly
+and not in the least ascetic. 'It is the privilege of poetic genius,' he
+says in his defence of Burns, 'to catch a spirit of pleasure wherever it
+can be found--in the walks of nature and in the business of men. The
+poet, trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of
+love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes the fairer aspects
+of war: nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love
+though immoderate--from convivial pleasure though intemperate--nor from
+the presence of war though savage and recognised as the handmaid of
+desolation. Who but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in
+works of art ever read without delight the picture which Burns has drawn
+of the convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o' Shanter?'
+There is no want of sympathy in Wordsworth's own picture of the
+'convivial exaltation' of his Waggoner. It is true that he himself never
+describes a scene in which, to quote his astonishing phrase, 'conjugal
+fidelity archly bends to the service of general benevolence,' and that
+his treatment of sexual passion is always grave and, in a true sense,
+moral; but it is plain and manly and perfectly free from timidity or
+monkishness. It would really be easier to make out against Wordsworth a
+charge of excessive tolerance than a charge of excessive rigidity. A
+beggar is the sort of person he likes. It is all very well for him to
+say that he likes the Old Cumberland Beggar because, by making people
+give, he keeps love alive in their hearts. It may be so--he says so, and
+I always believe him. But that was not his only reason; and it is clear
+to me that, when he met the tall gipsy-beggar, he gave her money because
+she was beautiful and queenly, and that he delighted in her two lying
+boys because of their gaiety and joy in life. Neither has he the least
+objection to a thief. The grandfather and grandson who go pilfering
+together, two infants separated by ninety years, meet with nothing but
+smiles from him. The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale, after thirty years of
+careless hospitality, found himself ruined. He borrowed money, spent
+some of it in paying a few of his other debts, and absconded to London.
+
+  But this he did all in the _ease_ of his heart.
+
+And for this reason, and because in London he keeps the ease of his
+heart and continues to love the country, Wordsworth dismisses him with a
+blessing. What he cannot bear is torpor. He passes a knot of gipsies in
+the morning; and, passing them again after his twelve hours of joyful
+rambling, he finds them just as they were, sunk in sloth; and he breaks
+out,
+
+           Oh, better wrong and strife,
+  Better vain deeds and evil than such life.
+
+He changed this shocking exclamation later, but it represents his
+original feeling, and he might have trusted that only an 'impenetrable
+dunce or narrow-minded puritan' would misunderstand him.[13]
+
+Wordsworth's morality is of one piece with his optimism and with his
+determination to seize and exhibit in everything the element of good.
+But this is a subject far too large for treatment here, and I can refer
+to it only in the most summary way. What Arnold precisely meant when he
+said that Wordsworth 'put by' the cloud of human destiny I am not sure.
+That Wordsworth saw this cloud and looked at it steadily is beyond all
+question. I am not building on such famous lines as
+
+  The still sad music of humanity,
+
+or
+
+          the fierce confederate storm
+  Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore
+  Within the walls of cities;
+
+or
+
+  Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills,
+  The generations are prepared; the pangs,
+  The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife
+  Of poor humanity's afflicted will
+  Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny;
+
+for, although such quotations could be multiplied, isolated expressions,
+even when not dramatic,[14] would prove little. But I repeat the remark
+already made, that if we review the subjects of many of Wordsworth's
+famous poems on human life,--the subjects, for example, of _The Thorn_,
+_The Sailor's Mother_, _Ruth_, _The Brothers_, _Michael_, _The
+Affliction of Margaret_, _The White Doe of Rylstone_, the story of
+Margaret in _Excursion_, i., half the stories told in _Excursion_, vi.
+and vii.--we find ourselves in the presence of poverty, crime, insanity,
+ruined innocence, torturing hopes doomed to extinction, solitary
+anguish, even despair. Ignore the manner in which Wordsworth treated
+his subjects, and you will have to say that his world, so far as
+humanity is concerned, is a dark world,--at least as dark as that of
+Byron. Unquestionably then he saw the cloud of human destiny, and he did
+not avert his eyes from it. Nor did he pretend to understand its
+darkness. The world was to him in the end 'this unintelligible world,'
+and the only 'adequate support for the calamities of mortal life' was
+faith.[15] But he was profoundly impressed, through the experience of
+his own years of crisis, alike by the dangers of despondency, and by the
+superficiality of the views which it engenders. It was for him (and
+here, as in other points, he shows his natural affinity to Spinoza) a
+condition in which the soul, concentrated on its own suffering, for that
+very reason loses hold both of its own being and of the reality of which
+it forms a part. His experience also made it impossible for him to doubt
+that what he grasped
+
+  At times when most existence with herself
+  Is satisfied,
+
+--and these are the times when existence is most united in love with
+other existence--was, in a special sense or degree, the truth, and
+therefore that the evils which we suffer, deplore, or condemn, cannot
+really be what they seem to us when we merely suffer, deplore, or
+condemn them. He set himself to _see_ this, as far as he could, and to
+show it. He sang of pleasure, joy, glee, blitheness, love, wherever in
+nature or humanity they assert their indisputable power; and turning to
+pain and wrong, and gazing at them steadfastly, and setting himself to
+present the facts with a quiet but unsparing truthfulness, he yet
+endeavoured to show what he had seen, that sometimes pain and wrong are
+the conditions of a happiness and good which without them could not
+have been, that no limit can be set to the power of the soul to
+transmute them into its own substance, and that, in suffering and even
+in misery, there may still be such a strength as fills us with awe or
+with glory. He did not pretend, I repeat, that what he saw sufficed to
+solve the riddle of the painful earth. 'Our being rests' on 'dark
+foundations,' and 'our haughty life is crowned with darkness.' But still
+what he showed was what he _saw_, and he saw it in the cloud of human
+destiny. We are not here concerned with his faith in the sun behind that
+cloud; my purpose is only to insist that he 'fronted' it 'fearlessly.'
+
+
+  4.
+
+After quoting the lines from _A Poet's Epitaph_, and Arnold's lines on
+Wordsworth, I asked how the man described in them ever came to write the
+_Ode_ on Immortality, or _Yew-trees_, or why he should say,
+
+  For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
+  Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
+  To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
+
+The aspect of Wordsworth's poetry which answers this question forms my
+last subject.
+
+We may recall this aspect in more than one way. First, not a little of
+Wordsworth's poetry either approaches or actually enters the province of
+the sublime. His strongest natural inclination tended there. He himself
+speaks of his temperament as 'stern,' and tells us that
+
+          to the very going out of youth
+  [He] too exclusively esteemed _that_ love,
+  And sought _that_ beauty, which, as Milton says,
+  Hath terror in it.
+
+This disposition is easily traced in the imaginative impressions of his
+childhood as he describes them in the _Prelude_. His fixed habit of
+looking
+
+       with feelings of fraternal love
+  Upon the unassuming things that hold
+  A silent station in this beauteous world,
+
+was only formed, it would seem, under his sister's influence, after his
+recovery from the crisis that followed the ruin of his towering hopes in
+the French Revolution. It was a part of his endeavour to find something
+of the distant ideal in life's familiar face. And though this attitude
+of sympathy and humility did become habitual, the first bent towards
+grandeur, austerity, sublimity, retained its force. It is evident in the
+political poems, and in all those pictures of life which depict the
+unconquerable power of affection, passion, resolution, patience, or
+faith. It inspires much of his greatest poetry of Nature. It emerges
+occasionally with a strange and thrilling effect in the serene,
+gracious, but sometimes stagnant atmosphere of the later poems,--for the
+last time, perhaps, in that magnificent stanza of the _Extempore
+Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg_ (1835),
+
+  Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
+    Or waves that own no curbing hand,
+  How fast has brother followed brother
+    From sunshine to the sunless land!
+
+Wordsworth is indisputably the most sublime of our poets since Milton.
+
+We may put the matter, secondly, thus. However much Wordsworth was the
+poet of small and humble things, and the poet who saw his ideal
+realised, not in Utopia, but here and now before his eyes, he was, quite
+as much, what some would call a mystic. He saw everything in the light
+of 'the visionary power.' He was, for himself,
+
+  The transitory being that beheld
+  This Vision.
+
+He apprehended all things, natural or human, as the expression of
+something which, while manifested in them, immeasurably transcends them.
+And nothing can be more intensely Wordsworthian than the poems and
+passages most marked by this visionary power and most directly issuing
+from this apprehension. The bearing of these statements on Wordsworth's
+inclination to sublimity will be obvious at a glance.
+
+Now we may prefer the Wordsworth of the daffodils to the Wordsworth of
+the yew-trees, and we may even believe the poet's mysticism to be
+moonshine; but it is certain that to neglect or throw into the shade
+this aspect of his poetry is neither to take Wordsworth as he really was
+nor to judge his poetry truly, since this aspect appears in much of it
+that we cannot deny to be first-rate. Yet there is, I think, and has
+been for some time, a tendency to this mistake. It is exemplified in
+Arnold's Introduction and has been increased by it, and it is visible in
+some degree even in Pater's essay. Arnold wished to make Wordsworth more
+popular; and so he was tempted to represent Wordsworth's poetry as much
+more simple and unambitious than it really was, and as much more easily
+apprehended than it ever can be. He was also annoyed by attempts to
+formulate a systematic Wordsworthian philosophy; partly, doubtless,
+because he knew that, however great the philosophical value of a poet's
+ideas may be, it cannot by itself determine the value of his poetry; but
+partly also because, having himself but little turn for philosophy, he
+was disposed to regard it as illusory; and further because, even in the
+poetic sphere, he was somewhat deficient in that kind of imagination
+which is allied to metaphysical thought. This is one reason of his
+curious failure to appreciate Shelley, and of the evident irritation
+which Shelley produced in him. And it is also one reason why, both in
+his _Memorial Verses_ and in the introduction to his selection from
+Wordsworth, he either ignores or depreciates that aspect of the poetry
+with which we are just now concerned. It is not true, we must bluntly
+say, that the cause of the greatness of this poetry 'is simple and may
+be told quite simply.' It is true, and it is admirably said, that this
+poetry 'is great because of the extraordinary power with which
+Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us
+in the simple primary affections and duties.' But this is only half the
+truth.
+
+Pater's essay is not thus one-sided. It is, to my mind, an extremely
+fine piece of criticism. Yet the tendency to which I am objecting does
+appear in it. Pater says, for example, that Wordsworth is the poet of
+nature, 'and of nature, after all, in her modesty. The English Lake
+country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of
+Wordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of
+apparently little and familiar things, would have found its true test
+had he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.'
+This last sentence is, in one sense, doubtless true. The 'function'
+referred to could have been exercised in Surrey, and was exercised in
+Dorset and Somerset, as well as in the Lake country. And this function
+was a 'peculiar function of Wordsworth's genius.' But that it was _the_
+peculiar function of his genius, or more peculiar than that other
+function which forms our present subject, I venture to deny; and for the
+full exercise of this latter function, it is hardly hazardous to assert,
+Wordsworth's childhood in a mountain district, and his subsequent
+residence there, were indispensable. This will be doubted for a moment,
+I believe, only by those readers (and they are not a few) who ignore the
+_Prelude_ and the _Excursion_. But the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_,
+though there are dull pages in both, contain much of Wordsworth's best
+and most characteristic poetry. And even in a selection like Arnold's,
+which, perhaps wisely, makes hardly any use of them, many famous poems
+will be found which deal with nature but not with nature 'in her
+modesty.'
+
+My main object was to insist that the 'mystic,' 'visionary,' 'sublime,'
+aspect of Wordsworth's poetry must not be slighted. I wish to add a few
+remarks on it, but to consider it fully would carry us far beyond our
+bounds; and, even if I attempted the task, I should not formulate its
+results in a body of doctrines. Such a formulation is useful, and I see
+no objection to it in principle, as one method of exploring Wordsworth's
+mind with a view to the better apprehension of his poetry. But the
+method has its dangers, and it is another matter to put forward the
+results as philosophically adequate, or to take the position that
+'Wordsworth was first and foremost a philosophical thinker, a man whose
+intention and purpose it was to think out for himself, faithfully and
+seriously, the questions concerning man and nature and human life' (Dean
+Church). If this were true, he should have given himself to philosophy
+and not to poetry; and there is no reason to think that he would have
+been eminently successful. Nobody ever was so who was not forced by a
+special natural power and an imperious impulsion into the business of
+'thinking out,' and who did not develope this power by years of arduous
+discipline. Wordsworth does not show it in any marked degree; and,
+though he reflected deeply and acutely, he was without philosophical
+training. His poetry is immensely interesting as an imaginative
+expression of the same mind which, in his day, produced in Germany great
+philosophies. His poetic experience, his intuitions, his single
+thoughts, even his large views, correspond in a striking way, sometimes
+in a startling way, with ideas methodically developed by Kant,
+Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer. They remain admirable material for
+philosophy; and a philosophy which found itself driven to treat them as
+moonshine would probably be a very poor affair. But they are like the
+experience and the utterances of men of religious genius: great truths
+are enshrined in them, but generally the shrine would have to be broken
+to liberate these truths in a form which would satisfy the desire to
+understand. To claim for them the power to satisfy that desire is an
+error, and it tempts those in whom that desire is predominant to treat
+them as mere beautiful illusions.
+
+Setting aside, then, any questions as to the ultimate import of the
+'mystic' strain in Wordsworth's poetry, I intend only to call attention
+to certain traits in the kind of poetic experience which exhibits it
+most plainly. And we may observe at once that in this there is always
+traceable a certain hostility to 'sense.' I do not mean that hostility
+which is present in _all_ poetic experience, and of which Wordsworth was
+very distinctly aware. The regular action of the senses on their
+customary material produces, in his view, a 'tyranny' over the soul. It
+helps to construct that every-day picture of the world, of sensible
+objects and events 'in disconnection dead and spiritless,' which we take
+for reality. In relation to this reality we become passive slaves;[16]
+it lies on us with a weight 'heavy as frost and deep almost as life.' It
+is the origin alike of our torpor and our superficiality. _All_ poetic
+experience frees us from it to some extent, or breaks into it, and so
+may be called hostile to sense. But this experience is, broadly
+speaking, of two different kinds. The perception of the daffodils as
+dancing in glee, and in sympathy with other gleeful beings, shows us a
+living, joyous, loving world, and so a 'spiritual' world, not a merely
+'sensible' one. But the hostility to sense is here no more than a
+hostility to _mere_ sense: this 'spiritual' world is itself the sensible
+world more fully apprehended: the daffodils do not change or lose their
+colour in disclosing their glee. On the other hand, in the kind of
+experience which forms our present subject, there is always some feeling
+of definite contrast with the limited sensible world. The arresting
+feature or object is felt in some way _against_ this background, or even
+as in some way a denial of it. Sometimes it is a visionary unearthly
+light resting on a scene or on some strange figure. Sometimes it is the
+feeling that the scene or figure belongs to the world of dream.
+Sometimes it is an intimation of boundlessness, contradicting or
+abolishing the fixed limits of our habitual view. Sometimes it is the
+obscure sense of 'unknown modes of being,' unlike the familiar modes.
+This kind of experience, further, comes often with a distinct shock,
+which may bewilder, confuse or trouble the mind. And, lastly, it is
+especially, though not invariably, associated with mountains, and again
+with solitude. Some of these bald statements I will go on to illustrate,
+only remarking that the boundary between these modes of imagination is,
+naturally, less marked and more wavering in Wordsworth's poetry than in
+my brief analysis.
+
+We may begin with a poem standing near this boundary, the famous verses
+_To the Cuckoo_, 'O blithe new-comer.' It stands near the boundary
+because, like the poem on the Daffodils, it is entirely happy. But it
+stands unmistakably on the further side of the boundary, and is, in
+truth, more nearly allied to the _Ode_ on Immortality than to the poem
+on the Daffodils. The sense of sight is baffled, and its tyranny broken.
+Only a cry is heard, which makes the listener look a thousand ways, so
+shifting is the direction from which it reaches him. It seems to come
+from a mere 'voice,' 'an invisible thing,' 'a mystery.' It brings him
+'a tale of visionary hours,'--hours of childhood, when he sought this
+invisible thing in vain, and the earth appeared to his bewildered but
+liberated fancy 'an unsubstantial fairy place.' And still, when he hears
+it, the great globe itself, we may say, fades like an unsubstantial
+pageant; or, to quote from the Immortality _Ode_, the 'shades of the
+prison house' melt into air. These words are much more solemn than the
+Cuckoo poem; but the experience is of the same type, and 'the visionary
+gleam' of the ode, like the 'wandering voice' of the poem, is the
+expression through sense of something beyond sense.
+
+Take another passage referring to childhood. It is from the _Prelude_,
+ii. Here there is something more than perplexity. There is apprehension,
+and we are approaching the sublime:
+
+    One summer evening (led by her[17]) I found
+  A little boat tied to a willow tree
+  Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
+  Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
+  Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
+  And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
+  Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
+  Leaving behind her still, on either side,
+  Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
+  Until they melted all into one track
+  Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
+  Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
+  With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
+  Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
+  The horizon's utmost boundary; far above
+  Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
+  She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
+  I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
+  And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
+  Went heaving through the water like a swan;
+  When, from behind that craggy steep till then
+  The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
+  As if with voluntary power instinct,
+  Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
+  And growing still in stature the grim shape
+  Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
+  For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
+  And measured motion like a living thing,
+  Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
+  And through the silent water stole my way
+  Back to the covert of the willow tree;
+  There in her mooring-place I left my bark,--
+  And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
+  And serious mood; but after I had seen
+  That spectacle, for many days, my brain
+  Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
+  Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
+  There hung a darkness, call it solitude
+  Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
+  Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
+  Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
+  But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
+  Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
+  By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
+
+The best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in the poet's
+other works. And those last dozen lines furnish the best commentary on
+that famous passage in the _Ode_, where the poet, looking back to his
+childhood, gives thanks for it,--not however for its careless delight
+and liberty,
+
+      But for those obstinate questionings
+      Of sense and outward things,
+      Fallings from us, vanishings;
+      Blank misgivings of a Creature
+  Moving about in worlds not realised,
+  High instincts before which our mortal Nature
+  Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
+
+Whether, or how, these experiences afford 'intimations of immortality'
+is not in question here; but it will never do to dismiss them so airily
+as Arnold did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.
+
+The most striking recollections of his childhood have not in all cases
+this manifest affinity to the _Ode_, but wherever the visionary feeling
+appears in them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still
+traceable. There is, for instance, in _Prelude_, xii., the description
+of the crag, from which, on a wild dark day, the boy watched eagerly
+the two highways below for the ponies that were coming to take him home
+for the holidays. It is too long to quote, but every reader of it will
+remember
+
+           the wind and sleety rain,
+  And all the business of the elements,
+  The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
+  And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
+  The noise of wood and water, and the mist
+  That on the line of each of those two roads
+  Advanced in such indisputable shapes.
+
+Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen
+to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory.
+In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he
+recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow
+world of common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and the vast unseen
+world which encloses it in beneficent yet dark and inexorable arms. The
+visionary feeling has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or
+covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or
+breaking into the customary 'reality.' Its character varies; and so
+sometimes at its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity,
+melts in rapture into that infinite being; while at other times the
+'mortal nature' stands dumb, incapable of thought, or shrinking from
+some presence
+
+  Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks
+  That threaten the profane.
+
+This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth's most characteristic
+poems that it may almost be called their soul; and failure to understand
+them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It appears in a mild and
+tender form, but quite openly, in the lines _To a Highland Girl_, where
+the child, and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her home, seem
+to the poet
+
+  Like something fashioned in a dream.
+
+It gives to _The Solitary Reaper_ its note of remoteness and wonder; and
+even the slight shock of bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening
+line of the most famous stanza:
+
+  Will no one tell me what she sings?
+
+Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the White Doe, and sounds
+faintly to us from far away through all the tale of failure and anguish.
+Without it such shorter narratives as _Hartleap Well_ and _Resolution
+and Independence_ would lose the imaginative atmosphere which adds
+mystery and grandeur to the apparently simple 'moral.'
+
+In _Hartleap Well_ it is conveyed at first by slight touches of
+contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit of the Hart, has mounted his
+third horse.
+
+  Joy sparkled in the prancing courser's eyes;
+  The horse and horseman are a happy pair;
+  But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,
+  There is a doleful silence in the air.
+
+  A rout this morning left Sir Walter's hall,
+  That as they galloped made the echoes roar;
+  But horse and man are vanished, one and all;
+  Such race, I think, was never seen before.
+
+At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one by one among the
+mountain fern.
+
+  Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?
+  The bugles that so joyfully were blown?
+  --This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;
+  Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.
+
+Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the old shepherd's description
+of the utter desolation of the spot where the waters of the little
+spring had trembled with the last deep groan of the dying stag, and
+where the Knight, to commemorate his exploit, had built a basin for the
+spring, three pillars to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a
+pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing plants, for the summer
+joy of himself and his paramour. But now 'the pleasure-house is dust,'
+and the trees are grey, 'with neither arms nor head':
+
+  Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;
+  The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
+  So will it be, as I have often said,
+  Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.
+
+It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable Powers,
+behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride, that
+justifies the solemnity of the stanza:
+
+  The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
+  That is in the green leaves among the groves,
+  Maintains a deep and reverential care
+  For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
+
+_Hartleap Well_ is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely
+successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There can be no sort of doubt as to
+_Resolution and Independence_, probably, if we must choose, the most
+Wordsworthian of Wordsworth's poems, and the best test of ability to
+understand him. The story, if given in a brief argument, would sound far
+from promising. We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat
+like that of _Simon Lee_. When we read it, we find instead lines of
+extraordinary grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines more pedestrian
+than could be found in an impressive poem from any other hand,--for
+instance,
+
+  And, drawing to his side, to him did say,
+  'This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.'
+
+or,
+
+  'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'
+
+We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless
+reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered),
+which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a
+writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured.
+Yet with all this, and by dint of all this, we read with bated breath,
+almost as if we were in the presence of that 'majestical' Spirit in
+_Hamlet_, come to 'admonish' from another world, though not this time by
+terror. And one source of this effect is the confusion, the almost
+hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind, that falls on the
+poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer, and hears, without
+understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the
+prosaic 'occupation' he 'pursues':
+
+  The old man still stood talking by my side;
+  But now his voice to me was like a stream
+  Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
+  And the whole body of the man did seem
+  Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
+  Or like a man from some far region sent,
+  To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
+
+The same question was asked again, and the answer was repeated. But
+
+  While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
+  The old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me.
+
+'Trouble' is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the
+confusion caused by some visionary experience. Here are, again, the
+fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of the
+soul's infinity.
+
+Out of many illustrations I will choose three more. There is in the
+_Prelude_, iv., the passage (so strongly resembling _Resolution and
+Independence_ that I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an
+old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone on the moon-lit
+road, all alone:
+
+  No living thing appeared in earth or air;
+  And, save the flowing water's peaceful voice,
+  Sound there was none ...
+                            ... still his form
+  Kept the same awful steadiness--at his feet
+  His shadow lay, and moved not.
+
+His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghost was never ghostlier than
+he. And by him we may place the London beggar of _Prelude_, vii.:
+
+  How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
+  Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
+  Unto myself, 'The face of every one
+  That passes by me is a mystery!'
+  Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
+  By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,
+  Until the shapes before my eyes became
+  A second-sight procession, such as glides
+  Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;
+  And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
+  The reach of common indication, lost
+  Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
+  Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
+  Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
+  Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
+  Wearing a written paper, to explain
+  His story, whence he came, and who he was.
+  Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
+  As with the might of waters; an apt type
+  This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
+  Both of ourselves and of the universe;
+  And, on the shape of that unmoving man,
+  His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
+  As if admonished from another world.
+
+Still more curious psychologically is the passage, in the preceding book
+of the _Prelude_, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the
+description of its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the
+passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones ('Jones, as from Calais
+southward you and I') set out to walk over the Simplon, then traversed
+only by a rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way, and, meeting a
+peasant, discovered from his answers to their questions that, without
+knowing it, they '_had crossed the Alps_.' This may not sound important,
+and the italics are Wordsworth's, not mine. But the next words are
+these:
+
+    Imagination--here the Power so called
+  Through sad incompetence of human speech,
+  That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
+  Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
+  At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
+  Halted without an effort to break through;
+  But to my conscious soul I now can say--
+  'I recognise thy glory': in such strength
+  Of usurpation, when the light of sense
+  Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
+  The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
+  There harbours; whether we be young or old,
+  Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
+  Is with infinitude, and only there;
+  With hope it is, hope that can never die,
+  Effort, and expectation, and desire,
+  And something evermore about to be.
+
+And what was the result of this shock? The poet may answer for himself
+in some of the greatest lines in English poetry. The travellers
+proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.
+
+                   Downwards we hurried fast,
+  And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
+  Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
+  Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
+  And with them did we journey several hours
+  At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
+  Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
+  The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
+  And in the narrow rent at every turn
+  Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
+  The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
+  The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
+  Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
+  As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
+  And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
+  The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
+  Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light--
+  Were all like workings of one mind, the features
+  Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
+  Characters of the great Apocalypse,
+  The types and symbols of Eternity,
+  Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.[18]
+
+I hardly think that 'the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its
+life' could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have
+lately referred, and all the passages I have quoted, there are but two
+or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or
+the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish.
+The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the
+more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo in _O blithe new-comer_, though
+visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is
+
+  Like--but oh, how different![19]
+
+It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer,
+_felt_ his faith. It was there that all things
+
+  Breathed immortality, revolving life,
+  And greatness still revolving; infinite.
+  There littleness was not; the least of things
+  Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
+  Her prospects, nor did he believe,--he _saw_.
+
+And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words,
+as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.
+
+  Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
+  One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.
+
+And of the second of these we may say that 'few or none hears it right'
+now he is gone.
+
+Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more
+pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain
+voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom
+Wordsworth's greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered
+him than to do what he has probably never done in his life--to be on a
+mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only, but all
+solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.
+
+  The outward shows of sky and earth,
+  Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
+  And impulses _of deeper birth_
+  Have come to him in solitude.
+
+The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is essential to nearly
+all the poems and passages we have been considering, and to some of
+quite a different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas. And it is not
+merely that the poet is alone; what he sees is so too. If the
+leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been
+solitary figures, they would not have awaked 'the visionary power'; and
+it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the boy who was watching for his
+father's ponies had had beside him any more than
+
+  The _single_ sheep and the _one_ blasted tree,
+
+the mist would not have advanced along the roads 'in such indisputable
+shapes.' With Wordsworth that power seems to have sprung into life at
+once on the perception of loneliness. What is lonely is a spirit. To
+call a thing lonely or solitary is, with him, to say that it opens a
+bright or solemn vista into infinity. He himself 'wanders lonely as a
+cloud': he seeks the 'souls of lonely places': he listens in awe to
+
+  One voice, the solitary raven ...
+  An iron knell, with echoes from afar:
+
+against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,
+
+  A solitary object and sublime,
+  Above all height! like an aerial cross
+  Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
+  Of the Chartreuse, for worship.
+
+But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I will refer only to two
+poems more. The editor of the _Golden Treasury_, a book never to be
+thought of without gratitude, changed the title _The Solitary_ _Reaper_
+into _The Highland Reaper_. He may have had his reasons. Perhaps he had
+met some one who thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still the
+change was a mistake: the 'solitary' in Wordsworth's title gave the
+keynote. The other poem is _Lucy Gray_. 'When I was little,' a lover of
+Wordsworth once said, 'I could hardly bear to read _Lucy Gray_, it made
+me feel so lonely.' Wordsworth called it _Lucy Gray, or Solitude_, and
+this young reader understood him. But there is too much, reason to fear
+that for half his readers his 'solitary child' is generalised into a
+mere 'little girl,' and that they never receive the main impression he
+wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines,
+and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which give even to
+this ballad the visionary touch which distinguishes it from _Alice
+Fell_:
+
+  Yet some maintain that to this day
+  She is a living child;
+  That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
+  Upon the lonesome wild.
+
+  O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
+  And never looks behind;
+  And sings a solitary song
+  That whistles in the wind.
+
+The solitariness which exerted so potent a spell on Wordsworth had in it
+nothing 'Byronic.' He preached in the _Excursion_ against the solitude
+of 'self-indulging spleen.' He was even aware that he himself, though
+free from that weakness, had felt
+
+                   perhaps too much
+  The self-sufficing power of Solitude.[20]
+
+No poet is more emphatically the poet of community. A great part of his
+verse--a part as characteristic and as precious as the part on which I
+have been dwelling--is dedicated to the affections of home and
+neighbourhood and country, and to that soul of joy and love which links
+together all Nature's children, and 'steals from earth to man, from man
+to earth.' And this soul is for him as truly the presence of 'the Being
+that is in the clouds and air' and in the mind of man as are the power,
+the darkness, the silence, the strange gleams and mysterious visitations
+which startle and confuse with intimations of infinity. But solitude and
+solitariness were to him, in the main, one of these intimations. They
+had not for him merely the 'eeriness' which they have at times for
+everyone, though that was essential to some of the poems we have
+reviewed. They were the symbol of power to stand alone, to be
+'self-sufficing,' to dispense with custom and surroundings and aid and
+sympathy--a self-dependence at once the image and the communication of
+'the soul of all the worlds.' Even when they were full of 'sounds and
+sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,' the solitude of the Reaper
+or of Lucy, they so appealed to him. But they appealed also to that
+austerer strain which led him to love 'bare trees and mountains bare,'
+and lonely places, and the bleak music of the old stone wall, and to
+dwell with awe, and yet with exultation, on the majesty of that
+'unconquerable mind' which through long years holds its solitary
+purpose, sustains its solitary passion, feeds upon its solitary anguish.
+For this mind, as for the blind beggar or the leech-gatherer, the 'light
+of sense' and the sweetness of life have faded or 'gone out'; but in it
+'greatness makes abode,' and it 'retains its station proud,' 'by form or
+image unprofaned.' Thus, in whatever guise it might present itself,
+solitariness 'carried far into his heart' the haunting sense of an
+'invisible world'; of some Life beyond this 'transitory being' and
+'unapproachable by death';
+
+  Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;
+  That hath been, is, and where it was and is
+  There shall endure,--existence unexposed
+  To the blind walk of mortal accident;
+  From diminution safe and weakening age;
+  While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;
+  And countless generations of mankind
+  Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.
+
+For me, I confess, all this is far from being 'mere poetry'--partly
+because I do not believe that any such thing as 'mere poetry' exists.
+But whatever kind or degree of truth we may find in all this, everything
+in Wordsworth that is sublime or approaches sublimity has, directly or
+more remotely, to do with it. And without this part of his poetry
+Wordsworth would be 'shorn of his strength,' and would no longer stand,
+as he does stand, nearer than any other poet of the Nineteenth Century
+to Milton.
+
+
+  NOTE.
+
+I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about _We are Seven_.
+Wordsworth's friend, James Tobin, who saw the _Lyrical Ballads_ while
+they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make
+him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I
+have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of
+the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever
+heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the
+'moral' of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the
+'moral' given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative
+impression from which the poem arose.
+
+The 'moral' is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated
+opening stanza:
+
+  --------A simple child,
+    That lightly draws its breath,
+  And feels its life in every limb,
+    What should it know of death?
+
+Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was
+all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed
+that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea
+better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza
+as we have it, except that the first line ran, 'A simple child, dear
+brother Jim,'--this Jim, who rhymes with 'limb,' being the James Tobin
+who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in the
+_Lyrical Ballads_ as Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the
+words 'dear brother Jim' as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for
+the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.
+
+Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has a felicity of
+style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have achieved in expressing
+the idea. And the idea was not only accepted by Wordsworth, but,
+according to his own account, he had mentioned in substance what he
+wished to be expressed. It must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a
+doubt whether the stanza truly represents the imaginative experience
+from which the poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this
+doubt does not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge's
+authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having read _We are
+Seven_ without feeling it or without saying to myself at the end, 'This
+means more than the first stanza says.' And, however improbable, it
+cannot be called impossible that even so introspective a poet as
+Wordsworth might misconstrue the impression that stirred him to write. I
+will take courage, therefore, to confess the belief that what stirred
+him was the coincidence of the child's feelings with some of those
+feelings of his own childhood which he described in the Immortality
+_Ode_, and once or twice in conversation, and which, in a less
+individual and peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs,
+to children in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer
+to one or two passages. 'At that time I could not believe that I should
+lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust'
+(remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth, _Prose Works_, ed. Grosart, iii.
+464). Is not this the condition of the child in _We are Seven_?
+'Nothing,' he says to Miss Fenwick, 'was more difficult for me in
+childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my
+own being' (_ib._ iii. 194). He then quotes the first stanza of _We are
+Seven_. It is true that thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own
+case from the child's, attributing the difficulty in her case to 'animal
+vivacity.' But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth's direct
+testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention to a
+passage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth begins by
+saying that the custom of raising monuments to the dead 'proceeded
+obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to guard the remains of the
+deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation, and,
+secondly, to preserve their memory.' But these desires, in his opinion,
+resolve themselves into one, and both proceed from the consciousness or
+fore-feeling of immortality, also described as 'an intimation or
+assurance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable.' And
+he goes on thus: 'If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall
+find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own
+individual Being, the mind was without this assurance.... Forlorn, and
+cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that
+man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the
+mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal
+spirits with which the lamb in the meadow or any other irrational
+creature is endowed; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of
+his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a
+notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been
+instilled into him!' Now Coleridge's stanza, and Wordsworth's own
+distinction between the child and himself, do come at least very near to
+attributing the child's inability to realise the fact of death to that
+very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient cause of it, is
+here indignantly repudiated. According to the present passage, this
+inability ought to have been traced to that 'sense' or 'consciousness'
+of immortality which is inherent in human nature. And (whether or no
+Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it was _this_, I suggest, that,
+unknown to himself, arrested him in the child's persistent ignoring of
+the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the Immortality _Ode_. The
+child is in possession of one of those 'truths that wake to perish
+never,' though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of
+custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the conversation took
+place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth
+had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he
+saw them later (_Tintern Abbey_, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to
+the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted
+from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even
+to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly
+significant that the child in _We are Seven_ is not described as showing
+any particular 'animal vivacity': she strikes one as rather a quiet,
+though determined, little person.
+
+These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who
+feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But
+many, I think, must feel them.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a
+    short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April,
+    1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of
+    English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other
+    lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the
+    course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult
+    Professor Herford's _The Age of Wordsworth_, a little book which is
+    familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the
+    more admired the more they use it?
+
+  [2] These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen
+    partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much
+    the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in
+    _The Tables Turned_, where occurs that outrageous stanza about 'one
+    impulse from a vernal wood' which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When
+    all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these
+    statements, and many like them, are 'poetic,' they ought to remain
+    startling. Two of them--that from the story of Margaret (_Excursion_,
+    I.), and that from the _Ode_, 1815--were made less so, to the injury
+    of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten
+    what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.
+
+  [3] _Goody Blake_, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of
+    impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge's _Three Graves_. The
+    question as to the _Anecdote for Fathers_ is not precisely whether it
+    makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in
+    such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is
+    in the lines,
+
+      And five times to the child I said,
+      Why, Edward, tell me why?
+
+    The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim,
+    is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed
+    with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the
+    effect so delightfully reproduced in _Through the Looking-glass_
+    ('I'll tell thee everything I can').
+
+  [4] Some remarks on _We are seven_ are added in a note at the end of
+    the lecture.
+
+  [5] The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from
+    Hazlitt and De Quincey.
+
+  [6] The publication of the _Excursion_ seems to have been postponed
+    for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the
+    world for thirteen years.
+
+  [7] _Evening Voluntaries_, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.
+
+  [8] _Poems on the Naming of Places_, iv. Keats need not have been
+    ashamed to write the last line.
+
+  [9] ''Tis past, that melancholy dream,'--so he describes his sojourn
+    in Germany.
+
+  [10] Wordsworth's Letter to Major-General Pasley (_Prose Works_, i.)
+    contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of
+    his hostility to mere militarism.
+
+  [11] I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost
+    courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased
+    to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.
+
+  [12] [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh
+    (_Comus_, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the
+    quotation.]
+
+  [13] In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of
+    course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude,
+    cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in
+    his poetry or in his life. 'I could kick such a man across England
+    with my naked foot,' the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base
+    action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was
+    not so very unlike Wordsworth's. And neither poet would have found it
+    difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or 'the
+    unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.'
+
+  [14] The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary
+    (_Excursion_, vi.).
+
+  [15] The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the
+    _Excursion_, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.
+
+  [16] This is just the opposite of the 'wise passiveness' of
+    imaginative but unreflective feeling.
+
+  [17] Nature.
+
+  [18] I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture,
+    but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth's mind who cares to
+    return to them.
+
+    The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth,
+    'the visionary power' arises from, and testifies to, the mind's
+    infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united
+    with, a feeling or idea of _the_ infinite or 'one mind,' and of union
+    with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague
+    alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet's
+    experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought
+    always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about
+    'immortality' or 'eternity.' His sense or consciousness of
+    'immortality,' that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in
+    some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness
+    that 'he' belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an 'active
+    principle' which is eternal, indivisible, and the 'soul of all the
+    worlds' (cf. opening of _Excursion_, ix.). Whatever we may make of
+    this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain
+    entirely outside Wordsworth's mind in passages like that just
+    referred to, and in passages where he talks of 'acts of immortality
+    in Nature's course,' or says that to the Wanderer 'all things among
+    the mountains breathed immortality,' or says that he has been
+    unfolding 'far-stretching views of immortality,' though he may not
+    appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and
+    Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth 'transitory,' but Nature always
+    and everywhere _reveals_ 'immortality,' and Man (in another sense) is
+    'immortal.' Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise
+    sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only
+    chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except
+    Wordsworth, may mean by 'man' and 'immortal,' and to try to get into
+    _his_ mind.
+
+    There is an illuminating passage on 'the visionary power' and the
+    mind's infinity or immortality, in _Prelude_, ii.:
+
+              and hence, from the same source,
+      Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,
+      Under the quiet stars, and at that time
+      Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
+      To breathe an elevated mood, by form
+      Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
+      If the night blackened with a coming storm,
+      Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
+      The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
+      Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
+      Thence did I drink the visionary power;
+      And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
+      Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
+      That they are kindred to our purer mind
+      And intellectual life; but that the soul,
+      Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
+      Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
+      Of possible sublimity, whereto
+      With growing faculties she doth aspire,
+      With faculties still growing, feeling still
+      That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
+      Have something to pursue.
+
+    An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of
+    this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with
+    Wordsworth's love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for
+    instance, _Prelude_, xiii., 'Who doth not love to follow with his eye
+    The windings of a public way?' And compare the enchantment of the
+    question, _What, are you stepping westward_?
+
+                         'twas a sound
+      Of something without place or bound.
+
+  [19] _Yes, it was the mountain echo_, placed in Arnold's selection,
+    with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem _To the Cuckoo_.
+
+  [20] This was Coleridge's opinion.
+
+
+
+
+SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY
+
+
+SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY
+
+
+The ideas of Wordsworth and of Coleridge about poetry have often been
+discussed and are familiar. Those of Shelley are much less so, and in
+his eloquent exposition of them there is a radiance which almost
+conceals them from many readers. I wish, at the cost of all the
+radiance, to try to see them and show them rather more distinctly. Even
+if they had little value for the theory of poetry, they would still have
+much as material for it, since they allow us to look into a poet's
+experience in conceiving and composing. And, in addition, they throw
+light on some of the chief characteristics of Shelley's own poetry.
+
+His poems in their turn form one of the sources from which his ideas on
+the subject may be gathered. We have also some remarks in his letters
+and in prose pieces dealing with other topics. We have the prefaces to
+those of his works which he himself published. And, lastly, there is the
+_Defence of Poetry_. This essay was written in reply to an attack made
+on contemporary verse by Shelley's friend Peacock,--not a favourable
+specimen of Peacock's writing. The _Defence_, we can see, was hurriedly
+composed, and it remains a fragment, being only the first of three
+projected parts. It contains a good deal of historical matter, highly
+interesting, but too extensive to be made use of here. Being polemical,
+it no doubt exaggerates such of Shelley's views as collided with those
+of his antagonist. But, besides being the only full expression of these
+views, it is the most mature, for it was written within eighteen months
+of his death. It appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth's
+Prefaces or to Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_; but there are a few
+reminiscences of Sidney's _Apology_, which Shelley had read just before
+he wrote his own _Defence_; and it shows, like much of his mature
+poetry, how deeply he was influenced by the more imaginative dialogues
+of Plato.
+
+
+  1.
+
+Any one familiar with the manner in which Shelley in his verse
+habitually represents the world could guess at his general view of
+poetry. The world to him is a melancholy place, a 'dim vast vale of
+tears,' illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but glorious
+power. Nor is this power, as that favourite metaphor would imply, wholly
+outside the world. It works within it as a soul contending with
+obstruction and striving to penetrate and transform the whole mass. And
+though the fulness of its glory is concealed, its nature is known in
+outline. It is the realised perfection of everything good and beautiful
+on earth; or, in other words, all such goodness and beauty is its
+partial manifestation. 'All,' I say: for the splendour of nature, the
+love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law,
+the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art, the truths deformed by
+superstitious religion,--all are equally operations or appearances of
+the hidden power. It is of the first importance for the understanding of
+Shelley to realise how strong in him is the sense and conviction of this
+unity in life: it is one of his Platonic traits. The intellectual Beauty
+of his _Hymn_ is absolutely the same thing as the Liberty of his _Ode_,
+the 'Great Spirit' of Love that he invokes to bring freedom to Naples,
+the One which in _Adonaďs_ he contrasts with the Many, the Spirit of
+Nature of _Queen Mab_, and the Vision of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_.
+The skylark of the famous stanzas is free from our sorrows, not because
+it is below them, but because, as an embodiment of that perfection, it
+knows the rapture of love without its satiety, and understands death as
+we cannot. The voice of the mountain, if a whole nation could hear it
+with the poet's ear, would 'repeal large codes of fraud and woe'; it is
+the same voice as the reformer's and the martyr's. And in the far-off
+day when the 'plastic stress' of this power has mastered the last
+resistance and is all in all, outward nature, which now suffers with
+man, will be redeemed with him, and man, in becoming politically free,
+will become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then, poetry, as the
+world now is, must be one of the voices of this power, or one tone of
+its voice. To use the language so dear to Shelley, it is the revelation
+of those eternal ideas which lie behind the many-coloured, ever-shifting
+veil that we call reality or life. Or rather, it is one such revelation
+among many.
+
+When we turn to the _Defence of Poetry_ we meet substantially the same
+view. There is indeed a certain change; for Shelley is now
+philosophising and writing prose, and he wishes not to sing from the
+mid-sky, but, for a while at least, to argue with his friend on the
+earth. Hence at first we hear nothing of that perfect power at the heart
+of things, and poetry is considered as a creation rather than a
+revelation. But for Shelley, we soon discover, this would be a false
+antithesis. The poet creates, but this creation is no mere fancy of his;
+it represents 'those forms which are common to universal nature and
+existence,' and 'a poem is the very image of life expressed in its
+eternal truth.' We notice, further, that the more voluntary and
+conscious work of invention and execution is regarded as quite
+subordinate in the creative process. In that process the mind, obedient
+to an influence which it does not understand and cannot control, is
+driven to produce images of perfection which rather form themselves in
+it than are formed by it. The greatest stress is laid on this influence
+or inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin of the whole
+process lies in certain exceptional moments when visitations of thought
+and feeling, elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but always
+arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, reach the soul; that these
+are, as it were, the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our
+own; and that the province of the poet is to arrest these apparitions,
+to veil them in language, to colour every other form he touches with
+their evanescent hues, and so to 'redeem from decay the visitations of
+the divinity in man.'
+
+Even more decided is the emphasis laid on the unity of all the forms in
+which the 'divinity' or ideal power thus attests its presence. Indeed,
+throughout a large part of the essay, that 'Poetry' which Shelley is
+defending is something very much wider than poetry in the usual sense.
+The enemy he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its influence
+steadily decline as civilisation advances, and that they are giving
+place, and ought to give place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility.
+His answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been, is, and
+always will be, the prime source of everything that has intrinsic value
+in life. Reasoning, he declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon
+the products of imagination. Further, he holds that the predominance of
+mere reasoning and mere utility has become in great part an evil; for
+while it has accumulated masses of material goods and moral truths, we
+distribute the goods iniquitously and fail to apply the truths, because,
+for want of imagination, we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not
+feel what we know. The 'Poetry' which he defends, therefore, is the
+whole creative imagination with all its products. And these include not
+merely literature in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied
+to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts; and, finally,
+all actions, inventions, institutions, and even ideas and moral
+dispositions, which imagination brings into being in its effort to
+satisfy the longing for perfection. Painters and musicians are poets.
+Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is
+much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented
+the arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed, as
+sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And
+every one, Shelley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined
+virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For
+all these things come from imagination.
+
+Shelley's exposition of this, which is probably the most original part
+of his theory, is not very clear; but, if I understand his meaning, that
+which he takes to happen in all these cases might be thus described. The
+imagination--that is to say, the soul imagining--has before it, or feels
+within it, something which, answering perfectly to its nature, fills it
+with delight and with a desire to realise what delights it. This
+something, for the sake of brevity, we may call an idea, so long as we
+remember that it need not be distinctly imagined and that it is always
+accompanied by emotion. The reason why such ideas delight the imagining
+soul is that they are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own
+perfection--of itself become perfect--in one aspect or another. These
+aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life
+and outward existence; and so the idea may be that of the perfect
+harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of the perfect union of soul
+with soul (love), or of the perfect order of certain social relations
+or forces (a law or institution), or of the perfect adjustment of
+intellectual elements (a truth); and so on. The formation and expression
+of any such idea is thus the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while
+at the same time (as we must add, to complete Shelley's thought) any
+such idea is a gleam or apparition of the perfect Intellectual Beauty.
+
+I choose this particular title of the hidden power or divinity in order
+to point out (what the reader is left to observe for himself) that the
+imaginative idea is always regarded by Shelley as beautiful. It is, for
+example, desirable for itself and not merely as a means to a further
+result; and it has the formal characters of beauty. For, as will have
+been noticed in the instances given, it is always the image of an order,
+or harmony, or unity in variety, of the elements concerned. Shelley
+sometimes even speaks of their 'rhythm.' For example, he uses this word
+in reference to an action; and I quote the passage because, though it
+occurs at some distance from the exposition of his main view, it
+illustrates it well. He is saying that the true poetry of Rome, unlike
+that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems. 'The true poetry
+of Rome lived in its institutions: for whatever of beautiful, true and
+majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which
+creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus; the death
+of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their god-like state, of
+the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with
+Hannibal after the battle of Cannć'--these he describes as 'a rhythm and
+order in the shows of life,' an order not arranged with a view to
+utility or outward result, but due to the imagination, which, 'beholding
+the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own
+idea.'
+
+
+  2.
+
+If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the
+poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls?
+Not essentially in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry,
+but in the kind of expression he gives to them. In so far as he is a
+poet, his medium of expression, of course, is not virtue, or action, or
+law; poetry is one of the acts. And, again, it differs from the rest,
+because its particular vehicle is language. We have now to see,
+therefore, what Shelley has to say of the form of poetry, and especially
+of poetic language.
+
+First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of
+artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also
+the most plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being
+simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination;
+whereas any more material medium has a nature of its own, and relations
+to other things in the material world, and this nature and these
+relations intervene between the artist's conception and his expression
+of it in the medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that
+Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as
+compared with other arts. He forgets (if I may interpose a word of
+criticism) that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain
+advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the
+inferiority which he notices. He would also have found it difficult to
+show that language, on its physical side, is any more a product of
+imagination than stone or pigments. And his idea that the medium in the
+other arts is an obstacle intervening between conception and expression
+is, to say the least, one-sided. A sculptor, painter, or musician, would
+probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium that enable
+him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the
+vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not from
+the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical. It is true, no
+doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is
+also true of language.
+
+But to resume. Language, Shelley goes on to say, receives in poetry a
+peculiar form. As it represents in its meaning a perfection which is
+always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound,
+_is_ an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not
+the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning.
+For Shelley, however, this measured language is not of necessity
+metrical. The order or measure may remain at the stage which it reaches
+in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose language,
+Shelley declares, is the most intense it is possible to conceive. It may
+again advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient,
+popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing much action.
+But he will not have any new great poet tied down to it. It is not
+essential, while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere accident of
+poetry that its language is measured, nor does a delight in this measure
+mean little. As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is
+always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of
+thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less
+indispensable than their meaning to the communication of the influence
+of poetry. 'Hence,' says Shelley, 'the vanity of translation: it were as
+wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal
+principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one
+language into another the creations of a poet.' Strong words to come
+from the translator of the _Hymn to Mercury_ and of Agathon's speech in
+the _Symposium_![1] And is not all that Shelley says of the difference
+between measured and unrhythmical language applicable, at least in some
+degree, to the difference between metrical and merely measured language?
+Could he really have supposed that metre is no more than a
+'convenience,' which contributes nothing of any account to the influence
+of poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather point out how
+surprising, at first sight, and how significant, is Shelley's insistence
+on the importance of measure or rhythm. No one could assert more
+absolutely than he the identity of the general substance of poetry with
+that of moral life and action, of the other arts, and of the higher
+kinds of philosophy. And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the
+emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it)
+is indispensable to the effect of poetry.
+
+Shelley, however, nowhere considers this element more at length. He has
+no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He
+never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover. We
+hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a
+passage of Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he ramped
+through the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower. When in his
+letters he refers to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions
+particular lines or expressions; and we have no evidence that, like
+Coleridge and Keats, he was a curious student of metrical effects or the
+relations of vowel-sounds. I doubt if all this is wholly accidental.
+Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of aspiration, love and
+worship, that we can imagine his feeling it almost an impiety to break
+up its unity even for purposes of study, and to give a separate
+attention to its means of utterance. And what he does say on the
+subject confirms this impression. In the first place, as we have seen,
+he lays great stress on inspiration; and his statements, if exaggerated
+and misleading, must still reflect in some degree his own experience. No
+poem, he asserts, however inspired it may be, is more than a feeble
+shadow of the original conception; for when composition begins,
+inspiration is already on the decline. And so in a letter he speaks of
+the detail of execution destroying all wild and beautiful visions.
+Still, inspiration, if diminished by composition, is not wholly
+dispelled; and he appeals to the greatest poets of his day whether it is
+not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced
+by labour and study. Such toil he would restrict to those parts which
+connect the inspired passages, and he speaks with contempt of the
+fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_.
+He seems to exaggerate on this matter because in the _Defence_ his foe
+is cold reason and calculation. Elsewhere he writes more truly of the
+original conception as being obscure as well as intense;[2] from which
+it would seem to follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least
+more distinct than the original. He forgets, too, what is certainly the
+fact, that the poet in reshaping and correcting is able to revive in
+some degree the fire of the first impulse. And we know from himself that
+his greatest works cost him a severe labour not confined to the
+execution, while his manuscripts show plenty of various readings, if
+never so many as fifty-six in one line.
+
+Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his own practice in
+composition. He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its way, without
+pausing to complete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not
+come; and the next day (if ever) he filled up the gaps and smoothed the
+ragged edges. And the result answers to his theory. Keats was right in
+telling him that he might be more of an artist. His language, indeed,
+unlike Wordsworth's or Byron's, is, in his mature work, always that of a
+poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently
+diffuse and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are
+sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the
+mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its
+way into all the little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly
+inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so
+inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. It has the rapture of
+the mystic, and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly said of the
+hymn _Life of Life_: 'He seems to go up into the air and burst.' It is
+true: and, if we are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not compare
+_Life of Life_ with a great set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that
+illumines the whole sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling
+sight than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and it bursts at a height no
+other fire can reach.
+
+In addition to his praise of inspiration Shelley has some scattered
+remarks on another point which show the same spirit. He could not bear
+in poetic language any approach to artifice, or any sign that the writer
+had a theory or system of style. He thought Keats's earlier poems faulty
+in this respect, and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth in the
+following sentence from the Preface to the _Revolt of Islam_: 'Nor have
+I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of
+the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to
+my own ingenuity in contriving,--to disgust him according to the rules
+of criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me
+the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar with
+nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can
+scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of
+language, produced by that familiarity.'[3] His own poetic style
+certainly corresponds with his intention. It cannot give the kind of
+pleasure afforded by what may be called without disparagement a learned
+and artful style, such as Virgil's or Milton's; but, like the best
+writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is, with all its individuality,
+almost entirely free from mannerism and the other vices of
+self-consciousness, and appears to flow so directly from the thought
+that one is ashamed to admire it for itself. This is equally so whether
+the appropriate style is impassioned and highly figurative, or simple
+and even plain. It is indeed in the latter case that Shelley wins his
+greatest, because most difficult, triumph. In the dialogue part of
+_Julian and Maddalo_ he has succeeded remarkably in keeping the style
+quite close to that of familiar though serious conversation, while
+making it nevertheless unmistakably poetic. And the _Cenci_ is an
+example of a success less complete only because the problem was even
+harder. The ideal of the style of tragic drama in the nineteenth or
+twentieth century should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications
+the style of Shakespeare, but to do what Shakespeare did--to idealise,
+without deserting, the language of contemporary speech. Shelley in the
+_Cenci_ seems to me to have come nearest to this ideal.
+
+
+  3.
+
+So much for general exposition. If now we consider more closely what
+Shelley says of the substance of poetry, a question at once arises. He
+may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of
+perfection in some form, and accordingly to imagine its effect as simply
+joy or delighted aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an
+expression; and we understand when we find him saying that Homer
+embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and
+unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses 'the truth and beauty of
+friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object.' But
+poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this
+kind. What is to be said, on Shelley's theory, of his own melancholy
+lyrics, those 'sweetest songs' that 'tell of saddest thought'? What of
+satire, of the epic of conflict and war, or of tragic exhibitions of
+violent and destructive passion? Does not his theory reflect the
+weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and
+abstract ideal instead of interpreting the concrete detail of nature and
+life; and ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would consider
+poetry simply as a representation of fact?
+
+To this last question I should answer No. Shelley's theory, rightly
+understood, will take in, I think, everything really poetic. And to a
+considerable extent he himself shows the way to meet these doubts. He
+did not mean that the _immediate_ subject of poetry must be perfection
+in some form. The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the ideal
+everything he touches. If so, he may write of absolutely anything so
+long as he _can_ so colour it, and nothing would be excluded from his
+province except those things (if any such exist) in which no positive
+relation to the ideal, however indirect, can be shown or intimated. Thus
+to take the instance of Shelley's melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament
+which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its
+visitations or the desolation of its absence, is indirectly an
+expression _of_ the ideal; and so on his theory is the simplest song of
+unhappy love or the simplest dirge. Further, he himself observes that,
+though the joy of poetry is often unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the
+'highest portions of our being is frequently connected with the pain of
+the inferior,' that 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the
+pleasure of pleasure itself,' and that not sorrow only, but 'terror,
+anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an
+approximation to the highest good.' That, then, which appeals poetically
+to such painful emotions will again be an indirect portrayal of the
+ideal; and it is clear, I think, that this was how Shelley in the
+_Defence_ regarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether narrative or
+dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect characters and its exhibition of
+conflict and wild passion. He had, it is true, another and an
+unsatisfactory way of explaining the presence of these things in poetry;
+and I will refer to this in a moment. But he tells us that the Athenian
+tragedies represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals) of
+passion and of power (not merely of virtue); and that in them we behold
+ourselves, 'under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but
+that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the
+internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become.' He
+writes of Milton's Satan in somewhat the same strain. The Shakespearean
+tragedy from which he most often quotes is one in which evil holds the
+stage, _Macbeth_; and he was inclined to think _King Lear_, which
+certainly is no direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama in the
+world. Lastly, in the Preface to his own _Cenci_ he truly says that,
+while the story is fearful and monstrous, 'the poetry which exists in
+these tempestuous sufferings and crimes,' if duly brought out,
+'mitigates the pain of the contemplation of moral deformity': so that he
+regards Count Cenci himself as a _poetic_ character, and therefore as in
+_some_ sense an expression of the ideal. He does not further explain his
+meaning. Perhaps it was that the perfection which poetry is to exhibit
+includes, together with those qualities which win our immediate and
+entire approval or sympathy, others which are capable of becoming the
+instruments of evil. For these, the energy, power and passion of the
+soul, though they may be perverted, are in themselves elements of
+perfection; and so, even in their perversion or their combination with
+moral deformity, they retain their value, they are not simply ugly or
+horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly painful to the same
+love of the ideal which is directly satisfied by pictures of goodness
+and beauty. Now to these various considerations we shall wish to add
+others; but if we bear these in mind, I believe we shall find Shelley's
+theory wide enough, and must hold that the substance of poetry is never
+mere fact, but is always ideal, though its method of representation is
+sometimes more direct, sometimes more indirect.
+
+Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his view quite clear to
+himself, or to hold to it consistently. We are left with the impression,
+not merely that he personally preferred the direct method (as he was, of
+course, entitled to do), but that his use of it shows a certain
+weakness, and also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to regard
+it as the primary and proper method, and to admit only by a reluctant
+after-thought the representation of imperfection. Let me point out some
+signs of this. He considered his own _Cenci_ as a poem inferior in kind
+to his other main works, even as a sort of accommodation to the public.
+With all his modesty he knew what to think of the neglected
+_Prometheus_ and _Adonaďs_, but there is no sign that he, any more than
+the world, was aware that the character of Cenci was a creation without
+a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth century. His enthusiasm
+for some second-rate and third-rate Italian paintings, and his failure
+to understand Michael Angelo, seem to show the same tendency. He could
+not enjoy comedy: it seemed to him simply cruel: he did not perceive
+that to show the absurdity of the imperfect is to glorify the perfect.
+And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers in his view of the
+representation of heroic and tragic imperfection. We find in the Preface
+to _Prometheus Unbound_ the strange notion that Prometheus is a more
+poetic character than Milton's Satan because he is free from Satan's
+imperfections, which are said to interfere with the interest. And in the
+_Defence_ a similar error appears. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, though
+they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits, imperfect. Why, then, did
+Homer make them so? Because, he seems to reply, Homer's contemporaries
+regarded their vices (_e.g._ revengefulness and deceitfulness) as
+virtues. Homer accordingly had to conceal in the costume of these vices
+the unspotted beauty that he himself imagined; and, like Homer, 'few
+poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
+conceptions in its naked truth and splendour.' Now, this idea, to say
+nothing of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer, and its
+probable baselessness in reference to most other poets, is quite
+inconsistent with that truer view of heroic and tragic character which
+was explained just now. It is an example of Shelley's tendency to
+abstract idealism or spurious Platonism. He is haunted by the fancy that
+if he could only get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete aloofness
+from the Many, from life with all its change, decay, struggle, sorrow
+and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry: as if the
+whole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion, the sheer opposite
+of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation. Life, he
+says--
+
+  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
+  Stains the white radiance of eternity;
+
+but the other side, the fact that the many colours _are_ the white light
+broken, he tends to forget, by no means always, but in one, and that not
+the least inspired, of his moods. This is the source of that thinness
+and shallowness of which his view of the world and of history is justly
+accused, a view in which all imperfect being is apt to figure as
+absolutely gratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure white or
+pitch black. Hence also his ideals of good, whether as a character or as
+a mode of life, resting as they do on abstraction from the mass of real
+existence, tend to lack body and individuality; and indeed, if the
+existence of the many is a mere calamity, clearly the next best thing to
+their disappearance is that they should all be exactly alike and have as
+little character as possible. But we must remember that Shelley's
+strength and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very
+abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of
+aspiration towards it in which his poetry is unequalled. We must not go
+for this to Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe; and if we go for it to
+Dante, we shall find, indeed, a mind far vaster than Shelley's, but also
+that dualism of which we complain in him, and the description of a
+heaven which, equally with Shelley's regenerated earth, is no place for
+mere mortality. In any case, as we have seen, the weakness in his
+poetical practice, though it occasionally appears also as a defect in
+his poetical theory, forms no necessary part of it.
+
+
+  4.
+
+I pass to his views on a last point. If the business of poetry is
+somehow to express ideal perfection, it may seem to follow that the
+poet should embody in his poems his beliefs about this perfection and
+the way to approach it, and should thus have a moral purpose and aim to
+be a teacher. And in regard to Shelley this conclusion seems the more
+natural because his own poetry allows us to see clearly some of his
+beliefs about morality and moral progress. Yet alike in his Prefaces and
+in the _Defence_ he takes up most decidedly the position that the poet
+ought neither to affect a moral aim nor to express his own conceptions
+of right and wrong. 'Didactic poetry,' he declares, 'is my abhorrence:
+nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and
+supererogatory in verse.'[4] 'There was little danger,' he tells us in
+the _Defence_, 'that Homer or any of the eternal poets' should make a
+mistake in this matter; but 'those in whom the poetical faculty, though
+great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have
+frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is
+diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to
+advert to this purpose.' These statements may appeal to us, but are they
+consistent with Shelley's main views of poetry? To answer this question
+we must observe what exactly it is that he means to condemn.
+
+Shelley was one of the few persons who can literally be said to _love_
+their kind. He held most strongly, too, that poetry does benefit men,
+and benefits them morally. The moral purpose, then, to which he objects
+cannot well be a poet's general purpose of doing moral as well as other
+good through his poetry--such a purpose, I mean, as he may cherish when
+he contemplates his life and his life's work. And, indeed, it seems
+obvious that nobody with any humanity or any sense can object to that,
+except through some intellectual confusion. Nor, secondly, does Shelley
+mean, I think, to condemn even the writing of a particular poem with a
+view to a particular moral or practical effect; certainly, at least, if
+this was his meaning he was condemning some of his own poetry. Nor,
+thirdly, can he be referring to the portrayal of moral ideals; for that
+he regarded as one of the main functions of poetry, and in the very
+place where he says that didactic poetry is his abhorrence he also says,
+by way of contrast, that he has tried to familiarise the minds of his
+readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence. It appears,
+therefore, that what he is really attacking is the attempt to give, in
+the strict sense, moral _instruction_, to communicate doctrines, to
+offer argumentative statements of opinion on right and wrong, and more
+especially, I think, on controversial questions of the day. An example
+would be Wordsworth's discourse on education at the end of the
+_Excursion_, a discourse of which Shelley, we know, had a very low
+opinion. In short, his enemy is not the purpose of producing a moral
+effect, it is the appeal made for this purpose to the reasoning
+intellect. He says to the poet: By all means aim at bettering men; you
+are a man, and are bound to do so; but you are also a poet, and
+therefore your proper way of doing so is not by reasoning and preaching.
+His idea is of a piece with his general championship of imagination, and
+it is quite consistent with his main view of poetry.[5]
+
+What, then, are the _grounds_ of this position? They are not clearly set
+out, but we can trace several, and they are all solid. Reasoning on
+moral subjects, moral philosophy, was by no means 'tedious' to Shelley;
+it seldom is to real poets. He loved it, and (outside his _Defence_) he
+rated its value very high.[6] But he thought it tedious and out of place
+in poetry, because it can be equally well expressed in 'unmeasured'
+language--much better expressed, one may venture to add. You invent an
+art in order to effect by it a particular purpose which nothing else can
+effect as well. How foolish, then, to use this art for a purpose better
+served by something else! I know no answer to this argument, and its
+application is far wider than that given to it by Shelley. Secondly,
+Shelley remarks that a poet's own conceptions on moral subjects are
+usually those of his place and time, while the matter of his poem ought
+to be eternal, or, as we say, of permanent and universal interest. This,
+again, seems true, and has a wide application; and it holds good even
+when the poet, like Shelley himself, is in rebellion against orthodox
+moral opinion; for his heterodox opinions will equally show the marks of
+his place and time, and constitute a perishable element in his work.
+Doubtless no poetry can be without a perishable element; but that poetry
+has least of it which interprets life least through the medium of
+systematic and doctrinal ideas. The veil which time and place have hung
+between Homer or Shakespeare and the general reader of to-day is almost
+transparent, while even a poetry so intense as that of Dante and Milton
+is impeded in its passage to him by systems which may be unfamiliar,
+and, if familiar, may be distasteful.
+
+Lastly--and this is Shelley's central argument--as poetry itself is
+directly due to imaginative inspiration and not to reasoning, so its
+true moral effect is produced through imagination and not through
+doctrine. Imagination is, for Shelley, 'the great instrument of moral
+good.' The 'secret of morals is love.' It is not 'for want of admirable
+doctrines that men hate and despise and censure and deceive and
+subjugate one another': it is for want of love. And love is 'a going out
+of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
+which exists in thought, action or person not our own.' 'A man,'
+therefore, 'to be greatly good must imagine intensely and
+comprehensively.' And poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by
+acting on its cause, imagination. It strengthens imagination as exercise
+strengthens a limb, and so it indirectly promotes morality. It also
+fills the imagination with beautiful impersonations of all that we
+should wish to be. But moral reasoning does not act upon the cause, it
+only analyses the effect; and the poet has no right to be content to
+analyse what he ought indirectly to create. Here, again, in his
+eagerness, Shelley cuts his antitheses too clean, but the defect is
+easily made good, and the main argument is sound.
+
+Limits of time will compel me to be guilty of the same fault in adding a
+consideration which is in the spirit of Shelley's. The chief moral
+effect claimed for poetry by Shelley is exerted, primarily, by
+imagination on the emotions; but there is another influence, exerted
+primarily through imagination on the understanding. Poetry is largely an
+interpretation of life; and, considering what life is, that must mean a
+moral interpretation. This, to have poetic value, must satisfy
+imagination; but we value it also because it gives us knowledge, a wider
+comprehension, a new insight into ourselves and the world.[7] Now, it
+may be held--and this view answers to a very general feeling among
+lovers of poetry now--that the most deep and original moral
+interpretation is not likely to be that which most shows a moral purpose
+or is most governed by reflective beliefs and opinions, and that as a
+rule we learn most from those who do not try to teach us, and whose
+opinions may even remain unknown to us: so that there is this weighty
+objection to the appearance of such purpose and opinions, that it tends
+to defeat its own intention. And the reason that I wish to suggest is
+this, that always we get most from the _genius_ in a man of genius and
+not from the rest of him. Now, although poets often have unusual powers
+of reflective thought, the specific genius of a poet does not lie there,
+but in imagination. Therefore his deepest and most original
+interpretation is likely to come by the way of imagination. And the
+specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held
+ideas; it is to produce half-consciously a matter from which, when
+produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry (I must
+exaggerate to be clear), psychologically considered, is not the
+_expression_ of ideas or of a view of life; it is their discovery or
+creation, or rather both discovery and creation in one. The
+interpretation contained in _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_ was not brought
+ready-made to the old stories. What was brought to them was the huge
+substance of Shakespeare's imagination, in which all his experience and
+thought was latent; and this, dwelling and working on the stories with
+nothing but a dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion,
+gradually discovered or created in them a meaning and a mass of truth
+about life, which was brought to birth by the process of composition,
+but never preceded it in the shape of ideas, and probably never, even
+after it, took that shape to the poet's mind. And _this_ is the
+interpretation which we find inexhaustibly instructive, because
+Shakespeare's _genius_ is in it. On the other hand, however much from
+curiosity and personal feeling towards him we may wish to know his
+opinions and beliefs about morals or religion or his own poems or Queen
+Elizabeth, we have not really any reason to suppose that their value
+would prove extraordinary. And so, to apply this generally, the
+opinions, reasonings and beliefs of poets are seldom of the same quality
+as their purely imaginative product. Occasionally, as with Goethe, they
+are not far off it; but sometimes they are intense without being
+profound, and more eccentric than original; and often they are very sane
+and sound, but not very different from those of wise men without genius.
+And therefore poetry is not the place for them. For we want in poetry a
+moral interpretation, but not the interpretation we have already. As a
+rule the genuine artist's quarrel with 'morality' in art is not really
+with morality, it is with a stereotyped or narrow morality; and when he
+refuses in his art to consider things from what he calls the moral point
+of view, his reasons are usually wrong, but his instinct is right.
+
+Poetry itself confirms on the whole this contention, though doubtless in
+these last centuries a great poet's work will usually reveal more of
+conscious reflection than once it did. Homer and Shakespeare show no
+moral aim and no system of opinion. Milton was far from justifying the
+ways of God to men by the argumentation he put into divine and angelic
+lips; his truer moral insight is in the creations of his genius; for
+instance, in the character of Satan or the picture of the glorious
+humanity of Adam and Eve. Goethe himself could never have told the world
+what he was going to express in the First Part of _Faust_: the poem told
+_him_, and it is one of the world's greatest. He knew too well what he
+was going to express in the Second Part, and with all its wisdom and
+beauty it is scarcely a great poem. Wordsworth's original message was
+delivered, not when he was a Godwinian semi-atheist, nor when he had
+subsided upon orthodoxy, but when his imagination, with a few hints from
+Coleridge, was creating a kind of natural religion; and this religion
+itself is more profoundly expressed in his descriptions of his
+experience than in his attempts to formulate it. The moral virtue of
+Tennyson is in poems like _Ulysses_ and parts of _In Memoriam_, where
+sorrow and the consciousness of a deathless affection or an unquenchable
+desire for experience forced an utterance; but when in the _Idylls_ he
+tried to found a great poem on explicit ideas about the soul and the
+ravages wrought in it by lawless passion, he succeeded but partially,
+because these ideas, however sound, were no product of his genius. And
+so the moral virtue of Shelley's poetry lay, not in his doctrines about
+the past and future of man, but in an intuition, which was the substance
+of his soul, of the unique value of love. In the end, for him, the
+truest name of that perfection called Intellectual Beauty, Liberty,
+Spirit of Nature, is Love. Whatever in the world has any worth is an
+expression of Love. Love sometimes talks. Love talking musically is
+Poetry.
+
+1904.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Statements equally emphatic on this subject may be found in a
+    passage quoted by Mrs. Shelley in a footnote to Shelley's letter to
+    John Gisborne, Nov. 16, 1819 (Letter XXX. in Mrs. Shelley's edition).
+    Cf. also Letter XXXIII. to Leigh Hunt, Nov. 1819.
+
+  [2] I cannot find the passage or passages to which I referred in
+    making this statement, and therefore I do not vouch for its accuracy.
+    Cf. from the fragment _Fiordispina_,
+
+      The ardours of a vision which obscure
+      The very idol of its portraiture.
+
+  [3] Cf. from the Preface to the _Cenci_: 'I entirely agree with those
+    modern critics who assert that, in order to move men to true
+    sympathy, we must use the familiar language of men.... But it must be
+    the real language of men in general, and not that of any particular
+    class to whose society the writer happens to belong.'
+
+  [4] Preface to _Prometheus Unbound_.
+
+  [5] I do not discuss the adequacy of Shelley's position, or assert
+    that he held it quite clearly or consistently. In support of my
+    interpretation, of it I may refer to the Preface to the _Cenci_.
+    There he repudiates the idea of making the dramatic exhibition of the
+    story 'subservient to what is vulgarly called a moral purpose,' and,
+    as the context shows, he identifies such a treatment of the story
+    with the 'enforcement' of a 'dogma.'
+
+    This passage has a further interest. The dogma which Shelley would
+    not enforce in his tragedy was that 'no person can truly be
+    dishonoured by the act of another, and the fit return to make to the
+    most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution
+    to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love'; and
+    accordingly he held that 'if Beatrice had thought in this manner, she
+    would have been wiser and better.' How inexcusable then is the not
+    uncommon criticism on the _Cenci_ that he represents Beatrice as a
+    perfect character and justifies her murder of 'the injurer.'
+
+    Shelley's position in the _Defence_, it may be added, is in total
+    disagreement with his youthful doctrine and practice. In 1811 he
+    wrote to Miss Hitchener, 'My opinion is that all poetical beauty
+    ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral,' and a large part of
+    _Queen Mab_ is frankly didactic. Even there, however, he reserved
+    most of the formal instruction for the Notes, perceiving that 'a poem
+    very didactic is ... very stupid.'
+
+  [6] 'I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political
+    science,' he says in a letter to Peacock, Jan. 1819.
+
+  [7] And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does it
+    imaginatively, the more does it satisfy imagination, and the greater
+    is its _poetic_ value.
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH
+
+
+THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH[1]
+
+
+The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the
+glories of our literature. It is surpassed, many would add, by the
+poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious
+flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly
+conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves
+with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is
+great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a
+wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal
+accomplishment?
+
+
+  1.
+
+Matthew Arnold, in his essay on _The Function of Criticism at the
+Present Time_, gave an answer to this question. 'It has long seemed to
+me,' he wrote, 'that the burst of creative activity in our literature,
+through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact,
+something premature.... And this prematureness comes from its having
+proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials
+to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of
+this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not
+know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
+Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and
+in variety.' The statement that this poetry 'did not know enough' means,
+of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of
+a kind, but that it lacked 'criticism.' And this means that it did not
+live and move freely in an atmosphere of the best available ideas, of
+ideas gained by a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology,
+philosophy, history, science, to see things as they are. In such an
+atmosphere Goethe lived. There was not indeed in Goethe's Germany, nor
+was there in the England of our poets, the 'national glow of life and
+thought' that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of
+Elizabeth. That happiest atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both
+countries. But there was for Goethe 'a sort of equivalent for it in the
+complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans,' a
+culture produced by a many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined
+critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.
+
+Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it may not have had all
+the importance he ascribes to it, but considerable importance it must
+have had. And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt. One of
+the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth's age is the very
+unusual superiority of the imaginative literature to the scientific. I
+mean by the 'scientific' literature that of philosophy, theology,
+history, politics, economics, not only that of the sciences of Nature,
+which for our present purpose are perhaps the least important. In this
+kind of literature Wordsworth's age has hardly an author to show who
+could for a moment be placed on a level with some five of the poets,
+with the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the poetic critics
+Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It has no writers to compare with Bacon,
+Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the time of Paley,
+Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford, Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher
+and theologian. These are names worthy of all respect, but they
+represent a literature quite definitely of the second rank. And this
+great disproportion between the two kinds of literature, we must
+observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the
+Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was
+doubtless superior to the other in Shakespeare's time, possibly even in
+Milton's; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and Clarendon and Hobbes are
+not separated from the best poets of their day by any startling
+difference of quality;[2] while in the later periods, right down to the
+age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say
+no more, with the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth's own
+time is there that gap between the two that we find in England. In
+respect of genius the philosophers, for example, though none of them was
+the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all inferior to the poets.
+The case of England in Wordsworth's age is anomalous.
+
+This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must have been influential.
+It confirms Arnold's view that the intellectual atmosphere of the time
+was not of the best. If we think of the periodical literature--of the
+_Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh_ and _Blackwood_--we shall be still more
+inclined to assent to that view. And when we turn to the poets
+themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and
+recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lamb,
+and of Coleridge, we cannot reject it. Assuredly we read with
+admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance--in
+greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany,
+if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the
+superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to
+ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe,
+Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four
+either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin?
+Could any of them have seen in the French Revolution no more
+significance than Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are the
+attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets towards
+the Christian religion! Could anything be more _borné_ than Coleridge's
+professed reason for not translating _Faust_?[3] Is it possible that a
+German poet with the genius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited
+a mental world so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened to us
+by the brilliant letters of the former, or could have sunk, like the
+latter, to suggesting that the cholera was a divine condemnation of
+Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill?
+
+But if we accept Arnold's statement as to the intellectual atmosphere of
+the poetry of Wordsworth's time, a question will remain. Was he right in
+regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even as the chief, cause of
+the fact (if it is one) that the poetry does not fully correspond in
+greatness with the genius of the poets? And before we come to this
+question we must put another. Is the fact really as it has just been
+stated? I do not think so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it
+seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems. Reviewing these in
+memory, and asking ourselves how many we can unreservedly call 'great,'
+we hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in some of them, fine
+poetry in many; but that does not make a great whole. Which of them is
+great as a whole? Not the _Prelude_ or the _Excursion_, still less
+_Endymion_ or _The Revolt of Islam_ or _Childe Harold_, which hardly
+pretends to unity. _Christabel_, the wonderful fragment, is a fragment;
+so is _Hyperion_; _Don Juan_, also unfinished, becomes more discursive
+the further it proceeds, and in spirit is nowhere great. All the
+principal poets wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and some
+readers think that in _Manfred_, and still more certainly in _Cain_, we
+have great poems, while others think this of _Prometheus Unbound_ and
+_The Cenci_. But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our
+judgment quite confident, and can we say that any of them _satisfy_ us,
+like some works of earlier times? We are thus satisfied, it seems to me,
+only when we come to poems of smaller dimensions, like _The Ancient
+Mariner_, or _The Eve of Saint Agnes_, or _Adonaďs_, or _The Vision of
+Judgment_, or when we read the lyrics. To save time I will confine
+myself to the latter.
+
+Within this sphere we have no longer that impression of genius which
+fails to reach full accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of
+course, of Wordsworth's age is the equal of Shakespeare or of Milton;
+and there are certain qualities, too, of lyrical verse in which the
+times of Shakespeare and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth.
+But if we take the better part of the lyrical poetry of these three
+periods in the mass, or again in a representative selection, it will not
+be the latest period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In the
+original edition of the _Golden Treasury_, Book I. (Wyatt to
+Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book II. (the rest of the seventeenth
+century) sixty-five; Book IV., which covers the very much shorter
+period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a hundred and forty. 'Book
+I.,' perhaps most of us would say, 'should be longer, and Book IV. a
+good deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in it, and
+Wordsworth is over-represented. And the Elizabethan poems are mostly
+quite short, while the Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the
+longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but
+admitted poems like Coleridge's _Love_ and Wordsworth's _Ruth_ (seven
+whole pages). And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.' No; but
+still quantity must count for something, and the _Golden Treasury_ is a
+volume excellent in selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think,
+leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth was our greatest period
+in lyrical poetry. And if Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book
+IV., this impression would not be materially altered; it might even be
+deepened. For the change would force into notice the comparative
+monotony of the themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely wider
+range of the thought and emotion that attain expression in the later. It
+might also convince us that, on the whole, this more varied material is
+treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is
+difficult to be sure, since we recognise what may be called the
+conventions of an earlier age, and are perhaps a little blind to those
+of a time near our own.
+
+Now the eminence of Wordsworth's age in lyrical poetry, even if it is
+not also a pre-eminence, is a significant fact. It may mean that the
+whole poetic spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this may
+indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment which mingles with
+our admiration of the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to
+two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of Campbell are already
+dead; he survives only in lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite
+of fine passages (and the battle in _Marmion_ is in certain qualities
+superior to anything else of the time) Scott's longer poems cannot be
+classed with the best contemporary poetry; but in some of his ballads
+and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again, much of the most famous
+narrative poetry is semi-lyrical in form, as a moment's thought of
+Scott, Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for instance, several
+of Byron's tales, or Wordsworth's _White Doe of Rylstone_) is strongly
+tinged with the lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It is
+an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than in scenes, events,
+actions, which express and re-act on emotions, thoughts, will. It would
+hardly be going too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative
+poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained.[4] (3) The
+same tendencies are visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron's
+regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived, are almost forgotten;
+but _Heaven and Earth_, which is still alive, is largely composed of
+lyrics, and the first two acts of _Manfred_ are full of them.
+_Prometheus Unbound_ is called 'a lyrical drama.' Though it has some
+very fine and some very beautiful blank verse passages (usually
+undramatic), its lyrics are its glory; and this is even more the case
+with _Hellas_. It would be untrue to say that the comparative failure of
+most of the dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical spirit,
+but many of them show it. (4) The strength of this spirit may be
+illustrated lastly by a curious fact. The ode is one of the longest and
+most ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most famous poems of
+Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are odes. But the greatest of the
+lyrists, who wrote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind,
+found the limits even of the ode too narrow for his 'flight of fire.' If
+_Lycidas_ and _L'Allegro_ and Spenser's _Epithalamion_ are lyrical
+poems, and if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing shall be
+called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, _Adonaďs_ will be a
+lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the _Lines written
+among the Euganean Hills_ and _Epipsychidion_ will be lyrics consisting
+respectively of 370 and 600 lines.
+
+It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical poem may be called
+short as compared with a narrative or drama. It is usual, further, to
+say that lyrical poetry is 'subjective,' since, instead of telling or
+representing a story of people, actions, and events, it expresses the
+thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous
+and in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to have a basis in
+fact. It may be suggested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical
+poetry of Wordsworth's time, and the imperfection of the long narratives
+and dramas, may have a common origin. Just as it was most natural to
+Homer or to Shakespeare to express the imaginative substance of his mind
+in the 'objective' shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly
+severed from his own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some reason
+or reasons, it was most natural to the best poets of this later time to
+express that substance in the shape of impassioned reflections,
+aspirations, prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of peace.
+The matter of these might, in another sense of the word, be 'objective'
+enough, a matter of general human interest, not personal in any
+exclusive way; but it appeared in the form of the poet's thought and
+feeling. Just because he most easily expressed it thus, he succeeded
+less completely when he attempted the more objective form of utterance;
+and for the same reason it was especially important that he should be
+surrounded and penetrated by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal
+'criticism.' For he not only lived among ideas; he expressed ideas, and
+expressed them _as_ ideas.
+
+These suggestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry.
+The 'subjective' spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer poems.
+This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron's case, that
+the poet's one hero is himself. It appears in another way when the poem,
+through its story or stories, displays the poet's favourite ideas and
+beliefs. The _Excursion_ does this; most of Shelley's longer poems do
+it. And the strength of this tendency may be seen in an apparent
+contradiction. One of the marks of the Romantic Revival is a disposition
+to substitute the more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and drama
+for the eighteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic
+reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their
+characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse;
+Coleridge, for example, in _Religious Musings_, Byron in the first two
+cantos of _Childe Harold_, Shelley in _Queen Mab_, and Keats in _Sleep
+and Poetry_. These are not, like the _Pleasures of Memory_ and
+_Pleasures of Hope_, continuations of the traditional style; they are
+thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective. Scott, indeed, goes
+straight to the objective forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was
+little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time. Those who were
+deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had their minds full of
+theoretic ideas. They were groping after, or were already inflamed by,
+some explicit view of life, and of life seen in relation to an ideal
+which it revealed or contradicted. And this view of life, at least at
+first, pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract shape, or
+became a sort of soul or second meaning within those appearances of
+nature, or actions of men, or figures and fantasies of youthful
+imagination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry.
+
+Considered in this light, the following facts become very significant.
+Wordsworth, now about thirty, and the author of many characteristic
+lyrics, on returning from Germany and settling at Grasmere, begins to
+meditate a long poem. He tells us in the _Prelude_ of the subjects he
+thought of. They are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories of
+action, not at all theoretical.[5] But it will not do: his mind 'turns
+recreant to her task.' He has another hope, a 'favourite aspiration'
+towards 'a philosophic song of Truth.' But even this will not do; it is
+premature; even Truth (I venture to suggest) is not inward enough. He
+must first tell the story of his own mind: the subject of his long poem
+must be Poetry itself. He tells this story, to our great gain, in the
+_Prelude_; and it is the story of the steps by which he came to see
+reality, Nature and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of an
+all-embracing and perfect spiritual life or Being. Not till this is done
+can he proceed to the _Excursion_, which, together with much reflection
+and even argumentation, contains pictures of particular men.
+
+'This for our greatest'; but it is not his history alone. The first
+longer poem of Shelley which can be called mature was _Alastor_. And
+what is its subject? The subject of the _Prelude_; the story of a Poet's
+soul, and of the effect on it of the revelation of its ideal. The first
+long poem of Keats was _Endymion_. The tendency to the concrete was
+strong in Keats; he has been called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of
+due time; and _Endymion_, like _Venus and Adonis_, is a mythological
+story. But it is by no means that alone. The infection of his time was
+in him. The further subject of _Endymion_ is again the subject of the
+_Prelude_, the story of a poet's soul smitten by love of its ideal, the
+Principle of Beauty, and striving for union with it, for the 'wedding'
+of the mind of man 'with this goodly universe in love and holy passion.'
+What, again, is the subject of _Epipsychidion_? The same.
+
+  There was a Being whom my spirit oft
+  Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft
+  In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn.
+
+The poem is all about the search of the poet's soul for this ideal
+Being. And the _Sensitive Plant_ is this soul, and the Lady of the
+Garden this Being, And _Prince Athanase_ is the same soul, and if the
+poem had been continued the Being would soon have appeared. Is it not an
+astonishing proof of Shelley's powers that the _Cenci_ was ever written?
+Shelley, when he died, had half escaped--Keats, some time before he
+died, had quite escaped--from that bewitching inward world of the poet's
+soul and its shadowy adventures. Could that well be the world of what we
+call emphatically a 'great poem'?
+
+
+  2.
+
+Let us review for a moment the course of our discussion. I have been
+suggesting that, if our pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth's
+age is tinged with disappointment, this does not extend to the lyrical
+poetry; that the lyrical spirit, or, more generally, an inward or
+subjective tendency, shows itself in many of the longer works; and that
+their imperfection is partly due to it. Now, let me suggest that the
+atmosphere of adequate 'criticism' which Arnold misses in the age and
+its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced favourably even the
+lyrics, and much more the larger works, could hardly have diminished the
+force of that tendency, and that the main difficulty lay _there_. But,
+before developing this idea further, I propose to leave for a time the
+English poetry of Wordsworth's age, to look beyond it, and to ask
+certain questions.
+
+First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of 'criticism' was more
+favourable in Germany than in England, how many long poems were produced
+in Germany that we can call without hesitation or qualification 'great'?
+Were _any_ produced except by Goethe? And, if we admit (as I gladly do)
+that he produced several, was not the _main_ reason simply that he was
+born with more poetic genius than any of his contemporaries, just as
+Dante and Shakespeare and Milton were? And again, with this native
+genius and his long laborious life, did he produce anything like as many
+great poems as might have been expected? And, if not, why not? I do not
+suggest that his general culture, so superior to that of his English
+contemporaries, did not help him; but are we sure that it did not also
+hinder him? And is it not also significant that, in spite of his love of
+new ideas, he felt an instinctive dread of the influence of philosophy,
+in the strict sense, as of something dangerous to the poetic modes of
+vision and creation?
+
+Secondly, if we look beyond the first quarter of the century to the
+second and third, do we find in Europe a large number of those
+emphatically great poems, solid coherent structures of concrete
+imagination? It seems more than doubtful. To confine ourselves to
+English examples, is it not the case that Tennyson is primarily a
+lyrical poet, that the best of his longer poems, _Maud_ and _In
+Memoriam_, are lyrical, and that the most ambitious, the narrative
+_Idylls of the King_, is, as a whole, not great? Is the _Ring and the
+Book_, however fine in parts, a great whole, or comparable as a whole
+with _Andrea del Sarto_ or _Rabbi ben Ezra_? And is any one of
+Browning's dramas a great play? What these questions suggest is that,
+while the difficulty about the long poem affects in an extreme degree
+the age of Wordsworth, it affects in some degree the time that follows.
+Its beginnings, too, are traceable before the nineteenth century. In
+fact it is connected with essential characteristics of modern poetry and
+art; and these characteristics are connected with the nature of modern
+life, and the position of the artist within that life. I wish to touch
+on this huge subject before returning to the age of Wordsworth.
+
+Art, we may say, has become free, and, in a sense, universal. The poet
+is no longer the minstrel of king or nobles, nor even of a city or
+country. Literature, as Goethe foretold, becomes increasingly European,
+and more than European; and the poet, however national, is a citizen of
+the Republic of Letters. No class of subject, again, has any prerogative
+claim on him. Whatever, in any time or place, is human, whatever has
+been conceived as divine, whatever belongs even to external nature, he
+may choose, as it suits his bent or offers a promising material. The
+world is all before him; and it is a world which the increase of
+knowledge has made immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has
+asserted its independence. Its public exhibition must conform to the
+law; but otherwise it neither asks the approval nor submits to the
+control of any outward authority; and it is the handmaid of nothing. It
+claims a value for itself, as an expression of mind co-ordinate with
+other expressions, theoretic and practical; satisfying a need and
+serving a purpose that none of them can fulfil; subject only, as they
+too are subject, to the unity of human nature and human good. Finally,
+in respect of the methods of his art the poet claims and enjoys the same
+freedom. The practice of the past, the 'rules' of the past (if they
+existed or exist), are without authority for him. It is improbable
+beforehand that a violent breach with them will lead him to a real
+advance, just as it is improbable that such a breach with the morals or
+the science of his day will do so. But there is no certainty beforehand;
+and if he fails, he expects blame not because he innovates, but because
+he has failed by innovating.
+
+The freedom of modern art, and the universality of its field, are great
+things, and the value of the second is easily seen in the extraordinary
+variety of subject-matter in the longer poems of the nineteenth century.
+But in candid minds most recitals of our modern advantages are followed
+by a melancholy sense of our feebleness in using them. And so in some
+degree it is here. The unrivalled opportunities fail to produce
+unrivalled works. And we can see that the deepest cause of this is not a
+want of native genius or of acquired skill or even of conscientious
+labour, but the fact that the opportunities themselves bring danger and
+difficulty. The poet who knows everything and may write about anything
+has, after all, a hard task. Things must have been easier, it seems to
+us, for an artist whose choice, if his aim was high, was restricted to a
+cycle of ideas and stories, mythological, legendary, or historical, or
+all together, concerning beings divine, daemonic, angelic, or heroic.
+His matter, as it existed in the general imagination, was already highly
+poetical. If not created by imagination, it was shaped or coloured by
+it; a world not of bodiless thoughts and emotions, but of scenes,
+figures, actions, and events. For the most part he lived in unity with
+it; it appealed to his own religious and moral feelings and beliefs,
+sometimes to his patriotic feelings; and he wrote, painted, or carved,
+for people who shared with him both his material and his attitude
+towards it. It belonged usually to the past, but he did not view it over
+a great gulf of time with the eye of a scientific historian. If he
+wished to robe it in the vesture of the life around him, he was checked
+by no scruples as to truth; and the life around him can seldom, we
+think, have appeared to him repulsively prosaic. Broad statements like
+these require much qualification; but, when it is supplied, they may
+still describe periods in which perhaps most of the greatest
+architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry has come into being.
+
+How different the position of the artist has now become we see at a
+glance, and I confine myself to some points which specially concern the
+difficulty of the long poem. If a poem is to be anything like great it
+must, in one sense, be concerned with the present. Whatever its
+'subject' may be, it must express something living in the mind from
+which it comes and the minds to which it goes. Wherever its body is, its
+soul must be here and now. What subject, then, in the measureless field
+of choice, is the poet to select and fashion into a body? The outward
+life around him, as he and his critics so often lament, appears uniform,
+ugly, and rationally regulated, a world of trousers, machinery and
+policemen. Law--the rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable
+will--is a vast achievement and priceless possession; but it is not
+favourable to striking events or individual actions on the grand scale.
+Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there is doubtless an
+infinity of poetic matter; but this is inward, or it fails to appear in
+impressive forms; and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the
+monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel, but hardly the long
+poem or high tragedy. Even war, for reasons not hard to find, is no
+longer the subject that it was.
+
+But when the poet turns to a subject distant in place or time or both,
+new troubles await him. If he aims at complete truth to time and place
+the soul of the present will hardly come into his work. Yet he lives in
+an age of history and science, and these hamper as well as help him. The
+difficulty is not that he is bound to historical or scientific truth,
+for in principle, I venture to say, he is free. If he _can_ satisfy
+imagination by violating them he is justified. It is no function of his
+to attain or propagate them; and a critic who objected, say, to the
+First Part of _Faust_ on the ground that it puts a modern spirit into
+the legend, would rightly be laughed at. It is its triumph to do so and
+yet to succeed. But then success is exceedingly difficult. For the poet
+lives in a time when the violation of truth is _prima facie_ felt to be
+a fault, something that does require justification by the result.
+Further, he has himself to start from a clear consciousness of
+difference between the present and the past, the spirit and the story,
+and has to produce on this basis a harmony of spirit and story. And
+again, living in an age of analytical thought, he is likely--all the
+more likely, if he has much greatness of mind--to be keenly interested
+in ideas; and so he is exposed to the temptation of using as the spirit
+of the old story some highly reflective idea--an idea not only
+historically alien to his material, but perhaps not very poetical, or
+again not very deep, because it belongs to him rather as philosopher
+than poet, while his genius is that of a poet.
+
+The influence of some of these difficulties might readily be shown in
+the Second Part of _Faust_ or in _Prometheus Unbound_, especially where
+we perceive in a figure or action some symbolical meaning, but find this
+meaning deficient in interest or poetic truth, or are vexed by the doubt
+how far it ought to be pursued.[6] But the matter is more easily
+illustrated by the partial failure of the _Idylls of the King_. We have
+no right to condemn beforehand an attempt to modernise the Arthurian
+legends. Tennyson's treatment of them, even his outrage on the story of
+Tristram, might conceivably have been justified by the result. And,
+indeed, in the _Holy Grail_ and the _Passing of Arthur_ his treatment,
+to my mind, was more than justified. But, in spite of countless
+beauties, the total result of the _Idylls_ was disappointing, not merely
+from the defects of this or that poem, but because the old unity of
+spirit and story was broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old
+nor complete in itself. For the main semi-allegorical idea, having
+already the disadvantage of not being poetic in its origin, was, as a
+reflective idea, by no means profound, and it led to such inconsistency
+in the very centre of the story as the imagination refuses to accept.
+Tennyson's Lancelot might have wronged the Arthur who is merely a
+blameless king and represents Conscience; but Tennyson's Lancelot would
+much rather have killed himself than be systematically treacherous to
+the friend and lover-husband who appears in _Guinevere_.[7]
+
+These difficulties belong in some measure to the whole modern time--the
+whole time that begins with the Renaissance; but they become so much
+clearer and so much more serious with the advance of knowledge and
+criticism, that in speaking of them I have been referring specially to
+the last century. There are other difficulties not so closely connected
+with that advance, and I will venture some very tentative remarks on
+one of these, which also has increased with time. It has to do with the
+kind of life commonly lived by our poets. Is there not some significance
+in the fact that the most famous of our narrative poets were all three,
+in their various ways and degrees, public men, or in contact with great
+affairs; and that poets in earlier times no less must usually have seen
+something at first hand of adventure, political struggles, or war;
+whereas poets now, for the most part, live wholly private lives, and,
+like the majority of their readers, are acquainted only by report with
+anything of the kind? If Chaucer had never been at Court, or seen
+service in the French war, or gone on embassies abroad; if Spenser had
+not known Sidney and Raleigh and been secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland;
+if Milton had spent his whole life at Horton; would it have made no
+difference to their poetry? Again, if we turn to the drama and ask why
+the numerous tragedies of the nineteenth century poets so rarely
+satisfy, what is the answer? There are many reasons, and among them the
+poet's ignorance of the stage will doubtless count for much; but must we
+not also consider that he scarcely ever saw anything resembling the
+things he tried to portray? When we study the history of the time in
+which the Elizabethan dramas were composed, when we examine the
+portraits of the famous men, or read such a book as the autobiography of
+Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we realise that the violent actions and
+passions which the dramatist depicted were like the things he saw.
+Whatever Shakespeare's own disposition was, he lived among these men,
+jested with the fellow-actor who had borne arms abroad and killed his
+man in a duel at home, conversed with nobles whose heads perhaps were no
+great way from the block. But the poet who strolls about the lanes or
+plods the London streets with an umbrella for a sword, and who has
+probably never seen a violent deed in his life, or for a moment really
+longed to kill so much as a critic, how is he to paint the vengeance of
+Hamlet or the frenzy of Macbeth, and not merely to thrill you with the
+emotions of his actors but to make them _do_ things that take your
+imagination by the throat?
+
+
+  3.
+
+Assuming, now, that (even if this last idea is doubtful or unimportant)
+there is some truth in the suggestion that the difficulties of the long
+poem arise largely from the conditions described, and especially from
+the nature of the intellectual atmosphere which the modern poet
+breathes, let us return to Wordsworth's age in particular. In that age
+these difficulties were aggravated in a quite exceptional way by special
+causes, causes responsible also in part for the unusual originality and
+intensity of the poetry. In it we find conditions removed to the
+extremest distance from those of the poet who wrote, in the midst of a
+generally accepted social order, for an audience with which he shared
+traditional ideas and beliefs and a more or less traditional imaginative
+material. It was, in a word, a revolutionary age, in the electric
+atmosphere of which the most potent intellectual influences were those
+of Rousseau and (for the English poets) of Godwin. Milton's time was not
+in the same sense revolutionary, much less Shakespeare's. The forces of
+the great movement of mind in Shakespeare's day _we_ may formulate as
+'ideas,' but they were not the abstractly conceived ideas of
+Wordsworth's day. Such theoretical ideas were potent in Milton's time,
+but they were not ideas that made a total breach with the past,
+rejecting as worthless, or worse, the institutions, beliefs, and modes
+of life in which human nature had endeavoured to realise itself, and
+drawing airy pictures of a different human nature on a new earth. Nor
+was the poetic mind of those ages enraptured or dejected by the haunting
+many-featured contrast of real and ideal. But the poetic mind in
+Wordsworth's age breathed this atmosphere of revolution, though it was
+not always sensitive to the influence. Nor is it a question of the
+acceptance or rejection of the 'ideas of the Revolution.' That influence
+is clearly traceable in all the greater writers except Scott and Jane
+Austen. It is equally obvious in Wordsworth, who hungered for realities,
+recovered from his theoretic malady, sought for good in life's familiar
+face, yet remained a preacher; in Byron, who was too shrewd, sceptical,
+and selfish to contract that particular malady, but who suffered from
+the sickness from which Goethe freed himself by writing _Werther_,[8]
+and who punctuates his story in _Don Juan_ with bursts of laughter and
+tears; and in Shelley, whose 'rapid spirit' was quickened, and then
+clogged, by the abstractions of revolutionary theory.
+
+But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical example of this
+influence and of its effects. From the world of his imagination the
+shapes of the old world had disappeared, and their place was taken by a
+stream of radiant vapours, incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving
+in the 'clear golden dawn,' and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to
+the music of the stars and the 'singing rain,' the sublime ridiculous
+formulas of Godwin. In his heart were emotions that responded to the
+vision,--an aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like those of
+spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over its ruin. And he wrote, not,
+like Shakespeare or Pope, for Londoners sitting in a theatre or a
+coffee-house, intelligences vivid enough but definitely embodied in a
+definite society; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to
+other spirit-sparks of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark
+earth, to spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or
+Freedom or Love, his one place of rest and the one source of his vision,
+ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang _to_ this, and he sang _of_ it, and of the
+emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest with such shapes of
+darkness as Faith and Custom. And he made immortal music; now in
+melodies as exquisite and varied as the songs of Schubert, and now in
+symphonies where the crudest of Philosophies of History melted into
+golden harmony. But the songs were more perfect than the symphonies; and
+they could hardly fail to be so. For a single thought and mood,
+expressive of one aspect of things, suffices, with its melody, for a
+lyric, but not for a long poem. That requires a substance which
+implicitly contains a whole 'criticism' or interpretation of life. And
+although there was something always working in Shelley's mind, and
+issuing in those radiant vapours, that was far deeper and truer than his
+philosophic creed, its expression and even its development were
+constantly checked or distorted by the hard and narrow framework of that
+creed. And it was one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of the human
+nature that has formed the material of the world's great poems.[9]
+
+The second and third quarters of the century were not in the same degree
+as the first a revolutionary time, and we feel this change in the
+poetry. The fever-heat is gone, the rapture and the dejection moderate,
+the culture is wider, the thought more staid and considerate, the
+fascination of abstractions less potent, and the formative or plastic
+impulse, if not stronger, less impeded. Late in the period, with Morris,
+the born teller of tales re-appears. If, as we saw, the lyrical spirit
+continues to prevail, no one would deny to Browning the full and robust
+sympathy of the dramatist with all the variety of character and passion.
+Yet these changes and others are far from obliterating those features of
+the earlier generation on which we have dwelt. To describe the
+atmosphere of 'criticism' as that of a common faith or view of the world
+would be laughable. If not revolutionary, it was agitated, restless, and
+distressed by the conflict of theoretic ideas. To Arnold's mind it was
+indeed a most unhappy time for poetry, though the poetic impulse
+remained as yet, and even later, powerful. The past was dead, but he
+could share neither the soaring hope nor the passionate melancholy of
+the opening century. He was
+
+  Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
+    The other powerless to be born,
+  With nowhere yet to rest his head.
+
+And the two greatest poets, as well as he, still offer not only, as
+poets always must, an interpretation, but a definite theory of life,
+and, more insistently than ever before, of death. Confidence in the
+detail, at least, of such theories has diminished, and with the rapid
+advance of the critical sciences the poets may prophesy less than their
+predecessors; but they probe, and weigh, and deliberate more. And the
+strength of the 'inward' tendency, obvious in Tennyson and Arnold, may
+be clearly seen even in Browning, and not alone in such works as
+_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_ or _La Saisiaz_.
+
+Objective and dramatic as Browning is called and by comparison is, he is
+surely most at home, and succeeds most completely, in lyrics, and in
+monologues divested of action and merely suggestive of a story or
+suggested by one. He too must begin, in _Pauline_, with the picture of a
+youthful poet's soul. Dramatic the drama of _Paracelsus_ neither is nor
+tries to be: it consists of scenes in the history of souls. Of the
+narrative _Sordello_ its author wrote: 'The historical decoration was
+purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my
+stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is
+worth study.' Even if that is so, great narrative poems are not written
+thus. And what Browning says here applies more or less fully to most of
+his works. In the end, if we set aside the short lyrics, his best poems
+are all 'studies' of souls. 'Well,' it may be answered, 'so are
+Shakespeare's tragedies and tragi-comedies.' But the difference is
+great. Shakespeare, doubtless, is little concerned with the accuracy of
+the historical background,--much less concerned than Browning. But his
+subject is not a soul, nor even souls: it is the actions of souls, or
+souls coming into action. It is more. It is that clash of souls which
+exhibits not them alone, but a whole of spiritual forces, appearing in
+them, but spreading beyond them into the visible society to which they
+essentially belong, and into invisible regions which enclose it. The
+thing shown, therefore, is huge, multiform, ponderous, yet quivering
+with an inward agitation which explodes into violent bodily expression
+and speaks to the _eye_ of imagination. What specially interests
+Browning is not this. It is the soul moving in itself, often in its most
+secret windings and recesses; before action or after it, where there is
+action at all; and this soul not essentially as in its society (that is
+'background' or 'decoration'), but alone, or in relation to another
+soul, or to God. He exhibits it best, therefore, in monologue, musing,
+explaining, debating, pleading, overflowing into the expression of
+feeling or passion, but not acting. The 'men and women' that haunt the
+reader's imagination are not so much men of action as lovers, artists,
+men of religion. And when they act (as for example in _The Ring and the
+Book_, or the dramas) what rivets attention, and is first recalled to
+memory by their names, is not the action, but its reflection in the soul
+of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my experience; and in the
+end a critic can only offer to others his considered experience. But
+with Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise. Even with Dante
+it is otherwise. I see not souls alone, but souls in visible attitudes,
+in outward movement, often in action. I see Paolo and Francesca drifting
+on the wind: I see them sitting and reading: I see them kiss: I _see_
+Dante's pity:
+
+  E caddi come corpo morto cade.
+
+
+  4.
+
+I spoke of Tennyson and Browning in order to point out that, although in
+their day the intellectual atmosphere was no longer 'revolutionary,' it
+remained an atmosphere of highly reflective ideas representing no common
+'faith' or way of envisaging the world, and that the inward tendency
+still asserts itself in their poetry. We cannot pursue the history
+further, but it does not appear that in the last forty years culture has
+advanced much, or at all, towards such a faith or way, or shows the
+working of new semi-conscious creative ideas beneath the surface of
+warring theories and opinions. Only the younger among us can hope to see
+what Arnold descried in the distance,
+
+  One mighty wave of thought and joy
+    Lifting mankind again.
+
+And even when, for them or their descendants, that hope is realised, and
+with it the hope of a new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly
+still be one of 'criticism,' and Arnold's insistence on the necessity of
+the best criticism will still be as urgently required. It must indeed be
+more and more needed as the power of half-educated journalism grows. How
+poetry then will overcome the obstacles which, therefore, must in some
+measure still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable not
+by the reflections of critics, but by the creative deeds of poets
+themselves. Accordingly, while one may safely prophesy that their long
+poems will differ from those of any past age, I have no idea of
+predicting the nature of this difference, and will refer in conclusion
+only to certain views which seem to me delusive.
+
+It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern
+difficulties by any attempt to withdraw himself from the atmosphere of
+free and scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity of view and
+concreteness of imagination, to live in a past century or a sanctuary of
+esoteric art, whether secular or religious. Whatever of value such an
+attempt may yield--and that it may yield much I do not deny--it will
+never yield poems at once long and great.
+
+Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will sometimes deal with
+much of the common and painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that
+sense more 'democratic' or universal than any poetry of the past. But it
+is vain to imagine that this can be done by a refusal to 'interpret' and
+an endeavour to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going prose
+'realism' there is selection; and, to go no further, selection itself is
+interpretation. And, as for poetry, the mirror which the least
+theoretical of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And that,
+whether he likes it or not, is an activity which divides, and sifts,
+and recombines into a unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the
+crude material which experience thrusts upon it. This must be so; the
+only question is of the choice of matter and the method of treatment.
+Nor can the end to be achieved be anything but beauty, though the
+meaning of that word may be extended and deepened. And beauty in its
+essence is something that gives satisfaction, however much of pain,
+repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and overcome.
+
+'But, even so,' it may be said, 'why should the poet trouble himself
+about figures, events, and actions? That inward tendency in which you
+see danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply and solely what on
+one side you admit it to be, the sign of our advance. What we really
+need is to make our long poems _entirely_ interior. We only want to know
+how Dante felt; we do not _wish_ to see his pity felling him to the
+ground; and much less do we wish to hear Othello say "and smote him
+thus," or even to imagine the blow. We are not children or savages.' We
+do not want, I agree, attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But
+those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how many kinds of poem this
+inward tendency can display its power without any injury or drawback.
+They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a _long_ poem so entirely
+'interior' can possibly have the clearness, variety, and solidity of
+effect that the best long poems have possessed; whether it can produce
+the same impression of a massive, building, organising, 'architectonic'
+power of imagination; and whether all this and much else is of little
+value. They can hardly have realised, one must suspect, how much of life
+they wish to leave unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that
+perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at once to satisfy and
+to purify, the primitive instincts from which it arises; and that, in
+the case of poetic art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures,
+scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts, and one that in
+the immense majority of men shows no sign of decay. And finally, if they
+suppose that the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is a
+symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of semi-barbarism, I am sure
+they are woefully mistaken. There is more virtue than their philosophy
+dreams of in deeds, in 'the motion of a muscle this way or that.'
+Doubtless it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains
+interior is not the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny can
+show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds, good and evil, will
+undeceive me.
+
+A last delusion remains. 'There is,' we may be told, 'a simple, final,
+and comfortable answer to all these doubts and fears. The long poem is
+not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and should be
+publicly buried, and there is not the least occasion to mourn it. It has
+become impossible not because we cannot write it, but because we see
+that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was written. The thing called
+a long poem was really, as any long poem must be, a number of short
+ones, linked together by passages of prose. And these passages _could_
+be nothing except prose; for poetry is the language of a state of
+crisis, and a crisis is brief. The long poem is an offence to art.' I
+believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was, unless I mistake, the
+invention of Poe, and it is about as true as I conceive his story of the
+composition of _The Raven_ to be. It became a gospel with some
+representatives of the Symbolist movement in France; and in fact it
+would condemn not only the long poem, but the middle-sized one, and
+indeed all sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to imply no
+want of gratitude for the lyrics of some of its adherents; but the
+theory itself seems strangely thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not
+quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic
+intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as
+a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying
+that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the
+rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation
+of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more
+beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were
+equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one
+movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem
+could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to
+speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an
+eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow
+in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as
+we have seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one;
+and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects
+of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes.
+That the long poem is doomed is a possible, however groundless, belief;
+but it is futile to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable
+worth will perish.[10]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The material of these pages belongs in part to the course
+    mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905.
+    They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible
+    to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a
+    single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the
+    prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which
+    doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the
+    long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the
+    false impression that the writer's admiration for those poems is
+    lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the
+    Romantic Revival of Wordsworth's time.
+
+  [2] This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is
+    the point.
+
+  [3] _Table-talk_, Feb. 16, 1833.
+
+  [4] The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they
+    come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this
+    balance. Such, for instance, are _The Eve of St. Agnes_, _Lamia_,
+    _Michael_, _The Vision of Judgment_, some of Crabbe's tales. It does
+    not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest
+    poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day
+    in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the
+    time.
+
+  [5] See p. 110.
+
+  [6] Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.
+
+  [7] This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with
+    which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur's speech in that
+    Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies
+    in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far
+    as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of
+    Conscience, the attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is
+    appropriate, and, again, Lancelot's treachery to him is intelligible
+    and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience
+    could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or
+    shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the
+    other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along
+    Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold
+    and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not
+    merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of the _Idylls_
+    could not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson's design requires
+    Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this
+    is not imaginable.
+
+    Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I
+    think the depreciation of Tennyson's genius now somewhat prevalent a
+    mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard
+    him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.
+
+  [8] It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English
+    poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge,
+    and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.
+
+  [9] The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an
+    exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the
+    poetry of the time, and of Shelley's poetry in particular, and must
+    supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him
+    to observe that Godwin's formulas are called sublime as well as
+    ridiculous. _Political Justice_ would never have fascinated such
+    young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a great truth
+    had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be
+    felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its
+    misapprehension.
+
+  [10] The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a
+    misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is
+    fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that
+    this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it is _not_ so in
+    a narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we
+    may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than
+    of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole
+    poetic content of the _Divine Comedy_ in a form not its own than you
+    can the content of a song.
+
+    The theory is connected in some minds with the view that 'music is
+    the true type or measure of perfected art.' That view again rests on
+    the idea that 'it is the art of music which most completely realises
+    [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and
+    matter,' and that accordingly 'the arts may be represented as
+    continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a
+    condition which music alone completely realises' (Pater, _The
+    Renaissance_, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent
+    from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what
+    follows is that poetry should endeavour _in its own way_ to achieve
+    that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that
+    it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible
+    to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply
+    it. But others have.
+
+
+
+
+THE LETTERS OF KEATS
+
+
+THE LETTERS OF KEATS
+
+
+There is no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been
+discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations;
+by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr.
+Bridges. Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_ and Mr. Colvin's biography
+both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no
+further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de Sélincourt in a volume
+invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its
+author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he
+has contributed so much. My principal object is to consider Keats's
+attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas
+set forth in previous lectures on Shelley's views and on the age of
+Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to
+prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the
+poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge
+from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am
+sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to
+listen to quotations from them.[1]
+
+
+The best of Keats's poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without
+extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost
+necessary to the understanding of _Endymion_ and of some of the earlier
+or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind
+and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the
+fictions once current of a puny Keats who was 'snuffed out by an
+article,' a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and 'slippery
+blisses,' and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and
+his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died
+at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his
+faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the
+whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of
+that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic
+genius.
+
+Of Keats's character, as the letters manifest it, Arnold has written.
+While speaking plainly and decidedly of the weakness visible in those to
+Miss Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which proves that
+Keats 'had flint and iron in him,' 'had virtue in the true and large
+sense of the word.' And he selected passages, too, which illustrate the
+'admirable wisdom and temper' and the 'strength and clearness of
+judgment' shown by Keats, alike in matters of friendship and in his
+criticisms of his own productions, of the public, and of the literary
+circles,--the 'jabberers about pictures and books,' as Keats in a bitter
+mood once called them. We may notice, in addition, two characteristics.
+In spite of occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at the
+magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably plain from these
+letters, had a clear and habitual consciousness of his genius. He never
+dreamed of being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet; sometimes he
+hoped to be a great one. I remember no sign that he felt himself the
+inferior of any living poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of Byron,
+whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious. When Shelley wrote, hinting
+a criticism, but referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius, he
+returned the criticism without the compliment. His few references to
+Coleridge are critical, and his amusing description of Coleridge's talk
+is not more reverential than Carlyle's. Something, indeed, of the native
+pugnacity which his friends ascribe to him seems to show itself in his
+allusions to contemporaries, including even Wordsworth. Yet with all
+this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame, no letters extant
+breathe a more simple and natural modesty than these; and from end to
+end they exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the irritable
+vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime egotism of Milton and
+Wordsworth. He was of Shakespeare's tribe.
+
+The other trait that I wish to refer to appears in a particular series
+of letters--sometimes mere notes--scattered through the collection. They
+are addressed to Keats's school-girl sister Fanny, who was eight years
+younger than he, and who died in the same year as Browning.[2] Keats, as
+we see him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr. Colvin's
+collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm and ambition which his sister
+was too young to understand. During his last two years he was, besides,
+passionately and miserably in love, and, latterly, ill and threatened
+with death. His soul was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself,
+avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate friends. Yet, until he
+left England, he never ceased to visit his sister when he could; and,
+when he could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of amusing
+nonsense, full of brotherly care for her, and of excellent advice
+offered as by an equal who happened to be her senior; letters quite free
+from thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and the resentment
+against fate which in parts of his later correspondence with others
+betray his suffering. These letters to his sister are, in one sense, the
+least remarkable in the collection, yet it would lose much by their
+omission. They tell us next to nothing of his genius, but as we come
+upon them the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a moment
+hard or troubled, becomes once more soft and bright.
+
+To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from the character to the
+mind of Keats, if the reader has formed a notion of him as a youth with
+a genius for poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise
+not intellectually remarkable, this error will soon be dispelled by the
+letters. With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were
+passions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his
+contemporaries at the same time of life.[3] The letters remind us also
+that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual
+training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the
+University wits. They show, too--the earlier far more than the later--in
+certain literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence of Leigh Hunt and
+his circle. But everywhere we feel in them the presence of an
+intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open,
+daring, rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic, yet
+observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense without narrowness,
+and quite as various both in its interests and its capacities as the
+mind of Wordsworth or of Shelley. Fundamentally, and in spite of
+abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense, the mind of Keats was very
+serious and thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative than an
+original mind should be in youth; an intelligence which now startles by
+flashes of sudden beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and deep
+thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty aid from theories, out of
+personal experience. In quality--and I speak of nothing else--the mind
+of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have been very different.
+
+Short extracts can give but little idea of all this; but they may at
+least illustrate the variety of Keats's mind, and the passages I am
+about to read have been chosen mainly with this intention, and not
+because the majority are among the most striking that might be found.
+The earliest belong to the September of 1817, and I take them partly for
+their local interest. Keats spent most of that month here in Oxford,
+staying in the Magdalen Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man
+whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly admired. 'We lead,'
+he writes to his sister, 'very industrious lives--he in general studies,
+and I in proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem which I hope you
+will see early in the next year.' It was _Endymion_: he wrote, it seems,
+the whole of the Third Book in Bailey's rooms. Unluckily the hero in
+that Book is wandering at the bottom of the sea; but even in those
+regions, as Keats imagined them, a diligent student may perhaps find
+some traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers and quadrangles,
+cloisters and groves; of the deer in Magdalen Park; and how
+
+      The mouldering arch,
+      Shaded o'er by a larch,
+  Lives next door to Wilson the hosier
+
+(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear
+streams--'more clear streams than ever I saw together.' 'I take a walk
+by the side of one of them every evening.' 'For these last five or six
+days,' he writes to Reynolds, 'we have had regularly a boat on the Isis,
+and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your
+eyelashes. We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become
+naturalised river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we
+have christened "Reynolds's Cove," in which we have read Wordsworth and
+talked as may be.' Of those talks over Wordsworth with the grave
+religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the
+best-known of all the letters (it is too well known to quote), thoughts
+which take their origin from the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_.[4]
+
+About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a
+walking-tour to the Highlands; and I will quote two passages from the
+letters written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast they
+exhibit between the two strains in Keats's mind. The first is the later.
+The letter is dated 'Cairn-something July 17th':
+
+  Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides, take a little
+  from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I. The banks of
+  the Clyde are extremely beautiful--the north end of Loch Lomond grand
+  in excess--the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part is
+  precious good--the evening was beautiful--nothing could surpass our
+  fortune in the weather. Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet
+  of chivalry Barges with trumpets and banners, just to die away before
+  me into that blue place among the mountains.[5]
+
+Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was written a fortnight
+earlier from Carlisle:
+
+  After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in
+  Cumberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school
+  holden at the Tun. It was indeed 'no new cotillion fresh from
+  France.' No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and
+  whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go'd it, and twirl'd it and
+  whirl'd it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like
+  mad. The difference between our country dances and these Scottish
+  figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o' tea and
+  beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely gratified to think that,
+  if I had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which
+  I could not possibly enter. I hope I shall not return without having
+  got the Highland fling. There was as fine a row of boys and girls as
+  you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never
+  felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means
+  a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.[6]
+
+There is little enough here of the young poet who believes himself to
+care for nothing but 'Art'; and as little of the theoretic
+cosmopolitanism of some of Keats's friends.
+
+Some three months later we find Keats writing from London to his brother
+and his sister-in-law in America; and he tells them of a young lady from
+India whom he has just met:
+
+  She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich
+  Eastern look. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the
+  same as the beauty of a leopardess.... You will by this time think I
+  am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am
+  not--she kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
+  speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can
+  feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very
+  'yes' and 'no' of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though,
+  she has faults--the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet
+  she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there are two
+  distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly,
+  theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and
+  ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian,
+  hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop
+  Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the
+  conquering feelings.[7]
+
+I do not read this passage merely for its biographical interest, but a
+word may be ventured on that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less
+than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he immediately became her
+slave. When we observe the fact, and consider how very unlike the words
+I have quoted are to anything in Keats's previous letters, we can hardly
+help suspecting that he was at this time in a peculiar condition and
+ripe for his fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned from his
+Scotch tour, which was broken off because the Inverness doctor used the
+most menacing language about the state of his throat; and further, that
+he was now, in the late autumn, nursing his brother Tom, who died of
+consumption before the year was out. And an idea suggests itself which,
+if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some comfort in it. How often have
+readers of Keats's life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss
+Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does it not seem at least as
+probable that, if Miss Brawne had never existed, what happened would
+still have happened, and even that the fever of passion which helped to
+destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?
+
+I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a passage on politics.
+The friends of Keats were, for the most part, advanced liberals. His own
+sympathies went that way. A number of lines in the poems of his boyhood
+show this, and so do many remarks in the letters. And his sympathies
+were not mere sentiments. 'I hope sincerely,' he wrote in September,
+1819, 'I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the
+question before I die'; and a few days later, when he tells Brown of his
+wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work for his livelihood,
+composing deliberate poems only when he can afford to, he says that he
+will write as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he makes it a
+condition that he is to write 'on the liberal side of the question.' It
+is a mistake to suppose that he had no political interests. But he
+cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and Tory; a 'Radical' was
+for him the type of an 'obstinate and heady' man; and the perfectibility
+theories of friends like Shelley and Dilke slipped from his mind like
+water from a duck's back. We have seen the concrete shape his patriotism
+took. He always saw ideas embodied, and was 'convinced that small causes
+make great alterations.' I could easily find passages more
+characteristic than the following; but it is short, it shows that Keats
+thought for himself, and it has a curious interest just now (1905):[8]
+
+  Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of
+  Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of
+  Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the divine right
+  gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good. No, they have taken a
+  lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done,
+  without any of the good. The worst thing he has done is that he has
+  taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. The Emperor
+  Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian,
+  creating two Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch
+  of the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years keep
+  peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to
+  China. I think it a very likely thing that China itself may fall;
+  Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its
+  horns against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France.
+
+Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is in these letters, I
+may take next one or two passages which have an interest also from their
+bearing on Keats's poems. Here we have, for example, the unmistakable
+origin of the _Ode on Indolence_:
+
+  This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless.
+  I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_. My
+  passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven
+  and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation,
+  about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl
+  and the breath of lilies, I should call it languor, but as I am* I
+  must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the
+  brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a
+  happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement, and pain no
+  unbearable power.[9] Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any
+  alertness of countenance as they pass by me. They seem rather like
+  figures on a Greek vase--a man and two women whom no one but myself
+  could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness,
+  and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the
+  mind.[10]
+
+    * Especially as I have a black eye.
+
+'This is the only happiness'--the sentence will surprise no one who has
+even dipped into Keats's letters. It expresses a settled conviction.
+Happiness, he feels, belongs only to childhood and early youth. A young
+man thinks he can keep it, but a little experience shows him he must do
+without it. The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is fatal to
+it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because it is to realise the
+sorrow of the world and to feel the burden of the mystery. 'Health and
+spirits,' he says, 'can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man.'[11]
+Shelley might be speaking. 'To see an entirely disinterested girl quite
+happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It
+depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary.
+Women must want Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and so may
+we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of
+crime.'[12] These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his
+qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply
+a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect
+with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such
+'dreaming' poets as himself) to men of action.
+
+In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several
+recently written poems, and among them the ballad _La Belle Dame Sans
+Merci_. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say,
+'Here is the record of my love and my despair,' for on this one subject
+he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the
+copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):
+
+  She took me to her elfin grot,
+    And there she wept and sighed full sore,
+  And there I shut her wild wild eyes
+    With kisses four.
+
+'Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the
+headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said "score"
+without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the
+Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that
+both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece
+quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three
+and a half apiece--a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my
+side.' This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best
+poems, but I dare say the author of _Hamlet_ made such jests about it.
+Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were
+probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not
+published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.
+
+I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in different ways
+Keats's insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more
+decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe
+that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success
+in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of 'nonsense,'
+rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and
+worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing 'three
+witty people, all distinct in their excellence'; and he goes on:
+
+  I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his
+  excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a
+  negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see
+  him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear
+  the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel,
+  the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.
+
+C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and
+still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered
+the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much
+out of the tune of Falstaff: 'C, they say, is not his mother's true
+child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to
+sell.'[13]
+
+In the second passage Keats is describing one of his friends:
+
+  Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he
+  has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening
+  one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the
+  mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus
+  is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of
+  the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not
+  pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you
+  turn the point, still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a
+  truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a
+  Godwin Methodist.[14]
+
+These lines illustrate the instinctive feeling of Keats that it is
+essential to the growth of the poetic mind to preserve its natural
+receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it.
+They illustrate also his dislike of the fixed theories held and preached
+by some members of his circle. We shall have to consider later the
+meaning of his occasional outbreaks against 'thought,' 'knowledge,'
+'philosophy.' It is important not to be misled by them, and not to
+forget the frequent expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and
+must strive to gain is this very 'knowledge' and 'philosophy.' Here I
+will only observe that his polemics against them, though coloured by his
+temperament, coincide to a large extent with Wordsworth's dislike of 'a
+reasoning self-sufficing thing,' his depreciation of mere
+book-knowledge, and his praise of a wise passiveness. And, further, what
+he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is the 'Methodism,'
+the stubborn argument, and the habit of bringing to the argument and
+maintaining throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his own
+thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his
+brother--men willing to probe with him any serious idea--but not to
+Dilke. It is clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident
+assertions and negations of Shelley and his other Godwinian friends and
+acquaintances. Probably from his ignorance of theories he felt at a
+disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not dismiss their theories
+as something of no interest to a poet. He thought about them, convinced
+himself that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself philosophises
+in criticising them. The following passage, from a letter to George and
+Georgiana Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his writings to
+a theory of the world, a theology as he jestingly calls it; and although
+it is long, I make no apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he
+says, Robertson's _History of America_ and Voltaire's _Sičcle de Louis
+XIV._, and he observes that, though the two civilisations described are
+so different, the case of the great body of the people is equally
+lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:
+
+  The whole appears to resolve into this--that man is originally a poor
+  forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the
+  forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other.
+  If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts, at
+  each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of
+  annoyances--he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars
+  above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us
+  is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom-appearing
+  Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness
+  carried to an extreme, but what must it end in? Death--and who could
+  in such a case bear with death? The whole troubles of life, which are
+  now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for
+  the last days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would
+  leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all
+  believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will
+  not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to
+  itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in
+  winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight
+  of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa--whirlpools
+  and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may
+  arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as
+  far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For
+  instance, suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful
+  morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It
+  cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native
+  to the world as itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the
+  worldly elements will prey upon his nature.
+
+  The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and
+  superstitious is 'a vale of tears,' from which we are to be redeemed
+  by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven. What
+  a little circumscribed straitened notion! Call the world if you please
+  'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world
+  (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it
+  to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of
+  showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say
+  '_Soul-making_'--Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence.[15] There
+  may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they
+  are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is
+  personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know
+  and they see and they are pure; in short they are God. How then are
+  souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have
+  identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each
+  one's individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like
+  this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a
+  grander system of salvation than the Christian religion--or rather it
+  is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand
+  materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These
+  three materials are the _Intelligence_, the _human heart_ (as
+  distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or elemental
+  space suited for the proper action of _Mind_ and _Heart_ on each other
+  for the purpose of forming the _Soul_ or _Intelligence destined to
+  possess the sense of Identity_. I can scarcely express what I but
+  dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the
+  more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will
+  call the _world_ a School instituted for the purpose of teaching
+  little children to read. I will call the _human heart_ the horn-book
+  read in that School. And I will call the _Child able to read_, the
+  _Soul_ made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how
+  necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence
+  and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a
+  thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the
+  Mind's Bible, it is the mind's experience, it is the text from which
+  the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives
+  of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does God make
+  individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own
+  essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation
+  which does not offend our reason and humanity.[16]
+
+Surely, when Keats's education is considered, this, with all its
+crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find
+anything written at the same age by another poet of the time which shows
+more openness of mind, more knowledge of human nature, or more original
+power of thought.
+
+About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description of A, B, and C, he
+received what he recognised at once for his death-warrant. He had yet
+fourteen months to endure, but at this point the development of his mind
+was arrested. During the three preceding years it had been very rapid,
+and is easy to trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in
+spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided difference between
+the Keats of the earlier letters and the Keats of the later. The tour in
+Scotland in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient accuracy as
+a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is the youth who had written the
+_Sonnet on first_ _looking into Chapman's Homer_, and _Sleep and
+Poetry_, and who was writing _Endymion_. He is thoughtful, often grave,
+sometimes despondent; but he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of
+the joy and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied the sense of
+poetic power. He is the poet who looked, we are told, as though he had
+been gazing on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose face
+worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields about Hampstead; who is
+described watching with rapture the billowing of the wind through the
+trees and over meadow-grasses and corn, and looking sometimes like a
+young eagle and sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the
+forest depths. This is the Keats who wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy
+for ever'; who found 'the Religion of Joy' in the monuments of the Greek
+spirit, in sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere handbooks
+of mythology; who never ceased, he said, to wonder at all that incarnate
+delight, and would point out to Severn how essentially modern, how
+imperishable, the Greek spirit is--a joy for ever.
+
+Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware, and we find him becoming
+more and more aware, that joy is not the only word. He had not read for
+nothing Wordsworth's great Ode, and _Tintern Abbey_, and the
+_Excursion_. We know it from _Endymion_, and the letter about the
+'burden of the mystery' was written before the tour in Scotland. But
+after this we feel a more decided change, doubtless hastened by outward
+events. The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews of _Endymion_
+appeared--reviews not less inexcusable because we understand their
+origin. Then came his brother's death. A few weeks later he met Miss
+Brawne. Henceforth his youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid
+feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are connected, I think,
+solely with his passion. His brother's death deepened his sympathies.
+The reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him nothing but
+good. He rated them at their true value, but they gave him a salutary
+shock. They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the
+weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt's verse and his own. Through them he
+saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into
+self-worship by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He
+kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He
+became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and
+rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns
+against his old self harshly. Some of his friends, he says, think he has
+lost his old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He speaks
+slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the human heart is something
+finer,--not its dreams, but its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as
+intent as ever,--more intent; but the glory he would see walks in a
+fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and learn. He is young, he
+says, writing at random, straining his eyes at particles of light in the
+midst of a great darkness. He knows at times the 'agony' of ignorance.
+In one year he writes six or seven of the best poems in the language,
+but he is little satisfied. 'Thus far,' he says, 'I have a consciousness
+of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase.' Two
+months later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, 'I am afraid I
+shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.' And so it was.
+
+It is important to remember this change in Keats in considering his
+ideas about poetry; but we have first to look at them in a more general
+way. Many of the most interesting occur in detached remarks or
+aphorisms, and these I must pass by. The others I intended at first to
+deal with in connection with Shelley's view of poetry; and, although
+that plan proved to be too large for a single lecture, I do not wish
+altogether to abandon it, because in the extracts which I have been
+reading the difference between the minds of the two poets has already
+appeared, and because it re-appears both in their poetic practice and in
+their opinions about their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it
+might be thought unlikely that these opinions would show also a marked
+resemblance. For Keats, it may be said, was of all the great poets then
+alive the one least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that
+'revolutionary' atmosphere of which I spoke in a previous lecture. He
+did not concern himself, we may be told, with the progress of humanity,
+or with Manchester Massacres or risings in Naples. He cared nothing for
+theories, abstractions, or ideals. He worshipped Beauty, not Liberty;
+and the beauty he worshipped was not 'intellectual,' but visible,
+audible, tangible. 'O for a life of sensations,' he cried, 'rather than
+of thoughts.' He was an artist, intent upon fashioning his material
+until the outward sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful.
+In all this he was at the opposite pole to Shelley; and he himself felt
+it. He refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might keep his own
+unfettered scope; and he never speaks of Shelley cordially. He told him,
+too, that he might be more of an artist and load every rift of his
+subject with ore; and that, while many people regard the purpose of a
+work as the God, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist must serve
+Mammon. And his practice, like his opinions, proves that, both in his
+strength and his limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.
+
+In such a plea there would certainly be much truth; and yet it is not
+_the_ truth, for it ignores other truths which must somehow be combined
+with it. There are great differences between the two poets, but then in
+Keats himself there are contending strains. Along with the differences,
+too, we find very close affinities. And these affinities with Shelley
+also show that Keats was deeply influenced by the spirit of his time.
+Let me illustrate these statements.
+
+The poet who cried, 'O for a life of sensations,' was consoled, as his
+life withered away, by the remembrance that he 'had loved the principle
+of beauty in all things.' And this is not a chance expression; it
+repeats, for instance, a phrase used two years before, 'the mighty
+abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things.' If Shelley had used this
+language, it would be taken to prove his love of abstractions. How does
+it differ from the language of the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_?[17]
+
+Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness between _Alastor_
+and _Endymion_, each the first poem of any length in which the writer's
+genius decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a young poet;
+of a dream in which his ideal appears in human form, and he knows the
+rapture of union with it; of the passion thus enkindled, and the search
+for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer to read _Endymion_ simply
+as we read _Isabella_; but the question here is not of our preferences.
+If we examine the poem without regard to them, we shall be unable to
+doubt that to some extent the story symbolises or allegorises this
+pursuit of the principle of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of
+the causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not in himself the
+experience required by parts of his design, and hence in them he had to
+write from mere imagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a flagrant
+degree the defect felt here and there in _Prometheus Unbound_. If we
+wish to read it as the author meant it, we must ask for the significance
+of the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear that not all of
+them are intended to have this further significance, and we are
+perplexed by the question where, and how far, we are to look for it.[18]
+
+Take, again, some of the most famous of the lyrical poems. Is it true
+that Keats was untroubled by that sense of contrast between ideal and
+real which haunted Shelley and was so characteristic of the time? So far
+is this from being the case that a critic might more plausibly object to
+his monotonous insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known
+lyrics of the two poets are the stanzas _To a Skylark_ and the _Ode to a
+Nightingale_. Well, if we summarise prosaically the subject of the one
+poem we have summarised that of the other. 'Our human life is all unrest
+and sorrow, an oscillation between longing and satiety, a looking before
+and after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot attain, and that
+leaves us dissatisfied by everything attainable. And we die, and do not
+understand death. But the bird is beyond this division and dissonance;
+it attains the ideal;
+
+  Das Unzulängliche,
+  Hier wird's Ereigniss.'
+
+This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre, tone, atmosphere,
+they are far apart; the 'idea' is identical. And what else is the idea
+of the _Ode_ _on a Grecian Urn_, where a moment, arrested in its
+ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the change and decay of
+reality? And what else is the idea of the playful lines _To
+Fancy_,--Fancy who brings together the joys which in life are parted by
+distances of time and place, and who holds in sure possession what life
+wins only to lose? Even a poem so pictorial and narrative and free from
+symbolism as the _The Eve of St. Agnes_ rests on the same feeling. The
+contrast, so exquisitely imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the
+storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy enmity of the world
+outside Madeline's chamber, and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy
+bliss within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired the _Ode to a
+Nightingale_.
+
+It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would be easy, too, to show
+that Keats was far from indifferent to the 'progress of humanity.' He
+conceived it in his own way, but it is as much the theme of _Hyperion_
+as of _Prometheus Unbound_. We are concerned however here not with the
+interpretation of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and especially
+with certain real or apparent inconsistencies in it. For in the letters
+he now praises 'sensation' and decries thought or knowledge, and now
+cries out for 'knowledge' as his greatest need; in one place declares
+that an artist must have self-concentration, perhaps selfishness, and in
+others insists that what he desires is to be of use to his fellow-men.
+We shall gain light on these matters and on his relation to Shelley if I
+try to reduce his general view to a precise and prosaic form.
+
+That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is a 'principle'; it is One.
+All things beautiful manifest it, and so far therefore are one and the
+same. This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in many crucial
+passages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The goddess
+Cynthia in _Endymion_ is the Principle of Beauty. In this story she is
+also identified with the Moon. Accordingly the hero, gazing at the moon,
+declares that in all that he ever loved he loved _her_:
+
+                      thou wast the deep glen--
+  Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen--
+  The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun;
+  Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won;
+  Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed--
+  My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:--
+  Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
+  O what a wild and harmonised tune
+  My spirit struck from all the beautiful!
+
+When he says this he does not yet understand that the Moon and his
+strange visitant are one; he thinks they are rivals. So later, when he
+loves the Indian maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself
+therefore false to his goddess, he is in error; for she is only his
+goddess veiled, the shaded half of the moon.
+
+Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends differ. Indeed, the one
+Beauty is infinitely various. But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to
+fall into two main classes. On the one hand there is the kind of beauty
+that comes easily and is all sweetness and pleasure. In receiving it we
+seem to suppress nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely
+sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it speaks to sense and
+delights us. It is 'luxury.' But the other kind is won through thought,
+and also through pain. And this second and more difficult kind is also
+the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the Principle. That it is won
+through pain is doubly true. First, because the poet cannot reach it
+unless he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which disturb his
+enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter beauty, and may even seem to lead
+him away from beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain union with his
+goddess only by leaving the green hill-sides where he met her first, and
+by wandering unhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth and
+under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of other lovers, and to help
+them undertakes tasks which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia.
+Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a maiden devoted to sorrow,
+and gains his goddess just when he thinks he has resigned her. The
+highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet's pain; and, in the
+second place, it has pain in itself, or at least appears in objects that
+are painful. In his early poem _Sleep and Poetry_ Keats asks himself the
+question,
+
+  And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
+
+And he answers:
+
+  Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
+  Where I may find the agonies, the strife
+  Of human hearts.
+
+He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He never became equal to
+it, but the idea was realised to some extent in _Isabella_ and _Lamia_
+and _Hyperion_. The first two of these are tales of passion, 'agony,'
+and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a story of 'strife.'
+
+Such, in its bare outline, is Keats's habitual view of poetry. What,
+then, are the points where, in spite of its evident resemblance to
+Shelley's, we feel a marked difference? The most important seem to be
+two. In the first place Keats lays far the heavier stress on the idea
+that beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is
+to be found in Shelley, but (as we saw in another lecture) it is not
+congenial to him; it appears almost incidentally and is stated
+half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only
+manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested most fully, we find,
+I believe, no trace. And this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of
+Shelley's mind was to regard suffering and conflict with mere distress
+and horror as something senseless and purely evil, and to look on the
+world as naturally a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an
+inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this world of woe his
+Intellectual Beauty does not really belong; it appears there only in
+flashes; its true home is a place where no contradictions, not even
+reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of Keats is much more
+concrete. He has no belief either in this natural paradise or in
+'Godwinian perfectibility.' Pain and conflict have a meaning to him.
+Without them souls could not be made; and the business of the world, he
+conjectures, is the making of souls. They are not therefore simply
+obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this world it manifests
+itself most fully in and through them. For 'scenery is fine, but human
+nature is finer';[19] and the passions and actions of man are finer than
+his enjoyments and dreams. In the same way, the conflict in _Hyperion_
+is not one between light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as in
+_Prometheus Unbound_. The Titans must yield to the Olympians because, in
+a word, they are less beautiful, and
+
+                 'tis the eternal law
+  That first in beauty should be first in might.
+
+But the Titans, though less beautiful, _are_ beautiful; it is one and
+the same 'principle' that manifests itself in them and more fully in
+their victors. Their defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but
+the completion of their own being. This, it seems probable, the hero in
+_Hyperion_ would have come to recognise, so that the poem, at least so
+far as he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation born of
+strife.
+
+Man is 'finer,' Keats says, and the Titans must submit because they are
+less 'beautiful.' The second point of difference between him and
+Shelley lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with Shelley has many
+names, and one of them is beauty, but we hardly feel it to be the name
+nearest to his heart. The spirit of his worship is rather
+
+               that sustaining Love
+  Which, through the web of being blindly wove
+  By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
+  Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
+  The fire for which all thirst;
+
+and 'love' is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the term must be
+used, than 'beauty.' But the ideal for Keats is always and emphatically
+beauty or the 'principle of beauty.' When he sets the agonies and
+strifes of human hearts above a painless or luxurious loveliness, it is
+because they are the more beautiful. He would not have said that the
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_ is superior to _King Lear_ in beauty, but
+inferior to it in some other respect; it is inferior in _beauty_ to
+_King Lear_. Let art only be 'intense' enough, let the poet only look
+hard enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain in his object
+is seen truly as the vesture of great passion and action, and all
+'disagreeables' will 'evaporate,' and nothing will remain but
+beauty.[20] Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the
+great poet's power of vision, he is still content when he can feel that
+a poem of his has intensity, has (as he says of _Lamia_) 'that sort of
+fire in it that must take hold of people some way.'[21] And an earlier
+and inferior poem, _Isabella_, may show his mind. The mere subject is
+exceedingly painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the painful
+incidents and details; but the poem can hardly be called painful at all;
+for the final impression is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as
+the final impression left by the blissful story of _St. Agnes' Eve_. And
+this is most characteristic of Keats. If the word beauty is used in his
+sense, and not in the common contracted sense, we may truly say that he
+was, and must have remained, more than any other poet of his time, a
+worshipper of Beauty.
+
+When, then--to come to his apparent inconsistencies--he exalts sensation
+and decries thought or knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty.
+The word 'sensation,' as a comparison of passages would readily show,
+has not in his letters its usual meaning. It stands for _poetic_
+sensation, and, indeed, for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name
+for _all_ poetic or imaginative experience; and the contents of the
+speech of Oceanus are, in kind, just as much 'sensation' as the eating
+of nectarines (which may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I
+repeat, to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes in the earlier
+letters we find Keats false to his better mind. Knowing that the more
+difficult beauty is the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so
+entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that he rebels against
+everything that would disturb its magic or trouble his 'exquisite sense
+of the luxurious.' And then he is tempted to see in thought only that
+vexatious questioning that 'spoils the singing of the nightingale,' and
+to forget that it is necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of
+beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew that there was something
+wilful and weak about them; and they gradually disappear. On the whole,
+the gist of his attitude to 'thought' or 'philosophy' may be stated as
+follows.
+
+He was far from being indifferent to truth, or from considering it
+unimportant for poetry. In an early letter, when he criticises a poem of
+Wordsworth's, he ventures to say that 'if Wordsworth had thought a
+little deeper at that moment he would not have written it,' and that 'it
+is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after
+truth.'[22] He writes of a passage in _Endymion_: 'The whole thing
+must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a
+thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that, when I wrote it, it
+was the regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.'[23] And many
+passages show his conviction that for his progress towards this truth
+'thought,' 'knowledge,' 'philosophy,' are indispensable;[24] that he
+must submit to the toil and the solitude that they involve, just as he
+must undergo the pains of sympathy; that 'there is but one way for him,'
+and that this one 'road lies through application, study, and
+thought.'[25] On the other hand he had, in the first place, as we saw, a
+strong feeling that a man, and especially a poet, must not be in a hurry
+to arrive at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box of his
+supposed results, but must be content with half-knowledge, and capable
+of 'living in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
+reaching after fact and reason.' And, in the second place, a poet, he
+felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasonings which do not
+also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also beauty; and in
+so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are _mere_ thoughts
+and reasonings, they are no more than a means, though a necessary means,
+to an end, which end is beauty,--that beauty which is also truth. This
+alone is the poet's end, and therefore his law. 'With a great poet the
+sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather
+obliterates all consideration.'[26] Thought, knowledge, philosophy, if
+they fall short of this, are nothing but a 'road' to his goal. They
+bring matter for him to mould to his purpose of beauty; but he must not
+allow them to impose _their_ purpose on him, or to ask that it shall
+appear in his product. These statements formulate Keats's position more
+than he formulates it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He
+was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or because, while
+his mind had much general power, he was, more than Wordsworth or
+Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.[27]
+
+We can now deal more briefly with another apparent inconsistency. Keats
+says again and again that the poet must not live for himself, but must
+feel for others and try to help them; that 'there is no worthy pursuit
+but the idea of doing some good for the world'; that he is ambitious to
+do some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes to Shelley about the
+_Cenci_: 'There is only one part of it I am judge of--the poetry and
+dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon.
+A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An
+artist must serve Mammon; he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness,
+perhaps.'[28] These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember
+the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to
+Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic
+purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than
+any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious too to criticise the
+irritability of a man condemned to death; and in any case these sentences
+are perfectly consistent with Keats's expressed desire to do good. The
+poet is to do good; yes, but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of
+doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not to obtrude it in his
+poetry, or to show that he has a design upon us.[29] To make beauty is
+_his_ philanthropy. He will not succeed in it best by making what is only
+in part beauty,--something like the _Excursion_, half poem and half
+lecture. He must be unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish; by
+refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of helping by the
+desire to help in another way. This is the drift of Keats's thought. If
+we remember what he means by 'beauty' and 'poet,' and how he
+distinguishes the poet from the 'dreamer,'[30] we shall think it sound
+doctrine.
+
+Keats was by nature both dreamer and poet, and his ambition was to
+become poet pure and simple. There was, in a further sense, a double
+strain in his nature. He had in him the poetic temper of his time, the
+ever-present sense of an infinite, the tendency to think of this as an
+ideal perfection manifesting itself in reality, and yet surpassing
+reality, and so capable of being contrasted with it. He was allied here
+especially to Wordsworth and to Shelley, by the former of whom he was
+greatly influenced. But there was also in him another tendency; and
+this, it would seem, was strengthening at the expense of the first, and
+would in time have dominated it. It was perhaps the deeper and more
+individual. It may be called the Shakespearean strain, and it works
+against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real, or to
+magnify differences of grade into oppositions of kind. Keats had the
+impulse to interest himself in everything he saw or heard of, to be
+curious about a thing, accept it, identify himself with it, without
+first asking whether it is better or worse than another, or how far it
+is from the ideal principle. It is this impulse that speaks in the
+words, 'If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence
+and pick about the gravel';[31] and in the words, 'When she comes into a
+room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess';
+and in the feeling that she is fine, though Bishop Hooker is finer. It
+too is the source of his complaint that he has no personal identity, and
+of his description of the poetical character; 'It has no self; it is
+everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto,
+be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has
+as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the
+virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from
+its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for
+the bright one, because they both end in speculation.[32] A poet is the
+most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity. He
+is continually in, for, and filling some other body.'[33] That is not a
+description of Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley; neither does it apply
+very fully to Keats; but it describes something at least of the spirit
+of Shakespeare.
+
+Now this spirit, it is obvious, tends in poetry, I do not say to a
+realistic, but to what may be called a concrete method of treatment; to
+the vivid presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in preference
+to the expression of unembodied thoughts and feelings. The atmosphere of
+Wordsworth's age, as we have seen, was not, on the whole, favourable to
+it, and in various degrees it failed in strength, or it suffered, in all
+the greater poets. Scott had it in splendid abundance and vigour; but
+he had too little of the idealism or the metaphysical imagination which
+was common to those poets, and which Shakespeare united with his
+universal comprehension; nor was he, like Shakespeare and like some of
+them, a master of magic in language. But Keats had that magic in fuller
+measure, perhaps, than any of our poets since Milton; and, sharing the
+idealism of Wordsworth and Shelley, he possessed also wider sympathies,
+and, if not a more plastic or pictorial imagination than the latter, at
+least a greater freedom from the attraction of theoretic ideas. To what
+results might not this combination have led if his life had been as long
+as Wordsworth's or even as Byron's? It would be more than hazardous, I
+think, to say that he was the most highly endowed of all our poets in
+the nineteenth century, but he might well have written its greatest long
+poems.
+
+1905.
+
+
+  NOTE
+
+I have pointed out certain marked resemblances between _Alastor_ and
+_Endymion_, and it would be easy to extend the list. These resemblances
+are largely due to similarities in the minds of the two poets, and to
+the action of a common influence on both. But I believe that, in
+addition, Keats was affected by the reading of _Alastor_, which appeared
+in 1816, while his own poem was begun in the spring of 1817.
+
+The common influence to which I refer was that of Wordsworth, and
+especially of the _Excursion_, published in 1814. There is a quotation,
+or rather a misquotation, from it in the Preface to _Alastor_. The
+_Excursion_ is concerned in part with the danger of inactive and
+unsympathetic solitude; and this, treated of course in Shelley's own
+way, is the subject of _Alastor_, which also contains phrases
+reminiscent of Wordsworth's poem. Its Preface too reminds one
+immediately of the _Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peele Castle_; of
+the main idea, and of the lines,
+
+  Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,
+  Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind.
+
+As for Keats, the reader of his letters knows how much he was occupied
+in 1817 and 1818 with thoughts due to the reading of Wordsworth, and how
+great, though qualified, was his admiration of the _Excursion_. These
+thoughts concerned chiefly the poetic nature, its tendency to 'dream,'
+and the necessity that it should go beyond itself and feel for the
+sorrows of others. They may have been suggested _only_ by Wordsworth;
+but we must remember that _Alastor_ had been published, and that Keats
+would naturally read it. In comparing that poem with _Endymion_ I am
+obliged to repeat remarks already made in the lecture.
+
+_Alastor_, composed under the influence described, tells of the fate of
+a young poet, who is 'pure and tender-hearted,' but who, in his search
+for communion with the ideal influences of nature and of knowledge,
+keeps aloof from sympathies with his kind. 'So long as it is possible
+for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured,
+he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed.' But a time comes when he
+thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence like himself. His ideal
+requirements are embodied in the form of a being who appears to him in a
+dream, and to whom he is united in passionate love. But his
+'self-centred seclusion' now avenges itself. The 'spirit of sweet human
+love' vanishes as he wakes, and he wanders over the earth, vainly
+seeking the 'prototype' of the vision until he dies.
+
+In _Endymion_ the story of a dream-vision, of rapturous union with it,
+and of the consequent pursuit of it, re-appears, though the beginning
+and the end are different. The hero, before the coming of the vision,
+has of course a poetic soul, but he is not self-secluded, or inactive,
+or fragile, or philosophic; and his pursuit of the goddess leads not to
+extinction but to immortal union with her. It does lead, however, to
+adventures of which the main idea evidently is that the poetic soul can
+only reach complete union with the ideal (which union is immortality) by
+wandering in a world which seems to deprive him of it; by trying to
+mitigate the woes of others instead of seeking the ideal for himself;
+and by giving himself up to love for what seems to be a mere woman, but
+is found to be the goddess herself. It seems almost beyond doubt that
+the story of Cynthia and Endymion would not have taken this shape but
+for _Alastor_.
+
+The reader will find this impression confirmed if he compares the
+descriptions in _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, Book I., of the dreamer's
+feelings on awakening from his dream, of the disenchantment that has
+fallen on the landscape, and of his 'eager' pursuit of the lost vision.
+Everything is, in one sense, different, for the two poets differ
+greatly, and Keats, of course, was writing without any conscious
+recollection of the passage in _Alastor_; but the conception is the
+same.[34]
+
+Consider, again, the passage (near the beginning of _Endymion_, Book
+III.) quoted on p. 230 of the lecture. The hero is addressing the moon;
+and he says, to put it baldly, that from his boyhood everything that was
+beautiful to him was associated with his love of the moon's beauty. The
+passage continues thus:
+
+  On some bright essence could I lean, and lull
+  Myself to immortality: I prest
+  Nature's soft pillow in a wakeful rest.
+  But, gentle Orb! there came a nearer bliss--
+  My strange love came--Felicity's abyss!
+  She came, and thou didst fade, and fade away.
+
+In spite of the dissimilarities, surely the 'wakeful rest' here
+corresponds to the condition of the poet in _Alastor_ prior to the
+dream. 'So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards
+objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and
+self-possessed'; but when his 'strange love' comes these objects, like
+the objects of Endymion's earlier desires, no longer suffice him.
+
+There is, however, further evidence, indeed positive proof, of the
+effect of _Alastor_, and especially of its Preface, on Keats's mind. In
+the revised version of _Hyperion_, Book I., the dreamer in the Temple
+wonders why he has been preserved from death. The Prophetess tells him
+the reason (I italicise certain words):
+
+  'None can usurp this height,' returned that shade,
+  'But those to whom the _miseries of the world_
+  Are misery, and will not let them rest.
+  _All else_ who find a haven in the world,
+  Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
+  If by a chance into this fane they come,
+  Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.'
+  'Are there not thousands in the world,' said I,
+  Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,
+  'Who _love their fellows_ even to the death,
+  Who feel the giant agony of the world,
+  And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
+  Labour for mortal good?'
+
+If the reader compares with this the following passage from the Preface
+to _Alastor_, and if he observes the words I have italicised in it, he
+will hardly doubt that some unconscious recollection of the Preface was
+at work in Keats's mind. Shelley is distinguishing the self-centred
+seclusion of his poet from that of common selfish souls:
+
+'The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's
+self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible
+passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the
+luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by
+awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to
+a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its
+dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their
+delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no
+generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge,
+duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and
+cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their
+kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief;
+these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish,
+because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead.
+They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the
+world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to
+exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through
+the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when
+the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. _All else_,
+selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who
+constitute, together with their own, the lasting _misery_ and loneliness
+_of the world_. Those who _love not their fellow-beings_, live
+unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.'[35]
+
+I have still a passage to refer to. Let the reader turn to the quotation
+on p. 236 from Keats's reply to Shelley's letter of invitation to his
+home in Italy; and let him ask himself why Keats puts the word
+"self-concentration" in inverted commas. He is not referring to anything
+in Shelley's letter, and he is not in the habit in the letters of using
+inverted commas except to mark a quotation. Without doubt, I think, he
+is referring from memory to the Preface to _Alastor_ and the phrase
+'self-centred seclusion.' He has come to feel that this self-centred
+seclusion is _right_ for a poet like himself, and that the direct
+pursuit of philanthropy in poetry (which he supposes Shelley to
+advocate) is wrong. But this is another proof how much he had been
+influenced by Shelley's poem; and it is perhaps not too rash to
+conjecture that his consciousness of this influence was one reason why
+he had earlier refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might 'have
+his own unfettered scope.'[36]
+
+If it seems to anyone that these conclusions are derogatory to Keats,
+either as a man or a poet, I can only say that I differ from him
+entirely. But I will add that there seems to me some reason to
+conjecture that Shelley had read the _Ode to a Nightingale_ before he
+wrote the stanzas _To a Skylark_.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The Letters (except those to Miss Brawne, and a few others) have
+    been edited by Colvin, and (without exception) by Forman (pub. Gowans
+    & Gray). I refer to them by their numbers, followed by the initial of
+    the editor's name. Both editions reproduce peculiarities of
+    punctuation, etc.; but for my present purpose these are usually
+    without interest, and I have consulted the convenience of the reader
+    in making changes.
+
+  [2] Keats himself, it is strange to think, was born in the same year
+    as Carlyle.
+
+  [3] These passions were in his last two years overclouded at times,
+    but they remained to the end. When, in the bitterness of his soul, he
+    begged Severn to put on his tombstone no name, but only 'Here lies
+    one whose name was writ in water,' he was thinking not merely of the
+    reviewers who had robbed him of fame in his short life, but also of
+    those unwritten poems, of which 'the faint conceptions' in happier
+    days used to 'bring the blood into his forehead.'
+
+  [4] LII, C., LV, F. The quotations above are from XIV, XVI, C., XV,
+    XVII, XVIII, F. The verses are a parody of Wordsworth's lines, 'The
+    cock is crowing.'
+
+  [5] LXI, C., LXVI, F.
+
+  [6] LVI, C., LXI, F.
+
+  [7] LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. Mr. Hooker, I may remark, would not have
+    thanked Keats for his bishopric.
+
+  [8] From the letter last quoted. See also CXVI, CXVIII, CXIX, C.,
+    CXXXVII, CXXXIV, CXXXV, F.
+
+  [9] 'Pain had no sting and pleasure's wreath no flower.'
+
+  [10] XCII, C., CVI, F.
+
+  [11] XIX, C., XXI, F.
+
+  [12] LIV, C., LIX, F.
+
+  [13] CXXXI, C., CLII, F.
+
+  [14] CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F. The word 'turn' in the last sentence but
+    two seems to be doubtful. Mr. Colvin reads 'have.'
+
+  [15] Keats's use of the word is suggested, probably, by Milton's
+    'pure intelligence of heaven.'
+
+  [16] XCII, C., CVI, F.
+
+  [17] CLXVI, F., LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. In XLI, C., XLIV, F., occurs a
+    passage ending with the words, 'they are able to "_consecrate
+    whate'er they look upon_."' Is not this a quotation from the _Hymn_:
+
+      Spirit of BEAUTY that dost consecrate
+      With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon?
+
+    If so, and if my memory serves me, this is the only quotation from
+    Shelley's poetry in the letters of Keats. The _Hymn_ had been
+    published in Hunt's _Examiner_, Jan., 1817.
+
+  [18] The first critic, I believe, who seriously attempted to
+    investigate Keats's mind, and the ideas that were trying to take
+    shape in some of his poems, was F. M. Owen, whose _John Keats, a
+    Study_ (1880) never attracted in her too brief life-time the
+    attention it deserved. Mr. Bridges's treatment of these ideas is
+    masterly. To what is said above may be added that, although Keats was
+    dissatisfied with _Endymion_ even before he had finished it, he did
+    not at any time criticise it on the ground that it tried to put too
+    much meaning into the myth. On _Alastor_ and _Endymion_ see further
+    the Note appended to this lecture.
+
+  [19] A notable (but not isolated) remark, seeing that the poetic
+    genius of Keats showed itself soonest and perhaps most completely in
+    the rendering of Nature.
+
+  [20] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.
+
+  [21] CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F.
+
+  [22] XIX, C., XXI, F.
+
+  [23] XXXII, C., XXXIV, F.
+
+  [24] He contemplates even the study of metaphysics, LI, C., LIV, F.
+
+  [25] L, C., LIII, F.
+
+  [26] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.
+
+  [27] Cf. in addition to the letters already referred to, the obscure
+    letter to Bailey, XXII, C., XXIV, F., which, however, is early, and
+    not quite in agreement with later thoughts. I should observe perhaps
+    that if Keats's position, as formulated above, is accepted, the
+    question still remains whether a truth which is also beauty, or a
+    beauty which is also truth, can be found by man; and, if so, whether
+    it can, in strictness, be called by either of those names.
+
+  [28] CLV, C., CCVI, F. See on these sentences the Note at the end of
+    the lecture.
+
+  [29] An expression used in reference to Wordsworth, XXXIV, C., XXXVI,
+    F.
+
+  [30] I have not space to dwell on this distinction, but I must warn
+    the reader that he will probably misunderstand the important passage
+    in the revised _Hyperion_, 161 ff., unless he consults Mr. de
+    Sélincourt's edition.
+
+  [31] XXII, C., XXV, F.
+
+  [32] That is, in 'half-knowledge,' 'doubts,' 'mysteries' (see p.
+    235), while the philosopher is sometimes supposed by Keats to have a
+    reasoned certainty about everything. It is curious to reflect that
+    great metaphysicians, like Spinoza and Hegel, are often accused of
+    the un-moral impartiality which Keats attributes to the poet.
+
+  [33] LXXVI, C., LXXX, F.
+
+  [34] The ultimate origin of the dream-passage in both poems may well
+    be Adam's dream in _Paradise Lost_, Book viii.:
+
+      She disappear'd, and left me dark: I waked
+      To find her, or for ever to deplore
+      Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.
+
+    Keats alludes to this in XXII, C., XXIV, F.
+
+  [35] It is tempting to conjecture with Mr. Forman that the full-stop
+    before the last sentence is a misprint, and that we should read 'the
+    world,--those who,' etc., so that the last two clauses would be
+    relative clauses co-ordinate with 'who love not their fellow-beings.'
+    Not to speak of the run of the sentences, this conjecture is tempting
+    because of the comma after 'fellow-beings,' and because the paragraph
+    is followed by the quotation ('those' should be 'they'),
+
+                          The good die first,
+      And those whose hearts are dry as summer's dust
+      Burn to the socket.
+
+    The good who die first correspond with the 'pure and tender-hearted'
+    who perish and, as we naturally suppose, perish young, like the poet
+    in _Alastor_. But, as the last sentence stands, these, as well as the
+    torpid, live to old age. It is hard to believe that Shelley meant
+    this; but as he was in England when _Alastor_ was printed, he
+    probably revised the proofs, and it is perhaps easier to suppose that
+    he wrote what is printed than that he passed unobserved the serious
+    misprint supposed by Mr. Forman.
+
+  [36] XVIII, C., XX, F.
+
+
+
+
+THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF
+
+
+THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF[1]
+
+
+Of the two persons principally concerned in the rejection of Falstaff,
+Henry, both as Prince and as King, has received, on the whole, full
+justice from readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been
+in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare's famous characters.
+All of them, in passing from the mind of their creator into other minds,
+suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony through the
+disproportionate attention bestowed on some one feature, or to lose
+their uniqueness by being conventionalised into types already familiar.
+But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself. The original character
+is to be found alive in the two parts of _Henry IV._, dead in _Henry
+V._, and nowhere else. But not very long after these plays were
+composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very
+entertaining piece called _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. Perhaps his
+company wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as one would rather
+believe, the tradition may be true that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with
+the Falstaff scenes of _Henry IV._, expressed a wish to see the hero of
+them again, and to see him in love. Now it was no more possible for
+Shakespeare to show his own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two
+into five. But he could write in haste--the tradition says, in a
+fortnight--a comedy or farce differing from all his other plays in this,
+that its scene is laid in English middle-class life, and that it is
+prosaic almost to the end. And among the characters he could introduce a
+disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and could call them
+Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. And he could represent this knight
+assailing, for financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in the
+event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked,
+mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is
+horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself
+could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the _Two Noble Kinsmen_. But it
+no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that
+parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the
+_Merry Wives_ is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky
+Sharp the dupe of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served the least of
+these tricks he would have had his brains taken out and buttered, and
+have given them to a dog for a New Year's gift. I quote the words of the
+impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him and gave to him a few
+sentences worthy of Falstaff himself. But they are only a few--one side
+of a sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet critics have
+solemnly debated at what period in his life Sir John endured the gibes
+of Master Ford, and whether we should put this comedy between the two
+parts of _Henry IV._, or between the second of them and _Henry V._ And
+the Falstaff of the general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible
+conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the Falstaff of the mere
+play-goer is certainly much more like the impostor than the true man.
+
+The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and
+is insisted on in almost all competent estimates of the character of
+Falstaff. I do not propose to attempt a full account either of this
+character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall connect the remarks I
+have to make on them with a question which does not appear to have been
+satisfactorily discussed--the question of the rejection of Falstaff by
+the Prince on his accession to the throne. What do we feel, and what are
+we meant to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what does our
+feeling imply as to the characters of Falstaff and the new King?
+
+
+  1.
+
+Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire, engaged in borrowing a
+thousand pounds from Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding
+helter-skelter from London, brings him the great news that the old King
+is as dead as nail in door, and that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir
+John, in wild excitement, taking any man's horses, rushes to London; and
+he carries Shallow with him, for he longs to reward all his friends. We
+find him standing with his companions just outside Westminster Abbey, in
+the crowd that is waiting for the King to come out after his coronation.
+He himself is stained with travel, and has had no time to spend any of
+the thousand pounds in buying new liveries for his men. But what of
+that? This poor show only proves his earnestness of affection, his
+devotion, how he could not deliberate or remember or have patience to
+shift himself, but rode day and night, thought of nothing else but to
+see Henry, and put all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were
+nothing else to be done but to see him. And now he stands sweating with
+desire to see him, and repeating and repeating this one desire of his
+heart--'to see him.' The moment comes. There is a shout within the Abbey
+like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour of trumpets, and the doors
+open and the procession streams out.
+
+  FAL. God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!
+
+  PIST. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
+
+  FAL. God save thee, my sweet boy!
+
+  KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
+
+  CH. JUST. Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you speak?
+
+  FAL. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
+
+  KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.
+  How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
+  I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
+  So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
+  But being awaked I do despise my dream.
+  Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
+  Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
+  For thee thrice wider than for other men.
+  Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
+  Presume not that I am the thing I was;
+  For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
+  That I have turn'd away my former self;
+  So will I those that kept me company.
+  When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
+  Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
+  The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
+  Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
+  As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
+  Not to come near our person by ten mile.
+  For competence of life I will allow you,
+  That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
+  And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
+  We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
+  Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
+  To see perform'd the tenour of our word.
+  Set on.
+
+The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff and his friends remain.
+He shows no resentment. He comforts himself, or tries to comfort
+himself--first, with the thought that he has Shallow's thousand pounds,
+and then, more seriously, I believe, with another thought. The King, he
+sees, must look thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private
+when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes of his friends. But
+even as he speaks, the Chief Justice, accompanied by Prince John,
+returns, and gives the order to his officers:
+
+  Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;
+  Take all his company along with him.
+
+Falstaff breaks out, 'My lord, my lord,' but he is cut short and hurried
+away; and after a few words between the Prince and the Chief Justice the
+scene closes, and with it the drama.
+
+What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our
+feelings about Falstaff. If we have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff
+scenes of the two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old
+reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward, but a cruel and
+dangerous ruffian, I suppose we enjoy his discomfiture and consider that
+the King has behaved magnificently. But if we _have_ keenly enjoyed the
+Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed them as Shakespeare surely meant
+them to be enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us solely or
+even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we feel, I think, during the
+King's speech, a good deal of pain and some resentment; and when,
+without any further offence on Sir John's part, the Chief Justice
+returns and sends him to prison, we stare in astonishment. These, I
+believe, are, in greater or less degree, the feelings of most of those
+who really enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not). Nor are
+these feelings diminished when we remember the end of the whole story,
+as we find it in _Henry V._, where we learn that Falstaff quickly died,
+and, according to the testimony of persons not very sentimental, died of
+a broken heart.[2] Suppose this merely to mean that he sank under the
+shame of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but the words of
+Mrs. Quickly, 'The king has killed his heart'; of Nym, 'The king hath
+run bad humours on the knight; that's the even of it'; of Pistol,
+
+       Nym, thou hast spoke the right,
+  His heart is fracted and corroborate,
+
+assuredly point to something more than wounded pride; they point to
+wounded affection, and remind us of Falstaff's own answer to Prince
+Hal's question, 'Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?' 'A thousand
+pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth a million: thou owest me thy
+love.'
+
+Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though
+undoubtedly striking, leaves an impression so unpleasant? I will venture
+to put aside without discussion the idea that he meant us throughout the
+two plays to regard Falstaff with disgust or indignation, so that we
+naturally feel nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies
+that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare with which it is idle
+to argue. And there is another and a much more ingenious suggestion
+which must equally be rejected as impossible. According to it, Falstaff,
+having listened to the King's speech, did not seriously hope to be sent
+for by him in private; he fully realised the situation at once, and was
+only making game of Shallow; and in his immediate turn upon Shallow when
+the King goes out, 'Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,' we are
+meant to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that we end the
+play with the delightful feeling that, while Henry has done the right
+thing, Falstaff, in his outward overthrow, has still proved himself
+inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a critic who understands
+Falstaff, and in the suggestion itself shows that he understands him.[3]
+But it provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and could not
+account for, that which follows the short conversation with Shallow.
+Falstaff's dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove
+beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as
+a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount.
+
+Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise admissible, would
+still leave our problem only partly solved. For what troubles us is not
+only the disappointment of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry. It was
+inevitable that on his accession he should separate himself from Sir
+John, and we wish nothing else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should
+have a competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly improbable
+case of his reforming himself. And if Henry could not trust himself
+within ten miles of so fascinating a companion, by all means let him be
+banished that distance: we do not complain. These arrangements would not
+have prevented a satisfactory ending: the King could have communicated
+his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in a private
+interview rich in humour and merely touched with pathos. But Shakespeare
+has so contrived matters that Henry could not send a private warning to
+Falstaff even if he wished to, and in their public meeting Falstaff is
+made to behave in so infatuated and outrageous a manner that great
+sternness on the King's part was unavoidable. And the curious thing is
+that Shakespeare did not stop here. If this had been all we should have
+felt pain for Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against Henry. But
+two things we do resent. Why, when this painful incident seems to be
+over, should the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison? Can
+this possibly be meant for an act of private vengeance on the part of
+the Chief Justice, unknown to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare
+would have shown at once that the King disapproved and cancelled it. It
+must have been the King's own act. This is one thing we resent; the
+other is the King's sermon. He had a right to turn away his former
+self, and his old companions with it, but he had no right to talk all of
+a sudden like a clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and
+insincere to speak of them as his 'misleaders,' as though in the days of
+Eastcheap and Gadshill he had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen
+his former self, and we know that it was nothing of the kind. He had
+shown himself, for all his follies, a very strong and independent young
+man, deliberately amusing himself among men over whom he had just as
+much ascendency as he chose to exert. Nay, he amused himself not only
+among them, but at their expense. In his first soliloquy--and first
+soliloquies are usually significant--he declares that he associates with
+them in order that, when at some future time he shows his true
+character, he may be the more wondered at for his previous aberrations.
+You may think he deceives himself here; you may believe that he
+frequented Sir John's company out of delight in it and not merely with
+this cold-blooded design; but at any rate he _thought_ the design was
+his one motive. And, that being so, two results follow. He ought in
+honour long ago to have given Sir John clearly to understand that they
+must say good-bye on the day of his accession. And, having neglected to
+do this, he ought not to have lectured him as his misleader. It was not
+only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably like an attempt
+to buy the praise of the respectable at the cost of honour and truth.
+And it succeeded. Henry _always_ succeeded.
+
+You will see what I am suggesting, for the moment, as a solution of our
+problem. I am suggesting that our fault lies not in our resentment at
+Henry's conduct, but in our surprise at it; that if we had read his
+character truly in the light that Shakespeare gave us, we should have
+been prepared for a display both of hardness and of policy at this point
+in his career, And although this suggestion does not suffice to solve
+the problem before us, I am convinced that in itself it is true. Nor is
+it rendered at all improbable by the fact that Shakespeare has made
+Henry, on the whole, a fine and very attractive character, and that here
+he makes no one express any disapprobation of the treatment of Falstaff.
+For in similar cases Shakespeare is constantly misunderstood. His
+readers expect him to mark in some distinct way his approval or
+disapproval of that which he represents; and hence where _they_
+disapprove and _he_ says nothing, they fancy that he does _not_
+disapprove, and they blame his indifference, like Dr. Johnson, or at the
+least are puzzled. But the truth is that he shows the fact and leaves
+the judgment to them. And again, when he makes us like a character we
+expect the character to have no faults that are not expressly pointed
+out, and when other faults appear we either ignore them or try to
+explain them away. This is one of our methods of conventionalising
+Shakespeare. We want the world's population to be neatly divided into
+sheep and goats, and we want an angel by us to say, 'Look, that is a
+goat and this is a sheep,' and we try to turn Shakespeare into this
+angel. His impartiality makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear to see
+him, like the sun, lighting up everything and judging nothing. And this
+is perhaps especially the case in his historical plays, where we are
+always trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us that Richard II.
+was unworthy to be king, and we at once conclude that he thought
+Bolingbroke's usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely, what under
+the conditions was bound to exist, an inextricable tangle of right and
+unright. Or, Bolingbroke being evidently wronged, we suppose
+Bolingbroke's statements to be true, and are quite surprised when, after
+attaining his end through them, he mentions casually on his death-bed
+that they were lies. Shakespeare makes us admire Hotspur heartily; and
+accordingly, when we see Hotspur discussing with others how large his
+particular slice of his mother-country is to be, we either fail to
+recognise the monstrosity of the proceeding, or, recognising it, we
+complain that Shakespeare is inconsistent. Prince John breaks a
+tottering rebellion by practising a detestable fraud on the rebels. We
+are against the rebels, and have heard high praise of Prince John, but
+we cannot help seeing that his fraud is detestable; so we say
+indignantly to Shakespeare, 'Why, you told us he was a sheep'; whereas,
+in fact, if we had used our eyes we should have known beforehand that he
+was the brave, determined, loyal, cold-blooded, pitiless, unscrupulous
+son of a usurper whose throne was in danger.
+
+To come, then, to Henry. Both as prince and as king he is deservedly a
+favourite, and particularly so with English readers, being, as he is,
+perhaps the most distinctively English of all Shakespeare's men. In
+_Henry V._ he is treated as a national hero. In this play he has lost
+much of the wit which in him seems to have depended on contact with
+Falstaff, but he has also laid aside the most serious faults of his
+youth. He inspires in a high degree fear, enthusiasm, and affection;
+thanks to his beautiful modesty he has the charm which is lacking to
+another mighty warrior, Coriolanus; his youthful escapades have given
+him an understanding of simple folk, and sympathy with them; he is the
+author of the saying, 'There is some soul of goodness in things evil';
+and he is much more obviously religious than most of Shakespeare's
+heroes. Having these and other fine qualities, and being without certain
+dangerous tendencies which mark the tragic heroes, he is, perhaps, the
+most _efficient_ character drawn by Shakespeare, unless Ulysses, in
+_Troilus and Cressida_, is his equal. And so he has been described as
+Shakespeare's ideal man of action; nay, it has even been declared that
+here for once Shakespeare plainly disclosed his own ethical creed, and
+showed us his ideal, not simply of a man of action, but of a man.
+
+But Henry is neither of these. The poet who drew Hamlet and Othello can
+never have thought that even the ideal man of action would lack that
+light upon the brow which at once transfigures them and marks their
+doom. It is as easy to believe that, because the lunatic, the lover, and
+the poet are not far apart, Shakespeare would have chosen never to have
+loved and sung. Even poor Timon, the most inefficient of the tragic
+heroes, has something in him that Henry never shows. Nor is it merely
+that his nature is limited: if we follow Shakespeare and look closely at
+Henry, we shall discover with the many fine traits a few less pleasing.
+Henry IV. describes him as the noble image of his own youth; and, for
+all his superiority to his father, he is still his father's son, the son
+of the man whom Hotspur called a 'vile politician.' Henry's religion,
+for example, is genuine, it is rooted in his modesty; but it is also
+superstitious--an attempt to buy off supernatural vengeance for
+Richard's blood; and it is also in part political, like his father's
+projected crusade. Just as he went to war chiefly because, as his father
+told him, it was the way to keep factious nobles quiet and unite the
+nation, so when he adjures the Archbishop to satisfy him as to his right
+to the French throne, he knows very well that the Archbishop _wants_ the
+war, because it will defer and perhaps prevent what he considers the
+spoliation of the Church. This same strain of policy is what Shakespeare
+marks in the first soliloquy in _Henry IV._, where the prince describes
+his riotous life as a mere scheme to win him glory later. It implies
+that readiness to use other people as means to his own ends which is a
+conspicuous feature in his father; and it reminds us of his father's
+plan of keeping himself out of the people's sight while Richard was
+making himself cheap by his incessant public appearances. And if I am
+not mistaken there is a further likeness. Henry is kindly and pleasant
+to every one as Prince, to every one deserving as King; and he is so not
+merely out of policy: but there is no sign in him of a strong affection
+for any one, such an affection as we recognise at a glance in Hamlet and
+Horatio, Brutus and Cassius, and many more. We do not find this in
+_Henry V._, not even in the noble address to Lord Scroop, and in _Henry
+IV._ we find, I think, a liking for Falstaff and Poins, but no more:
+there is no more than a liking, for instance, in his soliloquy over the
+supposed corpse of his fat friend, and he never speaks of Falstaff to
+Poins with any affection. The truth is, that the members of the family
+of Henry IV. have love for one another, but they cannot spare love for
+any one outside their family, which stands firmly united, defending its
+royal position against attack and instinctively isolating itself from
+outside influence.
+
+Thus I would suggest that Henry's conduct in his rejection of Falstaff
+is in perfect keeping with his character on its unpleasant side as well
+as on its finer; and that, so far as Henry is concerned, we ought not to
+feel surprise at it. And on this view we may even explain the strange
+incident of the Chief Justice being sent back to order Falstaff to
+prison (for there is no sign of any such uncertainty in the text as
+might suggest an interpolation by the players). Remembering his father's
+words about Henry, 'Being incensed, he's flint,' and remembering in
+_Henry V._ his ruthlessness about killing the prisoners when he is
+incensed, we may imagine that, after he had left Falstaff and was no
+longer influenced by the face of his old companion, he gave way to anger
+at the indecent familiarity which had provoked a compromising scene on
+the most ceremonial of occasions and in the presence alike of court and
+crowd, and that he sent the Chief Justice back to take vengeance. And
+this is consistent with the fact that in the next play we find Falstaff
+shortly afterwards not only freed from prison, but unmolested in his old
+haunt in Eastcheap, well within ten miles of Henry's person. His anger
+had soon passed, and he knew that the requisite effect had been produced
+both on Falstaff and on the world.
+
+But all this, however true, will not solve our problem. It seems, on the
+contrary, to increase its difficulty. For the natural conclusion is that
+Shakespeare _intended_ us to feel resentment against Henry. And yet that
+cannot be, for it implies that he meant the play to end disagreeably;
+and no one who understands Shakespeare at all will consider that
+supposition for a moment credible. No; he must have meant the play to
+end pleasantly, although he made Henry's action consistent. And hence it
+follows that he must have intended our sympathy with Falstaff to be so
+far weakened when the rejection-scene arrives that his discomfiture
+should be satisfactory to us; that we should enjoy this sudden reverse
+of enormous hopes (a thing always ludicrous if sympathy is absent); that
+we should approve the moral judgment that falls on him; and so should
+pass lightly over that disclosure of unpleasant traits in the King's
+character which Shakespeare was too true an artist to suppress. Thus our
+pain and resentment, if we feel them, are wrong, in the sense that they
+do not answer to the dramatist's intention. But it does not follow that
+they are wrong in a further sense. They may be right, because the
+dramatist has missed what he aimed at. And this, though the dramatist
+was Shakespeare, is what I would suggest. In the Falstaff scenes he
+overshot his mark. He created so extraordinary a being, and fixed him so
+firmly on his intellectual throne, that when he sought to dethrone him
+he could not. The moment comes when we are to look at Falstaff in a
+serious light, and the comic hero is to figure as a baffled schemer; but
+we cannot make the required change, either in our attitude or in our
+sympathies. We wish Henry a glorious reign and much joy of his crew of
+hypocritical politicians, lay and clerical; but our hearts go with
+Falstaff to the Fleet, or, if necessary, to Arthur's bosom or
+wheresomever he is.[4]
+
+In the remainder of the lecture I will try to make this view clear. And
+to that end we must go back to the Falstaff of the body of the two
+plays, the immortal Falstaff, a character almost purely humorous, and
+therefore no subject for moral judgments. I can but draw an outline, and
+in describing one aspect of this character must be content to hold
+another in reserve.
+
+
+  2.
+
+Up to a certain point Falstaff is ludicrous in the same way as many
+other figures, his distinction lying, so far, chiefly in the mere
+abundance of ludicrous traits. _Why_ we should laugh at a man with a
+huge belly and corresponding appetites; at the inconveniences he suffers
+on a hot day, or in playing the footpad, or when he falls down and there
+are no levers at hand to lift him up again; at the incongruity of his
+unwieldy bulk and the nimbleness of his spirit, the infirmities of his
+age and his youthful lightness of heart; at the enormity of his lies and
+wiles, and the suddenness of their exposure and frustration; at the
+contrast between his reputation and his real character, seen most
+absurdly when, at the mere mention of his name, a redoubted rebel
+surrenders to him--_why_, I say, we should laugh at these and many such
+things, this is no place to inquire; but unquestionably we do. Here we
+have them poured out in endless profusion and with that air of careless
+ease which is so fascinating in Shakespeare; and with the enjoyment of
+them I believe many readers stop. But while they are quite essential to
+the character, there is in it much more. For these things by themselves
+do not explain why, beside laughing at Falstaff, we are made happy by
+him and laugh _with_ him. He is not, like Parolles, a mere _object_ of
+mirth.
+
+The main reason why he makes us so happy and puts us so entirely at our
+ease is that he himself is happy and entirely at his ease. 'Happy' is
+too weak a word; he is in bliss, and we share his glory. Enjoyment--no
+fitful pleasure crossing a dull life, nor any vacant convulsive
+mirth--but a rich deep-toned chuckling enjoyment circulates continually
+through all his being. If you ask _what_ he enjoys, no doubt the answer
+is, in the first place, eating and drinking, taking his ease at his inn,
+and the company of other merry souls. Compared with these things, what
+we count the graver interests of life are nothing to him. But then,
+while we are under his spell, it is impossible to consider these graver
+interests; gravity is to us, as to him, inferior to gravy; and what he
+does enjoy he enjoys with such a luscious and good-humoured zest that we
+sympathise and he makes us happy. And if any one objected, we should
+answer with Sir Toby Belch, 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,
+there shall be no more cakes and ale?'
+
+But this, again, is far from all. Falstaff's ease and enjoyment are not
+simply those of the happy man of appetite;[5] they are those of the
+humorist, and the humorist of genius. Instead of being comic to you and
+serious to himself, he is more ludicrous to himself than to you; and he
+makes himself out more ludicrous than he is, in order that he and
+others may laugh. Prince Hal never made such sport of Falstaff's person
+as he himself did. It is _he_ who says that his skin hangs about him
+like an old lady's loose gown, and that he walks before his page like a
+sow that hath o'erwhelmed all her litter but one. And he jests at
+himself when he is alone just as much as when others are by. It is the
+same with his appetites. The direct enjoyment they bring him is scarcely
+so great as the enjoyment of laughing at this enjoyment; and for all his
+addiction to sack you never see him for an instant with a brain dulled
+by it, or a temper turned solemn, silly, quarrelsome, or pious. The
+virtue it instils into him, of filling his brain with nimble, fiery, and
+delectable shapes--this, and his humorous attitude towards it, free him,
+in a manner, from slavery to it; and it is this freedom, and no secret
+longing for better things (those who attribute such a longing to him are
+far astray), that makes his enjoyment contagious and prevents our
+sympathy with it from being disturbed.
+
+The bliss of freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff. His
+humour is not directed only or chiefly against obvious absurdities; he
+is the enemy of everything that would interfere with his ease, and
+therefore of anything serious, and especially of everything respectable
+and moral. For these things impose limits and obligations, and make us
+the subjects of old father antic the law, and the categorical
+imperative, and our station and its duties, and conscience, and
+reputation, and other people's opinions, and all sorts of nuisances. I
+say he is therefore their enemy; but I do him wrong; to say that he is
+their enemy implies that he regards them as serious and recognises their
+power, when in truth he refuses to recognise them at all. They are to
+him absurd; and to reduce a thing _ad absurdum_ is to reduce it to
+nothing and to walk about free and rejoicing. This is what Falstaff
+does with all the would-be serious things of life, sometimes only by his
+words, sometimes by his actions too. He will make truth appear absurd by
+solemn statements, which he utters with perfect gravity and which he
+expects nobody to believe; and honour, by demonstrating that it cannot
+set a leg, and that neither the living nor the dead can possess it; and
+law, by evading all the attacks of its highest representative and almost
+forcing him to laugh at his own defeat; and patriotism, by filling his
+pockets with the bribes offered by competent soldiers who want to escape
+service, while he takes in their stead the halt and maimed and the
+gaol-birds; and duty, by showing how he labours in his vocation--of
+thieving; and courage, alike by mocking at his own capture of Colvile
+and gravely claiming to have killed Hotspur; and war, by offering the
+Prince his bottle of sack when he is asked for a sword; and religion, by
+amusing himself with remorse at odd times when he has nothing else to
+do; and the fear of death, by maintaining perfectly untouched, in the
+face of imminent peril and even while he _feels_ the fear of death, the
+very same power of dissolving it in persiflage that he shows when he
+sits at ease in his inn. These are the wonderful achievements which he
+performs, not with the sourness of a cynic, but with the gaiety of a
+boy. And, therefore, we praise him, we laud him, for he offends none but
+the virtuous, and denies that life is real or life is earnest, and
+delivers us from the oppression of such nightmares, and lifts us into
+the atmosphere of perfect freedom.
+
+No one in the play understands Falstaff fully, any more than Hamlet was
+understood by the persons round him. They are both men of genius. Mrs.
+Quickly and Bardolph are his slaves, but they know not why. 'Well, fare
+thee well,' says the hostess whom he has pillaged and forgiven; 'I have
+known thee these twenty-nine years, come peas-cod time, but an honester
+and truer-hearted man--well, fare thee well.' Poins and the Prince
+delight in him; they get him into corners for the pleasure of seeing him
+escape in ways they cannot imagine; but they often take him much too
+seriously. Poins, for instance, rarely sees, the Prince does not always
+see, and moralising critics never see, that when Falstaff speaks ill of
+a companion behind his back, or writes to the Prince that Poins spreads
+it abroad that the Prince is to marry his sister, he knows quite well
+that what he says will be repeated, or rather, perhaps, is absolutely
+indifferent whether it be repeated or not, being certain that it can
+only give him an opportunity for humour. It is the same with his lying,
+and almost the same with his cowardice, the two main vices laid to his
+charge even by sympathisers. Falstaff is neither a liar nor a coward in
+the usual sense, like the typical cowardly boaster of comedy. He tells
+his lies either for their own humour, or on purpose to get himself into
+a difficulty. He rarely expects to be believed, perhaps never. He
+abandons a statement or contradicts it the moment it is made. There is
+scarcely more intent in his lying than in the humorous exaggerations
+which he pours out in soliloquy just as much as when others are by.
+Poins and the Prince understand this in part. You see them waiting
+eagerly to convict him, not that they may really put him to shame, but
+in order to enjoy the greater lie that will swallow up the less. But
+their sense of humour lags behind his. Even the Prince seems to accept
+as half-serious that remorse of his which passes so suddenly into glee
+at the idea of taking a purse, and his request to his friend to bestride
+him if he should see him down in the battle. Bestride Falstaff! 'Hence!
+Wilt thou lift up Olympus?'
+
+Again, the attack of the Prince and Poins on Falstaff and the other
+thieves on Gadshill is contrived, we know, with a view to the
+incomprehensible lies it will induce him to tell. But when, more than
+rising to the occasion, he turns two men in buckram into four, and then
+seven, and then nine, and then eleven, almost in a breath, I believe
+they partly misunderstand his intention, and too many of his critics
+misunderstand it altogether. Shakespeare was not writing a mere farce.
+It is preposterous to suppose that a man of Falstaff's intelligence
+would utter these gross, palpable, open lies with the serious intention
+to deceive, or forget that, if it was too dark for him to see his own
+hand, he could hardly see that the three misbegotten knaves were wearing
+Kendal green. No doubt, if he _had_ been believed, he would have been
+hugely tickled at it, but he no more expected to be believed than when
+he claimed to have killed Hotspur. Yet he is supposed to be serious even
+then. Such interpretations would destroy the poet's whole conception;
+and of those who adopt them one might ask this out of some twenty
+similar questions:--When Falstaff, in the men in buckram scene, begins
+by calling twice at short intervals for sack, and then a little later
+calls for more and says, 'I am a rogue if I drunk to-day,' and the
+Prince answers, 'O villain, thy lips are scarce wiped since thou
+drunk'st last,' do they think that _that_ lie was meant to deceive? And
+if not, why do they take it for granted that the others were? I suppose
+they consider that Falstaff was in earnest when, wanting to get
+twenty-two yards of satin on trust from Master Dombledon the
+silk-mercer, he offered Bardolph as security; or when he said to the
+Chief Justice about Mrs. Quickly, who accused him of breaking his
+promise to marry her, 'My lord, this is a poor mad soul, and she says up
+and down the town that her eldest son is like you'; or when he explained
+his enormous bulk by exclaiming, 'A plague of sighing and grief! It
+blows a man up like a bladder'; or when he accounted for his voice
+being cracked by declaring that he had 'lost it with singing of
+anthems'; or even when he sold his soul on Good-Friday to the devil for
+a cup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg. Falstaff's lies about Hotspur
+and the men in buckram do not essentially differ from these statements.
+There is nothing serious in any of them except the refusal to take
+anything seriously.
+
+This is also the explanation of Falstaff's cowardice, a subject on which
+I should say nothing if Maurice Morgann's essay,[6] now more than a
+century old, were better known. That Falstaff sometimes behaves in what
+we should generally call a cowardly way is certain; but that does not
+show that he was a coward; and if the word means a person who feels
+painful fear in the presence of danger, and yields to that fear in spite
+of his better feelings and convictions, then assuredly Falstaff was no
+coward. The stock bully and boaster of comedy is one, but not Falstaff.
+It is perfectly clear in the first place that, though he had
+unfortunately a reputation for stabbing and caring not what mischief he
+did if his weapon were out, he had not a reputation for cowardice.
+Shallow remembered him five-and-fifty years ago breaking Scogan's head
+at the court-gate when he was a crack not thus high; and Shallow knew
+him later a good back-swordsman. Then we lose sight of him till about
+twenty years after, when his association with Bardolph began; and that
+association implies that by the time he was thirty-five or forty he had
+sunk into the mode of life we witness in the plays. Yet, even as we see
+him there, he remains a person of consideration in the army. Twelve
+captains hurry about London searching for him. He is present at the
+Council of War in the King's tent at Shrewsbury, where the only other
+persons are the King, the two princes, a nobleman and Sir Walter Blunt.
+The messenger who brings the false report of the battle to
+Northumberland mentions, as one of the important incidents, the death of
+Sir John Falstaff. Colvile, expressly described as a famous rebel,
+surrenders to him as soon as he hears his name. And if his own wish that
+his name were not so terrible to the enemy, and his own boast of his
+European reputation, are not evidence of the first rank, they must not
+be entirely ignored in presence of these other facts. What do these
+facts mean? Does Shakespeare put them all in with no purpose at all, or
+in defiance of his own intentions? It is not credible.
+
+And when, in the second place, we look at Falstaff's actions, what do we
+find? He boldly confronted Colvile, he was quite ready to fight with
+him, however pleased that Colvile, like a kind fellow, gave himself
+away. When he saw Henry and Hotspur fighting, Falstaff, instead of
+making off in a panic, stayed to take his chance if Hotspur should be
+the victor. He _led_ his hundred and fifty ragamuffins where they were
+peppered, he did not _send_ them. To draw upon Pistol and force him
+downstairs and wound him in the shoulder was no great feat, perhaps, but
+the stock coward would have shrunk from it. When the Sheriff came to the
+inn to arrest him for an offence whose penalty was death, Falstaff, who
+was hidden behind the arras, did not stand there quaking for fear, he
+immediately fell asleep and snored. When he stood in the battle
+reflecting on what would happen if the weight of his paunch should be
+increased by that of a bullet, he cannot have been in a tremor of craven
+fear. He _never_ shows such fear; and surely the man who, in danger of
+his life, and with no one by to hear him, meditates thus: 'I like not
+such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life: which if I can
+save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked-for, and there's an end,' is not
+what we commonly call a coward.
+
+'Well,' it will be answered, 'but he ran away on Gadshill; and when
+Douglas attacked him he fell down and shammed dead.' Yes, I am thankful
+to say, he did. For of course he did not want to be dead. He wanted to
+live and be merry. And as he had reduced the idea of honour _ad
+absurdum_, had scarcely any self-respect, and only a respect for
+reputation as a means of life, naturally he avoided death when he could
+do so without a ruinous loss of reputation, and (observe) with the
+satisfaction of playing a colossal practical joke. For _that_ after all
+was his first object. If his one thought had been to avoid death he
+would not have faced Douglas at all, but would have run away as fast as
+his legs could carry him; and unless Douglas had been one of those
+exceptional Scotchmen who have no sense of humour, he would never have
+thought of pursuing so ridiculous an object as Falstaff running. So
+that, as Mr. Swinburne remarks, Poins is right when he thus
+distinguishes Falstaff from his companions in robbery: 'For two of them,
+I know them to be as true-bred cowards as ever turned back; and for the
+third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I'll forswear arms.' And
+the event justifies this distinction. For it is exactly thus that,
+according to the original stage-direction, Falstaff behaves when Henry
+and Poins attack him and the others. The rest run away at once;
+Falstaff, here as afterwards with Douglas, fights for a blow or two,
+but, finding himself deserted and outmatched, runs away also. Of course.
+He saw no reason to stay. _Any_ man who had risen superior to all
+serious motives would have run away. But it does not follow that he
+would run from mere fear, or be, in the ordinary sense, a coward.[7]
+
+
+  3.
+
+The main source, then, of our sympathetic delight in Falstaff is his
+humorous superiority to everything serious, and the freedom of soul
+enjoyed in it. But, of course, this is not the whole of his character.
+Shakespeare knew well enough that perfect freedom is not to be gained in
+this manner; we are ourselves aware of it even while we are sympathising
+with Falstaff; and as soon as we regard him seriously it becomes
+obvious. His freedom is limited in two main ways. For one thing he
+cannot rid himself entirely of respect for all that he professes to
+ridicule. He shows a certain pride in his rank: unlike the Prince, he is
+haughty to the drawers, who call him a proud Jack. He is not really
+quite indifferent to reputation. When the Chief Justice bids him pay his
+debt to Mrs. Quickly for his reputation's sake, I think he feels a
+twinge, though to be sure he proceeds to pay her by borrowing from her.
+He is also stung by any thoroughly serious imputation on his courage,
+and winces at the recollection of his running away on Gadshill; he knows
+that his behaviour there certainly looked cowardly, and perhaps he
+remembers that he would not have behaved so once. It is, further, very
+significant that, for all his dissolute talk, he has never yet allowed
+the Prince and Poins to _see_ him as they saw him afterwards with Doll
+Tearsheet; not, of course, that he has any moral shame in the matter,
+but he knows that in such a situation he, in his old age, must appear
+contemptible--not a humorist but a mere object of mirth. And, finally,
+he has affection in him--affection, I think, for Poins and Bardolph, and
+certainly for the Prince; and that is a thing which he cannot jest out
+of existence. Hence, as the effect of his rejection shows, he is not
+really invulnerable. And then, in the second place, since he is in the
+flesh, his godlike freedom has consequences and conditions;
+consequences, for there is something painfully wrong with his great toe;
+conditions, for he cannot eat and drink for ever without money, and his
+purse suffers from consumption, a disease for which he can find no
+remedy.[8] As the Chief Justice tells him, his means are very slender
+and his waste great; and his answer, 'I would it were otherwise; I would
+my means were greater and my waist slenderer,' though worth much money,
+brings none in. And so he is driven to evil deeds; not only to cheating
+his tailor like a gentleman, but to fleecing Justice Shallow, and to
+highway robbery, and to cruel depredations on the poor woman whose
+affection he has secured. All this is perfectly consistent with the
+other side of his character, but by itself it makes an ugly picture.
+
+Yes, it makes an ugly picture when you look at it seriously. But then,
+surely, so long as the humorous atmosphere is preserved and the humorous
+attitude maintained, you do not look at it so. You no more regard
+Falstaff's misdeeds morally than you do the much more atrocious misdeeds
+of Punch or Reynard the Fox. You do not exactly ignore them, but you
+attend only to their comic aspect. This is the very spirit of comedy,
+and certainly of Shakespeare's comic world, which is one of
+make-believe, not merely as his tragic world is, but in a further
+sense--a world in which gross improbabilities are accepted with a smile,
+and many things are welcomed as merely laughable which, regarded
+gravely, would excite anger and disgust. The intervention of a serious
+spirit breaks up such a world, and would destroy our pleasure in
+Falstaff's company. Accordingly through the greater part of these dramas
+Shakespeare carefully confines this spirit to the scenes of war and
+policy, and dismisses it entirely in the humorous parts. Hence, if
+_Henry IV._ had been a comedy like _Twelfth Night_, I am sure that he
+would no more have ended it with the painful disgrace of Falstaff than
+he ended _Twelfth Night_ by disgracing Sir Toby Belch.[9]
+
+But _Henry IV._ was to be in the main a historical play, and its chief
+hero Prince Henry. In the course of it his greater and finer qualities
+were to be gradually revealed, and it was to end with beautiful scenes
+of reconciliation and affection between his father and him, and a final
+emergence of the wild Prince as a just, wise, stern, and glorious King.
+Hence, no doubt, it seemed to Shakespeare that Falstaff at last must be
+disgraced, and must therefore appear no longer as the invincible
+humorist, but as an object of ridicule and even of aversion. And
+probably also his poet's insight showed him that Henry, as he conceived
+him, _would_ behave harshly to Falstaff in order to impress the world,
+especially when his mind had been wrought to a high pitch by the scene
+with his dying father and the impression of his own solemn consecration
+to great duties.
+
+This conception was a natural and a fine one; and if the execution was
+not an entire success, it is yet full of interest. Shakespeare's purpose
+being to work a gradual change in our feelings towards Falstaff, and to
+tinge the humorous atmosphere more and more deeply with seriousness, we
+see him carrying out this purpose in the Second Part of _Henry IV._ Here
+he separates the Prince from Falstaff as much as he can, thus
+withdrawing him from Falstaff's influence, and weakening in our minds
+the connection between the two. In the First Part we constantly see them
+together; in the Second (it is a remarkable fact) only once before the
+rejection. Further, in the scenes where Henry appears apart from
+Falstaff, we watch him growing more and more grave, and awakening more
+and more poetic interest; while Falstaff, though his humour scarcely
+flags to the end, exhibits more and more of his seamy side. This is
+nowhere turned to the full light in Part I.; but in Part II. we see him
+as the heartless destroyer of Mrs. Quickly, as a ruffian seriously
+defying the Chief Justice because his position as an officer on service
+gives him power to do wrong, as the pike preparing to snap up the poor
+old dace Shallow, and (this is the one scene where Henry and he meet) as
+the worn-out lecher, not laughing at his servitude to the flesh but sunk
+in it. Finally, immediately before the rejection, the world where he is
+king is exposed in all its sordid criminality when we find Mrs. Quickly
+and Doll arrested for being concerned in the death of one man, if not
+more, beaten to death by their bullies; and the dangerousness of
+Falstaff is emphasised in his last words as he hurries from Shallow's
+house to London, words at first touched with humour but at bottom only
+too seriously meant: 'Let us take any man's horses; the laws of England
+are at my commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends, and
+woe unto my Lord Chief Justice.' His dismissal to the Fleet by the Chief
+Justice is the dramatic vengeance for that threat.
+
+Yet all these excellent devices fail. They cause us momentary
+embarrassment at times when repellent traits in Falstaff's character are
+disclosed; but they fail to change our attitude of humour into one of
+seriousness, and our sympathy into repulsion. And they were bound to
+fail, because Shakespeare shrank from adding to them the one device
+which would have ensured success. If, as the Second Part of _Henry IV._
+advanced, he had clouded over Falstaff's humour so heavily that the man
+of genius turned into the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_, we should have
+witnessed his rejection without a pang. This Shakespeare was too much
+of an artist to do--though even in this way he did something--and
+without this device he could not succeed. As I said, in the creation of
+Falstaff he overreached himself. He was caught up on the wind of his own
+genius, and carried so far that he could not descend to earth at the
+selected spot. It is not a misfortune that happens to many authors, nor
+is it one we can regret, for it costs us but a trifling inconvenience in
+one scene, while we owe to it perhaps the greatest comic character in
+literature. For it is in this character, and not in the judgment he
+brings upon Falstaff's head, that Shakespeare asserts his supremacy. To
+show that Falstaff's freedom of soul was in part illusory, and that the
+realities of life refused to be conjured away by his humour--this was
+what we might expect from Shakespeare's unfailing sanity, but it was
+surely no achievement beyond the power of lesser men. The achievement
+was Falstaff himself, and the conception of that freedom of soul, a
+freedom illusory only in part, and attainable only by a mind which had
+received from Shakespeare's own the inexplicable touch of infinity which
+he bestowed on Hamlet and Macbeth and Cleopatra, but denied to Henry the
+Fifth.
+
+1902.
+
+
+  NOTE
+
+For the benefit of readers unacquainted with Morgann's Essay I reproduce
+here, with additions, some remarks omitted from the lecture for want of
+time. 'Maurice Morgann, Esq. the ingenious writer of this work,
+descended from an antient and respectable family in Wales; he filled the
+office of under Secretary of State to the late Marquis of Lansdown,
+during his first administration; and was afterwards Secretary to the
+Embassy for ratifying the peace with America, in 1783. He died at his
+house in Knightsbridge, in the seventy-seventh year of his age, on the
+28th March, 1802' (Preface to the edition of 1825). He was a remarkable
+and original man, who seems to have written a good deal, but, beyond
+this essay and some pamphlets on public affairs, all or nearly all
+anonymous, he published nothing, and at his death he left orders that
+all his papers should be destroyed. The _Essay on the Dramatic Character
+of Sir John Falstaff_ was first published in 1777. It arose out of a
+conversation in which Morgann expressed his belief that Shakespeare
+never meant Falstaff for a coward. He was challenged to explain and
+support in print what was considered an extraordinary paradox, and his
+essay bears on its title-page the quotation, 'I am not John of Gaunt,
+your grandfather: but yet no coward, Hal'--one of Falstaff's few serious
+sentences. But Morgann did not confine himself to the question of
+Falstaff's cowardice; he analysed the whole character, and incidentally
+touched on many points in Shakespearean criticism. 'The reader,' he
+observes, 'will not need to be told that this inquiry will resolve
+itself of course into a critique on the genius, the arts, and the
+conduct, of Shakespeare: for what is Falstaff, what Lear, what Hamlet,
+or Othello, but different modifications of Shakespeare's thought? It is
+true that this inquiry is narrowed almost to a single point; but general
+criticism is as uninstructive as it is easy: Shakespeare deserves to be
+considered in detail;--a task hitherto unattempted.'
+
+The last words are significant. Morgann was conscious that he was
+striking out a new line. The Eighteenth Century critics had done much
+for Shakespeare in the way of scholarship; some of them had praised him
+well and blamed him well; but they had done little to interpret the
+process of his imagination from within. This was what Morgann attempted.
+His attitude towards Shakespeare is that of Goethe, Coleridge, Lamb,
+Hazlitt. The dangers of his method might be illustrated from the Essay,
+but in his hands it yielded most valuable results. And though he did not
+attempt the eloquence of some of his successors, but wrote like a
+cultivated ironical man of the world, he wrote delightfully; so that in
+all respects his Essay, which has long been out of print, deserves to be
+republished and better known. [It was republished in Mr. Nichol Smith's
+excellent _Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_, 1903; and, in
+1912, by itself, with an introduction by W. A. Gill.]
+
+Readers of Boswell (under the year 1783) will remember that Morgann, who
+once met Johnson, favoured his biographer with two most characteristic
+anecdotes. Boswell also records Johnson's judgment of Morgann's Essay,
+which, says Mr. Swinburne, elicited from him 'as good a jest and as bad
+a criticism as might have been expected.' Johnson, we are told, being
+asked his opinion of the Essay, answered: 'Why, Sir, we shall have the
+man come forth again; and as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he
+may prove Iago to be a very good character.' The following passage from
+Morgann's _Essay_ (p. 66 of the 1825 edition, p. 248 of Mr. Nichol
+Smith's book) gives, I presume, his opinion of Johnson. Having referred
+to Warburton, he adds: 'Another has since undertaken the custody of our
+author, whom he seems to consider as a sort of wild Proteus or madman,
+and accordingly knocks him down with the butt-end of his critical staff,
+as often as he exceeds that line of sober discretion, which this learned
+Editor appears to have chalked out for him: yet is this Editor,
+notwithstanding, "a man, take him for all in all," very highly
+respectable for his genius and his learning.'
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] In this lecture and the three that follow it I have mentioned the
+    authors my obligations to whom I was conscious of in writing or have
+    discovered since; but other debts must doubtless remain, which from
+    forgetfulness I am unable to acknowledge.
+
+  [2] See on this and other points Swinburne, _A Study of Shakespeare_,
+    p. 106 ff.
+
+  [3] Rötscher, _Shakespeare in seinen höchsten Charaktergebilden_,
+    1864.
+
+  [4] That from the beginning Shakespeare intended Henry's accession to
+    be Falstaff's catastrophe is clear from the fact that, when the two
+    characters first appear, Falstaff is made to betray at once the hopes
+    with which he looks forward to Henry's reign. See the First Part of
+    _Henry IV._, Act I., Scene ii.
+
+  [5] Cf. Hazlitt, _Characters of Shakespear's Plays_.
+
+  [6] See Note at end of lecture.
+
+  [7] It is to be regretted, however, that in carrying his guts away so
+    nimbly he 'roared for mercy'; for I fear we have no ground for
+    rejecting Henry's statement to that effect, and I do not see my way
+    to adopt the suggestion (I forget whose it is) that Falstaff spoke
+    the truth when he swore that he knew Henry and Poins as well as he
+    that made them.
+
+  [8] Panurge too was 'naturally subject to a kind of disease which at
+    that time they called lack of money'; it was a 'flux in his purse'
+    (Rabelais, Book II., chapters xvi., xvii.).
+
+  [9] I seem to remember that, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare did
+    disgrace Sir Toby--by marrying him to Maria!
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S _ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S _ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_[1]
+
+
+Coleridge's one page of general criticism on _Antony and Cleopatra_
+contains some notable remarks. 'Of all Shakespeare's historical plays,'
+he writes, '_Antony and Cleopatra_ is by far the most wonderful. There
+is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there
+are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so
+much--perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is
+greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained
+throughout.' In a later sentence he refers to the play as 'this
+astonishing drama.' In another he describes the style: '_feliciter
+audax_ is the motto for its style comparatively with that of
+Shakespeare's other works.' And he translates this motto in the phrase
+'happy valiancy of style.'
+
+Coleridge's assertion that in _Antony and Cleopatra_ Shakespeare
+followed history more minutely than in any other play might well be
+disputed; and his statement about the style of this drama requires some
+qualification in view of the results of later criticism as to the order
+of Shakespeare's works. The style is less individual than he imagined.
+On the whole it is common to the six or seven dramas subsequent to
+_Macbeth_, though in _Antony and Cleopatra_, probably the earliest of
+them, its development is not yet complete. And we must add that this
+style has certain special defects, unmentioned by Coleridge, as well as
+the quality which he points out in it. But it is true that here that
+quality is almost continuously present; and in the phrase by which he
+describes it, as in his other phrases, he has signalised once for all
+some of the most salient features of the drama.
+
+It is curious to notice, for example, alike in books and in
+conversation, how often the first epithets used in reference to _Antony
+and Cleopatra_ are 'wonderful' and 'astonishing.' And the main source of
+the feeling thus expressed seems to be the 'angelic strength' or 'fiery
+force' of which Coleridge wrote. The first of these two phrases is, I
+think, the more entirely happy. Except perhaps towards the close, one is
+not so conscious of fiery force as in certain other tragedies; but one
+is astonished at the apparent ease with which extraordinary effects are
+produced, the ease, if I may paraphrase Coleridge, of an angel moving
+with a wave of the hand that heavy matter which men find so intractable.
+We feel this sovereign ease in contemplating Shakespeare's picture of
+the world--a vast canvas, crowded with figures, glowing with colour and
+a superb animation, reminding one spectator of Paul Veronese and another
+of Rubens. We feel it again when we observe (as we can even without
+consulting Plutarch) the nature of the material; how bulky it was, and,
+in some respects, how undramatic; and how the artist, though he could
+not treat history like legend or fiction, seems to push whole masses
+aside, and to shift and refashion the remainder, almost with the air of
+an architect playing (at times rather carelessly) with a child's bricks.
+
+Something similar is felt even in the portrait of Cleopatra. Marvellous
+as it is, the drawing of it suggests not so much the passionate
+concentration or fiery force of _Macbeth_, as that sense of effortless
+and exultant mastery which we feel in the portraits of Mercutio and
+Falstaff. And surely it is a total mistake to find in this portrait any
+trace of the distempered mood which disturbs our pleasure in _Troilus
+and Cressida_. If the sonnets about the dark lady were, as need not be
+doubted, in some degree autobiographical, Shakespeare may well have used
+his personal experience both when he drew Cressida and when he drew
+Cleopatra. And, if he did, the story in the later play was the nearer to
+his own; for Antony might well have said what Troilus could never say,
+
+  When my love swears that she is made of truth,
+  I do believe her, though I know she lies.
+
+But in the later play, not only is the poet's vision unclouded, but his
+whole nature, emotional as well as intellectual, is free. The subject no
+more embitters or seduces him than the ambition of Macbeth. So that here
+too we feel the angelic strength of which Coleridge speaks. If we
+quarrelled with the phrase at all, it would be because we fancied we
+could trace in Shakespeare's attitude something of the irony of
+superiority; and this may not altogether suit our conception of an
+angel.
+
+I have still another sentence to quote from Coleridge: 'The highest
+praise, or rather form of praise, of this play which I can offer in my
+own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether
+the "Antony and Cleopatra" is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power
+in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of "Macbeth,"
+"Lear," "Hamlet," and "Othello."' Now, unless the clause here about the
+'giant power' may be taken to restrict the rivalry to the quality of
+angelic strength, Coleridge's doubt seems to show a lapse in critical
+judgment. To regard this tragedy as a rival of the famous four, whether
+on the stage or in the study, is surely an error. The world certainly
+has not so regarded it; and, though the world's reasons for its verdicts
+on works of art may be worth little, its mere verdict is worth much.
+Here, it seems to me, that verdict must be accepted. One may notice
+that, in calling _Antony and Cleopatra_ wonderful or astonishing, we
+appear to be thinking first of the artist and his activity, while in the
+case of the four famous tragedies it is the product of this activity,
+the thing presented, that first engrosses us. I know that I am stating
+this difference too sharply, but I believe that it is often felt; and,
+if this is so, the fact is significant. It implies that, although
+_Antony and Cleopatra_ may be for us as wonderful an achievement as the
+greatest of Shakespeare's plays, it has not an equal value. Besides, in
+the attempt to rank it with them there is involved something more, and
+more important, than an error in valuation. There is a failure to
+discriminate the peculiar marks of _Antony and Cleopatra_ itself, marks
+which, whether or no it be the equal of the earlier tragedies, make it
+decidedly different. If I speak first of some of these differences it is
+because they thus contribute to the individuality of the play, and
+because they seem often not to be distinctly apprehended in criticism.
+
+
+  1.
+
+Why, let us begin by asking, is _Antony and Cleopatra_, though so
+wonderful an achievement, a play rarely acted? For a tragedy, it is not
+painful. Though unfit for children, it cannot be called indecent; some
+slight omissions, and such a flattening of the heroine's part as might
+confidently be expected, would leave it perfectly presentable. It is, no
+doubt, in the third and fourth Acts, very defective in construction.
+Even on the Elizabethan stage, where scene followed scene without a
+pause, this must have been felt; and in our theatres it would be felt
+much more. There, in fact, these two and forty scenes could not possibly
+be acted as they stand. But defective construction would not distress
+the bulk of an audience, if the matter presented were that of _Hamlet_
+or _Othello_, of _Lear_ or _Macbeth_. The matter, then, must lack
+something which is present in those tragedies; and it is mainly owing to
+this difference in substance that _Antony and Cleopatra_ has never
+attained their popularity either on the stage or off it.
+
+Most of Shakespeare's tragedies are dramatic, in a special sense of the
+word as well as in its general sense, from beginning to end. The story
+is not merely exciting and impressive from the movement of conflicting
+forces towards a terrible issue, but from time to time there come
+situations and events which, even apart from their bearing on this
+issue, appeal most powerfully to the dramatic feelings--scenes of action
+or passion which agitate the audience with alarm, horror, painful
+expectation, or absorbing sympathies and antipathies. Think of the
+street fights in _Romeo and Juliet_, the killing of Mercutio and Tybalt,
+the rapture of the lovers, and their despair when Romeo is banished.
+Think of the ghost-scenes in the first Act of _Hamlet_, the passion of
+the early soliloquies, the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, the
+play-scene, the sparing of the King at prayer, the killing of Polonius.
+Is not _Hamlet_, if you choose so to regard it, the best melodrama in
+the world? Think at your leisure of _Othello_, _Lear_, and _Macbeth_
+from the same point of view; but consider here and now even the two
+tragedies which, as dealing with Roman history, are companions of
+_Antony and Cleopatra_. Recall in _Julius Cćsar_ the first suggestion of
+the murder, the preparation for it in a 'tempest dropping fire,' the
+murder itself, the speech of Antony over the corpse, and the tumult of
+the furious crowd; in _Coriolanus_ the bloody battles on the stage, the
+scene in which the hero attains the consulship, the scene of rage in
+which he is banished. And remember that in each of these seven tragedies
+the matter referred to is contained in the first three Acts.
+
+In the first three Acts of our play what is there resembling this?
+Almost nothing. People converse, discuss, accuse one another, excuse
+themselves, mock, describe, drink together, arrange a marriage, meet and
+part; but they do not kill, do not even tremble or weep. We see hardly
+one violent movement; until the battle of Actium is over we witness
+scarcely any vehement passion; and that battle, as it is a naval action,
+we do not see. Even later, Enobarbus, when he dies, simply dies; he does
+not kill himself.[2] We hear wonderful talk; but it is not talk, like
+that of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, or that of Othello and Iago, at which
+we hold our breath. The scenes that we remember first are those that
+portray Cleopatra; Cleopatra coquetting, tormenting, beguiling her lover
+to stay; Cleopatra left with her women and longing for him; Cleopatra
+receiving the news of his marriage; Cleopatra questioning the messenger
+about Octavia's personal appearance. But this is to say that the scenes
+we remember first are the least indispensable to the plot. One at least
+is not essential to it at all. And this, the astonishing scene where she
+storms at the messenger, strikes him, and draws her dagger on him, is
+the one passage in the first half of the drama that contains either an
+explosion of passion or an exciting bodily action. Nor is this all. The
+first half of the play, though it forebodes tragedy, is not decisively
+tragic in tone. Certainly the Cleopatra scenes are not so. We read
+them, and we should witness them, in delighted wonder and even with
+amusement. The only scene that can vie with them, that of the revel on
+Pompey's ship, though full of menace, is in great part humorous.
+Enobarbus, in this part of the play, is always humorous. Even later,
+when the tragic tone is deepening, the whipping of Thyreus, in spite of
+Antony's rage, moves mirth. A play of which all this can truly be said
+may well be as masterly as _Othello_ or _Macbeth_, and more delightful;
+but, in the greater part of its course, it cannot possibly excite the
+same emotions. It makes no attempt to do so; and to regard it as though
+it made this attempt is to miss its specific character and the intention
+of its author.
+
+That character depends only in part on Shakespeare's fidelity to his
+historical authority, a fidelity which, I may remark, is often greatly
+exaggerated. For Shakespeare did not merely present the story of ten
+years as though it occupied perhaps one fifth of that time, nor did he
+merely invent freely, but in critical places he effected startling
+changes in the order and combination of events. Still it may be said
+that, dealing with a history so famous, he could not well make the first
+half of his play very exciting, moving, or tragic. And this is true so
+far as mere situations and events are concerned. But, if he had chosen,
+he might easily have heightened the tone and tension in another way. He
+might have made the story of Antony's attempt to break his bondage, and
+the story of his relapse, extremely exciting, by portraying with all his
+force the severity of the struggle and the magnitude of the fatal step.
+
+And the structure of the play might seem at first to suggest this
+intention. At the opening, Antony is shown almost in the beginning of
+his infatuation; for Cleopatra is not sure of her power over him, exerts
+all her fascination to detain him, and plays the part of the innocent
+victim who has yielded to passion and must now expect to be deserted by
+her seducer. Alarmed and ashamed at the news of the results of his
+inaction, he rouses himself, tears himself away, and speeds to Italy.
+His very coming is enough to frighten Pompey into peace. He reconciles
+himself with Octavius, and, by his marriage with the good and beautiful
+Octavia, seems to have knit a bond of lasting amity with her brother,
+and to have guarded himself against the passion that threatened him with
+ruin. At this point his power, the world's peace, and his own peace,
+appear to be secured; his fortune has mounted to its apex. But soon
+(very much sooner than in Plutarch's story) comes the downward turn or
+counter-stroke. New causes of offence arise between the brothers-in-law.
+To remove them Octavia leaves her husband in Athens and hurries to Rome.
+Immediately Antony returns to Cleopatra and, surrendering himself at
+once and wholly to her enchantment is quickly driven to his doom.
+
+Now Shakespeare, I say, with his matchless power of depicting an inward
+struggle, might have made this story, even where it could not furnish
+him with thrilling incidents, the source of powerful tragic emotions;
+and, in doing so, he would have departed from his authority merely in
+his conception of the hero's character. But he does no such thing till
+the catastrophe is near. Antony breaks away from Cleopatra without any
+strenuous conflict. No serious doubt of his return is permitted to
+agitate us. We are almost assured of it through the impression made on
+us by Octavius, through occasional glimpses into Antony's mind, through
+the absence of any doubt in Enobarbus, through scenes in Alexandria
+which display Cleopatra and display her irresistible. And, finally, the
+downward turn itself, the fatal step of Antony's return, is shown
+without the slightest emphasis. Nay, it is not shown, it is only
+reported; and not a line portrays any inward struggle preceding it. On
+this side also, then, the drama makes no attempt to rival the other
+tragedies; and it was essential to its own peculiar character and its
+most transcendent effects that this attempt should not be made, but that
+Antony's passion should be represented as a force which he could hardly
+even desire to resist. By the very scheme of the work, therefore, tragic
+impressions of any great volume or depth were reserved for the last
+stage of the conflict; while the main interest, down to the battle of
+Actium, was directed to matters exceedingly interesting and even, in the
+wider sense, dramatic, but not overtly either terrible or piteous: on
+the one hand, to the political aspect of the story; on the other, to the
+personal causes which helped to make the issue inevitable.
+
+
+  2.
+
+The political situation and its development are simple. The story is
+taken up almost where it was left, years before, in _Julius Cćsar_.
+There Brutus and Cassius, to prevent the rule of one man, assassinate
+Cćsar. Their purpose is condemned to failure, not merely because they
+make mistakes, but because that political necessity which Napoleon
+identified with destiny requires the rule of one man. They spill Cćsar's
+blood, but his spirit walks abroad and turns their swords against their
+own breasts; and the world is left divided among three men, his friends
+and his heir. Here _Antony and Cleopatra_ takes up the tale; and its
+business, from this point of view, is to show the reduction of these
+three to one. That Lepidus will not be this one was clear already in
+_Julius Cćsar_; it must be Octavius or Antony. Both ambitious, they are
+also men of such opposite tempers that they would scarcely long agree
+even if they wished to, and even if destiny were not stronger than they.
+As it is, one of them has fixed his eyes on the end, sacrifices
+everything for it, uses everything as a means to it. The other, though
+far the greater soldier and worshipped by his followers, has no such
+singleness of aim; nor yet is power, however desirable to him, the most
+desirable thing in the world. At the beginning he is risking it for
+love; at the end he has lost his half of the world, and lost his life,
+and Octavius rules alone. Whether Shakespeare had this clearly in his
+mind is a question neither answerable nor important; this is what came
+out of his mind.
+
+Shakespeare, I think, took little interest in the character of Octavius,
+and he has not made it wholly clear. It is not distinct in Plutarch's
+'Life of Antony'; and I have not found traces that the poet studied
+closely the 'Life of Octavius' included in North's volume. To
+Shakespeare he is one of those men, like Bolingbroke and Ulysses, who
+have plenty of 'judgment' and not much 'blood.' Victory in the world,
+according to the poet, almost always goes to such men; and he makes us
+respect, fear, and dislike them. His Octavius is very formidable. His
+cold determination half paralyses Antony; it is so even in _Julius
+Cćsar_. In _Antony and Cleopatra_ Octavius is more than once in the
+wrong; but he never admits it; he silently pushes his rival a step
+backward; and, when he ceases to fear, he shows contempt. He neither
+enjoys war nor is great in it; at first, therefore, he is anxious about
+the power of Pompey, and stands in need of Antony. As soon as Antony's
+presence has served his turn, and he has patched up a union with him and
+seen him safely off to Athens, he destroys first Pompey and next
+Lepidus. Then, dexterously using Antony's faithlessness to Octavia and
+excesses in the East in order to put himself in the right, he makes for
+his victim with admirable celerity while he is still drunk with the joy
+of reunion with Cleopatra. For his ends Octavius is perfectly efficient,
+but he is so partly from his limitations. One phrase of his is
+exceedingly characteristic. When Antony in rage and desperation
+challenges him to single combat, Octavius calls him 'the old ruffian.'
+There is a horrid aptness in the phrase, but it disgusts us. It is
+shameful in this boy, as hard and smooth as polished steel, to feel at
+such a time nothing of the greatness of his victim and the tragedy of
+his victim's fall. Though the challenge of Antony is absurd, we would
+give much to see them sword to sword. And when Cleopatra by her death
+cheats the conqueror of his prize, we feel unmixed delight.
+
+The doubtful point in the character is this. Plutarch says that Octavius
+was reported to love his sister dearly; and Shakespeare's Octavius
+several times expresses such love. When, then, he proposed the marriage
+with Antony (for of course it was he who spoke through Agrippa), was he
+honest, or was he laying a trap and, in doing so, sacrificing his
+sister? Did he hope the marriage would really unite him with his
+brother-in-law; or did he merely mean it to be a source of future
+differences; or did he calculate that, whether it secured peace or
+dissension, it would in either case bring him great advantage?
+Shakespeare, who was quite as intelligent as his readers, must have
+asked himself some such question; but he may not have cared to answer it
+even to himself; and, in any case, he has left the actor (at least the
+actor in days later than his own) to choose an answer. If I were forced
+to choose, I should take the view that Octavius was, at any rate, not
+wholly honest; partly because I think it best suits Shakespeare's usual
+way of conceiving a character of the kind; partly because Plutarch
+construed in this manner Octavius's behaviour in regard to his sister at
+a later time, and this hint might naturally influence the poet's way of
+imagining his earlier action.[3]
+
+Though the character of Octavius is neither attractive nor wholly clear,
+his figure is invested with a certain tragic dignity, because he is felt
+to be the Man of Destiny, the agent of forces against which the
+intentions of an individual would avail nothing. He is represented as
+having himself some feeling of this sort. His lament over Antony, his
+grief that their stars were irreconcilable, may well be genuine, though
+we should be surer if it were uttered in soliloquy. His austere words to
+Octavia again probably speak his true mind:
+
+  Be you not troubled with the time, which drives
+  O'er your content these strong necessities;
+  But let determined things to destiny
+  Hold unbewailed their way.
+
+In any case the feeling of fate comes through to us. It is aided by
+slight touches of supernatural effect; first in the Soothsayer's warning
+to Antony that his genius or angel is overpowered whenever he is near
+Octavius; then in the strangely effective scene where Antony's soldiers,
+in the night before his last battle, hear music in the air or under the
+earth:
+
+  'Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,
+  Now leaves him.
+
+And to the influence of this feeling in giving impressiveness to the
+story is added that of the immense scale and world-wide issue of the
+conflict. Even the distances traversed by fleets and armies enhance this
+effect.
+
+And yet there seems to be something half-hearted in Shakespeare's appeal
+here, something even ironical in his presentation of this conflict. Its
+external magnitude, like Antony's magnificence in lavishing realms and
+gathering the kings of the East in his support, fails to uplift or
+dilate the imagination. The struggle in Lear's little island seems to us
+to have an infinitely wider scope. It is here that we are sometimes
+reminded of _Troilus and Cressida_, and the cold and disenchanting light
+that is there cast on the Trojan War. The spectacle which he portrays
+leaves Shakespeare quite undazzled; he even makes it appear inwardly
+small. The lordship of the world, we ask ourselves, what is it worth,
+and in what spirit do these 'world-sharers' contend for it? They are no
+champions of their country like Henry V. The conqueror knows not even
+the glory of battle. Their aims, for all we see, are as personal as if
+they were captains of banditti; and they are followed merely from
+self-interest or private attachment. The scene on Pompey's galley is
+full of this irony. One 'third part of the world' is carried drunk to
+bed. In the midst of this mock boon-companionship the pirate whispers to
+his leader to cut first the cable of his ship and then the throats of
+the two other Emperors; and at the moment we should not greatly care if
+Pompey took the advice. Later, a short scene, totally useless to the
+plot and purely satiric in its purport, is slipped in to show how
+Ventidius fears to pursue his Parthian conquests because it is not safe
+for Antony's lieutenant to outdo his master.[4] A painful sense of
+hollowness oppresses us. We know too well what must happen in a world so
+splendid, so false, and so petty. We turn for relief from the political
+game to those who are sure to lose it; to those who love some human
+being better than a prize, to Eros and Charmian and Iras; to Enobarbus,
+whom the world corrupts, but who has a heart that can break with shame;
+to the lovers, who seem to us to find in death something better than
+their victor's life.
+
+This presentation of the outward conflict has two results. First, it
+blunts our feeling of the greatness of Antony's fall from prosperity.
+Indeed this feeling, which we might expect to be unusually acute, is
+hardly so; it is less acute, for example, than the like feeling in the
+case of Richard II., who loses so much smaller a realm. Our deeper
+sympathies are focussed rather on Antony's heart, on the inward fall to
+which the enchantment of passion leads him, and the inward recovery
+which succeeds it. And the second result is this. The greatness of
+Antony and Cleopatra in their fall is so much heightened by contrast
+with the world they lose and the conqueror who wins it, that the
+positive element in the final tragic impression, the element of
+reconciliation, is strongly emphasised. The peculiar effect of the drama
+depends partly, as we have seen, on the absence of decidedly tragic
+scenes and events in its first half; but it depends quite as much on
+this emphasis. In any Shakespearean tragedy we watch some elect spirit
+colliding, partly through its error and defect, with a superhuman power
+which bears it down; and yet we feel that this spirit, even in the error
+and defect, rises by its greatness into ideal union with the power that
+overwhelms it. In some tragedies this latter feeling is relatively weak.
+In _Antony and Cleopatra_ it is unusually strong; stronger, with some
+readers at least, than the fear and grief and pity with which they
+contemplate the tragic error and the advance of doom.
+
+
+  3.
+
+The two aspects of the tragedy are presented together in the opening
+scene. Here is the first. In Cleopatra's palace one friend of Antony is
+describing to another, just arrived from Rome, the dotage of their great
+general; and, as the lovers enter, he exclaims:
+
+                       Look, where they come:
+  Take but good note, and you shall see in him
+  The triple pillar of the world transformed
+  Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see.
+
+With the next words the other aspect appears:
+
+  CLEO. If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
+
+  ANT. There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
+
+  CLEO. I'll set a bourne how far to be beloved.
+
+  ANT. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.
+
+And directly after, when he is provoked by reminders of the news from
+Rome:
+
+  Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
+  Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.
+  Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
+  Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life
+  Is to do thus.
+
+Here is the tragic excess, but with it the tragic greatness, the
+capacity of finding in something the infinite, and of pursuing it into
+the jaws of death.
+
+The two aspects are shown here with the exaggeration proper in dramatic
+characters. Neither the phrase 'a strumpet's fool,' nor the assertion
+'the nobleness of life is to do thus,' answers to the total effect of
+the play. But the truths they exaggerate are equally essential; and the
+commoner mistake in criticism is to understate the second. It is plain
+that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is destructive; that in some way
+it clashes with the nature of things; that, while they are sitting in
+their paradise like gods, its walls move inward and crush them at last
+to death. This is no invention of moralising critics; it is in the play;
+and any one familiar with Shakespeare would expect beforehand to find it
+there. But then to forget because of it the other side, to deny the name
+of love to this ruinous passion, to speak as though the lovers had
+utterly missed the good of life, is to mutilate the tragedy and to
+ignore a great part of its effect upon us. For we sympathise with them
+in their passion; we feel in it the infinity there is in man; even while
+we acquiesce in their defeat we are exulting in their victory; and when
+they have vanished we say,
+
+                   the odds is gone,
+  And there is nothing left remarkable
+  Beneath the visiting moon.
+
+Though we hear nothing from Shakespeare of the cruelty of Plutarch's
+Antony, or of the misery caused by his boundless profusion, we do not
+feel the hero of the tragedy to be a man of the noblest type, like
+Brutus, Hamlet, or Othello. He seeks power merely for himself, and uses
+it for his own pleasure. He is in some respects unscrupulous; and, while
+it would be unjust to regard his marriage exactly as if it were one in
+private life, we resent his treatment of Octavia, whose character
+Shakespeare was obliged to leave a mere sketch, lest our feeling for the
+hero and heroine should be too much chilled. Yet, for all this, we
+sympathise warmly with Antony, are greatly drawn to him, and are
+inclined to regard him as a noble nature half spoiled by his time.
+
+It is a large, open, generous, expansive nature, quite free from envy,
+capable of great magnanimity, even of entire devotion. Antony is
+unreserved, naturally straightforward, we may almost say simple. He can
+admit faults, accept advice and even reproof, take a jest against
+himself with good-humour. He is courteous (to Lepidus, for example, whom
+Octavius treats with cold contempt); and, though he can be exceedingly
+dignified, he seems to prefer a blunt though sympathetic plainness,
+which is one cause of the attachment of his soldiers. He has none of the
+faults of the brooder, the sentimentalist, or the man of principle; his
+nature tends to splendid action and lusty enjoyment. But he is neither a
+mere soldier nor a mere sensualist. He has imagination, the temper of an
+artist who revels in abundant and rejoicing appetites, feasts his senses
+on the glow and richness of life, flings himself into its mirth and
+revelry, yet feels the poetry in all this, and is able also to put it
+by and be more than content with the hardships of adventure. Such a man
+could never have sought a crown by a murder like Macbeth's, or, like
+Brutus, have killed on principle the man who loved him, or have lost the
+world for a Cressida.
+
+Beside this strain of poetry he has a keen intellect, a swift perception
+of the lie of things, and much quickness in shaping a course to suit
+them. In _Julius Cćsar_ he shows this after the assassination, when he
+appears as a dexterous politician as well as a warm-hearted friend. He
+admires what is fine, and can fully appreciate the nobility of Brutus;
+but he is sure that Brutus's ideas are moonshine, that (as he says in
+our play) Brutus is mad; and, since his mighty friend, who was
+incomparably the finest thing in the world, has perished, he sees no
+reason why the inheritance should not be his own. Full of sorrow, he yet
+uses his sorrow like an artist to work on others, and greets his success
+with the glee of a successful adventurer. In the earlier play he proves
+himself a master of eloquence, and especially of pathos; and he does so
+again in the later. With a few words about his fall he draws tears from
+his followers and even from the caustic humorist Enobarbus. Like Richard
+II., he sees his own fall with the eyes of a poet, but a poet much
+greater than the young Shakespeare, who could never have written
+Antony's marvellous speech about the sunset clouds. But we listen to
+Antony, as we do not to Richard, with entire sympathy, partly because he
+is never unmanly, partly because he himself is sympathetic and longs for
+sympathy.
+
+The first of living soldiers, an able politician, a most persuasive
+orator, Antony nevertheless was not born to rule the world. He enjoys
+being a great man, but he has not the love of rule for rule's sake.
+Power for him is chiefly a means to pleasure. The pleasure he wants is
+so huge that he needs a huge power; but half the world, even a third of
+it, would suffice. He will not pocket wrongs, but he shows not the
+slightest wish to get rid of his fellow Triumvirs and reign alone. He
+never minded being subordinate to Julius Cćsar. By women he is not only
+attracted but governed; from the effect of Cleopatra's taunts we can see
+that he had been governed by Fulvia. Nor has he either the patience or
+the steadfastness of a born ruler. He contends fitfully, and is prone to
+take the step that is easiest at the moment. This is the reason why he
+consents to marry Octavia. It seems the shortest way out of an awkward
+situation. He does not intend even to try to be true to her. He will not
+think of the distant consequences.
+
+A man who loved power as much as thousands of insignificant people love
+it, would have made a sterner struggle than Antony's against his
+enchantment. He can hardly be said to struggle at all. He brings himself
+to leave Cleopatra only because he knows he will return. In every moment
+of his absence, whether he wake or sleep, a siren music in his blood is
+singing him back to her; and to this music, however he may be occupied,
+the soul within his soul leans and listens. The joy of life had always
+culminated for him in the love of women: he could say 'no' to none of
+them: of Octavia herself he speaks like a poet. When he meets Cleopatra
+he finds his Absolute. She satisfies, nay glorifies, his whole being.
+She intoxicates his senses. Her wiles, her taunts, her furies and
+meltings, her laughter and tears, bewitch him all alike. She loves what
+he loves, and she surpasses him. She can drink him to his bed, out-jest
+his practical jokes, out-act the best actress who ever amused him,
+out-dazzle his own magnificence. She is his play-fellow, and yet a great
+queen. Angling in the river, playing billiards, flourishing the sword he
+used at Philippi, hopping forty paces in a public street, she remains
+an enchantress. Her spirit is made of wind and flame, and the poet in
+him worships her no less than the man. He is under no illusion about
+her, knows all her faults, sees through her wiles, believes her capable
+of betraying him. It makes no difference. She is his heart's desire made
+perfect. To love her is what he was born for. What have the gods in
+heaven to say against it? To imagine heaven is to imagine her; to die is
+to rejoin her. To deny that this is love is the madness of morality. He
+gives her every atom of his heart.
+
+She destroys him. Shakespeare, availing himself of the historic fact,
+portrays, on Antony's return to her, the suddenness and the depth of his
+descent. In spite of his own knowledge, the protests of his captains,
+the entreaties even of a private soldier, he fights by sea simply and
+solely because she wishes it. Then in mid-battle, when she flies, he
+deserts navy and army and his faithful thousands and follows her. 'I
+never saw an action of such shame,' cries Scarus; and we feel the
+dishonour of the hero keenly. Then Shakespeare begins to raise him
+again. First, his own overwhelming sense of shame redeems him. Next, we
+watch the rage of the dying lion. Then the mere sally before the final
+defeat--a sally dismissed by Plutarch in three lines--is magnified into
+a battle, in which Antony displays to us, and himself feels for the last
+time, the glory of his soldiership. And, throughout, the magnanimity and
+gentleness which shine through his desperation endear him to us. How
+beautiful is his affection for his followers and even for his servants,
+and the devotion they return! How noble his reception of the news that
+Enobarbus has deserted him! How touchingly significant the refusal of
+Eros either to kill him or survive him! How pathetic and even sublime
+the completeness of his love for Cleopatra! His anger is born and dies
+in an hour. One tear, one kiss, outweighs his ruin. He believes she has
+sold him to his enemy, yet he kills himself because he hears that she is
+dead. When, dying, he learns that she has deceived him once more, no
+thought of reproach crosses his mind: he simply asks to be carried to
+her. He knows well that she is not capable of dying because he dies, but
+that does not sting him; when, in his last agony, he calls for wine that
+he may gain a moment's strength to speak, it is to advise her for the
+days to come. Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch the final speech of
+Antony. It is fine, but it is not miraculous. The miraculous speeches
+belong only to his own hero:
+
+  I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
+  I here importune death awhile, until
+  Of many thousand kisses the poor last
+  I lay upon thy lips;
+
+or the first words he utters when he hears of Cleopatra's death:
+
+  Unarm, Eros: the long day's task is done,
+  And we must sleep.
+
+If he meant the task of statesman and warrior, that is not what his
+words mean to us. They remind us of words more familiar and less great--
+
+  No rest but the grave for the pilgrim of love.
+
+And he is more than love's pilgrim; he is love's martyr.
+
+
+  4.
+
+To reserve a fragment of an hour for Cleopatra, if it were not palpably
+absurd, would seem an insult. If only one could hear her own remarks
+upon it! But I had to choose between this absurdity and the plan of
+giving her the whole hour; and to that plan there was one fatal
+objection. She has been described (by Ten Brink) as a courtesan of
+genius. So brief a description must needs be incomplete, and Cleopatra
+never forgets, nor, if we read aright, do we forget, that she is a
+great queen. Still the phrase is excellent; only a public lecture is no
+occasion for the full analysis and illustration of the character it
+describes.
+
+Shakespeare has paid Cleopatra a unique compliment. The hero dies in the
+fourth Act, and the whole of the fifth is devoted to the heroine.[5] In
+that Act she becomes unquestionably a tragic character, but, it appears
+to me, not till then. This, no doubt, is a heresy; but as I cannot help
+holding it, and as it is connected with the remarks already made on the
+first half of the play, I will state it more fully. Cleopatra stands in
+a group with Hamlet and Falstaff. We might join with them Iago if he
+were not decidedly their inferior in one particular quality. They are
+inexhaustible. You feel that, if they were alive and you spent your
+whole life with them, their infinite variety could never be staled by
+custom; they would continue every day to surprise, perplex, and delight
+you. Shakespeare has bestowed on each of them, though they differ so
+much, his own originality, his genius. He has given it most fully to
+Hamlet, to whom none of the chambers of experience is shut, and perhaps
+more of it to Cleopatra than to Falstaff. Nevertheless, if we ask
+whether Cleopatra, in the first four Acts, is a tragic figure like
+Hamlet, we surely cannot answer 'yes.' Naturally it does not follow that
+she is a comic figure like Falstaff. This would be absurd; for, even if
+she were ridiculous like Falstaff, she is not ridiculous to herself; she
+is no humorist. And yet there is a certain likeness. She shares a
+weakness with Falstaff--vanity; and when she displays it, as she does
+quite naively (for instance, in the second interview with the
+Messenger), she does become comic. Again, though like Falstaff she is
+irresistible and carries us away no less than the people around her, we
+are secretly aware, in the midst of our delight, that her empire is
+built on sand. And finally, as his love for the Prince gives dignity and
+pathos to Falstaff in his overthrow, so what raises Cleopatra at last
+into pure tragedy is, in part, that which some critics have denied her,
+her love for Antony.
+
+Many unpleasant things can be said of Cleopatra; and the more that are
+said the more wonderful she appears. The exercise of sexual attraction
+is the element of her life; and she has developed nature into a
+consummate art. When she cannot exert it on the present lover she
+imagines its effects on him in absence. Longing for the living, she
+remembers with pride and joy the dead; and the past which the furious
+Antony holds up to her as a picture of shame is, for her, glory. She
+cannot see an ambassador, scarcely even a messenger, without desiring to
+bewitch him. Her mind is saturated with this element. If she is dark, it
+is because the sun himself has been amorous of her. Even when death is
+close at hand she imagines his touch as a lover's. She embraces him that
+she may overtake Iras and gain Antony's first kiss in the other world.
+
+She lives for feeling. Her feelings are, so to speak, sacred, and pain
+must not come near her. She has tried numberless experiments to discover
+the easiest way to die. Her body is exquisitely sensitive, and her
+emotions marvellously swift. They are really so; but she exaggerates
+them so much, and exhibits them so continually for effect, that some
+readers fancy them merely feigned. They are all-important, and everybody
+must attend to them. She announces to her women that she is pale, or
+sick and sullen; they must lead her to her chamber but must not speak to
+her. She is as strong and supple as a leopard, can drink down a master
+of revelry, can raise her lover's helpless heavy body from the ground
+into her tower with the aid only of two women; yet, when he is sitting
+apart sunk in shame, she must be supported into his presence, she cannot
+stand, her head droops, she will die (it is the opinion of Eros) unless
+he comforts her. When she hears of his marriage and has discharged her
+rage, she bids her women bear her away; she faints; at least she would
+faint, but that she remembers various questions she wants put to the
+Messenger about Octavia. Enobarbus has seen her die twenty times upon
+far poorer moment than the news that Antony is going to Rome.
+
+Some of her feelings are violent, and, unless for a purpose, she does
+not dream of restraining them; her sighs and tears are winds and waters,
+storms and tempests. At times, as when she threatens to give Charmian
+bloody teeth, or hales the luckless Messenger up and down by the hair,
+strikes him and draws her knife on him, she resembles (if I dare say it)
+Doll Tearsheet sublimated. She is a mother; but the threat of Octavius
+to destroy her children if she takes her own life passes by her like the
+wind (a point where Shakespeare contradicts Plutarch). She ruins a great
+man, but shows no sense of the tragedy of his ruin. The anguish of
+spirit that appears in his language to his servants is beyond her; she
+has to ask Enobarbus what he means. Can we feel sure that she would not
+have sacrificed him if she could have saved herself by doing so? It is
+not even certain that she did not attempt it. Antony himself believes
+that she did--that the fleet went over to Octavius by her orders. That
+she and her people deny the charge proves nothing. The best we can say
+is that, if it were true, Shakespeare would have made that clear. She is
+willing also to survive her lover. Her first thought, to follow him
+after the high Roman fashion, is too great for her. She would live on if
+she could, and would cheat her victor too of the best part of her
+fortune. The thing that drives her to die is the certainty that she
+will be carried to Rome to grace his triumph. That alone decides her.[6]
+
+The marvellous thing is that the knowledge of all this makes hardly more
+difference to us than it did to Antony. It seems to us perfectly
+natural, nay, in a sense perfectly right, that her lover should be her
+slave; that her women should adore her and die with her; that Enobarbus,
+who foresaw what must happen, and who opposes her wishes and braves her
+anger, should talk of her with rapture and feel no bitterness against
+her; that Dolabella, after a minute's conversation, should betray to her
+his master's intention and enable her to frustrate it. And when Octavius
+shows himself proof against her fascination, instead of admiring him we
+turn from him with disgust and think him a disgrace to his species. Why?
+It is not that we consider him bound to fall in love with her. Enobarbus
+did not; Dolabella did not; we ourselves do not. The feeling she
+inspires was felt then, and is felt now, by women no less than men, and
+would have been shared by Octavia herself. Doubtless she wrought magic
+on the senses, but she had not extraordinary beauty, like Helen's, such
+beauty as seems divine.[7] Plutarch says so. The man who wrote the
+sonnets to the dark lady would have known it for himself. He goes out of
+his way to add to her age, and tells us of her wrinkles and the waning
+of her lip. But Enobarbus, in his very mockery, calls her a wonderful
+piece of work. Dolabella interrupts her with the cry, 'Most sovereign
+creature,' and we echo it. And yet Octavius, face to face with her and
+listening to her voice, can think only how best to trap her and drag her
+to public dishonour in the streets of Rome. We forgive him only for his
+words when he sees her dead:
+
+                 She looks like sleep,
+  As she would catch another Antony
+  In her strong toil of grace.
+
+And the words, I confess, sound to me more like Shakespeare's than his.
+
+That which makes her wonderful and sovereign laughs at definition, but
+she herself came nearest naming it when, in the final speech (a passage
+surpassed in poetry, if at all, only by the final speech of Othello),
+she cries,
+
+  I am fire and air; my other elements
+  I give to baser life.
+
+The fire and air which at death break from union with those other
+elements, transfigured them during her life, and still convert into
+engines of enchantment the very things for which she is condemned. I can
+refer only to one. She loves Antony. We should marvel at her less and
+love her more if she loved him more--loved him well enough to follow him
+at once to death; but it is to blunder strangely to doubt that she loved
+him, or that her glorious description of him (though it was also meant
+to work on Dolabella) came from her heart. Only the spirit of fire and
+air within her refuses to be trammelled or extinguished; burns its way
+through the obstacles of fortune and even through the resistance of her
+love and grief; and would lead her undaunted to fresh life and the
+conquest of new worlds. It is this which makes her 'strong toil of
+grace' unbreakable; speaks in her brows' bent and every tone and
+movement; glorifies the arts and the rages which in another would merely
+disgust or amuse us; and, in the final scenes of her life, flames into
+such brilliance that we watch her entranced as she struggles for
+freedom, and thrilled with triumph as, conquered, she puts her conqueror
+to scorn and goes to meet her lover in the splendour that crowned and
+robed her long ago, when her barge burnt on the water like a burnished
+throne, and she floated to Cydnus on the enamoured stream to take him
+captive for ever.[8]
+
+Why is it that, although we close the book in a triumph which is more
+than reconciliation, this is mingled, as we look back on the story, with
+a sadness so peculiar, almost the sadness of disenchantment? Is it that,
+when the glow has faded, Cleopatra's ecstasy comes to appear, I would
+not say factitious, but an effort strained and prodigious as well as
+glorious, not, like Othello's last speech, the final expression of
+character, of thoughts and emotions which have dominated a whole life?
+Perhaps this is so, but there is something more, something that sounds
+paradoxical: we are saddened by the very fact that the catastrophe
+saddens us so little; it pains us that we should feel so much triumph
+and pleasure. In _Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, though in a
+sense we accept the deaths of hero and heroine, we feel a keen sorrow.
+We look back, think how noble or beautiful they were, wish that fate had
+opposed to them a weaker enemy, dream possibly of the life they might
+then have led. Here we can hardly do this. With all our admiration and
+sympathy for the lovers we do not wish them to gain the world. It is
+better for the world's sake, and not less for their own, that they
+should fail and die. At the very first they came before us, unlike those
+others, unlike Coriolanus and even Macbeth, in a glory already
+tarnished, half-ruined by their past. Indeed one source of strange and
+most unusual effect in their story is that this marvellous passion comes
+to adepts in the experience and art of passion, who might be expected to
+have worn its charm away. Its splendour dazzles us; but, when the
+splendour vanishes, we do not mourn, as we mourn for the love of Romeo
+or Othello, that a thing so bright and good should die. And the fact
+that we mourn so little saddens us.
+
+A comparison of Shakespearean tragedies seems to prove that the tragic
+emotions are stirred in the fullest possible measure only when such
+beauty or nobility of character is displayed as commands unreserved
+admiration or love; or when, in default of this, the forces which move
+the agents, and the conflict which results from these forces, attain a
+terrifying and overwhelming power. The four most famous tragedies
+satisfy one or both of these conditions; _Antony and Cleopatra_, though
+a great tragedy, satisfies neither of them completely. But to say this
+is not to criticise it. It does not attempt to satisfy these conditions,
+and then fail in the attempt. It attempts something different, and
+succeeds as triumphantly as _Othello_ itself. In doing so it gives us
+what no other tragedy can give, and it leaves us, no less than any
+other, lost in astonishment at the powers which created it.
+
+1905
+
+
+  NOTE A
+
+We are to understand, surely, that Enobarbus dies of 'thought'
+(melancholy or grief), and has no need to seek a 'swifter mean.' Cf. IV.
+vi. 34 _seq._, with the death-scene and his address there to the moon as
+the 'sovereign mistress of true melancholy' (IV. ix.). Cf. also III.
+xiii., where, to Cleopatra's question after Actium, 'What shall we do,
+Enobarbus?' he answers, 'Think, and die.'
+
+The character of Enobarbus is practically an invention of Shakespeare's.
+The death-scene, I may add, is one of the many passages which prove that
+he often wrote what pleased his imagination but would lose half its
+effect in the theatre. The darkness and moonlight could not be
+represented on a public stage in his time.
+
+
+  NOTE B
+
+The scene is the first of the third Act. Here Ventidius says:
+
+  Cćsar and Antony have ever won
+  More in their officer than person: Sossius,
+  One of my place in Syria, his lieutenant,
+  For quick accumulation of renown,
+  Which he achieved by the minute, lost his favour.
+
+Plutarch (North, sec. 19) says that 'Sossius, one of Antonius'
+lieutenants in Syria, did notable good service,' but I cannot find in
+him the further statement that Sossius lost Antony's favour. I presume
+it is Shakespeare's invention, but I call attention to it on the bare
+chance that it may be found elsewhere than in Plutarch, when it would
+point to Shakespeare's use of a second authority.
+
+
+  NOTE C
+
+Since this lecture was published (_Quarterly Review_, April, 1906) two
+notable editions of _Antony and Cleopatra_ have been produced. Nothing
+recently written on Shakespeare, I venture to say, shows more thorough
+scholarship or better judgment than Mr. Case's edition in the Arden
+series; and Dr. Furness has added to the immense debt which students of
+Shakespeare owe to him, and (if that is possible) to the admiration and
+respect with which they regard him, by the appearance of _Antony and
+Cleopatra_ in his New Variorum edition.
+
+On one question about Cleopatra both editors, Mr. Case more tentatively
+and Dr. Furness very decidedly, dissent from the interpretation given in
+the last pages of my lecture. The question is how we are to understand
+the fact that, although on Antony's death Cleopatra expresses her
+intention of following him, she does not carry out this intention until
+she has satisfied herself that Octavius means to carry her to Rome to
+grace his triumph. Though I do not profess to feel certain that my
+interpretation is right, it still seems to me a good deal the most
+probable, and therefore I have not altered what I wrote. But my object
+here is not to defend my view or to criticise other views, but merely to
+call attention to the discussion of the subject in Mr. Case's
+Introduction and Dr. Furness's Preface.
+
+
+  NOTE D
+
+Shakespeare, it seems clear, imagined Cleopatra as a gipsy. And this, I
+would suggest, may be the explanation of a word which has caused much
+difficulty. Antony, when 'all is lost,' exclaims (IV. x. 38):
+
+  O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,--
+  Whose eye beck'd forth my wars, and call'd them home,
+  Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,--
+  Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
+  Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.
+
+Pope changed 'grave' in the first line into 'gay.' Others conjecture
+'great' and 'grand.' Steevens says that 'grave' means 'deadly,' and
+that the word 'is often used by Chapman' thus; and one of his two
+quotations supports his statement; but certainly in Shakespeare the word
+does not elsewhere bear this sense. It could mean 'majestic,' as Johnson
+takes it here. But why should it not have its usual meaning? Cleopatra,
+we know, was a being of 'infinite variety,' and her eyes may sometimes
+have had, like those of some gipsies, a mysterious gravity or solemnity
+which would exert a spell more potent than her gaiety. Their colour,
+presumably, was what is called 'black'; but surely they were not, like
+those of Tennyson's Cleopatra, '_bold_ black eyes.' Readers interested
+in seeing what criticism is capable of may like to know that it has been
+proposed to read, for the first line of the quotation above, 'O this
+false fowl of Egypt! haggard charmer.' [Though I have not cancelled this
+note I have modified some phrases in it, as I have not much confidence
+in my suggestion, and am inclined to think that Steevens was right.]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] As this lecture was composed after the publication of my
+    _Shakespearean Tragedy_ I ignored in it, as far as possible, such
+    aspects of the play as were noticed in that book, to the Index of
+    which I may refer the reader.
+
+  [2] See Note A.
+
+  [3] 'Now whilest Antonius was busie in this preparation, Octavia his
+    wife, whom he had left at Rome, would needs take sea to come unto
+    him. Her brother Octauius Cćsar was willing vnto it, not for his
+    respect at all (as most authors do report) as for that he might haue
+    an honest colour to make warre with Antonius if he did misuse her,
+    and not esteeme of her as she ought to be.'--_Life of Antony_
+    (North's Translation), sect. 29. The view I take does not, of course,
+    imply that Octavius had no love for his sister.
+
+  [4] See Note B.
+
+  [5] The point of this remark is unaffected by the fact that the play
+    is not divided into acts and scenes in the folios.
+
+  [6] See Note C.
+
+  [7] See Note D.
+
+  [8] Of the 'good' heroines, Imogen is the one who has most of this
+    spirit of fire and air; and this (in union, of course, with other
+    qualities) is perhaps the ultimate reason why for so many readers she
+    is, what Mr. Swinburne calls her, 'the woman above all Shakespeare's
+    women.'
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE THE MAN
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE THE MAN
+
+
+Such phrases as 'Shakespeare the man' or 'Shakespeare's personality'
+are, no doubt, open to objection. They seem to suggest that, if we could
+subtract from Shakespeare the mind that produced his works, the residue
+would be the man himself; and that his mind was some pure impersonal
+essence unaffected by the accidents of physique, temperament, and
+character. If this were so, one could but echo Tennyson's thanksgiving
+that we know so little of Shakespeare. But as it is assuredly not so,
+and as 'Shakespeare the man' really means the one indivisible
+Shakespeare, regarded for the time from a particular point of view, the
+natural desire to know whatever can be known of him is not to be
+repressed merely because there are people so foolish as to be careless
+about his works and yet curious about his private life. For my own part
+I confess that, though I should care nothing about the man if he had not
+written the works, yet, since we possess them, I would rather see and
+hear him for five minutes in his proper person than discover a new one.
+And though we may be content to die without knowing his income or even
+the surname of Mr. W. H., we cannot so easily resign the wish to find
+the man in his writings, and to form some idea of the disposition, the
+likes and dislikes, the character and the attitude towards life, of the
+human being who seems to us to have understood best our common human
+nature.
+
+The answer of course will be that our biographical knowledge of
+Shakespeare is so small, and his writings are so completely dramatic,
+that this wish, however natural, is idle. But I cannot think so.
+Doubtless, in trying to form an idea of Shakespeare, we soon reach the
+limits of reasonable certainty; and it is also true that the idea we can
+form without exceeding them is far from being as individual as we could
+desire. But it is more distinct than is often supposed, and it _is_
+reasonably certain; and although we can add to its distinctness only by
+more or less probable conjectures, they are not mere guesses, they
+really have probability in various degrees. On this whole subject there
+is a tendency at the present time to an extreme scepticism, which
+appears to me to be justified neither by the circumstances of the
+particular case nor by our knowledge of human nature in general.
+
+This scepticism is due in part to the interest excited by Mr. Lee's
+discussion of the Sonnets in his _Life_ of Shakespeare, and to the
+importance rightly attached to that discussion. The Sonnets are lyrical
+poems of friendship and love. In them the poet ostensibly speaks in his
+own person and expresses his own feelings. Many critics, no doubt, had
+denied that he really did so; but they had not Mr. Lee's knowledge, nor
+had they examined the matter so narrowly as he; and therefore they had
+not much weakened the general belief that the Sonnets, however
+conventional or exaggerated their language may sometimes be, do tell us
+a good deal about their author. Mr. Lee, however, showed far more fully
+than any previous writer that many of the themes, many even of the
+ideas, of these poems are commonplaces of Renaissance sonnet-writing;
+and he came to the conclusion that in the Sonnets Shakespeare
+'unlocked,' not 'his heart,' but a very different kind of armoury, and
+that the sole biographical inference deducible from them is that 'at one
+time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an
+endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank.'
+Now, if that inference is correct, it certainly tells us something about
+Shakespeare the man; but it also forbids us to take seriously what the
+Sonnets profess to tell us of his passionate affection, with its hopes
+and fears, its pain and joy; of his pride and his humility, his
+self-reproach and self-defence, his weariness of life and his
+consciousness of immortal genius. And as, according to Mr. Lee's
+statement, the Sonnets alone of Shakespeare's works 'can be held to
+throw any illumination on a personal trait,' it seems to follow that, so
+far as the works are concerned (for Mr. Lee is not specially sceptical
+as to the external testimony), the only idea we can form of the man is
+contained in that single inference.
+
+Now, I venture to surmise that Mr. Lee's words go rather beyond his
+meaning. But that is not our business here, nor could a brief discussion
+do justice to a theory to which those who disagree with it are still
+greatly indebted. What I wish to deny is the presupposition which seems
+to be frequently accepted as an obvious truth. Even if Mr. Lee's view of
+the Sonnets were indisputably correct, nay, if even, to go much further,
+the persons and the story in the Sonnets were as purely fictitious as
+those of _Twelfth Night_, they might and would still tell us something
+of the personality of their author. For however free a poet may be from
+the emotions which he simulates, and however little involved in the
+conditions which he imagines, he cannot (unless he is a mere copyist)
+write a hundred and fifty lyrics expressive of those simulated emotions
+without disclosing something of himself, something of the way in which
+he in particular _would_ feel and behave under the imagined conditions.
+And the same thing holds in principle of the dramas. Is it really
+conceivable that a man can write some five and thirty dramas, and
+portray in them an enormous amount and variety of human nature, without
+betraying anything whatever of his own disposition and preferences? I do
+not believe that he could do this, even if he deliberately set himself
+to the task. The only question is how much of himself he would betray.
+
+One is entitled to say this, I think, on general grounds; but we may
+appeal further to specific experience. Of many poets and novelists we
+know a good deal from external sources. And in these cases we find that
+the man so known to us appears also in his works, and that these by
+themselves would have left on us a personal impression which, though
+imperfect and perhaps in this or that point even false, would have been
+broadly true. Of course this holds of some writers much more fully than
+of others; but, except where the work is very scanty in amount, it seems
+to hold in some degree of all.[1] If so, there is an antecedent
+probability that it will apply to Shakespeare too. After all, he was
+human. We may exclaim in our astonishment that he was as universal and
+impartial as nature herself; but this is the language of religious
+rapture. If we assume that he was six times as universal as Sir Walter
+Scott, which is praise enough for a mortal, we may hope to form an idea
+of him from his plays only six times as dim as the idea of Scott that we
+should derive from the Waverley Novels.
+
+And this is not all. As a matter of fact, the great majority of
+Shakespeare's readers--lovers of poetry untroubled by theories and
+questions--do form from the plays some idea of the man. Knowingly or
+not, they possess such an idea; and up to a certain point the idea is
+the same. Ask such a man whether he thinks Shakespeare was at all like
+Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Milton, and it will not occur to him to
+answer 'I have not the faintest notion'; he will answer unhesitatingly
+No. Ask him whether he supposes that Shakespeare was at all like
+Fielding or Scott, and he will probably be found to imagine that, while
+differing greatly from both, he did belong to the same type or class.
+And such answers unquestionably imply an idea which, however deficient
+in detail, is definite.
+
+Again, to go a little further in the same direction, take this fact.
+After I had put together my notes for the present lecture, I re-read
+Bagehot's essay on Shakespeare the Man, and I read a book by Goldwin
+Smith and an essay by Leslie Stephen (who, I found, had anticipated a
+good deal that I meant to say).[2] These three writers, with all their
+variety, have still substantially the same idea of Shakespeare; and it
+is the idea of the competent 'general reader' more fully developed. Nor
+is the value of their agreement in the least diminished by the fact that
+they make no claim to be Shakespeare scholars. They show themselves much
+abler than most scholars, and if they lack the scholar's knowledge they
+are free from his defects. When they wrote their essays they had not
+wearied themselves with rival hypotheses, or pored over minutiae until
+they lost the broad and deep impressions which vivid reading leaves.
+Ultra-scepticism in this matter does not arise merely or mainly from the
+humility which every man of sense must feel as he creeps to and fro in
+Shakespeare's prodigious mind. It belongs either to the clever faddist
+who can see nothing straight, or it proceeds from those dangers and
+infirmities which the expert in any subject knows too well.
+
+The remarks I am going to make can have an interest only for those who
+share the position I have tried to indicate; who believe that the most
+dramatic of writers must reveal in his writings something of himself,
+but who recognise that in Shakespeare's case we can expect a reasonable
+certainty only within narrow limits, while beyond them we have to trust
+to impressions, the value of which must depend on familiarity with his
+writings, on freedom from prejudice and the desire to reach any
+particular result, and on the amount of perception we may happen to
+possess. I offer my own impressions, insecure and utterly unprovable as
+I know them to be, simply because those of other readers have an
+interest for me; and I offer them for the most part without argument,
+because even where argument might be useful it requires more time than a
+lecture can afford. For the same reason I shall assume, without
+attempting to define it further, and without dilating on its
+implications, the truth of that general feeling about Shakespeare and
+Fielding and Scott.
+
+But, before we come to impressions at all, we must look at the scanty
+store of external evidence: for we may lay down at once the canon that
+impressions derived from the works must supplement and not contradict
+this evidence, so far as it appears trustworthy. It is scanty, but it
+yields a decided outline.
+
+  This figure that thou here seest put,
+  It was for gentle Shakespeare cut:
+
+--so Jonson writes of the portrait in the Folio, and the same adjective
+'gentle' is used elsewhere of Shakespeare. It had not in Elizabethan
+English so confined a meaning as it has now; but it meant something, and
+I do not remember that their contemporaries called Marlowe or Jonson or
+Marston 'gentle.' Next, in the earliest extant reference that we have to
+Shakespeare, the writer says that he himself has seen his 'demeanour' to
+be 'civil.'[3] It is not saying much; but it is not the first remark an
+acquaintance would probably have made about Ben Jonson or Samuel
+Johnson. The same witness adds about Shakespeare that 'divers of worship
+have reported his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty.'
+'Honesty' and 'honest' in an Elizabethan passage like this mean more
+than they would now; they answer rather to our 'honourable' or 'honour.'
+Lastly we have the witness borne by Jonson in the words: 'I loved the
+man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He
+was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature.' With this notable
+phrase, to which I shall have to return, we come to an end of the
+testimony of eye-witnesses to Shakespeare the Man (for we have nothing
+to do with references to the mere actor or author). It is scanty, and
+insufficient to discriminate him from other persons who were gentle,
+civil, upright in their dealings, honourable, open, and free: but I
+submit that there have been not a few writers to whom all these
+qualities could not be truly ascribed, and that the testimony therefore
+does tell us something definite. To which must be added that we have
+absolutely no evidence which conflicts with it. Whatever Greene in his
+jealous embitterment might have said would carry little weight, but in
+fact, apart from general abuse of actors, he only says that the upstart
+had an over-weening opinion of his own capacities.
+
+There remain certain traditions and certain facts; and without
+discussing them I will mention what seems to me to have a more or less
+probable significance. Stratford stories of drinking bouts may go for
+nothing, but not the consensus of tradition to the effect that
+Shakespeare was a pleasant and convivial person, 'very good company, and
+of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit.'[4] That after his retirement
+to Stratford he spent at the rate of Ł1000 a year is incredible, but
+that he spent freely seems likely enough. The tradition that as a young
+man he got into trouble with Sir Thomas Lucy for deer-stealing (which
+would probably be an escapade rather than an essay in serious poaching)
+is supported by his unsavoury jest about the 'luces' in Sir Robert
+Shallow's coat. The more general statement that in youth he was wild
+does not sound improbable; and, obscure as the matter is, I cannot
+regard as comfortable the little we know of the circumstances of his
+very early marriage. A contemporary story of an amorous adventure in
+London may well be pure invention, but we have no reason to reject it
+peremptorily as we should any similar gossip about Milton. Lastly,
+certain inferences may safely be drawn from the facts that, once
+securely started in London, Shakespeare soon began to prosper, and
+acquired, for an actor and playwright, considerable wealth; that he
+bought property in his native town, and was consulted sometimes by
+fellow-townsmen on matters of business; that he enforced the payment of
+certain debts; and that he took the trouble to get a coat of arms. But
+what cannot with any logic or any safety be inferred is that he, any
+more than Scott, was impelled to write simply and solely by the desire
+to make money and improve his social position; and the comparative
+abundance of business records will mislead only those who are
+thoughtless enough to forget that, if they buy a house or sue a debtor,
+the fact will be handed down, while their kind or generous deeds may be
+recorded, if at all, only in the statement that they were 'of an open
+and free nature.'
+
+That Shakespeare was a good and perhaps keen man of business, or that he
+set store by a coat of arms, we could not have inferred from his
+writings. But we could have judged from them that he worked hard, and
+have guessed with some probability that he would rather have been a
+'gentleman' than an actor. And most of the other characteristics that
+appear from the external evidence would, I think, have seemed probable
+from a study of the works. This should encourage us to hope that we may
+be right in other impressions which we receive from them. And we may
+begin with one on which the external evidence has a certain bearing.
+
+Readers of Shakespeare, I believe, imagine him to have been not only
+sweet-tempered but modest and unassuming. I do not doubt that they are
+right; and, vague as the Folio portrait and the Stratford bust are, it
+would be difficult to believe that their subject was an irritable,
+boastful, or pushing person. But if we confine ourselves to the works,
+it is not easy to give reasons for the idea that their author was modest
+and unassuming; and a man is not necessarily so because he is open,
+free, and very good company. Perhaps we feel that a man who was not so
+would have allowed much more of himself to appear in his works than
+Shakespeare does. Perhaps again we think that anything like presumption
+or self-importance was incompatible with Shakespeare's sense of the
+ridiculous, his sublime common-sense, and his feeling of man's
+insignificance. And, lastly, it seems to us clear that the playwright
+admires and likes people who are modest, unassuming, and plain; while it
+may perhaps safely be said that those who lack these qualities rarely
+admire them in others and not seldom despise them. But, however we may
+justify our impression that Shakespeare possessed them, we certainly
+receive it; and assuming it to be as correct as the similar impression
+left by the Waverley Novels indubitably is, I go on to observe that the
+possession of them does not of necessity imply a want of spirit, or of
+proper self-assertion or insistence on rights.[5] It did not in Scott,
+and we have ground for saying that it did not in Shakespeare. If it had,
+he could not, being of an open and free nature, have prospered as he
+prospered. He took offence at Greene's attack on him, and showed that he
+took it. He was 'gentle,' but he liked his debts to be paid. However his
+attitude as to the enclosure at Welcombe may be construed, it is clear
+that he had to be reckoned with. It appears probable that he held
+himself wronged by Sir Thomas Lucy, and, pocketing up the injury because
+he could not resent it, gave him tit for tat after some fifteen years.
+The man in the Sonnets forgives his friend easily, but it is not from
+humility; and towards the world he is very far from humble. Of the
+dedication of _The Rape of Lucrece_ we cannot judge, for we do not know
+Shakespeare's relations with Lord Southampton at that date; but, as for
+the dedication of _Venus and Adonis_, could modesty and dignity be
+better mingled in a letter from a young poet to a great noble than they
+are there?
+
+Some of Shakespeare's writings point to a strain of deep reflection and
+of quasi-metaphysical imagination in his nature; and a few of them seem
+to reveal a melancholy, at times merely sad, at times embittered or
+profound, if never hopeless. It is on this side mainly that we feel a
+decided difference between him and Fielding, and even between him and
+Scott. Yet nothing in the contemporary allusions or in the traditions
+would suggest that he was notably thoughtful or serious, and much less
+that he was melancholy. And although we could lay no stress on this fact
+if it stood alone, it is probably significant. Shakespeare's writings,
+on the whole, leave a strong impression that his native disposition was
+much more gay than grave. They seem always to have made this impression.
+Fuller tells us that 'though his genius generally was jocular and
+inclining him to festivity, yet he could, when so disposed, be solemn
+and serious, as appears by his tragedies.'[6] Johnson agreed with Rymer
+that his 'natural disposition' led him to comedy; and, although Johnson
+after his manner distorts a true idea by wilful exaggeration and by
+perverting distinctions into antitheses, there is truth in his
+development of Rymer's remark. It would be easy to quote nineteenth
+century critics to the same effect; and the study of Shakespeare's early
+works leads to a similar result. It has been truly said that we feel
+ourselves in much closer contact with his personality in the early
+comedies and in _Romeo and Juliet_ than in _Henry VI._ and _Richard
+III._ and _Titus Andronicus_. In the latter, so far as we suppose them
+to be his own, he seems on the whole to be following, and then improving
+on, an existing style, and to be dealing with subjects which engage him
+as a playwright without much appealing to him personally. With _Romeo
+and Juliet_, on the other hand, and with _Richard II._ (which seems
+clearly to be his first attempt to write historical tragedy in a manner
+entirely his own), it is different, and we feel the presence of the
+whole man. The stories are tragic, but it is not precisely the _tragic_
+aspect of them that attracts him most; and even Johnson's statement,
+grotesquely false of the later tragedies, that 'in tragedy he is always
+struggling after some occasion to be comic,' is no more than an
+exaggeration in respect to _Romeo and Juliet_.[7] From these tragedies,
+as from _Love's Labour's Lost_ and the other early comedies, we should
+guess that the author was a young man, happy, alert, light-hearted, full
+of romance and poetry, but full also of fun; blessed with a keen
+enjoyment of absurdities, but, for all his intellectual subtlety and
+power, not markedly reflective, and certainly not particularly grave or
+much inclined to dejection. One might even suspect, I venture to think,
+that with such a flow of spirits and such exceeding alacrity of mind he
+might at present be a trifle wanting in feeling and disposed to levity.
+In any case, if our general impression is correct, we shall not find it
+hard to believe that the author of these plays and the creator of
+Falstaff was 'very good company' and a convivial good-fellow; and it
+might easily happen that he was tempted at times to 'go here and there'
+in society, and 'make himself a motley to the view' in a fashion that
+left some qualms behind.[8]
+
+There is a tradition that Shakespeare was 'a handsome well-shaped man.'
+If the Stratford monument does not lie, he was not in later life a
+meagre man. And if our notion of his temperament has any truth, he can
+hardly have been physically feeble, bloodless, or inactive. Most readers
+probably imagine him the reverse. Even sceptical critics tell us that he
+was fond of field-sports; and of his familiar knowledge of them there
+can be no question. Yet--I can but record the impression without trying
+to justify it--his writings do not at all suggest to me that he was a
+splendidly powerful creature like Fielding, or that he greatly enjoyed
+bodily exertion, or was not easily tired. He says much of horses, but he
+does not make one think, as Scott does, that a gallop was a great
+delight to him. Nor again do I feel after reading him that he had a
+strong natural love of adventurous deeds, or longed to be an explorer or
+a soldier. The island of his boyish dreams--if he heard much of voyages
+as a boy--was, I fancy, the haunt of marmosets and hedgehogs, quaint
+moon-calves and flitting sprites, lovely colours, sounds and sweet airs
+that give delight and hurt not, less like Treasure Island than the Coral
+Island of Ballantyne in the original illustrations, and more full of
+wonders than of dangers. He would have liked the Arabian Nights better
+than Dumas. Of course he admired men of action, understood them, and
+could express their feelings; but we do not feel particularly close to
+his personality as we read the warrior speeches of Hotspur, Henry,
+Othello, Coriolanus, as we do when we read of Romeo or Hamlet, or when
+we feel the attraction of Henry's modesty. In the same way, I suppose
+nobody feels Shakespeare's personal presence in the ambition of Macbeth
+or the pride of Coriolanus; many feel it in Macbeth's imaginative
+terrors, and in the disgust of Coriolanus at the idea of recounting his
+exploits in order to win votes. When we seem to hear Shakespeare's
+voice--and we hear it from many mouths besides Romeo's or Hamlet's--it
+is the voice of a man with a happy, enjoying, but still contemplative
+and even dreamy nature, not of a man richly endowed with the impulses
+and feelings either of strenuous action or of self-assertion. If he had
+drawn a Satan, we should not have felt his personality, as we do
+Milton's, in Satan's pride and indomitable courage and intolerance of
+rule.
+
+We know how often Shakespeare uses the antithesis of blood or passion,
+and judgment or reason; how he praises the due commingling of the two,
+or the control of the first by the second; how frequently it is the want
+of such control that exposes his heroes to the attack of Fortune or
+Fate. What, then, were the passions or the 'affections of the blood'
+most dangerous to himself? Not, if we have been right, those of pride or
+ambition; nor yet those of envy, hatred, or revenge; and still less that
+of avarice. But, in the first place, let us remember Jonson's words, 'he
+was honest and of an open and free nature,' and let me repeat an
+observation, made elsewhere in passing, that these words are true also
+of the great majority of Shakespeare's heroes, and not least of his
+tragic heroes. Jonson almost quotes Iago:
+
+  The Moor is of a free and open nature,
+  That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.
+
+The king says that Hamlet,
+
+                              being remiss,
+  Most generous, and free from all contrivings,
+  Will not peruse the foils.
+
+The words 'open and free' apply no less eminently to Brutus, Lear, and
+Timon. Antony and Coriolanus are men naturally frank, liberal, and
+large. Prospero lost his dukedom through his trustfulness. Romeo and
+Troilus and Orlando, and many slighter characters, are so far of the
+same type. Now such a free and open nature, obviously, is specially
+exposed to the risks of deception, perfidy, and ingratitude. If it is
+also a nature sensitive and intense, but not particularly active or (if
+the word may be excused) volitional, such experiences will tempt it to
+melancholy, embitterment, anger, possibly even misanthropy. If it _is_
+thus active or volitional, it may become the prey of violent and
+destructive passion, such as that of Othello and of Coriolanus, and such
+as Lear's would be if he were not so old. These affections, passions,
+and sufferings of free and open natures are Shakespeare's favourite
+tragic subject; and his favouritism, surely, goes so far as to
+constitute a decided peculiarity, not found thus in other tragic poets.
+Here he painted most, one cannot but think, what his own nature was most
+inclined to feel. But it would rather be melancholy, embitterment, an
+inactive rage or misanthropy, than any destructive passion; and it would
+be a further question whether, and how far, he may at any time have
+experienced what he depicts. I am speaking here only of his
+disposition.[9]
+
+That Shakespeare was as much inclined to be a lover as most poets we may
+perhaps safely assume; but can we conjecture anything further on this
+subject? I will confine myself to two points. He treats of love
+romantically, and tragically, and humorously. In the earlier plays
+especially the humorous aspect of the matter, the aspect so prominent in
+the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, the changefulness, brevity,
+irrationality, of the feeling, is at least as much dwelt on as the
+romantic, and with at least as much relish:
+
+  Lord! what fools these mortals be!
+
+Now, if there is anything peculiar in the pictures here, it is, perhaps,
+the special interest that Shakespeare seems to take in what we may call
+the unreality of the feeling of love in an imaginative nature. Romeo as
+he first appears, and, in a later play, Orsino, are examples of this.
+They are perfectly sincere, of course, but neither of them is really in
+love with a woman; each is in love with the state of being in love. This
+state is able to attach itself to a particular object, but it is not
+induced by the particular qualities of that object; it is more a dream
+than a passion, and can melt away without carrying any of the lover's
+heart with it; and in that sense it is unreal. This weakness, no doubt,
+is not confined to imaginative natures, but they may well be specially
+disposed to it (as Shelley was), and Shakespeare may have drawn it from
+his own experience. The suspicion is strengthened when we think of
+_Richard II_. In Richard this imaginative weakness is exhibited again,
+though not in relation to love. He luxuriates in images of his royal
+majesty, of the angels who guard his divine right, and of his own
+pathetic and almost sacred sufferings. The images are not insincere, and
+yet they are like dreams, for they refuse to touch earth and to connect
+themselves either with his past misdeeds or with the actions he ought
+now to perform. A strain of a similar weakness appears again in Hamlet,
+though only as one strain in a much more deep and complex nature. But
+this is not a common theme in poetry, much less in dramatic poetry.[10]
+
+To come to our second question. When Shakespeare painted Cressida or
+described her through the mouth of Ulysses ('O these encounterers,'
+etc.), or, again, when he portrayed the love of Antony for Cleopatra,
+was he using his personal experience? To answer that he _must_ have done
+so would be as ridiculous as to argue that Iago must be a portrait of
+himself; and the two plays contain nothing which, by itself, would
+justify us even in thinking that he probably did so. But we have the
+series of sonnets about the dark lady; and if we accept the sonnets to
+the friend as to some considerable extent based on fact and expressive
+of personal feelings, how can we refuse to take the others on the same
+footing? Even if the stories of the two series were not intertwined, we
+should have no ground for treating the two in different ways, unless we
+could say that external evidence, or the general impression we derive
+from Shakespeare's works, forbids us to believe that he could ever have
+been entangled in an intrigue like that implied in the second series, or
+have felt and thought in the manner there portrayed. Being unable to say
+this, I am compelled, most regretfully, to hold it probable that this
+series is, in the main, based on personal experience. And I say 'most
+regretfully,' not merely because one would regret to think that
+Shakespeare was the victim of a Cressida or even the lover of a
+Cleopatra, but because the story implied in these sonnets is of quite
+another kind. They leave, on the whole, a very disagreeable impression.
+We cannot compare it with the impressions produced, for example, by the
+'heathen' spirit of Goethe's _Roman Elegies_, or by the passion of
+Shakespeare's Antony. In these two cases, widely dissimilar of course,
+we may speak of 'immorality,' but we are not discomfited, much less
+disgusted. The feeling and the attitude are poetic, whole-hearted, and
+in one case passionate in the extreme. But the state of mind expressed
+in the sonnets about the dark lady is half-hearted, often prosaic, and
+never worthy of the name of passion. It is uneasy, dissatisfied,
+distempered, the state of mind of a man who despises his 'passion' and
+its object and himself, but, standing intellectually far above it, still
+has not resolution to end it, and only pains us by his gross and joyless
+jests. In _Troilus and Cressida_--not at all in the portrayal of
+Troilus's love, but in the atmosphere of the drama--we seem to trace a
+similar mood of dissatisfaction, and of intellectual but practically
+impotent contempt.
+
+In this connection it is natural to think of the 'unhappy period' which
+has so often been surmised in Shakespeare's life. There is not time here
+to expand the summary remarks made elsewhere on this subject; but I may
+refer a little more fully to a persistent impression left on my mind by
+writings which we have reason to assign to the years 1602-6.[11] There
+is surely something unusual in their tone regarding certain 'vices of
+the blood,' regarding drunkenness and sexual corruption. It does not lie
+in Shakespeare's _view_ of these vices, but in an undertone of disgust.
+Read Hamlet's language about the habitual drunkenness of his uncle, or
+even Cassio's words about his casual excess; then think of the tone of
+_Henry IV._ or _Twelfth Night_ or the _Tempest_; and ask if the
+difference is not striking. And if you are inclined to ascribe it wholly
+to the fact that _Hamlet_ and _Othello_ are tragedies, compare the
+passages in them with the scene on Pompey's galley in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_. The intent of that scene is terrible enough, but in the tone
+there is no more trace of disgust than in _Twelfth Night_. As to the
+other matter, what I refer to is not the transgression of lovers like
+Claudio and Juliet, nor even light-hearted irregularities like those of
+Cassio: here Shakespeare's speech has its habitual tone. But, when he is
+dealing with lechery and corruption, the undercurrent of disgust seems
+to become audible. Is it not true that in the plays from _Hamlet_ to
+_Timon_ that subject, in one shape or another, is continually before us;
+that the intensity of loathing in Hamlet's language about his mother's
+lust is unexampled in Shakespeare; that the treatment of the subject in
+_Measure for Measure_, though occasionally purely humorous, is on the
+whole quite unlike the treatment in _Henry IV._ or even in the brothel
+scenes of _Pericles_;[12] that while _Troilus and Cressida_ is full of
+disgust and contempt, there is not a trace of either in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, though some of the jesting there is obscene enough; that
+this same tone is as plainly heard in the unquestioned parts of _Timon_;
+and that, while it is natural in Timon to inveigh against female lechery
+when he speaks to Alcibiades and his harlots, there is no apparent
+reason why Lear in his exalted madness should choose this subject for
+similar invectives? 'Pah! give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to
+sweeten my imagination'--it is a fainter echo of this exclamation that
+one seems to hear in the plays of those years. Of course I am not
+suggesting that it is mainly due, or as regards drunkenness due in the
+least, to any private experience of Shakespeare's. It may have no
+connection whatever with that experience. It might well be connected
+with it only in so far as a man frequently wearied and depressed might
+be unusually sensitive to the ugly aspects of life. But, if we do not
+take the second series of sonnets to be purely fanciful, we shall think
+it probable that to some undefined extent it owed its origin to the
+experience depicted in them.[13]
+
+There remain the sonnets addressed to the friend. Even if it were
+possible to discuss the general question about them here, it would be
+needless; for I accept almost wholly, and in some points am greatly
+indebted to, the views put forward by Mr. Beeching in his admirable
+edition, to which I may therefore refer my hearers.[14] I intend only to
+state the main reason why I believe the sonnets to be, substantially,
+what they purport to be, and then to touch upon one or two of the points
+where they seem to throw light on Shakespeare's personality.
+
+The sonnets to the friend are, so far as we know, unique in Renaissance
+sonnet literature in being a prolonged and varied record of the intense
+affection of an older friend for a younger, and of other feelings
+arising from their relations. They have no real parallel in any series
+imitative of Virgil's second Eclogue, or in occasional sonnets to
+patrons or patron-friends couched in the high-flown language of the
+time. The intensity of the feelings expressed, however, ought not, by
+itself, to convince us that they are personal. The author of the plays
+could, I make no doubt, have written the most intimate of these poems to
+a mere creature of his imagination and without ever having felt them
+except in imagination. Nor is there any but an aesthetic reason why he
+should not have done so if he had wished. But an aesthetic reason there
+is; and this is the decisive point. No capable poet, much less a
+Shakespeare, intending to produce a merely 'dramatic' series of poems,
+would dream of inventing a story like that of these sonnets, or, even if
+he did, of treating it as they treat it. The story is very odd and
+unattractive. Such capacities as it has are but slightly developed. It
+is left obscure, and some of the poems are unintelligible to us because
+they contain allusions of which we can make nothing. Now all this is
+perfectly natural if the story is substantially a real story of
+Shakespeare himself and of certain other persons; if the sonnets were
+written from time to time as the relations of the persons changed, and
+sometimes in reference to particular incidents; and if they were written
+_for_ one or more of these persons (far the greater number for only
+one), and perhaps in a few cases for other friends,--written, that is to
+say, for people who knew the details and incidents of which we are
+ignorant. But it is all unnatural, well-nigh incredibly unnatural, if,
+with the most sceptical critics, we regard the sonnets as a free product
+of mere imagination.[15]
+
+Assuming, then, that the persons of the story, with their relations, are
+real, I would add only two remarks about the friend. In the first place,
+Mr. Beeching seems to me right in denying that there is sufficient
+evidence of his standing to Shakespeare and the 'rival' poet or poets in
+the position of a literary patron; while, even if he did, it appears to
+me quite impossible to take the language of many of the sonnets as that
+of interested flattery. And in the second place I should be inclined to
+push even further Mr. Beeching's view on another point. It is clear that
+the young man was considerably superior to the actor-dramatist in social
+position; but any gentleman would be so, and there is nothing to prove
+that he was more than a gentleman of some note, more than plain 'Mr. W.
+H.' (for these, on the obvious though not compulsory interpretation of
+the dedication, seem to have been his initials). It is remarkable
+besides that, while the earlier sonnets show much deference, the later
+show very little, so little that, when the writer, finding that he has
+pained his young friend by neglecting him, begs to be forgiven, he
+writes almost, if not quite, as an equal. Read, for example, sonnets
+109, 110, 120, and ask whether it is probable that Shakespeare is
+addressing here a great nobleman. It seems therefore most likely (though
+the question is not of much importance) that the sonnets are, to quote
+Meres's phrase,[16] his 'sonnets among his private friends.'
+
+If then there is, as it appears, no obstacle of any magnitude to our
+taking the sonnets as substantially what they purport to be, we may
+naturally look in them for personal traits (and, indeed, to repeat a
+remark made earlier, we might still expect to find such traits even if
+we knew the sonnets to be purely dramatic). But in drawing inferences we
+have to bear in mind what is implied by the qualification
+'substantially.' We have to remember that _some_ of these poems may be
+mere exercises of art; that all of them are poems, and not letters, much
+less _affidavits_; that they are Elizabethan poems; that the Elizabethan
+language of deference, and also of affection, is to our minds habitually
+extravagant and fantastic;[17] and that in Elizabethan plays friends
+openly express their love for one another as Englishmen now rarely do.
+Allowance being made, however, on account of these facts, the sonnets
+will still leave two strong impressions--that the poet was exceedingly
+sensitive to the charm of beauty, and that his love for his friend was,
+at least at one time, a feeling amounting almost to adoration, and so
+intense as to be absorbing. Those who are surprised by the first of
+these traits must have read Shakespeare's dramas with very inactive
+minds, and I must add that they seem to be somewhat ignorant of human
+nature. We do not necessarily love best those of our relatives, friends,
+and acquaintances who please our eyes most; and we should look askance
+on anyone who regulated his behaviour chiefly by the standard of beauty;
+but most of us, I suppose, love any human being, of either sex and of
+any age, the better for being beautiful, and are not the least ashamed
+of the fact. It is further the case that men who are beginning, like the
+writer of the sonnets, to feel tired and old, are apt to feel an
+increased and special pleasure in the beauty of the young.[18] If we
+remember, in addition, what some critics appear constantly to forget,
+that Shakespeare was a particularly poetical being, we shall hardly be
+surprised that the beginning of this friendship seems to have been
+something like a falling in love; and, if we must needs praise and
+blame, we should also remember that it became a 'marriage of true
+minds.'[19] And as to the intensity of the feeling expressed in the
+sonnets, we can easily believe it to be characteristic of the man who
+made Valentine and Proteus, Brutus and Cassius, Horatio and Hamlet; who
+painted that strangely moving portrait of Antonio, middle-aged, sad, and
+almost indifferent between life and death, but devoted to the young,
+brilliant spendthrift Bassanio; and who portrayed the sudden compelling
+enchantment exercised by the young Sebastian over the Antonio of
+_Twelfth Night_. 'If you will not murder me for your love, let me be
+your servant.' Antonio is accused of piracy: he may lose his life if he
+is identified:
+
+  I have many enemies in Orsino's court,
+  But, come what may, I do adore thee so
+  That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.
+
+The adoration, the 'prostration,' of the writer of the sonnets is of one
+kind with this.
+
+I do not remember what critic uses the word 'prostration.' It applies to
+Shakespeare's attitude only in some of the sonnets, but there it does
+apply, unless it is taken to suggest humiliation. _That_ is the term
+used by Hallam, but chiefly in view of a particular point, namely the
+failure of the poet to 'resent,' though he 'felt and bewailed,' the
+injury done him in 'the seduction of his mistress.' Though I think we
+should substitute 'resent more strongly' for the mere 'resent,' I do not
+deny that the poet's attitude in this matter strikes us at first as
+surprising as well as unpleasant to contemplate. But Hallam's
+explanation of it as perhaps due to the exalted position of the friend,
+would make it much more than unpleasant; and his language seems to show
+that he, like many critics, did not fully imagine the situation. It is
+not easy to speak of it in public with the requisite frankness; but it
+is necessary to realise that, whatever the friend's rank might be, he
+and the poet were intimate friends; that, manifestly, it was rather the
+mistress who seduced the friend than the friend the mistress; and that
+she was apparently a woman not merely of no reputation, but of such a
+nature that she might readily be expected to be mistress to two men at
+one and the same time. Anyone who realises this may call the situation
+'humiliating' in one sense, and I cannot quarrel with him; but he will
+not call it 'humiliating' in respect of Shakespeare's relation to his
+friend; nor will he wonder much that the poet felt more pain than
+resentment at his friend's treatment of him. There is something
+infinitely stranger in a play of Shakespeare's, and it may be
+symptomatic. Ten Brink called attention to it. Proteus actually offers
+violence to Sylvia, a spotless lady and the true love of his friend
+Valentine; and Valentine not only forgives him at once when he professes
+repentance, but offers to resign Sylvia to him! The incident is to us so
+utterly preposterous that we find it hard to imagine how the audience
+stood it; but, even if we conjecture that Shakespeare adopted it from
+the story he was using, we can hardly suppose that it was so absurd to
+him as it is to us.[20] And it is not the Sonnets alone which lead us to
+surmise that forgiveness was particularly attractive to him, and the
+forgiveness of a friend much easier than resentment. From the Sonnets we
+gather--and there is nothing in the plays or elsewhere to contradict the
+impression--that he would not be slow to resent the criticisms,
+slanders, or injuries of strangers or the world, and that he bore
+himself towards them with a proud, if silent, self-sufficiency. But, we
+surmise, for anyone whom he loved
+
+  He carried anger as a flint bears fire;
+  Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark
+  And straight is cold again;
+
+and towards anyone so fondly loved as the friend of the Sonnets he was
+probably incapable of fierce or prolonged resentment.
+
+
+The Sonnets must not occupy us further; and I will not dwell on the
+indications they afford that Shakespeare sometimes felt bitterly both
+the social inferiority of his position as an actor,[21] and its
+influence on his own character; or that (as we have already conjectured)
+he may sometimes have played the fool in society, sometimes felt weary
+of life, and often was over-tired by work. It is time to pass on to a
+few hesitating conjectures about what may be called his tastes.
+
+Some passages of his about music have become household words. It is not
+downright impossible that, like Bottom, having only a reasonable good
+ear, he liked best the tongs and the bones; that he wondered, with
+Benedick, how sheeps-guts should hale souls out of men's bodies; and
+that he wrote the famous lines in the _Merchant of Venice_ and in
+_Twelfth Night_ from mere observation and imagination. But it is futile
+to deal with scepticism run well-nigh mad, and certainly inaccessible to
+argument from the cases of poets whose tastes are matter of knowledge.
+Assuming therefore that Shakespeare was fond of music, I may draw
+attention to two points. Almost always he speaks of music as having a
+softening, tranquillising, or pensive influence. It lulls killing care
+and grief of heart to sleep. It soothes the sick and weary, and even
+makes them drowsy. Hamlet calls for it in his hysterical excitement
+after the success of the play scene. When it is hoped that Lear's long
+sleep will have carried his madness away, music is played as he awakes,
+apparently to increase the desired 'temperance.' It harmonises with the
+still and moon-lit night, and the dreamy happiness of newly-wedded
+lovers. Almost all the rare allusions to lively or exciting music,
+apart from dancing, refer, I believe, to 'the lofty instruments of
+_war_.' These facts would almost certainly have a personal significance
+if Shakespeare were a more modern poet. Whether they have any, or have
+much, in an Elizabethan I do not venture to judge.
+
+The second point is diminutive, but it may be connected with the first.
+The Duke in _Measure for Measure_ observes that music often has
+
+                       a charm
+  To make bad good and good provoke to harm.
+
+If we ask how it should provoke good to harm, we may recall what was
+said (p. 326) of the weaknesses of some poetic natures, and that no one
+speaks more feelingly of music than Orsino; further, how he refers to
+music as 'the food of love,' and who it is that almost repeats the
+phrase.
+
+  Give me some music: music, moody food
+  Of us that trade in love:
+
+--the words are Cleopatra's.[22] Did Shakespeare as he wrote them
+remember, I wonder, the dark lady to whose music he had listened (Sonnet
+128)?
+
+We should be greatly surprised to find in Shakespeare signs of the
+nineteenth century feeling for mountain scenery, but we can no more
+doubt that within certain limits he was sensitive to the beauty of
+nature than that he was fond of music.[23] The only question is whether
+we can guess at any preferences here. It is probably inevitable that the
+flowers most often mentioned should be the rose and the lily;[24] but
+hardly that the violet should come next and not far behind, and that the
+fragrance of the violet should be spoken of more often even than that of
+the rose, and, it seems, with special affection. This may be a fancy,
+and it will be thought a sentimental fancy too; but poets, like other
+people, may have favourite flowers; that of Keats, we happen to know,
+was the violet.
+
+Again, if we may draw any conclusion from the frequency and the
+character of the allusions, the lark held for Shakespeare the place of
+honour among birds; and the lines,
+
+  Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
+    And Phoebus gins arise,
+
+may suggest one reason for this. The lark, as several other collocations
+show, was to him the bird of joy that welcomes the sun; and it can
+hardly be doubted that dawn and early morning was the time of day that
+most appealed to him. That he felt the beauty of night and of moonlight
+is obvious; but we find very little to match the lines in _Richard II._,
+
+  The setting sun, and music at the close,
+  As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last;
+
+and still less to prove that he felt the magic of evening twilight, the
+'heavenliest hour' of a famous passage in _Don Juan_. There is a
+wonderful line in Sonnet 132,
+
+  And that full star that ushers in the even,
+
+but I remember little else of the same kind. Shakespeare, as it happens,
+uses the word 'twilight' only once, and in an unforgetable passage:
+
+  In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
+  As after sunset fadeth in the west:
+  Which by and by black night doth take away,
+  Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
+
+And this feeling, though not often so solemn, is on the whole the
+prevailing sentiment in the references to sunset and evening twilight.
+It corresponds with the analogy between the times of the day and the
+periods of human life. The sun sets from the weariness of age; but he
+rises in the strength and freshness of youth, firing the proud tops of
+the eastern pines, and turning the hills and the sea into burnished
+gold, while jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops, and the
+lark sings at the gate of heaven. In almost all the familiar lines about
+dawn one seems to catch that 'indescribable gusto' which Keats heard in
+Kean's delivery of the words:
+
+  Stir with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk.
+
+Two suggestions may be ventured as to Shakespeare's feelings towards
+four-footed animals. The first must be very tentative. We do not expect
+in a writer of that age the sympathy with animals which is so beautiful
+a trait in much of the poetry of the last hundred and fifty years. And I
+can remember in Shakespeare scarcely any sign of _fondness_ for an
+animal,--not even for a horse, though he wrote so often of horses. But
+there are rather frequent, if casual, expressions of pity, in
+references, for example, to the hunted hare or stag, or to the spurred
+horse:[25] and it may be questioned whether the passage in _As You Like
+It_ about the wounded deer is quite devoid of personal significance. No
+doubt Shakespeare thought the tears of Jaques sentimental; but he put a
+piece of himself into Jaques. And, besides, it is not Jaques alone who
+dislikes the killing of the deer, but the Duke; and we may surely hear
+some tone of Shakespeare's voice in the Duke's speech about the life in
+the forest. Perhaps we may surmise that, while he enjoyed field-sports,
+he felt them at times to be out of tune with the harmony of nature.
+
+On the second point, I regret to say, I can feel no doubt. Shakespeare
+did not care for dogs, as Homer did; he even disliked them, as Goethe
+did. Of course he can write eloquently about the points of hounds and the
+music of their voices in the chase, and humorously about Launce's love
+for his cur and even about the cur himself; but this is no more
+significant on the one side than is his conventional use of 'dog' as a
+term of abuse on the other. What is significant is the absence of
+allusion, or (to be perfectly accurate) of sympathetic allusion, to the
+characteristic virtues of dogs, and the abundance of allusions of an
+insulting kind. Shakespeare has observed and recorded, in some instances
+profusely, every vice that I can think of in an ill-conditioned dog. He
+fawns and cringes and flatters, and then bites the hand that caressed
+him; he is a coward who attacks you from behind, and barks at you the
+more the farther off you go; he knows neither charity, humanity, nor
+gratitude; as he flatters power and wealth, so he takes part against the
+poor and unfashionable, and if fortune turns against you so does he.[26]
+The plays swarm with these charges. Whately's exclamation--uttered after
+a College meeting or a meeting of Chapter, I forget which--'The more I
+see of men, the more I like dogs,' would never have been echoed by
+Shakespeare. The things he most loathed in men he found in dogs too. And
+yet all this might go for nothing if we could set anything of weight
+against it. But what can we set? Nothing whatever, so far as I remember,
+except a recognition of courage in bear-baiting, bull-baiting mastiffs.
+For I cannot quote as favourable to the spaniel the appeal of Helena:
+
+  I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
+  The more you beat me I will fawn on you:
+  Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
+  Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
+  Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
+
+This may show that Shakespeare was alive to the baseness of a
+spaniel-owner, but not that he appreciated that self-less affection
+which he describes. It is more probable that it irritated him, as it
+does many men still; and, as for its implying fidelity, there is no
+reference, I believe, to the fidelity of the dog in the whole of his
+works, and he chooses the spaniel himself as a symbol of flattery and
+ingratitude: his Cćsar talks of
+
+  Knee-crooked court'sies and base spaniel-fawning;
+
+his Antony exclaims:
+
+                              the hearts
+  That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave
+  Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
+  On blossoming Cćsar.
+
+To all that he loved most in men he was blind in dogs. And then we call
+him universal!
+
+This line of research into Shakespeare's tastes might be pursued a good
+deal further, but we must return to weightier matters. We saw that he
+could sympathise with anyone who erred and suffered from impulse,
+affections of the blood, or even such passions as were probably no
+danger to himself,--ambition, for instance, and pride. Can we learn
+anything more about him by observing virtues or types of character with
+which he appears to feel little sympathy, though he may approve them? He
+certainly does not show this imperfect sympathy towards self-control; we
+seem to feel even a special liking for Brutus, and again for Horatio,
+who has suffered much, is quietly patient, and has mastered both himself
+and fortune. But, not to speak of coldly selfish natures, he seems
+averse to bloodless people, those who lack, or those who have deadened,
+the natural desires for joy and sympathy, and those who tend to be
+precise.[27] Nor does he appear to be drawn to men who, as we say, try
+to live or to act on principle; nor to those who aim habitually at
+self-improvement; nor yet to the saintly type of character. I mean, not
+that he _could_ not sympathise with them, but that they did not attract
+him. Isabella, in _Measure for Measure_, is drawn, of course, with
+understanding, but, it seems to me, with little sympathy. Her readiness
+to abandon her pleading for Claudio, out of horror at his sin and a
+sense of the justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing his pardon, is
+doubtless in character; but if Shakespeare had sympathised more with her
+at this point, so should we; while, as it is, we are tempted to exclaim,
+
+  She loves him not, she wants the natural touch;
+
+and perhaps if Shakespeare had liked her better and had not regarded her
+with some irony, he would not have allowed himself, for mere
+convenience, to degrade her by marrying her to the Duke. Brutus and
+Cordelia, on the other hand, are drawn with the fullest imaginative
+sympathy, and they, it may be said, are characters of principle; but
+then (even if Cordelia could be truly so described) they are also
+intensely affectionate, and by no means inhumanly self-controlled.
+
+The mention of Brutus may carry us somewhat farther. Shakespeare's
+Brutus kills Cćsar, not because Cćsar aims at absolute power, but
+because Brutus fears that absolute power may make him cruel. That is not
+Plutarch's idea, it is Shakespeare's. He could fully sympathise with the
+gentleness of Brutus, with his entire superiority to private aims and
+almost entire freedom from personal susceptibilities, and even with his
+resolution to sacrifice his friend; but he could not so sympathise with
+mere horror of monarchy or absolute power. And now extend this a little.
+Can you imagine Shakespeare an enthusiast for an 'idea'; a devotee of
+divine right, or the rights of Parliament, or any particular form of
+government in Church or State; a Fifth Monarchy man, or a Quaker, or a
+thick-and-thin adherent of any compact, exclusive, abstract creed, even
+if it were as rational and noble as Mazzini's? This type of mind, even
+at its best, is alien from his. Scott is said, rightly or wrongly, to
+have portrayed the Covenanters without any deep understanding of them;
+it would have been the same with Shakespeare. I am not praising him, or
+at least not merely praising him. One may even suggest that on this side
+he was limited. In any age he would have been safe against fanaticism
+and one-sided ideas; but perhaps in no age would he have been the man to
+insist with the necessary emphasis on those one-sided ideas which the
+moment may need, or even to give his whole heart to men who join a
+forlorn hope or are martyred for a faith. And though it is rash to
+suggest that anything in the way of imagination was beyond his reach,
+perhaps the legend of Faust, with his longings for infinite power and
+knowledge and enjoyment of beauty, would have suited him less well than
+Marlowe; and if he had written on the subject that Cervantes took, his
+Don Quixote would have been at least as laughable as the hero we know,
+but would he have been a soul so ideally noble and a figure so
+profoundly pathetic?
+
+This would be the natural place to discuss Shakespeare's politics if we
+were to discuss them at all. But even if the question whether he shows
+any interest in the political differences of his time, or any sympathies
+or antipathies in regard to them, admits of an answer, it could be
+answered only by an examination of details; and I must pass it by, and
+offer only the briefest remarks on a wider question. Shakespeare, as we
+might expect, shows no sign of believing in what is sometimes called a
+political 'principle.' The main ideas which, consciously or
+unconsciously, seem to govern or emerge from his presentation of state
+affairs, might perhaps be put thus. National welfare is the end of
+politics, and the criterion by which political actions are to be judged.
+It implies of necessity 'degree'; that is, differences of position and
+function in the members of the body politic.[28] And the first
+requisites of national welfare are the observance of this degree, and
+the concordant performance of these functions in the general interest.
+But there appear to be no further absolute principles than these: beyond
+them all is relative to the particular case and its particular
+conditions. We find no hint, for example, in _Julius Cćsar_ that
+Shakespeare regarded a monarchical form of government as intrinsically
+better than a republican, or _vice versa_; no trace in _Richard II._
+that the author shares the king's belief in his inviolable right, or
+regards Bolingbroke's usurpation as justifiable. We perceive, again,
+pretty clearly in several plays a dislike and contempt of demagogues,
+and an opinion that mobs are foolish, fickle, and ungrateful. But these
+are sentiments which the most determined of believers in democracy, if
+he has sense, may share; and if he thinks that the attitude of
+aristocrats like Volumnia and Coriolanus is inhuman and as inexcusable
+as that of the mob, and that a mob is as easily led right as wrong and
+has plenty of good nature in it, he has abundant ground for holding that
+Shakespeare thought so too. That Shakespeare greatly liked and admired
+the typical qualities of the best kind of aristocrat seems highly
+probable; but then this taste has always been compatible with a great
+variety of political opinions. It is interesting but useless to wonder
+what his own opinions would have been at various periods of English
+history: perhaps the only thing we can be pretty sure of in regard to
+them is that they would never have been extreme, and that he would never
+have supposed his opponents to be entirely wrong.
+
+We have tried to conjecture the impulses, passions, and errors with
+which Shakespeare could easily sympathise, and the virtues and types of
+character which he may have approved without much sympathy. It remains
+to ask whether we can notice tendencies and vices to which he felt any
+special antipathy; and it is obvious and safe to point to those most
+alien to a gentle, open, and free nature, the vices of a cold and hard
+disposition, self-centred and incapable of fusion with others. Passing
+over, again, the plainly hideous forms or extremes of such vice, as we
+see them in characters like Richard III., Iago, Goneril and Regan, or
+the Queen in _Cymbeline_, we seem to detect a particular aversion to
+certain vices which have the common mark of baseness; for instance,
+servility and flattery (especially when deliberate and practised with a
+view to self-advancement), feigning in friendship, and ingratitude.
+Shakespeare's _animus_ against the dog arises from the attribution of
+these vices to him, and against them in men are directed the invectives
+which seem to have a personal ring. There appears to be traceable also a
+feeling of a special, though less painful, kind against unmercifulness.
+I do not mean, of course, cruelty, but unforgivingness, and even the
+tendency to prefer justice to mercy. From no other dramatic author,
+probably, could there be collected such prolonged and heart-felt praises
+of mercy as from Shakespeare. He had not at all strongly, I think, that
+instinct and love of justice and retribution which in many men are so
+powerful; but Prospero's words,
+
+                 they being penitent,
+  The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
+  Not a jot further,
+
+came from his heart. He perceived with extreme clearness the connection
+of acts with their consequences; but his belief that in this sense 'the
+gods are just' was accompanied by the strongest feeling that forgiveness
+ought to follow repentance, and (if I may so put it) his favourite
+petition was the one that begins 'Forgive us our trespasses.' To
+conclude, I have fancied that he shows an unusual degree of disgust at
+slander and dislike of censoriousness; and where he speaks in the
+Sonnets of those who censured him he betrays an exceptionally decided
+feeling that a man's offences are his own affair and not the
+world's.[29]
+
+Some of the vices which seem to have been particularly odious to
+Shakespeare have, we may notice, a special connection with prosperity
+and power. Men feign and creep and flatter to please the powerful and
+to win their own way to ease or power; and they envy and censure and
+slander their competitors in the race; and when they succeed, they are
+ungrateful to their friends and helpers and patrons; and they become
+hard and unmerciful, and despise and bully those who are now below them.
+So, perhaps, Shakespeare said to himself in those years when, as we
+imagine, melancholy and embitterment often overclouded his sky, though
+they did not obscure his faith in goodness and much less his
+intellectual vision. And prosperity and power, he may have added, come
+less frequently by merit than by those base arts or by mere fortune. The
+divorce of goodness and power was, to Shelley, the 'woe of the world';
+if we substitute for 'goodness' the wider word 'merit,' we may say that
+this divorce, with the evil bred by power, is to Shakespeare also the
+root of bitterness. This fact, presented in its extreme form of the
+appalling cruelty of the prosperous, and the heart-rending suffering of
+the defenceless, forms the problem of his most tremendous drama. We have
+no reason to surmise that his own sufferings were calamitous; and the
+period which seems to be marked by melancholy and embitterment was one
+of outward, or at least financial, prosperity; but nevertheless we can
+hardly doubt that he felt on the small scale of his own life the
+influence of that divorce of power and merit. His complaint against
+Fortune, who had so ill provided for his life, runs through the Sonnets.
+Even if we could regard as purely conventional the declarations that his
+verses would make his friend immortal, it is totally impossible that he
+can have been unaware of the gulf between his own gifts and those of
+others, or can have failed to feel the disproportion between his
+position and his mind. Hamlet had never experienced
+
+                       the spurns
+  That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
+
+and that make the patient soul weary of life; the man who had
+experienced them was the writer of Sonnet 66, who cried for death
+because he was tired with beholding
+
+              desert a beggar born,
+  And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
+
+--a beggarly soul flaunting in brave array. Neither had Hamlet felt in
+his own person 'the insolence of office'; but the actor had doubtless
+felt it often enough, and we can hardly err in hearing his own voice in
+dramatic expressions of wonder and contempt at the stupid pride of mere
+authority and at men's slavish respect for it. Two examples will
+suffice. 'Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar, and the
+creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of
+authority. A dog's obeyed in office': so says Lear, when madness has
+cleared his vision, and indignation makes the Timon-like verses that
+follow. The other example is almost too famous for quotation but I have
+a reason for quoting it:
+
+                   man, proud man,
+  Drest in a little brief authority,
+  Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
+  His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
+  Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
+  As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
+  Would all themselves laugh mortal.
+
+It is Isabella who says that; but it is scarcely in character;
+Shakespeare himself is speaking.[30]
+
+It is with great hesitation that I hazard a few words on Shakespeare's
+religion. Any attempt to penetrate his reserve on this subject may
+appear a crowning impertinence; and, since his dramas are almost
+exclusively secular, any impressions we may form must here be even more
+speculative than usual. Yet it is scarcely possible to read him much
+without such speculations; and there are at least some theories which
+may confidently be dismissed. It cannot be called absolutely impossible
+that Shakespeare was indifferent to music and to the beauty of Nature,
+and yet the idea is absurd; and in the same way it is barely possible,
+and yet it is preposterous, to suppose that he was an ardent and devoted
+atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic, and that all the indications to
+the contrary are due to his artfulness and determination not to get into
+trouble. There is no absurdity, on the other hand, nor of necessity
+anything hopeless, in the question whether there are signs that he
+belonged to this or that church, and was inclined to one mode of thought
+within it rather than to another. Only the question is scarcely worth
+asking for our present purpose, unless there is some reason to believe
+that he took a keen interest in these matters. Suppose, for example,
+that we had ground to accept a tradition that he 'died a papist,' this
+would not tell us much about him unless we had also ground to think that
+he lived a papist, and that his faith went far into his personality. But
+in fact we receive from his writings, it appears to me, a rather strong
+impression that he concerned himself little, if at all, with differences
+of doctrine or church government.[31] And we may go further. Have we not
+reason to surmise that he was not, in the distinctive sense of the word,
+a religious man--a man, that is to say, whose feelings and actions are
+constantly and strongly influenced by thoughts of his relation to an
+object of worship? If Shakespeare had been such a man, is it credible
+that we should find nothing in tradition or in his works to indicate the
+fact; and is it likely that we should find in his works some things
+that we do find there?[32]
+
+Venturing with much doubt a little farther I will put together certain
+facts and impressions without at once drawing any conclusion from them.
+Almost all the speeches that can be called pronouncedly religious and
+Christian in phraseology and spirit are placed in the mouths of persons
+to whom they are obviously appropriate, either from their position
+(_e.g._ bishops, friars, nuns), or from what Shakespeare found in
+histories (_e.g._ Henry IV., V., and VI.), or for some other plain
+reason. We cannot build, therefore, on these speeches in the least. On
+the other hand (except, of course, where they are hypocritical or
+politic), we perceive in Shakespeare's tone in regard to them not the
+faintest trace of dislike or contempt; nor can we find a trace anywhere
+of such feelings, or of irreverence, towards Christian ideas,
+institutions, or customs (mere humorous irreverence is not relevant
+here); and in the case of 'sympathetic' characters, living in Christian
+times but not in any decided sense religious, no disposition is visible
+to suppress or ignore their belief in, and use of, religious ideas. Some
+characters, again, Christian or heathen, who appear to be drawn with
+rather marked sympathy, have strong, if simple, religious convictions
+(e.g. Horatio, Edgar, Hermione); and in others, of whom so much can
+hardly be said, but who strike many readers, rightly or wrongly, as
+having a good deal of Shakespeare in them (_e.g._ Romeo and Hamlet), we
+observe a quiet but deep sense that they and other men are neither their
+own masters nor responsible only to themselves and other men, but are in
+the hands of 'Providence' or guiding powers 'above.'[33]
+
+To this I will add two remarks. To every one, I suppose, certain
+speeches sound peculiarly personal. Perhaps others may share my feeling
+about Hamlet's words:
+
+  There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
+  Rough-hew them how we will;
+
+and about those other words of his:
+
+  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy;
+
+and about the speech of Prospero ending, 'We are such stuff as dreams
+are made on.'[34] On the other hand, we observe that Hamlet seems to
+have arrived at that conviction as to the 'divinity' after reflection,
+and that, while he usually speaks as one who accepts the received
+Christian ideas, yet, when meditating profoundly, he appears to ignore
+them.[35] In the same way the Duke in _Measure for Measure_ is for the
+most part, and necessarily, a Christian; yet nobody would guess it from
+the great speech, 'Be absolute for death,' addressed by a supposed friar
+to a youth under sentence to die, yet containing not a syllable about a
+future life.[36]
+
+Without adducing more of the endless but baffling material for a
+conclusion, I will offer the result left on my mind, and, merely for the
+sake of brevity, will state it with hardly any of the qualifications it
+doubtless needs. Shakespeare, I imagine, was not, in the sense assigned
+to the word some minutes ago, a religious man. Nor was it natural to him
+to regard good and evil, better and worse, habitually from a theological
+point of view. But (this appears certain) he had a lively and serious
+sense of 'conscience,' of the pain of self-reproach and
+self-condemnation, and of the torment to which this pain might rise.[37]
+He was not in the least disposed to regard conscience as somehow
+illusory or a human invention, but on the contrary thought of it (I use
+the most non-committal phrase I can find) as connected with the power
+that rules the world and is not escapable by man. He realised very fully
+and felt very keenly, after his youth was past and at certain times of
+stress, the sufferings and wrongs of men, the strength of evil, the
+hideousness of certain forms of it, and its apparent incurability in
+certain cases. And he must sometimes have felt all this as a terrible
+problem. But, however he may have been tempted, and may have yielded, to
+exasperation and even despair, he never doubted that it is best to be
+good; felt more and more that one must be patient and must forgive;[38]
+and probably maintained unbroken a conviction, practical if not
+formulated, that to be good is to be at peace with that unescapable
+power. But it is unlikely that he attempted to theorise further on the
+nature of the power. All was for him, in the end, mystery; and, while we
+have no reason whatever to attribute to him a belief in the ghosts and
+oracles he used in his dramas, he had no inclination to play the spy on
+God or to limit his power by our notions of it. That he had dreams and
+ponderings about the mystery such as he never put into the mouths of
+actors I do not doubt; but I imagine they were no more than dreams and
+ponderings and movings about in worlds unrealised.
+
+Whether to this 'religion' he joined a more or less conventional
+acceptance of some or all of the usual Christian ideas, it is impossible
+to tell. There is no great improbability to me in the idea that he did
+not, but it is more probable to me that he did,--that, in fact, though
+he was never so tormented as Hamlet, his position in this matter was, at
+least in middle life (and he never reached old age), much like Hamlet's.
+If this were so it might naturally happen that, as he grew older and
+wearier of labour, and perhaps of the tumult of pleasure and thought and
+pain, his more personal religion, the natural piety which seems to gain
+in weight and serenity in the latest plays, came to be more closely
+joined with Christian ideas. But I can find no clear indications that
+this did happen; and though some have believed that they discovered
+these ideas displayed in full, though not explicitly, in the _Tempest_,
+I am not able to hear there more than the stream of Shakespeare's own
+'religion' moving with its fullest volume and making its deepest and
+most harmonious music.[39]
+
+This lecture must end, though its subject is endless, and I will touch
+on only one point more,--one that may to some extent recall and connect
+the scattered suggestions I have offered.
+
+If we were obliged to answer the question which of Shakespeare's plays
+contains, not indeed the fullest picture of his mind, but the truest
+expression of his nature and habitual temper, unaffected by special
+causes of exhilaration or gloom, I should be disposed to choose _As You
+Like It_. It wants, to go no further, the addition of a touch of Sir
+Toby or Falstaff, and the ejection of its miraculous conversions of
+ill-disposed characters. But the misbehaviour of Fortune, and the
+hardness and ingratitude of men, form the basis of its plot, and are a
+frequent topic of complaint. And, on the other hand, he who is reading
+it has a smooth brow and smiling lips, and a heart that murmurs,
+
+               Happy is your grace,
+  That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
+  Into so quiet and so sweet a style.
+
+And it is full not only of sweetness, but of romance, fun, humour of
+various kinds, delight in the oddities of human nature, love of modesty
+and fidelity and high spirit and patience, dislike of scandal and
+censure, contemplative curiosity, the feeling that in the end we are all
+merely players, together with a touch of the feeling that
+
+  Then is there mirth in heaven
+  When earthly things made even
+    Atone together.
+
+And, finally, it breathes the serene holiday mood of escape from the
+toil, competition, and corruption of city and court into the sun and
+shadow and peace of the country, where one can be idle and dream and
+meditate and sing, and pursue or watch the deer as the fancy takes one,
+and make love or smile at lovers according to one's age.[40]
+
+If, again, the question were put to us, which of Shakespeare's
+characters reveals most of his personality, the majority of those who
+consented to give an answer would answer 'Hamlet.' This impression may
+be fanciful, but it is difficult to think it wholly so, and, speaking
+for those who share it, I will try to trace some of its sources. There
+is a good deal of Shakespeare that is not in Hamlet. But Hamlet, we
+think, is the only character in Shakespeare who could possibly have
+composed his plays (though it appears unlikely, from his verses to
+Ophelia, that he could have written the best songs). Into Hamlet's mouth
+are put what are evidently Shakespeare's own views on drama and acting.
+Hamlet alone, among the great serious characters, can be called a
+humorist. When in some trait of another character we seem to touch
+Shakespeare's personality, we are frequently reminded of Hamlet.[41]
+When in a profound reflective speech we hear Shakespeare's voice, we
+usually hear Hamlet's too, and his peculiar humour and turns of phrase
+appear unexpectedly in persons otherwise unlike him and unlike one
+another. The most melancholy group of Sonnets (71-74) recalls Hamlet at
+once, here and there recalls even his words; and he and the writer of
+Sonnet 66 both recount in a list the ills that make men long for death.
+And then Hamlet 'was indeed honest and of an open and free nature';
+sweet-tempered and modest, yet not slow to resent calumny or injury; of
+a serious but not a melancholy disposition; and the lover of his friend.
+And, with these traits, we remember his poet ecstasy at the glory of
+earth and sky and the marvellous endowments of man; his eager
+affectionate response to everything noble or sweet in human nature; his
+tendency to dream and to live in the world of his own mind; his
+liability to sudden vehement emotion, and his admiration for men whose
+blood and judgment are better commingled; the overwhelming effect of
+disillusionment upon him; his sadness, fierceness, bitterness and
+cynicism. All this, and more: his sensitiveness to the call of duty; his
+longing to answer to it, and his anguish over his strange delay; the
+conviction gathering in his tortured soul that man's purposes and
+failures are divinely shaped to ends beyond his vision; his incessant
+meditation, and his sense that there are mysteries which no meditation
+can fathom; nay, even little traits like his recourse to music to calm
+his excitement, or his feeling on the one hand that the peasant should
+not tread on the courtier's heels, and on the other that the mere
+courtier is spacious in the possession of dirt--all this, I say,
+corresponds with our impression of Shakespeare, or rather of
+characteristic traits in Shakespeare, probably here and there a good
+deal heightened, and mingled with others not characteristic of
+Shakespeare at all. And if this is more than fancy, it may explain to us
+why Hamlet is the most fascinating character, and the most
+inexhaustible, in all imaginative literature. What else should he be, if
+the world's greatest poet, who was able to give almost the reality of
+nature to creations totally unlike himself, put his own soul straight
+into this creation, and when he wrote Hamlet's speeches wrote down his
+own heart?[42]
+
+1904.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning, who
+    in _At the Mermaid_ and _House_ wrote as though he imagined that
+    neither his own work nor Shakespeare's betrayed anything of the inner
+    man. But if we are to criticise those two poems as arguments, we must
+    say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we have
+    to choose between a self-revelation like Byron's and no
+    self-revelation at all, and that the relation between a poet and his
+    work is like that between the inside and the outside of a house.
+
+  [2] Almost all Shakespearean criticism, of course, contains something
+    bearing on our subject; but I have a practical reason for mentioning
+    in particular Mr. Frank Harris's articles in the _Saturday Review_
+    for 1898. A good many of Mr. Harris's views I cannot share, and I had
+    arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some
+    on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers. But I found in
+    them also valuable ideas which were quite new to me and would
+    probably be so to many readers. It is a great pity that the articles
+    are not collected and published in a book. [Mr. Harris has published,
+    in _The Man Shakespeare_, the substance of the articles, and also
+    matter which, in my judgment, has much less value.]
+
+  [3] He is apologising for an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet
+    of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer.
+
+  [4] It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not
+    played some kingly parts in sport (_i.e._ on the stage), he would
+    have been a companion for a king.
+
+  [5] Nor, _vice versa_, does the possession of these latter qualities
+    at all imply, as some writers seem to assume, the absence of the
+    former or of gentleness.
+
+  [6] Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to
+    assume this. His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare and
+    Jonson, in their wit combats, to an English man-of-war and a Spanish
+    great galleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating on the
+    reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses.
+
+  [7] See, for example, Act IV. Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in
+    the later tragedies.
+
+  [8] I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching's note on which seems to be
+    unquestionably right: 'There is no reference to the poet's profession
+    of player. The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of
+    society.' This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it
+    begins with 107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend,
+    though there are _also_ references to his profession and its effect
+    on his nature and his reputation. (By a slip Mr. Beeching makes the
+    neglect last for three years.)
+
+  [9] It is perhaps most especially in his rendering of the shock and
+    the effects of _disillusionment_ in open natures that we seem to feel
+    Shakespeare's personality. The nature of this shock is expressed in
+    Henry's words to Lord Scroop:
+
+                       I will weep for thee;
+      For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
+      Another fall of man.
+
+  [10] There is nothing of this semi-reality, of course, in the
+    _passion_ of love as portrayed, for example, in men so different as
+    Orlando, Othello, Antony, Troilus, whose love for Cressida resembles
+    that of Romeo for Juliet. What I have said of Romeo's 'love' for
+    Rosaline corresponds roughly with Coleridge's view; and, without
+    subscribing to all of Coleridge's remarks, I believe he was right in
+    finding an intentional contrast between this feeling and the passion
+    that displaces it (though it does not follow that the feeling would
+    not have become a genuine passion if Rosaline had been kind). Nor do
+    I understand the notion that Coleridge's view is refuted and even
+    rendered ridiculous by the mere fact that Shakespeare found the
+    Rosaline story in Brooke (Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines_, 7th ed.,
+    illustrative note 2). Was he compelled then to use whatever he found?
+    Was it his practice to do so? The question is always _why_ he used
+    what he found, and _how_. Coleridge's view of this matter, it need
+    hardly be said, is far from indisputable; but it must be judged by
+    our knowledge of Shakespeare's mind and not of his material alone. I
+    may add, as I have referred to Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare
+    made changes in the story he found; that it is arbitrary to assume
+    (not that it matters) that Coleridge, who read Steevens, was unaware
+    of Shakespeare's use of Brooke; and that Brooke was by no means a
+    'wretched poetaster.'
+
+  [11] _Hamlet_, _Measure for Measure_, _Othello_, _Troilus and
+    Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Timon of Athens_. See _Shakespearean
+    Tragedy_, pp. 79-85, 275-6. I should like to insist on the view there
+    taken that the tragedies subsequent to _Lear_ and _Timon_ do not show
+    the pressure of painful feelings.
+
+  [12] It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare's;
+    but I see no sufficient ground for decisively rejecting them.
+
+  [13] That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs
+    to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in the
+    _Passionate Pilgrim_. But I see no difficulty in that. What bears
+    little fruit in a normal condition of spirits may bear abundant fruit
+    later, in moods of discouragement and exasperation induced largely by
+    other causes.
+
+  [14] _The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes._
+    Ginn & Co., 1904.
+
+  [15] I find that Mr. Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of
+    Shakespeare (1907), has also urged these considerations.
+
+  [16] I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the
+    sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been
+    written by 1598.
+
+  [17] A fact to be remembered in regard to references to the social
+    position of the friend.
+
+  [18] Mr. Beeching's illustration of the friendship of the sonnets
+    from the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of
+    argument.
+
+  [19] In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is
+    too much based on beauty.
+
+  [20] This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as the _Two
+    Gentlemen of Verona_, and much less that they are earlier.
+
+  [21] This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of
+    Hereford, reprinted in Ingleby's _Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse_,
+    second edition, pp. 58, 84, 94. In the first of these passages, dated
+    1603 (and perhaps in the second, 1609), there are signs that Davies
+    had read Sonnet 111, a fact to be noted with regard to the question
+    of the chronology of the Sonnets.
+
+  [22] 'Mistress Tearsheet' too 'would fain hear some music,' and
+    'Sneak's noise' had to be sent for (2 _Henry IV._, II. iv. 12).
+
+  [23] It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from the _Tempest_ and
+    the great passage in _Pericles_ that Shakespeare must have been in a
+    storm at sea; but that he felt the poetry of a sea-storm is beyond
+    all doubt. Few moments in the reading of his works are more
+    overwhelming than that in which, after listening not without
+    difficulty to the writer of the first two Acts of _Pericles_,
+    suddenly, as the third opens, one hears the authentic voice:
+
+      Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
+      That wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman's whistle
+      Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
+      Unheard.
+
+    Knowing that this is coming, I cannot stop to read the Prologue to
+    Act III., though I believe Shakespeare wrote it. How it can be
+    imagined that he did more than touch up Acts I. and II. passes my
+    comprehension.
+
+    I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is
+    nothing in Shakespeare's authorities, as known to us, which
+    corresponds with the feeling of Timon's last speech, beginning,
+
+      Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
+      Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
+      Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:
+
+    a feeling made more explicit in the final speech of Alcibiades.
+
+  [24] The lily seems to be in almost all cases the Madonna lily. It is
+    very doubtful whether the lily of the valley is referred to at all.
+
+  [25] But there is something disappointing, and even estranging, in
+    Sonnet 50, which, promising to show a real sympathy, cheats us in the
+    end. I may observe, without implying that the fact has any personal
+    significance, that the words about 'the poor beetle that we tread
+    upon' are given to a woman (Isabella), and that it is Marina who
+    says:
+
+      I trod upon a worm against my will,
+      But I wept for it.
+
+  [26] Three times in one drama Shakespeare refers to this detestable
+    trait. See _Shakespearean Tragedy_, p. 268, where I should like to
+    qualify still further the sentence containing the qualification 'on
+    the whole.' Good judges, at least, assure me that I have admitted too
+    much against the dog.
+
+  [27] Nor can I recall any sign of liking, or even approval, of that
+    'prudent, _cautious_, self-control' which, according to a passage in
+    Burns, is 'wisdom's root.'
+
+  [28] The _locus classicus_, of course, is _Troilus and Cressida_, I.
+    iii. 75 ff.
+
+  [29] Of all the evils inflicted by man on man those chosen for
+    mention in the dirge in _Cymbeline_, one of the last plays, are the
+    frown o' the great, the tyrant's stroke, slander, censure rash.
+
+  [30] Having written these paragraphs, I should like to disclaim the
+    belief that Shakespeare was habitually deeply discontented with his
+    position in life.
+
+  [31] Allusions to puritans show at most what we take almost for
+    granted, that he did not like precisians or people hostile to the
+    stage.
+
+  [32] In the Sonnets, for example, there is an almost entire absence
+    of definitely religious thought or feeling. The nearest approach to
+    it is in Sonnet 146 ('Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth'),
+    where, however, there is no allusion to a divine law or judge.
+    According to Sonnet 129, lust in action is
+
+      The expense of spirit in a waste of shame;
+
+    but no word shows that it is also felt as alienation from God. It
+    must be added that in 108 and 110 there are references to the Lord's
+    Prayer and, perhaps, to the First Commandment, from which a decidedly
+    religious Christian would perhaps have shrunk. Of course I am not
+    saying that we can draw any _necessary_ inference from these facts.
+
+  [33] It is only this 'quiet but deep sense' that is significant. No
+    inference can be drawn from the fact that the mere belief in powers
+    above seems to be taken as a matter of course in practically all the
+    characters, good and bad alike. On the other hand there may well be
+    something symptomatic in the apparent absence of interest in
+    theoretical disbelief in such powers and in the immortality of the
+    soul. I have observed elsewhere that the atheism of Aaron does not
+    increase the probability that the conception of the character is
+    Shakespeare's.
+
+  [34] With the first compare, what to me has, though more faintly, the
+    same ring, Hermione's
+
+                      If powers divine
+      Behold our human actions, as they do:
+
+    with the second, Helena's
+
+      It is not so with Him that all things knows
+      As 'tis with us that square our guess by shows;
+      But most it is presumption in us when
+      The help of heaven we count the act of men:
+
+    followed soon after by Lafeu's remark:
+
+      They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons
+      to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless.
+      Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves
+      into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an
+      unknown fear.
+
+  [35] It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the
+    First Quarto version of 'To be or not to be,' to 'an everlasting
+    judge,' disappears in the revised versions.
+
+  [36] The suggested inference, of course, is that this speech, thus
+    out of character, and Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' (though that is
+    in character), show us Shakespeare's own mind. It has force, I think,
+    but not compulsory force. The topics of these speeches are, in the
+    old sense of the word, commonplaces. Shakespeare may have felt, Here
+    is my chance to show what I can do with certain feelings and thoughts
+    of supreme interest to men of all times and places and modes of
+    belief. It would not follow from this that they are not 'personal,'
+    but any inference to a non-acceptance of received religious ideas
+    would be much weakened. ('All the world's a stage' is a patent
+    example of the suggested elaboration of a commonplace.)
+
+  [37] What actions in particular _his_ conscience approved and
+    disapproved is another question and one not relevant here.
+
+  [38] This does not at all imply to Shakespeare, so far as we see,
+    that evil is never to be forcibly resisted.
+
+  [39] I do not mean to reject the idea that in some passages in the
+    _Tempest_ Shakespeare, while he wrote them with a dramatic purpose,
+    also thought of himself. It seems to me likely. And if so, there
+    _may_ have been such a thought in the words,
+
+      And thence retire me to my Milan, where
+      Every third thought shall be my grave;
+
+    and also in those lines about prayer and pardon which close the
+    Epilogue, and to my ear come with a sudden effect of great
+    seriousness, contrasting most strangely with their context. If they
+    _had_ a grave and personal under-meaning it cannot have been intended
+    for the audience, which would take the prayer as addressed to itself.
+
+  [40] It may be added that _As You Like It_, though idyllic, is not so
+    falsely idyllic as some critics would make it. It is based, we may
+    roughly say, on a contrast between court and country; but those who
+    inhale virtue from the woodland are courtiers who bring virtue with
+    them, and the country has its churlish masters and unkind or uncouth
+    maidens.
+
+  [41] This has been strongly urged and fully illustrated by Mr.
+    Harris.
+
+  [42] It may be suggested that, in the catalogue above, I should have
+    mentioned that imaginative 'unreality' in love referred to on p. 326.
+    But I do not see in Hamlet either this, or any sign that he took
+    Ophelia for an Imogen or even a Juliet, though naturally he was less
+    clearly aware of her deficiencies than Shakespeare.
+
+    I may add, however, another item to the catalogue. We do not feel
+    that the problems presented to most of the tragic heroes could have
+    been fatal to Shakespeare himself. The immense breadth and clearness
+    of his intellect would have saved him from the fate of Othello,
+    Troilus, or Antony. But we do feel, I think, and he himself may have
+    felt, that he could not have coped with Hamlet's problem; and there
+    is no improbability in the idea that he may have experienced in some
+    degree the melancholia of his hero.
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE.
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE.
+
+
+Why should we concern ourselves with Shakespeare's theatre and audience?
+The vast majority of his readers since the Restoration have known
+nothing about them, and have enjoyed his plays enormously. And if they
+have enjoyed without fully understanding, it was for want of imagination
+and of knowledge of human nature, and not from ignorance of the
+conditions under which his plays were produced. At any rate, such
+ignorance does not exclude us from the _soul_ of Shakespearean drama,
+any more than from the soul of Homeric epic or Athenian tragedy; and it
+is the soul that counts and endures. For the rest, we all know that
+Shakespeare's time was rough, indecorous, and inexpert in regard to
+machinery; and so we are prepared for coarse speech and primitive
+stage-arrangements, and we make allowance for them without thinking
+about the matter. Antiquarians may naturally wish to know more; but what
+more is needed for intelligent enjoyment of the plays?
+
+I have begun with these questions because I sympathise with their
+spirit. Everything I am going to speak of in this lecture is
+comparatively unimportant for the appreciation of that which is most
+vital in Shakespeare; and if I were allowed my choice between an hour's
+inspection of a performance at the Globe and a glimpse straight into his
+mind when he was planning the _Tempest_, I should not hesitate which to
+choose. Nevertheless, to say nothing of the intrinsic interest of
+antiquarian knowledge, we cannot make a clear division between the soul
+and body, or the eternal and the perishable, in works of art. Nor can we
+lay the finger on a line which separates that which has poetic interest
+from that which has none. Nor yet can we assume that any knowledge of
+Shakespeare's theatre and audience, however trivial it may appear, may
+not help us to appreciate, or save us from misapprehending, the 'soul'
+of a play or a scene. If our own souls were capacious and vivid enough,
+every atom of information on these subjects, or again on the material he
+used in composing, would so assist us. The danger of devotion to such
+knowledge lies merely in our weakness. Research, though toilsome, is
+easy; imaginative vision, though delightful, is difficult; and we may be
+tempted to prefer the first. Or we note that in a given passage
+Shakespeare has used what he found in his authority; and we excuse
+ourselves from asking why he used it and what he made of it. Or we see
+that he has done something that would please his audience; and we
+dismiss it as accounted for, forgetting that perhaps it also pleased
+_him_, and that we have to account for _that_. Or knowledge of his stage
+shows us the stage-convenience of a scene; and we say that the scene was
+due to stage-convenience, as if the cause of a thing must needs be
+single and simple. Such errors provoke the man who reads his Shakespeare
+poetically, and make him blaspheme our knowledge. But we ought not to
+fall into them; and we cannot reject any knowledge that may help us into
+Shakespeare's mind because of the danger it brings.
+
+I cannot attempt to describe Shakespeare's theatre and audience, and
+much less to discuss the evidence on which a description must be based,
+or the difficult problems it raises. I must confine myself for the most
+part to a few points which are not always fully realised, or on which
+there is a risk of misapprehension.
+
+
+  1.
+
+Shakespeare, we know, was a popular playwright. I mean not only that
+many of his plays were favourites in his day, but that he wrote, mainly
+at least, for the more popular kind of audience, and that, within
+certain limits, he conformed to its tastes. He was not, to our
+knowledge, the author of masques composed for performance at Court or in
+a great mansion, or of dramas intended for a University or one of the
+Inns of Court; and though his company for some time played at the
+Blackfriars, we may safely assume that the great majority of his works
+were meant primarily for a common or 'public' theatre like the Globe.
+The broad distinction between a 'private' and a 'public' theatre is
+familiar, and I need only remind you that at the former, which was
+smaller, provided seats even in the area, and was nowhere open to the
+weather, the audience was more select. Accordingly, dramatists who
+express their contempt for the audience, and their disapproval of those
+who consult its tastes, often discriminate between the audiences at the
+private and public theatres, and reserve their unmeasured language for
+the latter. It was for the latter that Shakespeare mainly wrote; and it
+is pretty clear that Jonson, who greatly admired and loved him, was
+still of opinion that he condescended to his audience.[1]
+
+So far we seem to be on safe ground; and yet even here there is some
+risk of mistake. We are not to imagine that the audience at a private
+theatre (say the Blackfriars) accepted Jonson's dramatic theories,
+while the audience at the Globe rejected them; or that the one was
+composed chiefly of cultured and 'judicious' gentlemen, and the other of
+riotous and malodorous plebeians; and still less that Shakespeare tried
+to please the latter section in preference to the former, and was
+beloved by the one more than by the other. The two audiences must have
+had the same general character, differing only in degree. Neither of
+them accepted Jonson's theories, nor were the 'judicious' of one mind on
+that subject. The same play was frequently offered to both. Both were
+very mixed. The tastes to which objection was taken cannot have been
+confined to the mob. From our knowledge of human nature generally, and
+of the Elizabethan nobility and gentry in particular, we may be sure of
+this; and Jonson himself implies it. Nor is it credible that an
+appreciation of the best things was denied to the mob, which doubtless
+loved what we should despise, but appears also to have admired what we
+admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than most of us can stomach.
+Neither can these groundlings have formed the majority of the 'public'
+audience or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it was possible
+for dramatists (Shakespeare included) to say such rude things of them to
+their faces. We must not delude ourselves as to these matters; and in
+particular we must realise that the mass of the audience in both kinds
+of theatre must have been indifferent to the unities of time and place,
+and more or less so to improbabilities and to decorum (at least as we
+conceive it) both in manners and in speech; and that it must have liked
+excitement, the open exhibition of violent and bloody deeds, and the
+intermixture of seriousness and mirth. What distinguished the more
+popular audience, and the more popular section in it, was a higher
+degree of this indifference and this liking, and in addition a special
+fondness for certain sources of inartistic joy. The most prominent of
+these, perhaps, were noise; rant; mere bawdry; 'shews'; irrelevant
+songs, ballads, jokes, dances, and clownage in general; and, lastly,
+target-fighting and battles.[2]
+
+We may describe Shakespeare's practice in broad and general terms by
+saying that he neither resisted the wishes of his audience nor gratified
+them without reserve. He accepted the type of drama that he found, and
+developed it without altering its fundamental character. And in the same
+way, in particular matters, he gave the audience what it wanted, but in
+doing so gave it what it never dreamed of. It liked tragedy to be
+relieved by rough mirth, and it got the Grave-diggers in _Hamlet_ and
+the old countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_. It liked a 'drum and
+trumpet' history, and it got _Henry V._ It liked clowns or fools, and it
+got Feste and the Fool in _King Lear_. Shakespeare's practice was by no
+means always on this level, but this was its tendency; and I imagine
+that (unless perhaps in early days) he knew clearly what he was doing,
+did it deliberately, and, when he gave the audience poor stuff, would
+not seriously have defended himself. Jonson, it would seem, did not
+understand this position. A fool was a fool to him; and if a play could
+be called a drum and trumpet history it was at once condemned in his
+eyes. One can hardly doubt that he was alluding to the _Tempest_ and the
+_Winter's Tale_ when, a few years after the probable date of their
+appearance, he spoke of writers who 'make nature afraid in their plays,'
+begetting 'tales, tempests, and such like drolleries,' and bringing in
+'a servant-monster' or 'a nest of antiques.' Caliban was a 'monster,'
+and the London public loved to gape at monsters; and so, it appears,
+that wonderful creation was to Jonson something like the fat woman, or
+the calf with five legs, that we pay a penny to see at a fair. In fact
+(how could he fail to take the warning?) he saw Caliban with the eyes of
+Trinculo and Stephano. 'A strange fish!' says Trinculo: 'were I in
+England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday
+fool there but would give a piece of silver.' 'If I can recover him,'
+says Stephano, 'and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he's a
+present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's-leather.' Shakespeare
+understood his monster otherwise; but, I fancy, when Jonson fulminated
+at the Mermaid against Caliban, he smiled and said nothing.
+
+But my present subject is rather the tastes of the audience than
+Shakespeare's way of meeting them.[3] Let me give two illustrations of
+them which may have some novelty. His public, in the first place, dearly
+loved to see soldiers, combats, and battles on the stage. They swarm in
+some of the dramas a little earlier than Shakespeare's time, and the
+cultured dramatists speak very contemptuously of these productions, if
+not of Shakespeare's historical plays. We may take as an example the
+First Part of _Henry VI._, a feeble piece, to which Shakespeare probably
+contributed touches throughout, and perhaps one or two complete scenes.
+It appears from the stage directions (which may be defective, but cannot
+well be redundant) that in this one play there were represented a
+pitched battle of two armies, an attack on a city wall with
+scaling-ladders, two street-scuffles, four single combats, four
+skirmishes, and seven excursions. No genuine play of Shakespeare's, I
+suppose, is so military from beginning to end; and we know how in _Henry
+V._ he laments that he must disgrace the name of Agincourt by showing
+four or five men with vile and ragged foils
+
+  Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.
+
+Still he does show them; and his serious dramas contain such a profusion
+of combats and battles as no playwright now would dream of exhibiting.
+We expect these things perhaps in the English history-plays, and we
+find them in abundance there: but not there alone. The last Act in
+_Julius Cćsar_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_, and
+_Cymbeline_; the fourth Act of _Antony and Cleopatra_; the opening Acts
+of _Coriolanus_,--these are all full of battle-scenes. If battle cannot
+be shown, it can be described. If it cannot be described, still soldiers
+can be shown, and twice in _Hamlet_ Fortinbras and his army march upon
+the stage.[4] At worst there can be street-brawls and single fights, as
+in _Romeo and Juliet_. In reading Shakespeare we scarcely realise how
+much of this kind is exhibited. In seeing him acted we do not fully
+realise it, for much of it is omitted. But beyond doubt it helped to
+make him the most popular dramatist of his time.
+
+If we examine Shakespeare's battles we shall observe a certain
+peculiarity, which is connected with the nature of his theatre and also
+explains the treatment of them in ours. In most cases he does not give a
+picture of two whole armies engaged, but makes a pair of combatants rush
+upon the stage, fight, and rush off again; and this pair is succeeded by
+a second, and perhaps by a third. This hurried series of single combats
+admitted of speech-making; perhaps it also gave some impression of the
+changes and confusion of a battle. Our tendency, on the other hand, is
+to contrive one spectacle with scenic effects, or even to exhibit one
+magnificent tableau in which nobody says a word. And this plan, though
+it has the advantage of getting rid of Shakespeare's poetry, is not
+exactly dramatic. It is adopted chiefly because the taste of our public
+is, or is supposed to be, less dramatic than spectacular, and because,
+unlike the Elizabethans, we are able to gratify such a taste. But there
+is another fact to be remembered here. Few playgoers now can appreciate
+a fencing-match, and much fewer a broad-sword and target fight. But the
+Elizabethan public went to see performances of this kind as we go to see
+cricket or football matches. They might watch them in the very building
+which at other times was used as a playhouse.[5] They could judge of the
+merit of the exhibition when Hotspur and Prince Henry fought, when
+Macduff 'laid on,' or when Tybalt and Mercutio used their rapiers. And
+this was probably another reason why Shakespeare's battles so often
+consist of single combats, and why these scenes were beloved by the
+simpler folk among his audience.
+
+Our second illustration concerns the popular appetite for musical and
+other sounds. The introduction of songs and dances[6] was censured as a
+corrupt gratification of this appetite. And so it was when the songs and
+dances were excessive in number, irrelevant, or out of keeping with the
+scene. I do not remember that in Shakespeare's plays this is ever the
+case; but, in respect of songs, we may perhaps take Marston's _Antonio
+and Mellida_ as an instance of abuse. For in each of the two Parts of
+that play there are directions for five songs; and, since not even the
+first lines of these songs are printed, we must suppose that the leader
+of the band, or the singing actor in the company, introduced whatever he
+chose. In addition to songs and dances, the musicians, at least in some
+plays, performed between the Acts; and the practice of accompanying
+certain speeches by low music--a practice which in some performances of
+Shakespeare now has become a pest--has the sanction of several
+Elizabethan playwrights, and (to a slight extent) of Shakespeare. It
+seems clear, for example, that in _Twelfth Night_ low music was played
+while the lovely opening lines ('That strain again') were being spoken,
+and also during a part of the dialogue preceding the song 'Come away,
+come away, death.' Some lines, too, of Lorenzo's famous speech about
+music in the _Merchant of Venice_ were probably accompanied; and there
+is a still more conspicuous instance in the scene where Lear wakes from
+his long sleep and sees Cordelia standing by his side.
+
+But, beyond all this, if we attend to the stage-directions we shall
+realise that in the serious plays of Shakespeare other musical sounds
+were of frequent occurrence. Almost always the ceremonial entrance of a
+royal person is marked by a 'flourish' or a 'sennet' on trumpets,
+cornets, or hautboys; and wherever we have armies and battles we find
+directions for drums, or for particular series of notes of trumpets or
+cornets appropriate to particular military movements. In the First Part
+of _Henry VI._, to take that early play again, we must imagine a dead
+march, two other marches, three retreats, three sennets, seven
+flourishes, eighteen alarums; and there are besides five directions for
+drums, one for a horn, and five for soundings, of a kind not specified,
+by trumpets. In the last three scenes of the first Act in
+_Coriolanus_--scenes containing less than three hundred and fifty
+lines--there are directions for a parley, a retreat, five flourishes,
+and eight alarums, with three, less specific, for trumpets, and four for
+drums. We find about twenty such directions in _King Lear_, and about
+twenty-five in _Macbeth_, a short play in which hautboys seem to have
+been unusually favoured.[7] It is evident that the audience loved these
+sounds, which, from their prevalence in passages of special kinds, seem
+to have been intended chiefly to stimulate excitement, and sometimes to
+heighten impressions of grandeur or of awe.
+
+But this is not all. Such purposes were also served by noises not
+musical. Four times in _Macbeth_, when the Witches appear, thunder is
+heard. It thunders and lightens at intervals through the storm-scenes in
+_King Lear_. Casca and Cassius, dark thoughts within them, walk the
+streets of Rome in a terrific thunderstorm. That loud insistent knocking
+which appalled Macbeth is repeated thrice at intervals while Lady
+Macbeth in vain endeavours to calm him, and five times while the Porter
+fumbles with his keys. The gate has hardly been opened and the murder
+discovered when the castle-bell begins its hideous alarum. The
+alarm-bell is used for the same purpose of intensifying excitement in
+the brawl that ruins Cassio, and its effect is manifest in Othello's
+immediate order, 'Silence that dreadful bell.' I will add but one
+instance more. In the days of my youth, before the melodrama audience
+dreamed of seeing chariot-races, railway accidents, or the infernal
+regions, on the stage, it loved few things better than the explosion of
+fire-arms; and its favourite weapon was the pistol. The Elizabethans had
+the same fancy for fire-arms, only they preferred cannon. Shakespeare's
+theatre was burnt down in 1613 at a performance of _Henry VIII._, not, I
+suppose, as Prynne imagined, by a Providence which shared his opinion of
+the drama, but because the wadding of a cannon fired during the play
+flew to the thatch of the roof and set it ablaze. In _Hamlet_
+Shakespeare gave the public plenty that they could not understand, but
+he made it up to them in explosions. While Hamlet, Horatio, and
+Marcellus are waiting for the Ghost, a flourish is heard, and then the
+roar of cannon. It is the custom to fire them when the King drinks a
+pledge; and this King drinks many. In the fencing-scene at the end he
+proposes to drink one for every hit scored by his beloved nephew; and
+the first hit is duly honoured by the cannon. Unexpected events
+prevented the celebration of the second, but the audience lost nothing
+by that. While Hamlet lies dying, a sudden explosion is heard.
+Fortinbras is coming with his army. And, as if that were not enough, the
+very last words of the play are, 'Go, bid the soldiers shoot,' and the
+very last sound of the performance is a peal of ordnance. Into this most
+mysterious and inward of his works, it would seem, the poet flung, as if
+in derision of his cultured critics, well-nigh every stimulant of
+popular excitement he could collect: 'carnal, bloody, and unnatural
+acts'; five deaths on the open stage, three appearances of a ghost, two
+of a mad woman, a dumb-show, two men raving and fighting in a grave at a
+funeral, the skulls and bones of the dead, a clown bandying jests with a
+prince, songs at once indecent and pathetic, marching soldiers, a
+fencing-match, then a litter of corpses, and explosions in the first Act
+and explosions in the last. And yet out of this sensational
+material--not in spite of it, but out of it--he made the most mysterious
+and inward of his dramas, which leaves us haunted by thoughts beyond the
+reaches of our souls; and he knew that the very audience that rejoiced
+in ghosts and explosions would listen, even while it was waiting for the
+ghost, to that which the explosion had suggested,--a general
+disquisition, twenty-five lines long, on the manner in which one defect
+may spoil a noble reputation. In this strange harmony of discords,
+surely unexampled before or since, we may see at a glance the essence of
+Elizabethan drama, of its poet, and of its audience.
+
+
+  2.
+
+We have been occupied so far with characteristics of the drama which
+reflect the more distinctively popular tastes objected to by critics
+like Jonson. We may now pass on to arrangements common to all public
+theatres, whether the play performed were Jonson's or Shakespeare's; and
+in the first instance to a characteristic common to the public and
+private theatres alike.
+
+As everyone knows, the female parts in stage-plays were taken by boys,
+youths, or men (a mask being sometimes worn in the last case). The
+indecorous Elizabethans regarded this custom almost entirely from the
+point of view of decorum and morality. And as to morality, no one, I
+believe, who examines the evidence, especially as it concerns the state
+of things that followed the introduction of actresses at the
+Restoration, will be very ready to dissent from their opinion. But it is
+often assumed as a matter beyond dispute that, on the side of dramatic
+effect, the Elizabethan practice was extremely unfortunate, if not
+downright absurd. This idea appears to me, to say the least,
+exaggerated. Our practice may be the better; for a few Shakespearean
+parts it _ought_ to be much better; but that, on the whole, it is
+decidedly so, or that the old custom had anything absurd about it, there
+seems no reason to believe. In the first place, experience in private
+and semi-private performances shows that female parts may be excellently
+acted by youths or men, and that the most obvious drawback, that of the
+adult male voice, is not felt to be nearly so serious as we might
+anticipate. For a minute or two it may call for a slight exertion of
+imagination in the audience; but there is no more radical error than to
+suppose that an audience finds this irksome, or to forget that the use
+of imagination at one point quickens it at other points, and so is a
+positive gain. And we have further to remember that the Elizabethan
+actor of female parts was no amateur, but a professional as carefully
+trained as an actress now; while dramatically he had this advantage over
+the actress, that he was regarded simply as a player, and not also as a
+woman with an attractive or unattractive person.[8]
+
+In the second place, if the current ideas on this subject were true,
+there would be, it seems to me, more evidence of their truth. We should
+find, for example, that when first the new fashion came in, it was hailed
+by good judges as a very great improvement on the old. But the traces of
+such an opinion appear very scanty and doubtful, while it is certain that
+one of the few actors who after the Restoration still played female parts
+maintained a high reputation and won great applause. Again, if these
+parts in Shakespeare's day were very inadequately performed, would not
+the effect of that fact be distinctly visible in the plays themselves?
+The rôles in question would be less important in Shakespeare's dramas,
+for example, than in dramas of later times: but I do not see that they
+are. Besides, in the Shakespearean play itself the female parts would be
+much less important than the male: but on the whole they are not. In the
+tragedies and histories, it is true, the impelling forces of the action
+usually belong in larger measure to men than to women. But that is
+because the action in such plays is laid in the sphere of public life;
+and in cases where, in spite of this, the heroine is as prominent as the
+hero, her part--the part of Juliet, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth--certainly
+requires as good acting as his. As to the comedies, if we ask ourselves
+who are the central or the most interesting figures in them, we shall
+find that we pronounce a woman's name at least as often as a man's. I
+understate the case. Of Shakespeare's mature comedies the _Merchant of
+Venice_, I believe, is the only one where this name would unquestionably
+be a man's, and in three of the last five it would almost certainly be a
+woman's--Isabella's, Imogen's, Hermione's. How shall we reconcile with
+these facts the idea that in his day the female parts were, on the whole,
+much less adequately played than the male? And finally, if the dramatists
+themselves believed this, why do we not find frequent indications of the
+belief in their prologues, epilogues, prefaces, and plays?[9]
+
+We must conclude, it would seem, that the absence of actresses from the
+Elizabethan theatre, though at first it may appear to us highly
+important, made no great difference to the dramas themselves.
+
+
+  3.
+
+That certainly cannot be said of the construction and arrangements of
+the stage. On this subject a great deal has been written of late years,
+and as regards many details there is still much difference of
+opinion.[10] But fortunately all that is of great moment for our present
+purpose is tolerably certain. In trying to bring it out, I will begin by
+reminding you of our present stage. For it is the stage, and not the
+rest of the theatre, that is of special interest here; and no serious
+harm will be done if, for the rest, we imagine Shakespeare's theatre
+with boxes, circles, and galleries like our own, though in the shape of
+a more elongated horse-shoe than ours. We must imagine, of course, an
+area too; but there, as we shall see, an important difference comes in.
+
+
+Our present stage may be called a box with one of its sides knocked out.
+Through this opening, which has an ornamental frame, we look into the
+box. Its three upright sides (for we may ignore the bottom and the top)
+are composed of movable painted scenes, which are changed from time to
+time during the course of the play. Before the play and after it the
+opening is blocked by a curtain, dropped from the top of the frame; and
+this is also dropped at intervals during the performance, that the
+scenes may be changed.
+
+In all these respects the Elizabethan arrangement was quite different.
+The stage came forward to about the middle of the area; so that a line
+bisecting the house would have coincided with the line of footlights, if
+there had been such things. The stage was therefore a platform viewed
+from both sides and not only from the front; and along its sides, as
+well as in front of it, stood the people who paid least, the
+groundlings, sometimes punningly derided by dramatists as 'the men of
+understanding.' Obviously, the sides of this platform were open; nor
+were there movable scenes even at the back of it; nor was there any
+front curtain. It was overshadowed by a projecting roof; but the area,
+or 'yard,' where the groundlings stood, was open to the weather, and
+accordingly the theatre could not be darkened. It will be seen that,
+when the actors were on the forward part of the stage, they were (to
+exaggerate a little) in the middle of the audience, like the performers
+in a circus now. And on this forward naked part of the stage most of a
+Shakespearean drama was played. We may call it the main or front
+stage.[11]
+
+If now we look towards the rear of this stage, what do we find? In the
+first place, while the back of our present-day box consists of a
+movable scene, that of the Elizabethan stage was formed by the
+'tiring-house,' or dressing-room, of the actors. In its wall were two
+doors, by which entrances and exits were made. But it was not merely a
+tiring-house. In the play it might represent a room, a house, a castle,
+the wall of a town; and the doors played their parts accordingly. Again,
+when a person speaks 'from within,' that doubtless means that he is in
+the tiring-house, opens one of the doors a little, and speaks through
+the chink. So apparently did the prompter.
+
+Secondly, on the top of the tiring-house was the 'upper stage' or
+'balcony,' which looked down on the platform stage. It is hardly
+possible to make brief statements about it that would be secure. For our
+purposes it may be imagined as a balcony jutting forward a little from
+the line of the tiring-house; and it will suffice to add that, though
+the whole or part of it was on some occasions, or in some theatres,
+occupied by spectators, the whole or part of it was sometimes used by
+the actors and was indispensably requisite to the performance of the
+play. 'Enter above' or 'enter aloft' means that the actor was to appear
+on this upper stage or balcony. Usually, no doubt, he reached it by a
+ladder or stair inside the tiring-house; but on occasions there were
+ascents or descents directly from, or to, the main stage, as we see from
+'climbs the tree and is received above' or 'the citizens leap from the
+walls.' The reader of Shakespeare will at once remember many scenes
+where the balcony was used. On it, as the city wall, appeared the
+Governor and citizens of Harfleur, while King Henry and his train stood
+before the gates below. From it Arthur made his fatal leap. It was
+Cleopatra's monument, into which she and her women drew up the dying
+Antony. Juliet talked to Romeo from it; and from it Romeo ('one kiss and
+I'll descend') 'goeth down' to the main stage. Richard appeared there
+between the two bishops; and there the spectators imagined Duncan
+murdered in his sleep.[12] But they could not look into his chamber. The
+balcony could be concealed by curtains, running, like all Elizabethan
+stage curtains, on a rod.
+
+In the third place, there was, towards the back of the main stage, a
+part that could be curtained off, and so separated from the front part
+of that stage. Let us call it the back stage. It is the matter about
+which there is most difficulty and controversy; but the general
+description just given would be accepted by almost all scholars and will
+suffice for us. Here was the curtain (more strictly, the curtains)
+through which the actors peeped at the audience before the play began,
+and at which the groundlings hurled apples and other missiles to hasten
+their coming or signify disapproval of them. And this 'back stage' was
+essential to many performances, and was used in a variety of ways. It
+was the room where Henry IV. lay dying; the cave of Timon or of
+Belarius; probably the tent in which Richmond slept before the battle of
+Bosworth; the cell of Prospero, who draws the curtains apart and shows
+Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess within; and here, I imagine, and
+not on the balcony, Juliet, after drinking the potion, 'falls upon her
+bed within the curtains.'[13] Finally, the back stage accounts for those
+passages where, at the close of a death-scene, there is no indication
+that the corpse was carried off the stage. If the death took place on
+the open stage, as it usually did, this of course was necessary, since
+there was no front curtain to drop; and so we usually find in the
+dialogue words like 'Take up the bodies' (_Hamlet_), or 'Bear them from
+hence' (_King Lear_). But Desdemona was murdered in her bed on the back
+stage; and there died also Othello and Emilia; so that Lodovico orders
+the bodies to be 'hid,' not carried off. The curtains were drawn
+together, and the dead actors withdrew into the tiring-house unseen,[14]
+while the living went off openly.
+
+This triple stage is the primary thing to remember about Shakespeare's
+theatre: a platform coming well forward into the yard, completely open
+in the larger front part, but having further back a part that could be
+curtained off, and overlooked by an upper stage or balcony above the
+tiring-house. Only a few further details need be mentioned. Though
+scenery was unknown, there were plenty of properties, as may be gathered
+from the dramas and, more quickly, from the accounts of Henslowe, the
+manager of the Rose. Chairs, benches, and tables are a matter of course.
+Kent sat in the stocks. The witches had a caldron. Imogen slept in a
+bed, and Iachimo crept out of his trunk in her room. Falstaff was
+carried off the stage in a clothes-basket. I have quoted the direction
+'climb the tree.' A 'banquet' figures in Henslowe's list, and in the
+_Tempest_ 'several strange shapes' bring one in. He mentions a 'tomb,'
+and it is possible, though not likely, that the tomb of the Capulets was
+a property; and he mentions a 'moss-bank,' doubtless such as that where
+the wild thyme was blowing for Titania. Her lover, you remember, wore an
+ass's head, and the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_ a buck's. There were
+whole animals, too. 'A great horse with his legs' is in Henslowe's
+list; and in a play not by Shakespeare Jonah is cast out of the whale's
+belly on to the stage. Besides these properties there was a contrivance
+with ropes and pulleys, by which a heavenly being could descend from the
+stage-roof (the 'heaven'), as in _Cymbeline_ Jupiter descends upon his
+eagle. When his speech is over we find the direction 'ascends.' Soon
+after comes another direction: 'vanish.' This is addressed not to
+Jupiter but to various ghosts who are present. For there was a hollow
+space under the stage, and a trap-door into it. Through this ghosts
+usually made their entrances and exits; and 'vanish' seems commonly to
+mean an exit that way. Through it, too, arose and sank the witches'
+caldron and the apparitions shown to Macbeth. A person could speak from
+under the stage, as the Ghost does when Hamlet calls him 'old mole'; and
+the musicians could go and play there, as they do in the scene where
+Antony's soldiers hear strange music on the night before the battle;
+'Musicke of the Hoboyes is under the Stage' the direction runs
+('Hoboyes' were used also in the witch-scene just mentioned).
+
+
+  4.
+
+We have now to observe certain ways in which this stage with its
+arrangements influenced the dramas themselves; and we shall find that
+the majority of these influences are connected with the absence of
+scenery. In this, to begin with, lies the main, though not the whole,
+explanation of the shortness of the performance. In our Shakespeare
+revivals the drama is always considerably cut down; and yet, even where
+no excessive prominence is given to scenic display, the time occupied is
+seldom less than three hours, and often a good deal more. In
+Shakespeare's day, as we gather from various sources (_e.g._ from the
+Prologues to _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Henry VIII._), the customary time
+taken by the un-shortened play was about two hours. And the chief reason
+of this great difference obviously is that the time which we spend in
+setting and changing scenes his company spent in acting the piece. At a
+given signal certain characters appeared. Unless a placard announced the
+place where they were supposed to be,[15] the audience gathered this
+from their conversation, or in the absence of such indications asked no
+questions on the subject. They talked for a time and went away; and at
+once another set appeared. The intervals between the acts (if intervals
+there were, and however they were occupied) had no purpose connected
+with scene-changing, and must have been short; and the introduction and
+removal of a few properties would take next to no time from the
+performance.[16] We may safely assume that not less than a hundred of
+the hundred and twenty minutes were given to the play itself.
+
+The absence of scenery, however, will not wholly account for the
+difference in question. If you take a Shakespearean play of average
+length and read it at about the pace usual in our revivals, you will
+find, I think, that you have occupied considerably more than a hundred
+or a hundred and twenty minutes.[17] The Elizabethan actor can hardly
+have spoken so slowly. Probably the position of the stage, and
+especially of the front part of it where most of the action took place,
+was of advantage to him in this respect. Standing almost in the middle
+of his audience, and at no great distance from any section of it, he
+could with safety deliver his lines much faster than an actor can now.
+He could speak even a 'passionate' speech 'trippingly on the tongue.'
+Hamlet bids him do so, warns him not to mouth, and, when the time for
+his speech comes, calls impatiently to him to leave his damnable faces
+and begin; and this is not the only passage in Elizabethan literature
+which suggests that good judges objected to a slow and over-emphatic
+delivery. We have some actors not inferior in elocution, we must
+presume, to Burbage or Taylor, but even Mr. Vezin or Mr. Forbes
+Robertson may find it difficult to deliver blank verse intelligibly,
+musically, and rapidly out of our stage-box.[18]
+
+I return to the absence of scenery, which even in this matter must be
+more important than the position of the stage or the preference for
+rapid speech. It explains, secondly, the great difference between
+Elizabethan and more modern plays in the number of the scenes.[19] This
+number, with Shakespeare, averages somewhere about twenty: it reaches
+forty-two in _Antony and Cleopatra_, and sinks to nine in _Love's
+Labour's Lost_, the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, and the _Tempest_. In the
+fourth act of the first of these plays there are thirteen scenes, no one
+of them in the same place as the next. The average number in Schiller's
+plays seems to be about eight. In plays written now it corresponds not
+unfrequently with the number of acts.[20] The primary cause of this
+difference, though not the only one, is, I presume, that we expect to
+see appropriate surroundings, at the least, for every part of the
+story. Such surroundings mean more or less elaborate scenery, which,
+besides being expensive, takes a long time to set and change. For a
+dramatist accordingly who is a dramatist and wishes to hold his audience
+by the play itself, it is an advantage to have as few scenes as may be.
+And so the absence of scenery in Shakespeare's day, and its presence in
+ours, result in two totally different systems, not merely of theatrical
+effect, but of dramatic construction.
+
+In certain ways it was clearly an advantage to a playwright to be able
+to produce a large number of scenes, varying in length according to his
+pleasure, and separated by almost inappreciable intervals. Nor could
+there be any disadvantage in this freedom, if he had a strong feeling
+for dramatic construction, and a gift for it, and a determination to
+construct as well as he could. But, as a matter of fact, many, perhaps
+the majority, of the pre-Shakespearean dramas are put together very
+loosely; scene follows scene in the manner of a casual narrative rather
+than a play; and a good deal is admitted for the sake of its immediate
+attraction and not because it is essential to the plot. The freedom
+which we are considering, though it could not necessitate these defects,
+gave the widest scope for them; the majority of the audience probably
+was, and continued to be, well-nigh indifferent to them; and a large
+proportion of the plays of Shakespeare's time exhibits them in some
+degree. The average drama of that day has great merits of a strictly
+dramatic kind, but it is not well-built, it is not what we mean by 'a
+good play'; and if we look at it from the restricted point of view
+implied by that phrase we shall be inclined, I think, to believe that it
+would have been a better play if its author had been compelled by the
+stage-arrangements to halve the number of the scenes. These remarks will
+hold of Shakespeare himself. Some of his most delightful dramas,
+indeed,--for instance, the two Parts of _Henry IV._--make little or no
+pretence to be well-constructed wholes; and even in those which fully
+deserve that title a certain amount of matter not indispensable to the
+plot is usually to be found. In point of construction _Othello_ is the
+best of his tragedies, _Julius Cćsar_ better than _King Lear_, and
+_Antony and Cleopatra_ perhaps the faultiest. To say that this depends
+solely on the number of scenes would be ridiculous, but still it is
+probably significant that the numbers are, respectively, fifteen,
+eighteen, twenty-one, and forty-two.
+
+The average Elizabethan play could not, of course, have been converted
+into a well-built fabric by a _mere_ reduction of the number of its
+scenes; and in some cases no amount of rearrangement of the whole
+material employed could have produced this result. This means, however,
+on the other hand, that the Elizabethans, partly from the very
+simplicity of their theatrical conditions, were able to handle with
+decided, though usually imperfect, dramatic effect subjects which would
+present difficulties still greater, if not insuperable, to a playwright
+now. And in Shakespeare we can trace, in this respect and in others, the
+advantages connected with the absence of scenery. He could carry his
+audience freely from one country, town, house or room, to another, or
+from this part of a battle-field to that, because the audience imagined
+each place and saw none. I take an extreme example. The Third Act of
+_Antony and Cleopatra_, according to modern editions, contains thirteen
+scenes, and these are the localities assigned to them: (1) a plain in
+Syria, (2) Rome, an ante-chamber in Cćsar's house, (3) Alexandria,
+Cleopatra's palace, (4) Athens, a room in Antony's house, (5) the same,
+another room, (6) Rome, Cćsar's house, (7) near Actium, Antony's camp,
+(8) a plain near Actium, (9) another part of the plain, (10) another
+part of the plain, (11) Alexandria, Cleopatra's palace, (12) Egypt,
+Cćsar's camp, (13) Alexandria, Cleopatra's palace. I wonder how long
+this Act would take on our stage, where each locality must be
+represented. Three hours perhaps, of which the performance might occupy
+one-eighth. But in Shakespeare's day there was no occasion for any
+stage-direction as to locality throughout the Act.
+
+Again, Shakespeare's method of working a double plot depends largely on
+his ability to bring the persons belonging to the two plots on to the
+stage in alternate scenes of no great length until the threads are
+combined. This is easily seen in _King Lear_; and there we can observe,
+further, how he varies the pitch of feeling and provides relief by
+interposing short quiet scenes between longer exciting ones. By this
+means, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the Storm-scene on the heath,
+which if undivided would be intolerable, is broken into three, separated
+by very short duologues spoken within the Castle and in prose. Again,
+since scene follows scene without a pause, he could make one tell on
+another in the way either of intensification or of contrast. We catch
+the effect in reading, but in our theatres it is usually destroyed by
+the interval. Finally, however many scenes an Act may contain,
+Shakespeare can keep attention glued to the play throughout the Act,
+because there are no intervals. So can our playwrights, because they
+have but one or two scenes in the Act. But in our reproductions of
+Shakespeare, though the number of scenes is reduced, it can scarcely
+ever be reduced to that extent; so that several times during an Act, and
+many times during the play, we are withdrawn perforce from the dramatic
+atmosphere into that of everyday life, solitary impatience or ennui,
+distracting conversation, third-rate music, or, occasionally, good music
+half-drowned in a babble of voices.
+
+If we consider the characteristics on which I have been dwelling, and
+bear in mind also the rapidity of speech which we have found to be
+probable, we shall realise that a performance in Shakespeare's day,
+though more of the play was performed, must have been something much
+more variegated and changeful, and much lighter in movement, than a
+revival now. And this difference will have been observed by those who
+have seen Shakespeare acted by the Elizabethan Stage Society, under the
+direction of Mr. Poel, who not only played scene after scene without
+intervals, but secured in a considerable degree that rapidity of speech.
+
+A minor point remains. The Elizabethan stage, we have seen, had no front
+curtain. The front curtain and the use of scenery naturally came in
+together, for the second, so far as the front stage was concerned, was
+dependent on the first; and as we have already glanced at some effects
+of the absence of the second, that of the first will require but a few
+additional words. It was clearly in some ways a great disadvantage; for
+every situation at the front of the stage had to be begun and ended
+before the eyes of the audience. In our dramas the curtain may rise on a
+position which the actors then had to produce by movements not really
+belonging to the play; and, what is more important, the scene may
+advance to a striking climax, the effect of which would be greatly
+diminished and sometimes destroyed if the actors had to leave the stage
+instead of being suddenly hidden. In Elizabethan plays, accordingly, we
+seldom meet with this kind of effect, though it is not difficult to
+discover places where it would have been appropriate. But we shall not
+find them, I venture to think, in tragedies. This effect, in other
+words, appears properly to belong to comedy and to melodrama (if that
+species of play is to be considered here at all); and the Elizabethans
+lost nothing by their inability to misuse it in tragedy, and especially
+at the close of a tragedy. Whether it can be artistic to end any
+serious scene whatever at the point of greatest tension seems doubtful,
+but surely it is little short of barbarous to drop the curtain on the
+last dying words, or, it may be, the last convulsion, of a tragic hero.
+In tragedy the Elizabethan practice, like the Greek, was to lower the
+pitch of emotion from this point by a few quiet words, followed perhaps
+by sounds which, in intention at least, were majestic or solemn, and so
+to restore the audience to common life 'in calm of mind, all passion
+spent.' Thus Shakespeare's tragedies always close; and the end of
+Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_ is not _Exeunt Devils with Faustus_, but the
+speech beginning
+
+  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
+  And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough,
+  That sometime grew within this learned man.
+
+In this particular case Marlowe, if he had not been a poet, might have
+dispensed with the final descent, or ascent, from the violent emotions
+attending the catastrophe; but in the immense majority of their
+tragedies the Elizabethans, even if they had wished to do as we too
+often do, were saved from the temptation by the absence of a front
+curtain.[21]
+
+
+  5.
+
+Hitherto we have not considered a Shakespearean performance on the side,
+I will not say of its spectacular, but of its pictorial effect. This
+must be our last subject. We have to bear in mind here three things: the
+fact that the stage was viewed from three sides, its illumination by
+daylight throughout the play, and the absence of scenery. It is obvious
+that the last two deprived the audience of many attractive or impressive
+pictures; while, as to the first, it seems unlikely that actors who were
+watched from the sides as well as the front would study to group
+themselves as parts of a composition addressed to the eye. Indeed one
+may doubt whether, except in regard to costume, they seriously attended
+to the pictorial effect of a drama at all; their tiny crowds and armies,
+for example, cannot have provided much of a show. And in any case it is
+clear that the audience had to dispense with many more or less beautiful
+sights that we may now enjoy. But the question whether their loss was,
+on the whole, a disadvantage is not so easy to answer; for here again it
+freed them from a temptation--that of sacrificing dramatic to pictorial
+effect; and we cannot tell whether, or how far, they would have been
+proof against its influence. Let us try, however, to see the position
+clearly.
+
+The essence of drama--and certainly of Shakespearean drama--lies in
+actions and words expressive of inward movements of human nature.
+Pictorial effects (if for convenience' sake the various matters under
+consideration may be signified by that phrase) are in themselves no more
+dramatic than songs, dances, military music, or the jests of a 'fool.'
+Like these other things, they may be made dramatic. They may be used and
+apprehended, that is to say, as elements fused with the essential
+elements of dramatic effect. And, so far as this is the case and they
+thus contribute to that effect, they are, it seems clear, an unmixed
+advantage. But a distinct and separate attention to them is another
+matter; for, the moment it sets in, attention begins to be withdrawn
+from the actions and words, and therefore from the inward movements that
+these express. And experience shows that, as soon as pictorial
+attractions exceed a certain limit, impossible to specify in general
+terms, they at once influence the average play-goer in this mischievous
+way. It is, further, well-nigh inevitable that this should happen.
+However interesting the actions, words, and inward movements may be,
+they call for some effort of imagination and of other mental
+activities,[22] while stage-pictures demand very little; and
+accordingly, at the present time at any rate, the bulk of an audience to
+which the latter are abundantly presented will begin to enjoy them for
+their own sakes, or as parts of a panorama and not of a drama. No one, I
+think, can honestly doubt this who watches and listens to the people
+sitting near him at what the newspapers too truly call 'an amazing
+Shakespearean spectacle.' If we are offered a pretty picture of the
+changing colours of the sky at dawn, or of a forest glade with deer
+miraculously moving across its sunny grass, most of us cease for the
+time to be an audience and become mere spectators; and let Romeo and
+Juliet, or Rosalind and Orlando, talk as like angels as they will, they
+will talk but half-heeded. Our dramatists know this well enough. Mr.
+Barrie and Mr. Pinero and Mr. Shaw, who want the audience to listen and
+understand, take good care not to divert its attention and deaden its
+imagination by scenic displays. And yet, with the heartiest admiration
+for their best work, one may say that Shakespeare's requires more
+attention and imagination than theirs.
+
+Whether the Elizabethan companies, if they had had the power to use the
+attractions of scenery, would have abused it, and whether in that case
+the audience would have been as readily debauched as ours, it is useless
+to dispute. The audience was not composed mainly of groundlings; and
+even the groundlings in that age had drama in their blood. But I venture
+to disbelieve that the main fault in these matters lies, in any age,
+with the audience. It is like the populace in Shakespeare's plays, easy
+to lead wrong but just as easy to lead right. If you give people in the
+East End, or even in the Albert Hall, nothing but third-rate music, most
+of them will be content with it, and possibly may come to disrelish what
+is better. But if you have a little faith in great art and in human
+nature, and offer them, I do not say the Diabelli variations, but such
+music as the symphonies of Beethoven or even of Brahms, they will
+justify your faith. This is not theory, but fact; and I cannot think
+that it is otherwise with drama, or at least with the dramas of
+Shakespeare. Did they ever 'spell ruin to managers' if they were,
+through the whole cast, satisfactorily acted? What spells real ruin to
+managers and actors alike is what spells degradation to audiences.[23]
+
+But whether or no Shakespeare's audience could have been easily degraded
+by scenic pleasure, it had not the chance; and I will not raise the
+further question how far its disabilities were the cause of its virtues,
+but will end with a few words on two of the virtues themselves. It
+possessed, first, a vivid imagination. Shakespeare could address to it
+not in vain the injunction, 'Work, work your thoughts!' Probably in
+three scenes out of five the place and surroundings of the action were
+absolutely invisible to its eyes. In a fourth it took the barest symbol
+for reality. A couple of wretched trees made the Forest of Arden for it,
+five men with ragged foils the army that conquered at Agincourt: are we
+stronger than it, or weaker? It heard Romeo say
+
+      Look, love, what envious streaks
+  Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;
+
+and to its mind's eye they were there. It looked at a shabby old
+balcony, but as it listened it saw the swallows flitting round the
+sun-lit battlements of Macbeth's castle, and our pitiful sense of
+grotesque incongruity never troubled it.[24] The simplest convention
+sufficed to set its imagination at work. If Prospero entered wearing a
+particular robe, it knew that no one on the stage could see his solid
+shape;[25] and if Banquo, rising through the trap-door, had his bloody
+face dusted over with meal, it recognised him for a ghost and thrilled
+with horror; and we, Heaven help us, should laugh. Though the stage
+stood in broad daylight, again, Banquo, for it, was being murdered on a
+dark wet night, for he carried a torch and spoke of rain; and the
+chaste stars were shining for it outside Desdemona's chamber as the
+awful figure entered and extinguished the lamp. Consider how
+extraordinary is the fact I am about to mention, and what a testimony it
+bears to the imagination of the audience. In _Hamlet_, _Othello_, and
+_Macbeth_, not one scene here and there but actually the majority of the
+most impressive scenes take place at night, and, to a reader, depend not
+a little on the darkness for their effect. Yet the Ghost-scenes, the
+play-scene, the sparing of the king at prayer, that conversation of
+Hamlet with his mother which is opened by the killing of Polonius and
+interrupted by the appearance of the Ghost; the murder of Duncan, the
+murder of Banquo, the Banquet-scene, the Sleep-walking scene; the whole
+of the first Act of _Othello_, the scene of Cassio's drunken revel and
+fight, and the whole of the terrible last Act,--all of this was played
+in a theatre open to the afternoon sun, and was written by a man who
+knew that it was so to be played. But he knew his audience too.[26]
+
+That audience had not only imagination, and the power to sink its soul
+in the essence of drama. It had something else of scarcely less import
+for Shakespeare, the love of poetry. Ignorant, noisy, malodorous, too
+fond of dances and songs and dirty jokes, of soldiers and trumpets and
+cannon, the groundling might be: but he liked poetry. If he had not
+liked it, he, with his brutal manners, would have silenced it, and the
+Elizabethan drama could never have been the thing it was. The plays of
+Shakespeare swarm with long speeches, almost all of which are cut down
+or cut clean away for our theatres. They are never, of course,
+irrelevant; sometimes they are indispensable to the full appreciation
+of a character; but it is manifest that they were not written solely
+for a dramatic purpose, but also because the author and his audience
+loved poetry. A sign of this is the fact that they especially abound
+where, from the nature of the story, the dramatic structure is
+imperfect.[27] They abound in _Troilus and Cressida_ and _Henry V._ more
+than in _Othello_ or _Much Ado_. Remember, for a standard of size, that
+'To be or not to be' is thirty-three lines in length, and then consider
+the following fact. _Henry V._ contains seventeen speeches longer than
+that soliloquy. Five of them are between forty and fifty lines long, two
+between fifty and sixty, and two exceed sixty. Yet if any play entirely
+by Shakespeare were open to the charge of being a 'drum and trumpet
+history' written to please the populace, it would be _Henry V._ Not only
+then the cultured section of the audience loved poetry; the whole
+audience loved it. How long would they have continued to relish this
+'perpetual feast of nectared sweets' if their eyes had been feasted too?
+Or is it likely that, once habituated to spectacular stimulants, they
+would have welcomed 'the crystal clearness of the Muses' spring'?
+
+1902.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] This, one may suspect, was also the position of Webster, who
+    praises Shakespeare, but groups him with Dekker and Heywood, and
+    mentions him after Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher
+    (Preface to the _White Devil_).
+
+  [2] I am obliged to speak summarily. Some of these things declined in
+    popularity as time went on.
+
+  [3] The examples just cited show his method at its best, and it would
+    be easy to mention others far less satisfactory. Nor do I doubt that
+    his plays would be much more free from blemishes of various kinds if
+    his audience had added to their virtues greater cultivation. On the
+    other hand the question whether, or how far, he knowingly 'wrote down
+    to' his audience, in the sense of giving it what he despised, seems
+    to me very difficult, if not impossible, to answer: and I may mention
+    some causes of this difficulty.
+
+    (1) There is no general presumption against interpolations in an
+    Elizabethan drama published piratically or after the author's death.
+    We have, further, positive grounds of the strongest kind for
+    believing that 'Shakespeare's plays' contain a good deal that
+    Shakespeare never wrote. We cannot therefore simply take it for
+    granted that he wrote every silly or offensive thing that we find in
+    the volume; and least of all should we do this when the passage is
+    more or less irrelevant and particularly easy to excise. I do not say
+    that these considerations have great importance here, but they have
+    some; and readers of Shakespeare, and even some scholars, constantly
+    tend to forget them, and to regard the texts as if they had been
+    published by himself, or by scrupulously careful men of letters
+    immediately after his death.
+
+    (2) We must never take for granted that what seems to us feeble or
+    bad seemed so to Shakespeare. Evidently he was amused by puns and
+    quips and verbal ingenuities in which most of us find little
+    entertainment. Gross jokes, scarcely redeemed in our eyes by their
+    humour, may have diverted him. He sometimes writes, and clearly in
+    good faith, what seems to us bombastic or 'conceited.' So far as this
+    was the case he was not writing down to his audience. He shared its
+    tastes, or the tastes of some section of it. So it may have been,
+    again, with such a blot as the blinding of Gloucester on the open
+    stage.
+
+    (3) Jonson defied his audience, yet he wrote a good deal that we
+    think bad. In the same way certain of Shakespeare's faults _cannot_
+    be due to condescension to his audience: _e.g._ the obscurities and
+    distortions of language not infrequent in his later plays. And this
+    may be so with some faults which have the appearance of arising from
+    that condescension.
+
+    (4) Other defects again he might have deliberately defended; _e.g._
+    the highly improbable conclusions and the distressing mis-marriages
+    of some of the comedies. 'It is of the essence of romantic comedy,'
+    he might have said, 'to treat such things with indifference. There is
+    a convention that you should take the characters with some degree of
+    seriousness while they are in difficulties, and should cease to do so
+    when they are to be delivered from them.' Do not we ourselves adopt
+    this point of view to some extent when we go to the theatre now?
+
+    I added this note after reading Mr. Bridges's very interesting and
+    original contribution to the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare
+    (vol x.). I disagree with some of Mr. Bridges's remarks, and am not
+    always repelled by things that he dislikes. But this brief note is
+    not, of course, meant for an answer to his paper; it merely suggests
+    reasons for at least diminishing the proportion of defect
+    attributable to a conscious sacrifice of art to the tastes of the
+    audience.
+
+  [4] To us their first appearance is of interest chiefly because it
+    introduces the soliloquy 'How all occasions.' But, it is amusing to
+    notice, the Folio, which probably represents the acting version in
+    1623, omits the soliloquy but retains the marching soldiers.
+
+  [5] I do not refer to the Globe.
+
+  [6] The latter, no doubt, accompanied by the band, except when the
+    clown played the tabor while he danced alone.
+
+  [7] This may possibly be one of the signs that _Macbeth_ was altered
+    after Shakespeare's retirement or death.
+
+  [8] Surely every company that plays Shakespeare should include a boy.
+    There would then be no excuse for giving to a woman such parts as
+    Ariel and Brutus's boy Lucius.
+
+  [9] This question will not be answered by the citation of one famous
+    speech of Cleopatra's--a speech, too, which is strictly in character.
+    But, as to this matter and the other considerations put forward
+    above, I must add that, while my impression is that what has been
+    said of Shakespeare holds of most of the contemporary dramatists, I
+    have not verified it by a research. A student looking for a subject
+    for his thesis might well undertake such a research.
+
+  [10] When the lecture was given (in 1902) I went more fully into
+    details, having arrived at certain conclusions mainly by an
+    examination of Elizabethan dramas. I suppress them here because I
+    have been unable to study all that has since been written on the
+    Elizabethan stage. The reader who is interested in the subject should
+    refer in the first instance to an excellent article by Mr. Archer in
+    the _Quarterly Review_ for April, 1908.
+
+  [11] This is a description of a public theatre. A private one, it
+    will be remembered, had seats in the area (there called the pit), was
+    completely roofed, and could be darkened.
+
+  [12] 'The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their
+    charge with snores,' says Lady Macbeth on the stage below; and no
+    doubt the tiring-house doors _were_ open.
+
+  [13] This view, into the grounds of which I cannot go, implies that
+    Juliet's bedroom was, in one scene, the upper stage, and, in another,
+    the back stage; but the Elizabethans, I believe, would make no
+    difficulty about that.
+
+  [14] Perhaps. It seems necessary to suppose that the sides of the
+    backstage, as well as its front, could be open; otherwise many of the
+    spectators could not have seen what took place there. But it is not
+    _necessary_, so far as I remember, to suppose that the sides could be
+    closed by curtains. The Elizabethans probably would not have been
+    troubled by seeing dead bodies get up and go into the tiring-house
+    when a play or even a scene was over.
+
+  [15] Where this contrivance was used at all it probably only
+    announced the general place of the action throughout the play: _e.g._
+    _Denmark_, or, a little more fully, _Verona_, _Mantua_.
+
+  [16] It is possibly significant that _Macbeth_ and the _Tempest_,
+    plays containing more 'shews' than most, are exceptionally short.
+
+  [17] It suffices for this rough experiment to read a column in an
+    edition like the Globe, and then to multiply the time taken by the
+    number of columns in the play.
+
+  [18] I do not know whether the average size of our theatres differs
+    much from that of the Elizabethan. The diameter of the area at the
+    _Fortune_ and the _Globe_ seems to have been fifty feet.
+
+  [19] I mean by a scene a section of a play before and after which the
+    stage is unoccupied. Most editions of Shakespeare are faulty in the
+    division of scenes (see _Shakespearean Tragedy_, p. 451).
+
+  [20] So it very nearly does in some Restoration comedies. In the _Way
+    of the World_ the scenery is changed only twice in the five acts,
+    though there are more than five scenes.
+
+  [21] The 'back' stage, which had curtains, must, I suppose, have been
+    too small to accommodate the number of persons commonly present,
+    alive or dead, at the close of a tragedy. I do not know if any recent
+    writer has raised and discussed the questions how often the back
+    stage is used in the last scene of an Elizabethan play, and, again,
+    whether it is often employed at all in order to produce, by the
+    closing of the curtains, the kind of effect referred to in the
+    paragraph above. Perhaps the fact that the curtains had to be closed
+    by an actor, within them or without, made this effect impossible. Or
+    perhaps it was not desired. In Shakespeare's tragedies, if my memory
+    serves me, the only sudden or startling appeals of an outward kind
+    (apart, of course, from actions) are those produced by supernatural
+    appearances and disappearances, as in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_. These,
+    we have seen, were usually managed by means of the trap-door, which,
+    it would seem from some passages, must have been rather large. These
+    matters deserve investigation if they have not already received it.
+
+  [22] I do not refer to such deliberate and sustained effort as a
+    reader may sometimes make. It is not commonly realised that
+    continuous attention to any imaginative or intellectual matter,
+    however enjoyable, involves considerable strain. If at a lecture or
+    sermon a careless person makes himself observable in arriving late or
+    leaving early, the eyes of half the audience will turn to him and
+    follow him. And the reason is not always that the speaker bores them;
+    it is that involuntarily they seek relief from this strain. The same
+    thing may be seen in the concert-room or theatre, but very much less
+    at a panorama, because the mere use of the eyes, even when
+    continuous, is comparatively easy.
+
+  [23] I am not referring here, or elsewhere, to such a moderate use of
+    scenery in Shakespearean performances as most of our actor-managers
+    (_e.g._ Mr. Benson) now adopt. I regret it in so far as it involves a
+    curtailing of the play; but I do not think it withdraws from the play
+    any attention that is of value, and for some of the audience it
+    probably heightens the dramatic effect. Still, in my belief, it would
+    be desirable to decrease it, because the less there is of it, the
+    more is good acting necessary, and the more of the play itself can be
+    acted. Some use of scenery, with its consequences to the play, must
+    unquestionably be accepted as the rule, but I would add that it ought
+    always to be possible for us to see performances, such as we owed to
+    Mr. Poel, nearer to those of Shakespeare's time.
+
+  [24] When, in the time of Malone and Steevens, the question was
+    debated whether Shakespeare's stage had scenery, it was argued that
+    it must have had it, because otherwise the contrast between the words
+    and the visible stage in the passage referred to would have been
+    hopelessly ludicrous.
+
+  [25] 'Enter invisible' (a common stage-direction) means 'Enter in the
+    dress which means to the audience that you are invisible.'
+
+  [26] Probably he never needed to think of the audience, but wrote
+    what pleased his own imagination, which, like theirs, was not only
+    dramatic but, in the best sense, theatrical.
+
+  [27] Their abundance in _Hamlet_ results partly from the character of
+    the hero. They helped, however, to make that play too long; and the
+    omission of 'How all occasions' from the Folio doubtless means that
+    the company cut this soliloquy (whether they did so in the author's
+    life-time we cannot tell). It may be noticed that, where a play shows
+    clear signs of revision by Shakespeare himself, we rarely find a
+    disposition to shorten long poetical speeches.
+
+
+
+
+In some of these lectures[1]--for the duties and pleasures that have
+fallen to me as Professor of Poetry are now to end--I may have betrayed
+a certain propensity to philosophise. But I should ask pardon for this
+only if I believed it to intrude where it has no place, in the
+imaginative perception of poetry. Philosophy has long been at home in
+this University; in the remarkable development of English philosophical
+thought during the last five-and-thirty years Oxford has played a
+leading part; and I hope the time will never come when a son of hers
+will need to apologise to his brethren for talking philosophy. Besides,
+though I owe her gratitude for many gifts, and most for the friendships
+she gave me, her best intellectual gift was the conviction that what
+imagination loved as poetry reason might love as philosophy, and that in
+the end these are two ways of saying the same thing. And, finally, I
+hoped, by dwelling in these lectures (for instance, with reference to
+the poets of Wordsworth's time) on the connection of poetry with the
+wider life around it, to correct an impression which my opening lecture
+seems here and there to have left. Not that I can withdraw or even
+modify the view put forward then. So far as any single function of
+spiritual life can be said to have an intrinsic value, poetry, it seems
+to me, possesses it just as other functions do, and it is in each case
+irreplaceable. And further, it seems to me, poetry attains its own aim,
+and in doing so makes its contribution to the whole, most surely and
+fully when it seeks its own end without attempting to reach those of
+co-ordinate functions, such as the attainment of philosophic truth or
+the furtherance of moral progress. But then I believe this because I
+also believe that the unity of human nature in its diverse activities is
+so intimate and pervasive that no influence can affect any one of them
+alone, and that no one of them can operate or change without
+transmitting its influence to the rest. If I may use the language of
+paradox I would say that the pursuit of poetry for its own sake is the
+pursuit both of truth and of goodness. Devotion to it is devotion to
+'the good cause of the world'; and wherever the imagination is
+satisfied, there, if we had a knowledge we have not, we should discover
+no idle fancy but the image of a truth.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [1] As the order of the lectures has been changed for the purposes of
+    publication, I have been obliged to move these concluding sentences
+    from their original place at the end of the lecture on _The Long Poem
+    in the Age of Wordsworth_.
+
+
+
+
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Oxford Lectures on Poetry, by Andrew Cecil Bradley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Oxford Lectures on Poetry
+
+Author: Andrew Cecil Bradley
+
+Release Date: July 17, 2011 [EBook #36773]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD LECTURES ON POETRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marius Masi, Suzanne Shell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p class="pt2">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center f80">
+<p><i>BY A. C. BRADLEY, LL.D., LITT.D.</i></p>
+<p>*</p>
+<p>SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY</p>
+
+<p class="sc">Lectures on<br />
+Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth</p>
+
+<p>*</p>
+
+<p>MACMILLAN &amp; CO LTD.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="center ptb1 sc" style="color: #c11B17; font-size: 250%;">OXFORD LECTURES<br />
+ON POETRY</p>
+
+<p class="center f80">BY</p>
+
+<p class="center f120">A. C. BRADLEY</p>
+
+<p class="center f80"><span class="sc">LL.D., Litt.D.</span><br />
+FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD<br />
+AND FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE</p>
+
+
+<p class="pt2 center">MACMILLAN</p>
+
+<p class="center f80">London ˇ Melbourne ˇ Toronto</p>
+
+<hr class="short" />
+
+<p class="center" style="letter-spacing: .5em;">ST MARTIN&rsquo;S PRESS<br />
+
+<span class="f80">New York<br />
+1965</span></p>
+
+<p class="center f80 pt2"><i>This book is copyright in all countries which<br />
+are signatories of the Berne Convention</i></p>
+
+<p class="center f80 pt2">First Edition, May 1909. Second Edition, November 1909<br />
+Reprinted 1911, 1914, 1917, 1919, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1934,<br />
+1941, 1950, 1955, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center f80 pt2">MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED<br />
+<i>St Martin&rsquo;s Street London WC2<br />
+also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne</i></p>
+
+<p class="center f80">THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED<br />
+<i>70 Bond Street Toronto 2</i></p>
+
+<p class="center f80">ST MARTIN&rsquo;S PRESS INC<br />
+<i>175 Fifth Avenue New York 10010 NY</i></p>
+
+
+<p class="center f80 pt2">PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN</p>
+
+<p class="center f80 pt2" style="letter-spacing: .5em;">TO<br />
+MY OXFORD FRIENDS<br />
+1869-1909</p>
+
+
+<p class="center f80 pt1"><i>&lsquo;They have seemed to be together, though absent,<br />
+shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced, as it<br />
+were, from the ends of opposed winds.&rsquo;</i></p>
+
+
+<hr class="art" />
+<p class="chap2 center">PREFACE</p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">This</span> volume consists of lectures delivered during
+my tenure of the Chair of Poetry at Oxford and not
+included in <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i>. Most of them
+have been enlarged, and all have been revised.
+As they were given at intervals, and the majority
+before the publication of that book, they contained
+repetitions which I have not found it possible
+wholly to remove. Readers of a lecture published
+by the University of Manchester on <i>English Poetry
+and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth</i>
+will pardon also the restatement of some ideas
+expressed in it.</p>
+
+<p>The several lectures are dated, as I have been
+unable to take account of most of the literature
+on their subjects published since they were
+delivered.</p>
+
+<p>They are arranged in the order that seems best
+to me, but it is of importance only in the case of
+the four which deal with the poets of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+time.</p>
+
+<p>I am indebted to the Delegates of the University
+Press, and to the proprietors and editors of the
+<i>Hibbert Journal</i> and the <i>Albany</i>, <i>Fortnightly</i>, and
+<i>Quarterly Reviews</i>, respectively, for permission to
+republish the first, third, fifth, eighth, and ninth
+lectures. A like acknowledgment is due for leave
+to use some sentences of an article on Keats
+contributed to <i>Chambers&rsquo;s Cyclopaedia of English
+Literature</i> (1903).</p>
+
+<p>In the revision of the proof-sheets I owed much
+help to a sister who has shared many of my Oxford
+friendships.</p>
+
+<hr class="art" />
+<p class="chap2 center">NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION</p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">This</span> edition is substantially identical with the first;
+but it and its later impressions contain a few improvements
+in points of detail, and, thanks to
+criticisms by my brother, F. H. Bradley, I hope
+to have made my meaning clearer in some pages of
+the second lecture.</p>
+
+<p>There was an oversight in the first edition which
+I regret. In adding the note on p. 247 I forgot
+that I had not referred to Professor Dowden in the
+lecture on &ldquo;Shakespeare the Man.&rdquo; In everything
+that I have written on Shakespeare I am indebted
+to Professor Dowden, and certainly not least in that
+lecture.</p>
+
+<hr class="art" />
+<p class="chap2 center">CONTENTS</p>
+
+<table class="pic" width="90%" summary="Contents">
+<tr><td class="tcr f80" colspan="2">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">Poetry for Poetry&rsquo;s Sake</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page2">3</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">The Sublime</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page36">37</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">Hegel&rsquo;s Theory of Tragedy</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page68">69</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">Wordsworth</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page98">99</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">Shelley&rsquo;s View of Poetry</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page150">151</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page176">177</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">The Letters of Keats</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page208">209</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">The Rejection of Falstaff</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page246">247</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">Shakespeare&rsquo;s &lsquo;Antony and Cleopatra&rsquo;</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page278">279</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">Shakespeare the Man</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page310">311</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tcl sc">Shakespeare&rsquo;s Theatre and Audience</td> <td class="tcr"><a href="#page360">361</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page1" id="page1"></a>1</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">POETRY FOR POETRY&rsquo;S SAKE</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page2" id="page2"></a>2<br />3</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2"><span class="chap2">POETRY FOR POETRY&rsquo;S SAKE</span><a name="fa1a" id="fa1a" href="#ft1a"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="center pt1 f90">(INAUGURAL LECTURE)</p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">One</span> who, after twenty years, is restored to the
+University where he was taught and first tried to
+teach, and who has received at the hands of his
+Alma Mater an honour of which he never dreamed,
+is tempted to speak both of himself and of her.
+But I remember that you have come to listen to
+my thoughts about a great subject, and not to my
+feelings about myself; and of Oxford who that
+holds this Professorship could dare to speak, when
+he recalls the exquisite verse in which one of his
+predecessors described her beauty, and the prose in
+which he gently touched on her illusions and protested
+that they were as nothing when set against
+her age-long warfare with the Philistine? How,
+again, remembering him and others, should I
+venture to praise my predecessors? It would be
+pleasant to do so, and even pleasanter to me and
+you if, instead of lecturing, I quoted to you some of
+their best passages. But I could not do this for five
+years. Sooner or later, my own words would have
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page4" id="page4"></a>4</span>
+to come, and the inevitable contrast. Not to sharpen
+it now, I will be silent concerning them also; and
+will only assure you that I do not forget them, or
+the greatness of the honour of succeeding them,
+or the responsibility which it entails.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">The words &lsquo;Poetry for poetry&rsquo;s sake&rsquo; recall the
+famous phrase &lsquo;Art for Art.&rsquo; It is far from my
+purpose to examine the possible meanings of that
+phrase, or all the questions it involves. I propose
+to state briefly what I understand by &lsquo;Poetry for
+poetry&rsquo;s sake,&rsquo; and then, after guarding against one
+or two misapprehensions of the formula, to consider
+more fully a single problem connected with it. And
+I must premise, without attempting to justify them,
+certain explanations. We are to consider poetry in
+its essence, and apart from the flaws which in most
+poems accompany their poetry. We are to include
+in the idea of poetry the metrical form, and not to
+regard this as a mere accident or a mere vehicle.
+And, finally, poetry being poems, we are to think of
+a poem as it actually exists; and, without aiming
+here at accuracy, we may say that an actual poem
+is the succession of experiences&mdash;sounds, images,
+thoughts, emotions&mdash;through which we pass when
+we are reading as poetically as we can.<a name="fa2a" id="fa2a" href="#ft2a"><span class="sp">2</span></a> Of course
+this imaginative experience&mdash;if I may use the phrase
+for brevity&mdash;differs with every reader and every
+time of reading: a poem exists in innumerable
+degrees. But that insurmountable fact lies in the
+nature of things and does not concern us now.</p>
+
+<p>What then does the formula &lsquo;Poetry for poetry&rsquo;s
+sake&rsquo; tell us about this experience? It says, as I
+understand it, these things. First, this experience
+is an end in itself, is worth having on its own
+account, has an intrinsic value. Next, its <i>poetic</i>
+value is this intrinsic worth alone. Poetry may
+have also an ulterior value as a means to culture or
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page5" id="page5"></a>5</span>
+religion; because it conveys instruction, or softens
+the passions, or furthers a good cause; because it
+brings the poet fame or money or a quiet conscience.
+So much the better: let it be valued for these
+reasons too. But its ulterior worth neither is nor
+can directly determine its poetic worth as a satisfying
+imaginative experience; and this is to be judged
+entirely from within. And to these two positions
+the formula would add, though not of necessity, a
+third. The consideration of ulterior ends, whether
+by the poet in the act of composing or by the reader
+in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic
+value. It does so because it tends to change the
+nature of poetry by taking it out of its own atmosphere.
+For its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a
+copy, of the real world (as we commonly understand
+that phrase), but to be a world by itself, independent,
+complete, autonomous; and to possess it fully you
+must enter that world, conform to its laws, and
+ignore for the time the beliefs, aims, and particular
+conditions which belong to you in the other world
+of reality.</p>
+
+<p>Of the more serious misapprehensions to which
+these statements may give rise I will glance only
+at one or two. The offensive consequences often
+drawn from the formula &lsquo;Art for Art&rsquo; will be found
+to attach not to the doctrine that Art is an end in
+itself, but to the doctrine that Art is the whole or
+supreme end of human life. And as this latter
+doctrine, which seems to me absurd, is in any case
+quite different from the former, its consequences fall
+outside my subject. The formula &lsquo;Poetry is an end
+in itself&rsquo; has nothing to say on the various questions
+of moral judgment which arise from the fact that
+poetry has its place in a many-sided life. For
+anything it says, the intrinsic value of poetry might
+be so small, and its ulterior effects so mischievous,
+that it had better not exist. The formula only tells
+us that we must not place in antithesis poetry and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page6" id="page6"></a>6</span>
+human good, for poetry is one kind of human good;
+and that we must not determine the intrinsic value
+of this kind of good by direct reference to another.
+If we do, we shall find ourselves maintaining what
+we did not expect. If poetic value lies in the stimulation
+of religious feelings, <i>Lead, kindly Light</i> is no
+better a poem than many a tasteless version of a
+Psalm: if in the excitement of patriotism, why is
+<i>Scots, wha hae</i> superior to <i>We don&rsquo;t want to fight?</i>
+if in the mitigation of the passions, the Odes of
+Sappho will win but little praise: if in instruction,
+Armstrong&rsquo;s <i>Art of preserving Health</i> should win
+much.</p>
+
+<p>Again, our formula may be accused of cutting
+poetry away from its connection with life. And this
+accusation raises so huge a problem that I must ask
+leave to be dogmatic as well as brief. There is
+plenty of connection between life and poetry, but it
+is, so to say, a connection underground. The two
+may be called different forms of the same thing: one
+of them having (in the usual sense) reality, but
+seldom fully satisfying imagination; while the other
+offers something which satisfies imagination but has
+not full &lsquo;reality.&rsquo; They are parallel developments
+which nowhere meet, or, if I may use loosely a word
+which will be serviceable later, they are analogues.
+Hence we understand one by help of the other, and
+even, in a sense, care for one because of the other;
+but hence also, poetry neither is life, nor, strictly
+speaking, a copy of it. They differ not only because
+one has more mass and the other a more perfect
+shape, but because they have different <i>kinds</i> of
+existence. The one touches us as beings occupying
+a given position in space and time, and having
+feelings, desires, and purposes due to that position:
+it appeals to imagination, but appeals to much
+besides. What meets us in poetry has not a position
+in the same series of time and space, or, if it has
+or had such a position, it is taken apart from much
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page7" id="page7"></a>7</span>
+that belonged to it there;<a name="fa3a" id="fa3a" href="#ft3a"><span class="sp">3</span></a> and therefore it makes
+no direct appeal to those feelings, desires, and purposes,
+but speaks only to contemplative imagination&mdash;imagination
+the reverse of empty or emotionless,
+imagination saturated with the results of &lsquo;real&rsquo;
+experience, but still contemplative. Thus, no doubt,
+one main reason why poetry has poetic value for us
+is that it presents to us in its own way something
+which we meet in another form in nature or life; and
+yet the test of its poetic value for us lies simply in
+the question whether it satisfies our imagination; the
+rest of us, our knowledge or conscience, for example,
+judging it only so far as they appear transmuted in
+our imagination. So also Shakespeare&rsquo;s knowledge
+or his moral insight, Milton&rsquo;s greatness of soul,
+Shelley&rsquo;s &lsquo;hate of hate&rsquo; and &lsquo;love of love,&rsquo; and that
+desire to help men or make them happier which may
+have influenced a poet in hours of meditation&mdash;all
+these have, as such, no poetical worth: they have
+that worth only when, passing through the unity
+of the poet&rsquo;s being, they reappear as qualities of
+imagination, and then are indeed mighty powers
+in the world of poetry.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">I come to a third misapprehension, and so to my
+main subject. This formula, it is said, empties
+poetry of its meaning: it is really a doctrine of form
+for form&rsquo;s sake. &lsquo;It is of no consequence what a
+poet says, so long as he says the thing well. The
+<i>what</i> is poetically indifferent: it is the <i>how</i> that
+counts. Matter, subject, content, substance, determines
+nothing; there is no subject with which
+poetry may not deal: the form, the treatment, is
+everything. Nay, more: not only is the matter
+indifferent, but it is the secret of Art to &ldquo;eradicate
+the matter by means of the form,&rdquo;&rsquo;&mdash;phrases and
+statements like these meet us everywhere in current
+criticism of literature and the other arts. They
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page8" id="page8"></a>8</span>
+are the stock-in-trade of writers who understand of
+them little more than the fact that somehow or
+other they are not &lsquo;bourgeois.&rsquo; But we find them
+also seriously used by writers whom we must respect,
+whether they are anonymous or not; something like
+one or another of them might be quoted, for
+example, from Professor Saintsbury, the late R. A. M.
+Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe himself; and they are
+the watchwords of a school in the one country
+where Aesthetics has flourished. They come, as a
+rule, from men who either practise one of the arts,
+or, from study of it, are interested in its methods.
+The general reader&mdash;a being so general that I may
+say what I will of him&mdash;is outraged by them. He
+feels that he is being robbed of almost all that he
+cares for in a work of art. &lsquo;You are asking me,&rsquo; he
+says, &lsquo;to look at the Dresden Madonna as if it were
+a Persian rug. You are telling me that the poetic
+value of <i>Hamlet</i> lies solely in its style and versification,
+and that my interest in the man and his fate is
+only an intellectual or moral interest. You allege
+that, if I want to enjoy the poetry of <i>Crossing the
+Bar</i>, I must not mind what Tennyson says there,
+but must consider solely his way of saying it. But
+in that case I can care no more for a poem than I do
+for a set of nonsense verses; and I do not believe
+that the authors of <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Crossing the Bar</i>
+regarded their poems thus.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>These antitheses of subject, matter, substance on
+the one side, form, treatment, handling on the other,
+are the field through which I especially want, in this
+lecture, to indicate a way. It is a field of battle;
+and the battle is waged for no trivial cause; but
+the cries of the combatants are terribly ambiguous.
+Those phrases of the so-called formalist may each
+mean five or six different things. Taken in one sense
+they seem to me chiefly true; taken as the general
+reader not unnaturally takes them, they seem to me
+false and mischievous. It would be absurd to pretend
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page9" id="page9"></a>9</span>
+that I can end in a few minutes a controversy
+which concerns the ultimate nature of Art, and leads
+perhaps to problems not yet soluble; but we can at
+least draw some plain distinctions which, in this
+controversy, are too often confused.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, then, let us take &lsquo;subject&rsquo; in
+one particular sense; let us understand by it that
+which we have in view when, looking at the title of
+an un-read poem, we say that the poet has chosen
+this or that for his subject. The subject, in this
+sense, so far as I can discover, is generally something,
+real or imaginary, as it exists in the minds of
+fairly cultivated people. The subject of <i>Paradise
+Lost</i> would be the story of the Fall as that story
+exists in the general imagination of a Bible-reading
+people. The subject of Shelley&rsquo;s stanzas <i>To a Skylark</i>
+would be the ideas which arise in the mind
+of an educated person when, without knowing the
+poem, he hears the word &lsquo;skylark&rsquo;. If the title of a
+poem conveys little or nothing to us, the &lsquo;subject&rsquo;
+appears to be either what we should gather by
+investigating the title in a dictionary or other book
+of the kind, or else such a brief suggestion as might
+be offered by a person who had read the poem, and
+who said, for example, that the subject of <i>The
+Ancient Mariner</i> was a sailor who killed an albatross
+and suffered for his deed.</p>
+
+<p>Now the subject, in this sense (and I intend to
+use the word in no other), is not, as such, inside the
+poem, but outside it. The contents of the stanzas
+<i>To a Skylark</i> are not the ideas suggested by the
+work &lsquo;skylark&rsquo; to the average man; they belong to
+Shelley just as much as the language does. The
+subject, therefore, is not the matter <i>of</i> the poem at
+all; and its opposite is not the <i>form</i> of the poem,
+but the whole poem. The subject is one thing;
+the poem, matter and form alike, another thing.
+This being so, it is surely obvious that the poetic
+value cannot lie in the subject, but lies entirely in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page10" id="page10"></a>10</span>
+its opposite, the poem. How can the subject determine
+the value when on one and the same subject
+poems may be written of all degrees of merit and
+demerit; or when a perfect poem may be composed
+on a subject so slight as a pet sparrow, and, if
+Macaulay may be trusted, a nearly worthless poem
+on a subject so stupendous as the omnipresence of
+the Deity? The &lsquo;formalist&rsquo; is here perfectly right.
+Nor is he insisting on something unimportant. He
+is fighting against our tendency to take the work of
+art as a mere copy or reminder of something already
+in our heads, or at the best as a suggestion of some
+idea as little removed as possible from the familiar.
+The sightseer who promenades a picture-gallery,
+remarking that this portrait is so like his cousin, or
+that landscape the very image of his birthplace, or
+who, after satisfying himself that one picture is about
+Elijah, passes on rejoicing to discover the subject,
+and nothing but the subject, of the next&mdash;what
+is he but an extreme example of this tendency?
+Well, but the very same tendency vitiates much
+of our criticism, much criticism of Shakespeare, for
+example, which, with all its cleverness and partial
+truth, still shows that the critic never passed from
+his own mind into Shakespeare&rsquo;s; and it may be
+traced even in so fine a critic as Coleridge, as when
+he dwarfs the sublime struggle of Hamlet into the
+image of his own unhappy weakness. Hazlitt by
+no means escaped its influence. Only the third of
+that great trio, Lamb, appears almost always to
+have rendered the conception of the composer.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it is surely true that we cannot determine
+beforehand what subjects are fit for Art, or name
+any subject on which a good poem might not
+possibly be written. To divide subjects into two
+groups, the beautiful or elevating, and the ugly or
+vicious, and to judge poems according as their
+subjects belong to one of these groups or the other,
+is to fall into the same pit, to confuse with our
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page11" id="page11"></a>11</span>
+pre-conceptions the meaning of the poet. What the
+thing is in the poem he is to be judged by, not by
+the thing as it was before he touched it; and how
+can we venture to say beforehand that he cannot
+make a true poem out of something which to us was
+merely alluring or dull or revolting? The question
+whether, having done so, he ought to publish his
+poem; whether the thing in the poet&rsquo;s work will not
+be still confused by the incompetent Puritan or the
+incompetent sensualist with the thing in <i>his</i> mind,
+does not touch this point: it is a further question,
+one of ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders
+of &lsquo;Art for art&rsquo;s sake&rsquo; will generally be in favour of
+the courageous course, of refusing to sacrifice the
+better or stronger part of the public to the weaker
+or worse; but their maxim in no way binds them to
+this view. Rossetti suppressed one of the best of
+his sonnets, a sonnet chosen for admiration by
+Tennyson, himself extremely sensitive about the
+moral effect of poetry; suppressed it, I believe,
+because it was called fleshly. One may regret
+Rossetti&rsquo;s judgment and at the same time respect
+his scrupulousness; but in any case he judged
+in his capacity of citizen, not in his capacity of
+artist.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">So far then the &lsquo;formalist&rsquo; appears to be right.
+But he goes too far, I think, if he maintains that the
+subject is indifferent and that all subjects are the
+same to poetry. And he does not prove his point
+by observing that a good poem might be written on
+a pin&rsquo;s head, and a bad one on the Fall of Man.
+That truth shows that the subject <i>settles</i> nothing,
+but not that it counts for nothing. The Fall of
+Man is really a more favourable subject than a pin&rsquo;s
+head. The Fall of Man, that is to say, offers
+opportunities of poetic effects wider in range and
+more penetrating in appeal. And the fact is that
+such a subject, as it exists in the general imagination,
+has some aesthetic value before the poet
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page12" id="page12"></a>12</span>
+touches it. It is, as you may choose to call it,
+an inchoate poem or the débris of a poem. It is
+not an abstract idea or a bare isolated fact, but an
+assemblage of figures, scenes, actions, and events,
+which already appeal to emotional imagination; and
+it is already in some degree organized and formed.
+In spite of this a bad poet would make a bad poem
+on it; but then we should say he was unworthy of
+the subject. And we should not say this if he
+wrote a bad poem on a pin&rsquo;s head. Conversely, a
+good poem on a pin&rsquo;s head would almost certainly
+transform its subject far more than a good poem on
+the Fall of Man. It might revolutionize its subject
+so completely that we should say, &lsquo;The subject may
+be a pin&rsquo;s head, but the substance of the poem has
+very little to do with it.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>This brings us to another and a different antithesis.
+Those figures, scenes, events, that form part of the
+subject called the Fall of Man, are not the substance
+of <i>Paradise Lost</i>; but in <i>Paradise Lost</i> there are
+figures, scenes, and events resembling them in some
+degree. These, with much more of the same kind,
+may be described as its substance, and may then be
+contrasted with the measured language of the poem,
+which will be called its form. Subject is the opposite
+not of form but of the whole poem. Substance
+is within the poem, and its opposite, form, is also
+within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis
+at present, but evidently it is quite different from
+the other. It is practically the distinction used in
+the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama, and it
+flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison,
+for example, in examining <i>Paradise Lost</i> considers
+in order the fable, the characters, and the sentiments;
+these will be the substance: then he considers the
+language, that is, the style and numbers; this will
+be the form. In like manner, the substance or
+meaning of a lyric may be distinguished from the
+form.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page13" id="page13"></a>13</span></p>
+
+<p>Now I believe it will be found that a large part
+of the controversy we are dealing with arises from
+a confusion between these two distinctions of substance
+and form, and of subject and poem. The
+extreme formalist lays his whole weight on the form
+because he thinks its opposite is the mere subject.
+The general reader is angry, but makes the same
+mistake, and gives to the subject praises that rightly
+belong to the substance<a name="fa4a" id="fa4a" href="#ft4a"><span class="sp">4</span></a>. I will read an example of
+what I mean. I can only explain the following
+words of a good critic by supposing that for the
+moment he has fallen into this confusion: &lsquo;The
+mere matter of all poetry&mdash;to wit, the appearances
+of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men&mdash;being
+unalterable, it follows that the difference between
+poet and poet will depend upon the manner
+of each in applying language, metre, rhyme, cadence,
+and what not, to this invariable material.&rsquo; What
+has become here of the substance of <i>Paradise Lost</i>&mdash;the
+story, scenery, characters, sentiments, as they
+are in the poem? They have vanished clean away.
+Nothing is left but the form on one side, and on the
+other not even the subject, but a supposed invariable
+material, the appearances of nature and the
+thoughts and feelings of men. Is it surprising that
+the whole value should then be found in the form?</p>
+
+<p>So far we have assumed that this antithesis of
+substance and form is valid, and that it always has
+one meaning. In reality it has several, but we will
+leave it in its present shape, and pass to the question
+of its validity. And this question we are compelled
+to raise, because we have to deal with the two contentions
+that the poetic value lies wholly or mainly
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page14" id="page14"></a>14</span>
+in the substance, and that it lies wholly or mainly
+in the form. Now these contentions, whether false
+or true, may seem at least to be clear; but we shall
+find, I think, that they are both of them false, or
+both of them nonsense: false if they concern anything
+outside the poem, nonsense if they apply to
+something in it. For what do they evidently imply?
+They imply that there are in a poem two parts,
+factors, or components, a substance and a form; and
+that you can conceive them distinctly and separately,
+so that when you are speaking of the one you are
+not speaking of the other. Otherwise how can you
+ask the question, In which of them does the value
+lie? But really in a poem, apart from defects, there
+are no such factors or components; and therefore it
+is strictly nonsense to ask in which of them the value
+lies. And on the other hand, if the substance and
+the form referred to are not in the poem, then both
+the contentions are false, for its poetic value lies in
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>What I mean is neither new nor mysterious; and
+it will be clear, I believe, to any one who reads
+poetry poetically and who closely examines his experience.
+When you are reading a poem, I would
+ask&mdash;not analysing it, and much less criticizing it,
+but allowing it, as it proceeds, to make its full
+impression on you through the exertion of your recreating
+imagination&mdash;do you then apprehend and
+enjoy as one thing a certain meaning or substance,
+and as another thing certain articulate sounds, and
+do you somehow compound these two? Surely you
+do not, any more than you apprehend apart, when
+you see some one smile, those lines in the face which
+express a feeling, and the feeling that the lines
+express. Just as there the lines and their meaning
+are to you one thing, not two, so in poetry the
+meaning and the sounds are one: there is, if I may
+put it so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance.
+If you read the line, &lsquo;The sun is warm, the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page15" id="page15"></a>15</span>
+sky is clear,&rsquo; you do not experience separately the
+image of a warm sun and clear sky, on the one side,
+and certain unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the
+other; nor yet do you experience them together,
+side by side; but you experience the one <i>in</i> the
+other. And in like manner, when you are really
+reading <i>Hamlet</i>, the action and the characters are
+not something which you conceive apart from the
+words; you apprehend them from point to point <i>in</i>
+the words, and the words as expressions of them.
+Afterwards, no doubt, when you are out of the
+poetic experience but remember it, you may by
+analysis decompose this unity, and attend to a substance
+more or less isolated, and a form more or
+less isolated. But these are things in your analytic
+head, not in the poem, which is <i>poetic</i> experience.
+And if you want to have the poem again, you cannot
+find it by adding together these two products of
+decomposition; you can only find it by passing back
+into poetic experience. And then what you recover
+is no aggregate of factors, it is a unity in which you
+can no more separate a substance and a form than
+you can separate living blood and the life in the
+blood. This unity has, if you like, various &lsquo;aspects&rsquo;
+or &lsquo;sides,&rsquo; but they are not factors or parts; if you
+try to examine one, you find it is also the other.
+Call them substance and form if you please, but
+these are not the reciprocally exclusive substance
+and form to which the two contentions <i>must</i> refer.
+They do not &lsquo;agree,&rsquo; for they are not apart: they
+are one thing from different points of view, and in
+that sense identical. And this identity of content
+and form, you will say, is no accident; it is of the
+essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry, and of all
+art in so far as it is art. Just as there is in music
+not sound on one side and a meaning on the other,
+but expressive sound, and if you ask what is the
+meaning you can only answer by pointing to the
+sounds; just as in painting there is not a meaning
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page16" id="page16"></a>16</span>
+<i>plus</i> paint, but a meaning <i>in</i> paint, or significant
+paint, and no man can really express the meaning
+in any other way than in paint and in <i>this</i> paint; so
+in a poem the true content and the true form neither
+exist nor can be imagined apart. When then you
+are asked whether the value of a poem lies in a
+substance got by decomposing the poem, and present,
+as such, only in reflective analysis, or whether
+the value lies in a form arrived at and existing in
+the same way, you will answer, &lsquo;It lies neither in
+one, nor in the other, nor in any addition of them,
+but in the poem, where they are not.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>We have then, first, an antithesis of subject and
+poem. This is clear and valid; and the question in
+which of them does the value lie is intelligible; and
+its answer is, In the poem. We have next a distinction
+of substance and form. If the substance
+means ideas, images, and the like taken alone, and
+the form means the measured language taken by
+itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction
+of things not in the poem, and the value lies
+in neither of them. If substance and form mean
+anything <i>in</i> the poem, then each is involved in the
+other, and the question in which of them the value
+lies has no sense. No doubt you may say, speaking
+loosely, that in this poet or poem the aspect of substance
+is the more noticeable, and in that the aspect
+of form; and you may pursue interesting discussions
+on this basis, though no principle or ultimate question
+of value is touched by them. And apart from that
+question, of course, I am not denying the usefulness
+and necessity of the distinction. We cannot dispense
+with it. To consider separately the action
+or the characters of a play, and separately its style
+or versification, is both legitimate and valuable, so
+long as we remember what we are doing. But the
+true critic in speaking of these apart does not really
+think of them apart; the whole, the poetic experience,
+of which they are but aspects, is always in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page17" id="page17"></a>17</span>
+his mind; and he is always aiming at a richer, truer,
+more intense repetition of that experience. On the
+other hand, when the question of principle, of poetic
+value, is raised, these aspects <i>must</i> fall apart into
+components, separately conceivable; and then there
+arise two heresies, equally false, that the value lies
+in one of two things, both of which are outside the
+poem, and therefore where its value cannot lie.</p>
+
+<p>On the heresy of the separable substance a few
+additional words will suffice. This heresy is seldom
+formulated, but perhaps some unconscious holder of
+it may object: &lsquo;Surely the action and the characters
+of <i>Hamlet</i> are in the play; and surely I can retain
+these, though I have forgotten all the words. I
+admit that I do not possess the whole poem, but I
+possess a part, and the most important part.&rsquo; And
+I would answer: &lsquo;If we are not concerned with any
+question of principle, I accept all that you say
+except the last words, which do raise such a question.
+Speaking loosely, I agree that the action
+and characters, as you perhaps conceive them,
+together with a great deal more, are in the poem.
+Even then, however, you must not claim to possess
+all of this kind that is in the poem; for in forgetting
+the words you must have lost innumerable details
+of the action and the characters. And, when the
+question of value is raised, I must insist that the
+action and characters, as you conceive them, are
+not in <i>Hamlet</i> at all. If they are, point them out.
+You cannot do it. What you find at any moment
+of that succession of experiences called <i>Hamlet</i> is
+words. In these words, to speak loosely again, the
+action and characters (more of them than you can
+conceive apart) are focussed; but your experience
+is not a combination of them, as ideas, on the one
+side, with certain sounds on the other; it is an
+experience of something in which the two are indissolubly
+fused. If you deny this, to be sure I can
+make no answer, or can only answer that I have
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page18" id="page18"></a>18</span>
+reason to believe that you cannot read poetically,
+or else are misinterpreting your experience. But
+if you do not deny this, then you will admit that
+the action and characters of the poem, as you separately
+imagine them, are no part of it, but a
+product of it in your reflective imagination, a
+faint analogue of one aspect of it taken in detachment
+from the whole. Well, I do not dispute, I
+would even insist, that, in the case of so long a
+poem as <i>Hamlet</i>, it may be necessary from time to
+time to interrupt the poetic experience, in order to
+enrich it by forming such a product and dwelling
+on it. Nor, in a wide sense of &ldquo;poetic,&rdquo; do I
+question the poetic value of this product, as you
+think of it apart from the poem. It resembles our
+recollections of the heroes of history or legend, who
+move about in our imaginations, &ldquo;forms more real
+than living man,&rdquo; and are worth much to us though
+we do not remember anything they said. Our
+ideas and images of the &ldquo;substance&rdquo; of a poem
+have this poetic value, and more, if they are at all
+adequate. But they cannot determine the poetic
+value of the poem, for (not to speak of the competing
+claims of the &ldquo;form&rdquo;) nothing that is outside
+the poem can do that, and they, as such, are outside
+it.&rsquo;<a name="fa5a" id="fa5a" href="#ft5a"><span class="sp">5</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Let us turn to the so-called form&mdash;style and
+versification. There is no such thing as mere form
+in poetry. All form is expression. Style may have
+indeed a certain aesthetic worth in partial abstraction
+from the particular matter it conveys, as in a
+well-built sentence you may take pleasure in the
+build almost apart from the meaning. Even so,
+style is expressive&mdash;presents to sense, for example,
+the order, ease, and rapidity with which ideas move
+in the writer&rsquo;s mind&mdash;but it is not expressive of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page19" id="page19"></a>19</span>
+meaning of that particular sentence. And it is
+possible, interrupting poetic experience, to decompose
+it and abstract for comparatively separate
+consideration this nearly formal element of style.
+But the aesthetic value of style so taken is not
+considerable;<a name="fa6a" id="fa6a" href="#ft6a"><span class="sp">6</span></a> you could not read with pleasure for
+an hour a composition which had no other merit.
+And in poetic experience you never apprehend this
+value by itself; the style is here expressive also of
+a particular meaning, or rather is one aspect of that
+unity whose other aspect is meaning. So that what
+you apprehend may be called indifferently an
+expressed meaning or a significant form. Perhaps
+on this point I may in Oxford appeal to authority,
+that of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, the
+latter at any rate an authority whom the formalist
+will not despise. What is the gist of Pater&rsquo;s teaching
+about style, if it is not that in the end the
+one virtue of style is truth or adequacy; that
+the word, phrase, sentence, should express perfectly
+the writer&rsquo;s perception, feeling, image, or thought;
+so that, as we read a descriptive phrase of Keats&rsquo;s,
+we exclaim, &lsquo;That is the thing itself&rsquo;; so that, to
+quote Arnold, the words are &lsquo;symbols equivalent
+with the thing symbolized,&rsquo; or, in our technical
+language, a form identical with its content? Hence
+in true poetry it is, in strictness, impossible to
+express the meaning in any but its own words, or
+to change the words without changing the meaning.
+A translation of such poetry is not really the old
+meaning in a fresh dress; it is a new product,
+something like the poem, though, if one chooses to
+say so, more like it in the aspect of meaning than in
+the aspect of form.</p>
+
+<p>No one who understands poetry, it seems to me,
+would dispute this, were it not that, falling away
+from his experience, or misled by theory, he takes
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page20" id="page20"></a>20</span>
+the word &lsquo;meaning&rsquo; in a sense almost ludicrously
+inapplicable to poetry. People say, for instance,
+&lsquo;steed&rsquo; and &lsquo;horse&rsquo; have the same meaning; and
+in bad poetry they have, but not in poetry that
+<i>is</i> poetry.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>&lsquo;Bring forth the horse!&rsquo; The horse was brought:</p>
+<p>In truth he was a noble steed!</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">says Byron in <i>Mazeppa</i>. If the two words mean
+the same here, transpose them:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>&lsquo;Bring forth the steed!&rsquo; The steed was brought:</p>
+<p>In truth he was a noble horse!</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and ask again if they mean the same. Or let me
+take a line certainly very free from &lsquo;poetic diction&rsquo;:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>To be or not to be, that is the question.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">You may say that this means the same as &lsquo;What is
+just now occupying my attention is the comparative
+disadvantages of continuing to live or putting an
+end to myself.&rsquo; And for practical purposes&mdash;the
+purpose, for example, of a coroner&mdash;it does. But
+as the second version altogether misrepresents the
+speaker at that moment of his existence, while the
+first does represent him, how can they for any but a
+practical or logical purpose be said to have the same
+sense? Hamlet was well able to &lsquo;unpack his heart
+with words,&rsquo; but he will not unpack it with our
+paraphrases.</p>
+
+<p>These considerations apply equally to versification.
+If I take the famous line which describes
+how the souls of the dead stood waiting by the
+river, imploring a passage from Charon:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and if I translate it, &lsquo;and were stretching forth their
+hands in longing for the further bank,&rsquo; the charm of
+the original has fled. Why has it fled? Partly
+(but we have dealt with that) because I have substituted
+for five words, and those the words of
+Virgil, twelve words, and those my own. In some
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page21" id="page21"></a>21</span>
+measure because I have turned into rhythmless
+prose a line of verse which, as mere sound, has
+unusual beauty. But much more because in doing
+so I have also changed the <i>meaning</i> of Virgil&rsquo;s line.
+What that meaning is <i>I</i> cannot say: Virgil has said
+it. But I can see this much, that the translation
+conveys a far less vivid picture of the outstretched
+hands and of their remaining outstretched, and a
+far less poignant sense of the distance of the shore
+and the longing of the souls. And it does so partly
+because this picture and this sense are conveyed
+not only by the obvious meaning of the words,
+but through the long-drawn sound of &lsquo;tendebantque,&rsquo;
+through the time occupied by the five syllables
+and therefore by the idea of &lsquo;ulterioris,&rsquo; and
+through the identity of the long sound &lsquo;or&rsquo; in the
+penultimate syllables of &lsquo;ulterioris amore&rsquo;&mdash;all this,
+and much more, apprehended not in this analytical
+fashion, nor as <i>added</i> to the beauty of mere sound
+and to the obvious meaning, but in unity with them
+and so as expressive of the poetic meaning of the
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>It is always so in fine poetry. The value of
+versification, when it is indissolubly fused with
+meaning, can hardly be exaggerated. The gift for
+feeling it, even more perhaps than the gift for
+feeling the value of style, is the <i>specific</i> gift for
+poetry, as distinguished from other arts. But versification,
+taken, as far as possible, all by itself, has
+a very different worth. Some aesthetic worth it
+has; how much, you may experience by reading
+poetry in a language of which you do not understand
+a syllable.<a name="fa7a" id="fa7a" href="#ft7a"><span class="sp">7</span></a> The pleasure is quite appreciable,
+but it is not great; nor in actual poetic experience
+do you meet with it, as such, at all. For, I repeat,
+it is not <i>added</i> to the pleasure of the meaning
+when you read poetry that you do understand: by
+some mystery the music is then the music <i>of</i> the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page22" id="page22"></a>22</span>
+meaning, and the two are one. However fond of
+versification you might be, you would tire very
+soon of reading verses in Chinese; and before long
+of reading Virgil and Dante if you were ignorant
+of their languages. But take the music as it is <i>in</i>
+the poem, and there is a marvellous change. Now</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>It gives a very echo to the seat</p>
+<p>Where love is throned;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">or &lsquo;carries far into your heart,&rsquo; almost like music
+itself, the sound</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Of old, unhappy, far-off things</p>
+    <p class="i2">And battles long ago.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>What then is to be said of the following sentence
+of the critic quoted before: &lsquo;But when any one
+who knows what poetry is reads&mdash;</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Our noisy years seem moments in the being</p>
+<p>Of the eternal silence,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, ...
+there is one note added to the articulate music
+of the world&mdash;a note that never will leave off
+resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it&rsquo;
+must think that the writer is deceiving himself. For
+I could quite understand his enthusiasm, if it were
+an enthusiasm for the music of the meaning; but as
+for the music, &lsquo;quite independently of the meaning,&rsquo;
+so far as I can hear it thus (and I doubt if any one
+who knows English can quite do so), I find it gives
+some pleasure, but only a trifling pleasure. And
+indeed I venture to doubt whether, considered as
+mere sound, the words are at all exceptionally
+beautiful, as Virgil&rsquo;s line certainly is.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">When poetry answers to its idea and is purely or
+almost purely poetic, we find the identity of form
+and content; and the degree of purity attained may
+be tested by the degree in which we feel it hopeless
+to convey the effect of a poem or passage in any
+form but its own. Where the notion of doing so is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page23" id="page23"></a>23</span>
+simply ludicrous, you have quintessential poetry.
+But a great part even of good poetry, especially in
+long works, is of a mixed nature; and so we find in
+it no more than a partial agreement of a form and
+substance which remain to some extent distinct.
+This is so in many passages of Shakespeare (the
+greatest of poets when he chose, but not always a
+conscientious poet); passages where something was
+wanted for the sake of the plot, but he did not care
+about it or was hurried. The conception of the
+passage is then distinct from the execution, and
+neither is inspired. This is so also, I think,
+wherever we can truly speak of merely decorative
+effect. We seem to perceive that the poet had a
+truth or fact&mdash;philosophical, agricultural, social&mdash;distinctly
+before him, and then, as we say, clothed
+it in metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative,
+didactic, or satiric poems are partly of
+this kind; and in imaginative poems anything which
+is really a mere &lsquo;conceit&rsquo; is mere decoration. We
+often deceive ourselves in this matter, for what we
+call decoration has often a new and genuinely poetic
+content of its own; but wherever there is mere
+decoration, we judge the poetry to be not wholly
+poetic. And so when Wordsworth inveighed
+against poetic diction, though he hurled his darts
+rather wildly, what he was rightly aiming at was a
+phraseology, not the living body of a new content,
+but the mere worn-out body of an old one.<a name="fa8a" id="fa8a" href="#ft8a"><span class="sp">8</span></a></p>
+
+<p>In pure poetry it is otherwise. Pure poetry is not
+the decoration of a preconceived and clearly defined
+matter: it springs from the creative impulse of a
+vague imaginative mass pressing for development
+and definition. If the poet already knew exactly
+what he meant to say, why should he write the
+poem? The poem would in fact already be written.
+For only its completion can reveal, even to him,
+exactly what he wanted. When he began and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page24" id="page24"></a>24</span>
+while he was at work, he did not possess his meaning;
+it possessed him. It was not a fully formed
+soul asking for a body: it was an inchoate soul in
+the inchoate body of perhaps two or three vague
+ideas and a few scattered phrases. The growing of
+this body into its full stature and perfect shape was
+the same thing as the gradual self-definition of the
+meaning.<a name="fa9a" id="fa9a" href="#ft9a"><span class="sp">9</span></a> And this is the reason why such poems
+strike us as creations, not manufactures, and have
+the magical effect which mere decoration cannot
+produce. This is also the reason why, if we insist
+on asking for the meaning of such a poem, we can
+only be answered &lsquo;It means itself.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>And so at last I may explain why I have troubled
+myself and you with what may seem an arid controversy
+about mere words. It is not so. These
+heresies which would make poetry a compound of
+two factors&mdash;a matter common to it with the merest
+prose, <i>plus</i> a poetic form, as the one heresy says: a
+poetical substance <i>plus</i> a negligible form, as the
+other says&mdash;are not only untrue, they are injurious
+to the dignity of poetry. In an age already inclined
+to shrink from those higher realms where poetry
+touches religion and philosophy, the formalist heresy
+encourages men to taste poetry as they would a fine
+wine, which has indeed an aesthetic value, but a
+small one. And then the natural man, finding an
+empty form, hurls into it the matter of cheap pathos,
+rancid sentiment, vulgar humour, bare lust, ravenous
+vanity&mdash;everything which, in Schiller&rsquo;s phrase,<a name="fa10a" id="fa10a" href="#ft10a"><span class="sp">10</span></a> the
+form should extirpate, but which no mere form can
+extirpate. And the other heresy&mdash;which is indeed
+rather a practice than a creed&mdash;encourages us in the
+habit so dear to us of putting our own thoughts or
+fancies into the place of the poet&rsquo;s creation. What
+he meant by <i>Hamlet</i>, or the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>,
+or <i>Abt Vogler</i>, we say, is this or that which we
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page25" id="page25"></a>25</span>
+knew already; and so we lose what he had to tell
+us. But he meant what he said, and said what he
+meant.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry in this matter is not, as good critics of
+painting and music often affirm, different from the
+other arts; in all of them the content is one thing
+with the form. What Beethoven meant by his
+symphony, or Turner by his picture, was not something
+which you can name, but the picture and the
+symphony. Meaning they have, but <i>what</i> meaning
+can be said in no language but their own: and we
+know this, though some strange delusion makes us
+think the meaning has less worth because we cannot
+put it into words. Well, it is just the same with
+poetry. But because poetry is words, we vainly
+fancy that some other words than its own will
+express its meaning. And they will do so no more&mdash;or,
+if you like to speak loosely, only a trifle
+more&mdash;than words will express the meaning of the
+Dresden Madonna.<a name="fa11a" id="fa11a" href="#ft11a"><span class="sp">11</span></a> Something a little like it they
+may indeed express. And we may find analogues
+of the meaning of poetry outside it, which may help
+us to appropriate it. The other arts, the best ideas
+of philosophy or religion, much that nature and life
+offer us or force upon us, are akin to it. But they
+are only akin. Nor is it the expression of them.
+Poetry does not present to imagination our highest
+knowledge or belief, and much less our dreams
+and opinions; but it, content and form in unity,
+embodies in its own irreplaceable way something
+which embodies itself also in other irreplaceable
+ways, such as philosophy or religion. And just
+as each of these gives a satisfaction which the
+other cannot possibly give, so we find in poetry,
+which cannot satisfy the needs they meet, that
+which by their natures they cannot afford us.
+But we shall not find it fully if we look for something
+else.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page26" id="page26"></a>26</span></p>
+
+<p>And now, when all is said, the question will still
+recur, though now in quite another sense, What
+does poetry mean?<a name="fa12a" id="fa12a" href="#ft12a"><span class="sp">12</span></a> This unique expression, which
+cannot be replaced by any other, still seems to be
+trying to express something beyond itself. And
+this, we feel, is also what the other arts, and religion,
+and philosophy are trying to express: and that is
+what impels us to seek in vain to translate the one
+into the other. About the best poetry, and not
+only the best, there floats an atmosphere of infinite
+suggestion. The poet speaks to us of one thing,
+but in this one thing there seems to lurk the secret
+of all. He said what he meant, but his meaning
+seems to beckon away beyond itself, or rather to
+expand into something boundless which is only
+focussed in it; something also which, we feel, would
+satisfy not only the imagination, but the whole of
+us; that something within us, and without, which
+everywhere</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+                <p class="i6">makes us seem</p>
+<p>To patch up fragments of a dream,</p>
+<p>Part of which comes true, and part</p>
+<p>Beats and trembles in the heart.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Those who are susceptible to this effect of poetry
+find it not only, perhaps not most, in the ideals
+which she has sometimes described, but in a child&rsquo;s
+song by Christina Rossetti about a mere crown of
+wind-flowers, and in tragedies like <i>Lear</i>, where the
+sun seems to have set for ever. They hear this
+spirit murmuring its undertone through the <i>Aeneid</i>,
+and catch its voice in the song of Keats&rsquo;s nightingale,
+and its light upon the figures on the Urn, and
+it pierces them no less in Shelley&rsquo;s hopeless lament,
+<i>O world, O life, O time</i>, than in the rapturous
+ecstasy of his <i>Life of Life</i>. This all-embracing
+perfection cannot be expressed in poetic words or
+words of any kind, nor yet in music or in colour,
+but the suggestion of it is in much poetry, if not all,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page27" id="page27"></a>27</span>
+and poetry has in this suggestion, this &lsquo;meaning,&rsquo; a
+great part of its value. We do it wrong, and we
+defeat our own purposes, when we try to bend it to
+them:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>We do it wrong, being so majestical,</p>
+<p>To offer it the show of violence;</p>
+<p>For it is as the air invulnerable,</p>
+<p>And our vain blows malicious mockery.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It
+will not speak at our bidding, nor answer in our
+language. It is not our servant; it is our master.</p>
+
+<p class="f80">1901</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page28" id="page28"></a>28</span></p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE A</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of this sentence was not, as has been supposed,
+to give a definition of poetry. To define poetry as something
+that goes on in us when we read poetically would be absurd
+indeed. My object was to suggest to my hearers in passing
+that it is futile to ask questions about the end, or substance,
+or form of poetry, if we forget that a poem is neither a mere
+number of black marks on a white page, nor such experience
+as is evoked in us when we read these marks as we read, let us
+say, a newspaper article; and I suppose my hearers to know,
+sufficiently for the purpose of the lecture, how that sort of
+reading differs from poetical reading.</p>
+
+<p>The truths thus suggested are so obvious, when stated, that
+I thought a bare reminder of them would be enough. But
+in fact the mistakes we make about &lsquo;subject,&rsquo; &lsquo;substance,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;form,&rsquo; and the like, are due not solely to misapprehension of
+our poetic experience, but to our examining what is not this
+experience. The whole lecture may be called an expansion
+of this statement.</p>
+
+<p>The passage to which the present note refers raises difficult
+questions which any attempt at a &lsquo;Poetics&rsquo; ought to discuss.
+I will mention three. (1) If the experience called a poem
+varies &lsquo;with every reader and every time of reading&rsquo; and &lsquo;exists
+in innumerable degrees,&rsquo; what is the poem itself, if there is such
+a thing? (2) How does a series of successive experiences form
+<i>one</i> poem? (3) If the object in the case of poetry and music
+(&lsquo;arts of hearing&rsquo;) is a succession somehow and to some extent
+unified, how does it differ in this respect from the object in
+&lsquo;arts of sight&rsquo;&mdash;a building, a statue, a picture?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page29" id="page29"></a>29</span></p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE B</p>
+
+<p>A lyric, for example, may arise from &lsquo;real&rsquo; emotions due to
+transitory conditions peculiar to the poet. But these emotions
+and conditions, however interesting biographically, are poetically
+irrelevant. The poem, what the poet <i>says</i>, is universal, and is
+appropriated by people who live centuries after him and perhaps
+know nothing of him and his life; and if it arose from mere
+imagination it is none the worse (or the better) for that. So
+far as it cannot be appropriated without a knowledge of the
+circumstances in which it arose, it is probably, so far, faulty
+(probably, because the difficulty <i>may</i> come from our distance
+from the whole mental world of the poet&rsquo;s time and country).</p>
+
+<p>What is said in the text applies equally to all the arts. It
+applies also to such aesthetic apprehension as does not issue
+in a work of art. And it applies to this apprehension whether
+the object belongs to &lsquo;Nature&rsquo; or to &lsquo;Man.&rsquo; A beautiful landscape
+is not a &lsquo;real&rsquo; landscape. Much that belongs to the
+&lsquo;real&rsquo; landscape is ignored when it is apprehended aesthetically;
+and the painter only carries this unconscious idealisation further
+when he deliberately alters the &lsquo;real&rsquo; landscape in further ways.</p>
+
+<p>All this does not in the least imply that the &lsquo;real&rsquo; thing,
+where there is one (personal emotion, landscape, historical event,
+etc.), is of small importance to the aesthetic apprehension or
+the work of art. But it is relevant only as it appears <i>in</i> that
+apprehension or work.</p>
+
+<p>If an artist alters a reality (<i>e.g.</i> a well-known scene or historical
+character) so much that his product clashes violently with our
+familiar ideas, he may be making a mistake: not because his
+product is untrue to the reality (this by itself is perfectly
+irrelevant), but because the &lsquo;untruth&rsquo; may make it difficult or
+impossible for others to appropriate his product, or because
+this product may be aesthetically inferior to the reality even
+as it exists in the general imagination.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE C</p>
+
+<p>For the purpose of the experiment you must, of course, know
+the sounds denoted by the letters, and you must be able to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page30" id="page30"></a>30</span>
+make out the rhythmical scheme. But the experiment will be
+vitiated if you get some one who understands the language to
+read or recite to you poems written in it, for he will certainly
+so read or recite as to convey to you something of the meaning
+through the sound (I do not refer of course to the logical
+meaning).</p>
+
+<p>Hence it is clear that, if by &lsquo;versification taken by itself&rsquo; one
+means the versification of a <i>poem</i>, it is impossible under the
+requisite conditions to get at this versification by itself. The
+versification of a poem is always, to speak loosely, influenced
+by the sense. The bare metrical scheme, to go no further, is
+practically never followed by the poet. Suppose yourself to
+know no English, and to perceive merely that in its general
+scheme</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>It gives a very echo to the seat</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">is an iambic line of five feet; and then read the line as you
+would have to read it; and then ask if <i>that</i> noise is the sound
+of the line <i>in the poem</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In the text, therefore, more is admitted than in strictness should
+be admitted. For I have assumed for the moment that you can
+hear the sound of poetry if you read poetry which you do not
+in the least understand, whereas in fact that sound cannot be
+produced at all except by a person who knows something of the
+meaning.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE D</p>
+
+<p>This paragraph has not, to my knowledge, been adversely
+criticised, but it now appears to me seriously misleading. It
+refers to certain kinds of poetry, and again to certain passages
+in poems, which we feel to be less poetical than some other
+kinds or passages. But this difference of degree in poeticalness
+(if I may use the word) is put as a difference between &lsquo;mixed&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;pure&rsquo; poetry; and that distinction is, I think, unreal and
+mischievous. Further, it is implied that in less poetical poetry
+there necessarily is only a partial unity of content and form.
+This (unless I am now mistaken) is a mistake, and a mistake
+due to failure to hold fast the main idea of the lecture. Naturally
+it would be most agreeable to me to re-write the paragraph, but
+if I reprint it and expose my errors the reader will perhaps be
+helped to a firmer grasp of that idea.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page31" id="page31"></a>31</span></p>
+
+<p>It is true that where poetry is most poetic we feel most
+decidedly how impossible it is to separate content and form.
+But where poetry is less poetic and does not make us feel this
+unity so decidedly, it does not follow that the unity is imperfect.
+Failure or partial failure in this unity is always (as in
+the case of Shakespeare referred to) a failure on the part of the
+<i>poet</i> (though it is not always due to the same causes). It does
+not lie of necessity in the nature of a particular kind of poetry
+(<i>e.g.</i> satire) or in the nature of a particular passage. All poetry
+cannot be equally poetic, but <i>all</i> poetry ought to maintain the
+unity of content and form, and, in that sense, to be &lsquo;pure.&rsquo;
+Only in certain kinds, and in certain passages, it is more difficult
+for the poet to maintain it than in others.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take first the &lsquo;passages&rsquo; and suppose them to occur
+in one of the more poetic kinds of poetry. In certain parts of
+any epic or tragedy matter has to be treated which, though
+necessary to the whole, is not in itself favourable to poetry, or
+would not in itself be a good &lsquo;subject.&rsquo; But it is the business
+of the poet to do his best to make this matter poetry, and pure
+poetry. And, if he succeeds, the passage, though it will probably
+be less poetic than the bulk of the poem, will exhibit the complete
+unity of content and form. It will not strike us as a mere
+bridge between other passages; it will be enjoyable for itself;
+and it will not occur to us to think that the poet was dealing
+with an un-poetic &lsquo;matter&rsquo; and found his task difficult or
+irksome. Shakespeare frequently does not trouble himself to
+face this problem and leaves an imperfect unity. The conscientious
+artists, like Virgil, Milton, Tennyson, habitually face,
+it and frequently solve it.<a name="fa13a" id="fa13a" href="#ft13a"><span class="sp">13</span></a> And when they wholly or partially
+fail, the fault is still <i>theirs</i>. It is, in one sense, due to the
+&lsquo;matter,&rsquo; which set a hard problem; but they would be the first
+to declare that <i>nothing</i> in the poem ought to be only mixedly
+poetic.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way, satire is not in its nature a highly poetic
+kind of poetry, but it ought, in its own kind, to be poetry
+throughout, and therefore ought not to show a merely partial
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page32" id="page32"></a>32</span>
+unity of content and form. If the satirist makes us exclaim &lsquo;This
+is sheer prose wonderfully well disguised,&rsquo; that is a fault, and
+<i>his</i> fault (unless it happens to be ours). The idea that a tragedy
+or lyric could really be reproduced in a form not its own strikes
+us as ridiculous; the idea that a satire could so be reproduced
+seems much less ridiculous; but if it were true the satire would
+not be poetry at all.</p>
+
+<p>The reader will now see where, in my judgment, the paragraph
+is wrong. Elsewhere it is, I think, right, though it deals
+with a subject far too large for a paragraph. This is also true
+of the next paragraph, which uses the false distinction of &lsquo;pure&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;mixed,&rsquo; and which will hold in various degrees of poetry
+in various degrees poetical.</p>
+
+<p>It is of course possible to use a distinction of &lsquo;pure&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;mixed&rsquo; in another sense. Poetry, whatever its kind, would be
+pure as far as it preserved the unity of content and form;
+mixed, so far as it failed to do so&mdash;in other words, failed to be
+poetry and was partly prosaic.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE E</p>
+
+<p>It is possible therefore that the poem, as it existed at certain
+stages in its growth, may correspond roughly with the poem
+as it exists in the memories of various readers. A reader who
+is fond of the poem and often thinks of it, but remembers
+only half the words and perhaps fills up the gaps with his own
+words, may possess something like the poem as it was when
+half-made. There are readers again who retain only what they
+would call the &lsquo;idea&rsquo; of the poem; and the poem <i>may</i> have
+begun from such an idea. Others will forget all the words, and
+will not profess to remember even the &lsquo;meaning,&rsquo; but believe
+that they possess the &lsquo;spirit&rsquo; of the poem. And what they
+possess may have, I think, an immense value. The poem, of
+course, it is not; but it may answer to the state of imaginative
+feeling or emotional imagination which was the germ of the
+poem. This is, in one sense, quite definite: it would not be
+the germ of a decidedly different poem: but in another sense
+it is indefinite, comparatively structureless, more a &lsquo;stimmung&rsquo;
+than an idea.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page33" id="page33"></a>33</span></p>
+
+<p>Such correspondences, naturally, must be very rough, if only
+because the readers have been at one time in contact with the
+fully grown poem.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE F</p>
+
+<p>I should be sorry if what is said here and elsewhere were
+taken to imply depreciation of all attempts at the interpretation
+of works of art. As regards poetry, such attempts, though
+they cannot possibly express the whole meaning of a poem,
+may do much to facilitate the poetic apprehension of that
+meaning. And, although the attempt is still more hazardous
+in the case of music and painting, I believe it may have a
+similar value. That its results <i>may</i> be absurd or disgusting
+goes without saying, and whether they are ever of use to
+musicians or the musically educated I do not know. But I
+see no reason why an exceedingly competent person should not
+try to indicate the emotional tone of a composition, movement,
+or passage, or the changes of feeling within it, or even, very
+roughly, the &lsquo;idea&rsquo; he may suppose it to embody (though he
+need not imply that the composer had any of this before his
+mind). And I believe that such indications, however inadequate
+they must be, may greatly help the uneducated lover of music
+to hear more truly the music itself.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE G</p>
+
+<p>This new question has &lsquo;quite another sense&rsquo; than that of the
+question, What is the meaning or content expressed by the form
+of a poem? The new question asks, What is it that the <i>poem</i>,
+the unity of this content and form, is trying to express? This
+&lsquo;beyond&rsquo; is beyond the content as well as the form.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, I should add, it is not <i>merely</i> beyond them or
+outside of them. If it were, they (the poem) could not &lsquo;suggest&rsquo;
+it. They are a partial manifestation of it, and point beyond
+themselves to it, both because they <i>are</i> a manifestation and
+because this is partial.</p>
+
+<p>The same thing is true, not only (as is remarked in the text)
+of the other arts and of religion and philosophy, but also of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page34" id="page34"></a>34</span>
+what is commonly called reality. This reality is a manifestation
+of a different order from poetry, and in certain important respects
+a much more imperfect manifestation. Hence, as was pointed
+out (pp. 6, 7, note B), poetry is not a copy of it, but in dealing
+with it idealises it, and in doing so produces in certain respects
+a fuller manifestation. On the other hand, that imperfect
+&lsquo;reality&rsquo; has for us a character in which poetry is deficient,&mdash;the
+character in virtue of which we call it &lsquo;reality.&rsquo; It is, we
+feel, thrust upon us, not made by us or by any other man.
+And in this respect it seems more akin than poetry to that
+&lsquo;beyond,&rsquo; or absolute, or perfection, which we want, which
+partially expresses itself in both, and which could not be
+perfection and could not satisfy us if it were not real (though
+it cannot be real in the same sense as that imperfect &lsquo;reality&rsquo;).
+This seems the ultimate ground of the requirement that poetry,
+though no copy of &lsquo;reality,&rsquo; should not be mere &lsquo;fancy,&rsquo; but
+should refer to, and interpret, that &lsquo;reality.&rsquo; For that reality,
+however imperfectly it reveals perfection, is at least no mere
+fancy. (Not that the merest fancy can fail to reveal something
+of perfection.)</p>
+
+<p>The lines quoted on p. 26 are from a fragment of Shelley&rsquo;s
+beginning &lsquo;Is it that in some brighter sphere.&rsquo;</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1a" id="ft1a" href="#fa1a"><span class="fn">1</span></a> The lecture, as printed in 1901, was preceded by the following
+note: &ldquo;This Lecture is printed almost as it was delivered. I am
+aware that, especially in the earlier pages, difficult subjects are treated
+in a manner far too summary, but they require an exposition so full
+that it would destroy the original form of the Lecture, while a slight
+expansion would do little to provide against misunderstandings.&rdquo; A
+few verbal changes have now been made, some notes have been added,
+and some of the introductory remarks omitted.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2a" id="ft2a" href="#fa2a"><span class="fn">2</span></a> Note A.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3a" id="ft3a" href="#fa3a"><span class="fn">3</span></a> Note B.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4a" id="ft4a" href="#fa4a"><span class="fn">4</span></a> What is here called &lsquo;substance&rsquo; is what people generally mean
+when they use the word &lsquo;subject&rsquo; and insist on the value of the
+subject. I am not arguing against this usage, or in favour of the
+usage which I have adopted for the sake of clearness. It does not
+matter which we employ, so long as we and others know what we
+mean. (I use &lsquo;substance&rsquo; and &lsquo;content&rsquo; indifferently.)</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5a" id="ft5a" href="#fa5a"><span class="fn">5</span></a> These remarks will hold good, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>, if by &lsquo;substance&rsquo;
+is understood the &lsquo;moral&rsquo; or the &lsquo;idea&rsquo; of a poem, although perhaps
+in one instance out of five thousand this may be found in so many
+words in the poem.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6a" id="ft6a" href="#fa6a"><span class="fn">6</span></a> On the other hand, the absence, or worse than absence, of style, in
+this sense, is a serious matter.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7a" id="ft7a" href="#fa7a"><span class="fn">7</span></a> Note C.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8a" id="ft8a" href="#fa8a"><span class="fn">8</span></a> This paragraph is criticized in Note D.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9a" id="ft9a" href="#fa9a"><span class="fn">9</span></a> Note E.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft10a" id="ft10a" href="#fa10a"><span class="fn">10</span></a> Not that to Schiller &lsquo;form&rsquo; meant mere style and versification.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft11a" id="ft11a" href="#fa11a"><span class="fn">11</span></a> Note F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft12a" id="ft12a" href="#fa12a"><span class="fn">12</span></a> Note G.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft13a" id="ft13a" href="#fa13a"><span class="fn">13</span></a> In Schiller&rsquo;s phrase, they have extirpated the mere &lsquo;matter.&rsquo; We often
+say that they do this by dint of style. This is roughly true, but in strictness
+it means, as we have seen, not that they decorate the mere &lsquo;matter&rsquo;
+with a mere &lsquo;form,&rsquo; but that they produce a new content-form.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page35" id="page35"></a>35</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">THE SUBLIME</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page36" id="page36"></a>36<br />37</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2"><span class="chap2">THE SUBLIME</span><a name="fa1b" id="fa1b" href="#ft1b"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">Coleridge</span> used to tell a story about his visit to the
+Falls of Clyde; but he told it with such variations
+that the details are uncertain, and without regard to
+truth I shall change it to the shape that suits my
+purpose best. After gazing at the Falls for some
+time, he began to consider what adjective would
+answer most precisely to the impression he had
+received; and he came to the conclusion that the
+proper word was &lsquo;sublime.&rsquo; Two other tourists
+arrived, and, standing by him, looked in silence at
+the spectacle. Then, to Coleridge&rsquo;s high satisfaction,
+the gentleman exclaimed, &lsquo;It is sublime.&rsquo; To
+which the lady responded, &lsquo;Yes, it is the prettiest
+thing I ever saw.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>This poor lady&rsquo;s incapacity (for I assume that
+Coleridge and her husband were in the right) is
+ludicrous, but it is also a little painful. Sublimity
+and prettiness are qualities separated by so great
+a distance that our sudden attempt to unite them
+has a comically incongruous effect. At the same
+time the first of these qualities is so exalted that
+the exhibition of entire inability to perceive it is
+distressing. Astonishment, rapture, awe, even self-abasement,
+are among the emotions evoked by
+sublimity. Many would be inclined to pronounce it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page38" id="page38"></a>38</span>
+the very highest of all the forms assumed by beauty,
+whether in nature or in works of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>I propose to make some remarks on this quality,
+and even to attempt some sort of answer to the
+question what sublimity is. I say &lsquo;some sort of
+answer,&rsquo; because the question is large and difficult,
+and I can deal with it only in outline and by drawing
+artificial limits round it and refusing to discuss
+certain presuppositions on which the answer rests.
+What I mean by these last words will be evident
+if I begin by referring to a term which will often
+recur in this lecture&mdash;the term &lsquo;beauty.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>When we call sublimity a form of beauty, as I
+did just now, the word &lsquo;beauty&rsquo; is obviously being
+used in the widest sense. It is the sense which the
+word bears when we distinguish beauty from goodness
+and from truth, or when &lsquo;beautiful&rsquo; is taken to
+signify anything and everything that gives aesthetic
+satisfaction, or when &lsquo;Aesthetics&rsquo; and &lsquo;Philosophy
+of the Beautiful&rsquo; are used as equivalent expressions.
+Of beauty, thus understood, sublimity is one particular
+kind among a number of others, for instance
+prettiness. But &lsquo;beauty&rsquo; and &lsquo;beautiful&rsquo; have also
+another meaning, narrower and more specific, as
+when we say that a thing is pretty but not beautiful,
+or that it is beautiful but not sublime. The beauty
+we have in view here is evidently not the same as
+beauty in the wider sense; it is only, like sublimity
+or prettiness, a particular kind or mode of that
+beauty. This ambiguity of the words &lsquo;beauty&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;beautiful&rsquo; is a great inconvenience, and especially
+so in a lecture, where it forces us to add some
+qualification to the words whenever they occur:
+but it cannot be helped. (Now that the lecture is
+printed I am able to avoid these qualifications by
+printing the words in inverted commas where they
+bear the narrower sense.)<a name="fa2b" id="fa2b" href="#ft2b"><span class="sp">2</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page39" id="page39"></a>39</span></p>
+
+<p>Now, obviously, all the particular kinds or modes
+of beauty must have, up to a certain point, the same
+nature. They must all possess that character in
+virtue of which they are called beautiful rather than
+good or true. And so a philosopher, investigating
+one of these kinds, would first have to determine
+this common nature or character; and then he would
+go on to ascertain what it is that distinguishes the
+particular kind from its companions. But here we
+cannot follow such a method. The nature of beauty
+in general is so much disputed and so variously
+defined that to discuss it here by way of preface
+would be absurd; and on the other hand it would
+be both presumptuous and useless to assume the
+truth of any one account of it. Our only plan,
+therefore, must be to leave it entirely alone, and to
+consider merely the distinctive character of sublimity.
+Let beauty in general be what it may, what is it
+that marks off <i>this</i> kind of beauty from others, and
+what is there peculiar in our state of mind when we
+are moved to apply to anything the specific epithet
+&lsquo;sublime&rsquo;?&mdash;such is our question. And this plan is
+not merely the only possible one, but it is, I believe,
+quite justifiable, since, so far as I can see, the answer
+to our particular question, unless it is pushed further
+than I propose to go, is unaffected by the differences
+among theories of repute concerning beauty
+in general. At the same time, it is essential to
+realise and always to bear in mind one consequence
+of this plan; which is that our account of what is
+peculiar to sublimity will not be an account of
+sublimity in its full nature. For sublimity is not
+those peculiar characteristics alone, it is that <i>beauty</i>
+which is distinguished by them, and a large part of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page40" id="page40"></a>40</span>
+its effect is due to that general nature of beauty
+which it shares with other kinds, and which we leave
+unexamined.</p>
+
+<p>In considering the question thus defined I propose
+to start from our common aesthetic experience
+and to attempt to arrive at an answer by degrees.
+It will be understood, therefore, that our first results
+may have to be modified as we proceed. And I
+will venture to ask my hearers, further, to ignore
+for the time any doubts they may feel whether I am
+right in saying, by way of illustration, that this or
+that thing is sublime. Such differences of opinion
+scarcely affect our question, which is not whether in
+a given case the epithet is rightly applied, but what
+the epithet signifies. And it has to be borne in
+mind that, while no two kinds of beauty can be
+quite the same, a <i>thing</i> may very well possess beauty
+of two different kinds.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">Let us begin by placing side by side five terms
+which represent five of the many modes of beauty&mdash;sublime,
+grand, &lsquo;beautiful,&rsquo; graceful, pretty.
+&lsquo;Beautiful&rsquo; is here placed in the middle. Before
+it come two terms, sublime and grand; and beyond
+it lie two others, graceful and pretty. Now is it not
+the case that the first two, though not identical, still
+seem to be allied in some respect; that the last two
+also seem to be allied in some respect; that in this
+respect, whatever it may be, these two pairs seem
+to stand apart from one another, and even to stand
+in contrast; that &lsquo;beauty,&rsquo; in this respect, seems to
+hold a neutral position, though perhaps inclining
+rather to grace than to grandeur; and that the
+extreme terms, sublime and pretty, seem in this
+respect to be the most widely removed; so that
+this series of five constitutes, in a sense, a descending
+series,&mdash;descending not necessarily in value,
+but in some particular respect not yet assigned?
+If, for example, in the lady&rsquo;s answer, &lsquo;Yes, it is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page41" id="page41"></a>41</span>
+the prettiest thing I ever saw,&rsquo; you substitute for
+&lsquo;prettiest&rsquo; first &lsquo;most graceful,&rsquo; and then &lsquo;most
+beautiful,&rsquo; and then &lsquo;grandest,&rsquo; you will find that
+your astonishment at her diminishes at each step,
+and that at the last, when she identifies sublimity
+and grandeur, she is guilty no longer of an absurdity,
+but only of a slight anti-climax. If, I may add,
+she had said &lsquo;majestic,&rsquo; the anti-climax would have
+been slighter still, and, in fact, in one version of the
+story Coleridge says that &lsquo;majestic&rsquo; was the word
+he himself chose.</p>
+
+<p>What then is the &lsquo;respect&rsquo; in question here,&mdash;the
+something or other in regard to which sublimity
+and grandeur seemed to be allied with one another,
+and to differ decidedly from grace and prettiness?
+It appears to be greatness. Thousands of things
+are &lsquo;beautiful,&rsquo; graceful, or pretty, and yet make
+no impression of greatness, nay, this impression in
+many cases appears to collide with, and even to
+destroy, that of grace or prettiness, so that if a
+pretty thing produced it you would cease to call
+it pretty. But whatever strikes us as sublime produces
+an impression of greatness, and more&mdash;of
+exceeding or even overwhelming greatness. And
+this greatness, further, is apparently no mere
+accompaniment of sublimity, but essential to it:
+remove the greatness in imagination, and the
+sublimity vanishes. Grandeur, too, seems always
+to possess greatness, though not in this superlative
+degree; while &lsquo;beauty&rsquo; neither invariably possesses
+it nor tends, like prettiness and grace, to exclude
+it. I will try, not to defend these statements by
+argument, but to develop their meaning by help
+of illustrations, dismissing from view the minor
+differences between these modes of beauty, and,
+for the most part, leaving grandeur out of account.</p>
+
+<p>We need not ask here what is the exact meaning
+of that &lsquo;greatness&rsquo; of which I have spoken: but we
+must observe at once that the greatness in question
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page42" id="page42"></a>42</span>
+is of more than one kind. Let us understand by
+the term, to begin with, greatness of extent,&mdash;of
+size, number, or duration; and let us ask whether
+sublime things are, in this sense, exceedingly great.
+Some certainly are. The vault of heaven, one
+expanse of blue, or dark and studded with countless
+and prodigiously distant stars; the sea that stretches
+to the horizon and beyond it, a surface smooth as glass
+or breaking into innumerable waves; time, to which
+we can imagine no beginning and no end,&mdash;these
+furnish favourite examples of sublimity; and to call
+them great seems almost mockery, for they are
+images of immeasurable magnitude. When we turn
+from them to living beings, of course our standard
+of greatness changes;<a name="fa3b" id="fa3b" href="#ft3b"><span class="sp">3</span></a> but, using the standard
+appropriate to the sphere, we find again that the
+sublime things have, for the most part, great
+magnitude. A graceful tree need not be a large
+one; a pretty tree is almost always small; but a
+sublime tree is almost always large. If you were
+asked to mention sublime animals, you would perhaps
+suggest, among birds, the eagle; among fishes,
+if any, the whale; among beasts, the lion or the
+tiger, the python or the elephant. But you would
+find it hard to name a sublime insect; and indeed it
+is not easy, perhaps not possible, to feel sublimity
+in any animal smaller than oneself, unless one goes
+beyond the special kind of greatness at present
+under review. Consider again such facts as these:
+that a human being of average, or even of less than
+average, stature and build may be graceful and
+even &lsquo;beautiful,&rsquo; but can hardly, in respect of
+stature and build, be grand or sublime; that we
+most commonly think of flowers as little things, and
+also most commonly think of them as &lsquo;beautiful,&rsquo;
+graceful, pretty, but rarely as grand, and still more
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page43" id="page43"></a>43</span>
+rarely as sublime, and that in these latter cases we
+do not think of them as small; that a mighty river
+may well be sublime, but hardly a stream; a towering
+or far-stretching mountain, but hardly a low
+hill; a vast bridge, but hardly one of moderate
+span; a great cathedral, but hardly a village
+church; that a model of a sublime building is not
+sublime, unless in imagination you expand it to the
+dimensions of its original; that a plain, though flat,
+may be sublime if its extent is immense; that while
+we constantly say &lsquo;a pretty little thing,&rsquo; or even &lsquo;a
+beautiful little thing,&rsquo; nobody ever says &lsquo;a sublime
+little thing.&rsquo; Examples like these seem to show
+clearly&mdash;not that bigness is sublimity, for bigness
+need have no beauty, while sublimity is a mode of
+beauty&mdash;but that this particular mode of beauty
+is frequently connected with, and dependent on,
+exceeding greatness of extent.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now take a further step. Can there be
+sublimity when such greatness is absent? And, if
+there can, is greatness of some other sort always
+present in such cases, and essential to the sublime
+effect? The answer to the first of these questions
+is beyond doubt. Children have no great extension,
+and what Wordsworth calls &lsquo;a six-years&rsquo; darling of
+a pigmy size&rsquo; is (if a darling) generally called pretty
+but not sublime; for it <i>is</i> &lsquo;of a pigmy size.&rsquo; Yet it
+certainly <i>may</i> be sublime, and it is so to the poet
+who addresses it thus:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie</p>
+  <p class="i1">Thy soul&rsquo;s immensity....</p>
+<p>Mighty prophet! Seer blest!</p>
+<p>On whom those truths do rest</p>
+<p>Which we are toiling all our lives to find.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">A baby is still smaller, but a baby too may be
+sublime. The starry sky is not more sublime than
+the babe on the arm of the Madonna di San Sisto.
+A sparrow is more diminutive still; but that it is
+possible for a sparrow to be sublime is not difficult
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page44" id="page44"></a>44</span>
+to show. This is a translation of a prose poem by
+Tourgénieff:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>I was on my way home from hunting, and was walking up the
+garden avenue. My dog was running on in front of me.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he slackened his pace, and began to steal forward as
+though he scented game ahead.</p>
+
+<p>I looked along the avenue; and I saw on the ground a young
+sparrow, its beak edged with yellow, and its head covered with
+soft down. It had fallen from the nest (a strong wind was
+blowing, and shaking the birches of the avenue); and there it
+sat and never stirred, except to stretch out its little half-grown
+wings in a helpless flutter.</p>
+
+<p>My dog was slowly approaching it, when suddenly, darting
+from the tree overhead, an old black-throated sparrow dropt like
+a stone right before his nose, and, all rumpled and flustered, with
+a plaintive desperate cry flung itself, once, twice, at his open jaws
+with their great teeth.</p>
+
+<p>It would save its young one; it screened it with its own body;
+the tiny frame quivered with terror; the little cries grew wild and
+hoarse; it sank and died. It had sacrificed itself.</p>
+
+<p>What a huge monster the dog must have seemed to it! And
+yet it could not stay up there on its safe bough. A power
+stronger than its own will tore it away.</p>
+
+<p>My dog stood still, and then slunk back disconcerted. Plainly
+he too had to recognise that power. I called him to me; and a
+feeling of reverence came over me as I passed on.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, do not laugh. It was really reverence I felt before that
+little heroic bird and the passionate outburst of its love.</p>
+
+<p>Love, I thought, is verily stronger than death and the terror of
+death. By love, only by love, is life sustained and moved.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This sparrow, it will be agreed, is sublime. What,
+then, makes it so? Not largeness of size, assuredly,
+but, we answer, its love and courage. Yes; but
+what do we mean by &lsquo;<i>its</i> love and courage&rsquo;? We
+often meet with love and courage, and always
+admire and approve them; but we do not always
+find them sublime. Why, then, are they sublime in
+the sparrow? From their extraordinary greatness.
+It is not in the quality alone, but in the quantity of
+the quality, that the sublimity lies. And this may
+be readily seen if we imagine the quantity to be
+considerably reduced,&mdash;if we imagine the parent
+bird, after its first brave effort, flinching and flying
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page45" id="page45"></a>45</span>
+away, or if we suppose the bird that sacrifices itself
+to be no sparrow but a turkey. In either case love
+and courage would remain, but sublimity would
+recede or vanish, simply because the love and
+courage would no longer possess the required
+immensity.<a name="fa4b" id="fa4b" href="#ft4b"><span class="sp">4</span></a></p>
+
+<p>The sublimity of the sparrow, then, no less than
+that of the sky or sea, depends on exceeding or
+overwhelming greatness&mdash;a greatness, however, not
+of extension but rather of strength or power, and in
+this case of spiritual power. &lsquo;Love is <i>stronger</i> than
+death,&rsquo; quotes the poet; &lsquo;a power <i>stronger</i> than its
+own tore it away.&rsquo; So it is with the dog of whom
+Scott and Wordsworth sang, whose master had
+perished among the crags of Helvellyn, and who
+was found three months after by his master&rsquo;s body,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>How nourished here through such long time</p>
+<p>He knows who gave that love sublime,</p>
+<p>And gave that strength of feeling, great</p>
+<p>Above all human estimate.<a name="fa5b" id="fa5b" href="#ft5b"><span class="sp">5</span></a></p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And if we look further we shall find that these cases
+of sublimity are, in this respect, far from being
+exceptions: &lsquo;thy soul&rsquo;s <i>immensity</i>,&rsquo; says Wordsworth
+to the child; &lsquo;<i>mighty</i> prophet&rsquo; he calls it. We shall
+find, in fact, that in the sublime, when there is not
+greatness of extent, there is another greatness, which
+(without saying that the phrase is invariably the
+most appropriate) we may call greatness of power
+and which in these cases is essential.</p>
+
+<p>We must develop this statement a little. Naturally
+the power, and therefore the sublimity, will
+differ in its character in different instances, and
+therefore will affect us variously. It may be&mdash;to
+classify very roughly&mdash;physical, or vital, or (in the
+old wide sense of the word) moral, like that of the
+sparrow and the dog. And physical force will
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page46" id="page46"></a>46</span>
+appeal to the imagination in one way, and vital in
+another, and moral or spiritual in another. But it
+is still power of some kind that makes a thing
+sublime rather than graceful, and immensity of
+power that makes it sublime rather than merely
+grand. For example, the lines of the water in a
+thin cascade may be exquisitely graceful, but such
+a cascade has not power enough to be sublime.
+Flickering fire in a grate is often &lsquo;beautiful,&rsquo; but it
+is not sublime; the fire of a big bonfire is on the
+way to be so; a &lsquo;great fire&rsquo; frequently is so, because
+it gives the impression of tremendous power. The
+ocean, in those stanzas of <i>Childe Harold</i> which
+no amount of familiarity or of defect can deprive of
+their sublimity, is the untameable monster which
+engulfs men as lightly as rain-drops and shatters
+fleets like toys. The sublimity of Behemoth and
+Leviathan in the <i>Book of Job</i> lies in the contrast
+of their enormous might with the puny power of
+man; that of the horse in the fiery energy of his
+courage and strength. Think of sublime figures or
+ideas in the world of fiction or of history, and you
+find that, whether they are radiant or gloomy,
+violent or peaceful, terrible or adorable, they all
+impress the imagination by their immense or even
+irresistible might. It is so with Achilles, standing
+alone beyond the wall, with the light of the divine
+flame soaring from his head, while he sends across
+the trench that shout at whose far-off sound the
+hearts of the Trojans die within them; or with
+Odysseus, when the moment of his vengeance has
+come, and he casts off his rags, and leaps onto the
+threshold with his bow, and pours his arrows down
+at his feet, and looks down the long hall at the
+doomed faces of his feasting enemies. Milton&rsquo;s
+Satan is sublime when he refuses to accept defeat
+from an omnipotent foe; he ceases to be so in
+tempting Eve, because here he shows not power
+but cunning, and we feel not the strength of his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page47" id="page47"></a>47</span>
+cunning but the weakness of his victim. In the
+bust of Zeus in the Vatican, in some of the figures
+of the Medici Chapel, in &lsquo;The horse and his rider,&rsquo;
+we feel again sublimity, because we feel gigantic
+power, put forth or held in reserve. Fate or Death,
+imagined as a lurking assassin, is not sublime, but
+may become so when imagined as inevitable, irresistible,
+<i>ineluctabile fatum</i>. The eternal laws to
+which Antigone appeals, like that Duty which
+preserves the strength and freshness of the most
+ancient heavens, are sublime. Prometheus, the
+saviour of mankind, opposing a boundless power of
+enduring pain to a boundless power of inflicting it;
+Regulus returning unmoved to his doom; Socrates,
+serene and even joyous in the presence of injury
+and death and the lamentations of his friends, are
+sublime. The words &lsquo;I have overcome the world&rsquo;
+are among the most sublime on record, and they
+are also the expression of the absolute power of
+the spirit.<a name="fa6b" id="fa6b" href="#ft6b"><span class="sp">6</span></a></p>
+
+<p>It seems clear, then, that sublimity very often
+arises from an overwhelming greatness of power.
+So abundant, indeed, are the instances that one
+begins to wonder whether it ever arises from any
+other kind of greatness, and whether we were right
+in supposing that mere magnitude of extension can
+produce it. Would such magnitude, however prodigious,
+seem to us sublime unless we insensibly
+construed it as the sign of power? In the case of
+living things, at any rate, this doubt seems to be
+well founded. A tree is sublime not because it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page48" id="page48"></a>48</span>
+occupies a large extent of empty space or time, but
+from the power in it which raises aloft and spreads
+abroad a thousand branches and a million leaves, or
+which has battled for centuries with buffeting storms
+and has seen summers and winters arise and pass
+like the hours of our day. It is not the mere bulk
+of the lion or the eagle that wins them their title as
+king of beasts or of birds, but the power exhibited
+in the gigantic head and arm or the stretch of wing
+and the piercing eye. And even when we pass
+from the realm of life our doubt remains. Would
+a mountain, a river, or a building be sublime to us
+if we did not read their masses and lines as symbols
+of force? Would even the illimitable extent of sea
+or sky, the endlessness of time, or the countlessness
+of stars or sands or waves, bring us anything but
+fatigue or depression if we did not apprehend them,
+in some way and however vaguely, as expressions
+of immeasurable power&mdash;power that created them,
+or lives in them, or <i>can</i> count them; so that what
+impresses us is not the mere absence of limits, but
+the presence of something that overpowers any
+imaginable limit? If these doubts are justified (as
+in my opinion they are), the conclusion will follow
+that the exceeding greatness required for sublimity
+is <i>always</i> greatness of some kind of power, though
+in one class of cases the impression of this greatness
+can only be conveyed through immensity of
+extent.</p>
+
+<p>However this question may be decided, our result
+so far seems to be that the peculiarity of the
+sublime lies in some exceeding and overwhelming
+greatness. But before this result can be considered
+safe, two obstacles must be removed. In the first
+place, are there no negative instances? Is it impossible
+to find anything sublime which does <i>not</i>
+show this greatness? Naturally I can say no more
+than that I have conscientiously searched for exceptions
+to the rule and have searched in vain. I can
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page49" id="page49"></a>49</span>
+find only apparent exceptions which in reality
+confirm the rule; and I will mention only those
+which look the most formidable. They are cases
+where at first sight there seems to be not merely
+an inconsiderable amount of power or other greatness,
+but actually the negation of it. For example,
+the silence of night, or the sudden pause in a storm
+or in stormy music, or again the silence and movelessness
+of death, may undoubtedly be sublime; and
+how, it may be asked, can a mere absence of sound
+and motion be an exhibition of immense greatness?
+It cannot, I answer; but neither can it be sublime.
+If you apprehend the silence in these cases as a
+mere absence, no feeling of sublimity will arise in
+your mind; and if you do apprehend the silence as
+sublime, it is to you the sign of immense power,
+put forth or held in reserve. The &lsquo;dead pause
+abrupt of mighty winds&rsquo; is the pause <i>of</i> mighty
+winds and not of gentle breezes; and it is not the
+absence of mighty winds, but their <i>pause</i> before
+they burst into renewed fury; or if their silence is
+not their will, it is a silence imposed on them by
+something mightier even than they. In either case
+there may be sublimity, but then there is the
+impression of immense power. In the same way
+the silence of night, when it seems sublime, is
+apprehended not as the absence but as the subdual
+of sound,&mdash;the stillness wrought by a power so
+mighty that at its touch all the restless noises of the
+day fall dumb,&mdash;or the brooding of an omnipotent
+peace over the world. And such a peace it is,
+an unassailable peace, that may make the face of
+death sublime, a stillness which is not moveless
+but immovable.<a name="fa7b" id="fa7b" href="#ft7b"><span class="sp">7</span></a></p>
+
+<p>At present, then, our result seems to stand firm.
+But another danger remains. Granted that in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page50" id="page50"></a>50</span>
+sublime there is always some exceeding and overwhelming
+greatness, is that <i>all</i> there is? Is there
+not in every case some further characteristic? This
+question, premising that the phrase &lsquo;overwhelming
+greatness&rsquo; contains important implications which
+have yet to be considered, I can only answer like
+the last. I do not find any other peculiarity that
+is <i>always</i> present. Several have been alleged, and
+one or two of these will be mentioned later, but
+none of them appears to show itself indubitably
+wherever sublimity is found. It is easy to give a
+much fuller account of the sublime if you include in
+it everything that impresses you in a sublime baby
+while you omit to consider Behemoth, or if you
+build upon Socrates and ignore Satan, or if you
+confine yourself to the sublime thunderstorm and
+forget the sublime rainbow or sunrise. But then
+your account will not answer to the instances you
+have ignored; and when you take them in you
+will have to pare it down until perhaps you end
+in a result like ours. At any rate we had better
+be content with it for the present, and turn to
+another aspect of the matter.<a name="fa8b" id="fa8b" href="#ft8b"><span class="sp">8</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="pt2">So far, on the whole, we have been regarding the
+sublime object as if its sublimity were independent
+of our state of mind in feeling and apprehending it.
+Yet the adjective in the phrase &lsquo;overwhelming
+greatness&rsquo; should at once suggest the truth that
+this state of mind is essential to sublimity. Let us
+now therefore look inward, and ask how this state
+differs from our state in perceiving or imagining
+what is graceful or &lsquo;beautiful.&rsquo; Since Kant dealt
+with the subject, most writers who have thought
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page51" id="page51"></a>51</span>
+about it have agreed that there is a decided difference,
+which I will try to describe broadly, and
+without pledging myself to the entire accuracy of
+the description.</p>
+
+<p>When, on seeing or hearing something, we exclaim,
+How graceful! or How lovely! or How
+&lsquo;beautiful&rsquo;! there is in us an immediate outflow of
+pleasure, an unchecked expansion, a delightful sense
+of harmony between the thing and ourselves.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+                          <p class="i12">The air</p>
+<p>Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself</p>
+<p>Unto our gentle senses.... The heaven&rsquo;s breath</p>
+<p>Smells wooingly here.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The thing wins us and draws us towards itself without
+resistance. Something in us hastens to meet it
+in sympathy or love. Our feeling, we may say, is
+entirely affirmative. For though it is not always
+untouched by pain (for the thing may have sadness
+in it),<a name="fa9b" id="fa9b" href="#ft9b"><span class="sp">9</span></a> this touch of pain or sadness does not mean
+any disharmony between the thing and us, or involve
+any check in our acceptance of it.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of sublimity, on the other hand, this
+acceptance does not seem to be so simple or immediate.
+There seem, in fact, to be two &lsquo;aspects&rsquo; or
+stages in it.<a name="fa10b" id="fa10b" href="#ft10b"><span class="sp">10</span></a> First&mdash;if only for a fraction of a
+second&mdash;there is a sense of being checked, or
+baffled, or even stupefied, or possibly even repelled
+or menaced, as though something were affecting us
+which we could not receive, or grasp, or stand up to.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page52" id="page52"></a>52</span>
+In certain cases we appear to shrink away from it,
+as though it thrust upon us a sense of our own
+feebleness or insignificance. This we may call by
+the convenient but too strong name of the negative
+stage. It is essential to sublimity; and nothing
+seems to correspond to it in our perception of loveliness
+or grace except sometimes a sense of surprise
+or wonder, which is wholly pleasant, and which does
+not necessarily qualify the lovely or graceful thing.</p>
+
+<p>But this first stage or aspect clearly does not by
+itself suffice for sublimity. To it there succeeds, it
+may be instantaneously or more gradually, another:
+a powerful reaction, a rush of self-expansion, or an
+uplifting, or a sense of being borne out of the self
+that was checked, or even of being carried away
+beyond all checks and limits. These feelings, even
+when the sublime thing might be called forbidding,
+menacing, or terrible, are always positive,&mdash;feelings
+of union with it; and, when its nature permits of
+this, they may amount to rapture or adoration. But
+the mark of the negation from which they have
+issued, the &lsquo;smell of the fire,&rsquo; usually remains on
+them. The union, we may say perhaps, has required
+a self-surrender, and the rapture or adoration is often
+strongly tinged with awe.</p>
+
+<p>Now, this peculiar doubleness in our apprehension
+of sublimity, this presence of two equally necessary
+stages or phases, a negative and a positive, seems
+to correspond with the peculiarity which we found
+in the sublime object when we were provisionally
+regarding it by itself. It is its overwhelming greatness
+which for a moment checks, baffles, subdues,
+even repels us or makes us feel our littleness, and
+which then, forcing its way into the imagination
+and emotions, distends or uplifts them to its own
+dimensions. We burst our own limits, go out to the
+sublime thing, identify ourselves ideally with it, and
+share its immense greatness. But if, and in so far
+as, we remain conscious of our difference from it, we
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page53" id="page53"></a>53</span>
+still feel the insignificance of our actual selves, and
+our glory is mingled with awe or even with self-abasement.<a name="fa11b" id="fa11b" href="#ft11b"><span class="sp">11</span></a></p>
+
+<p>In writing thus I was endeavouring simply and
+without any <i>arričre pensée</i> to describe a mode of
+aesthetic experience. But it must have occurred to
+some of my hearers that the description recalls other
+kinds of experience. And if they find it accurate in
+the main, they will appreciate, even if they do not
+accept, the exalted claim which philosophers, in
+various forms, have made for the sublime. It
+awakes in us, they say, through the check or shock
+which it gives to our finitude, the consciousness of
+an infinite or absolute; and this is the reason of the
+kinship we feel between this particular mode of
+aesthetic experience on the one side, and, on the
+other, morality or religion. For there, by the denial
+of our merely finite or individual selves, we rise into
+union with the law which imposes on us an unconditional
+demand, or with the infinite source and end
+of our spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p>These are ideas much too large to be considered
+now, and even later I can but touch on them. But
+the mere mention of them may carry us to the last
+enquiries with which we can deal. For it suggests
+this question: Supposing that high claim to be
+justified at all, can it really be made for <i>all</i> sublimity,
+or must it not be confined to the very highest forms?
+A similar question must be raised as to various other
+statements regarding the sublime; and I go on to
+speak of some of these.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">(1) Burke asserted that the sublime is always
+founded on fear; indeed he considered this to be
+its distinguishing characteristic. Setting aside,
+then, the connection of this statement with Burke&rsquo;s
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page54" id="page54"></a>54</span>
+general doctrine (a doctrine impossible to accept),
+we may ask, Is it true that the &lsquo;check&rsquo; administered
+by the sublime object is always one of fear? We
+must answer, first, that if this check is part of an
+aesthetic experience and not a mere preliminary to
+it, it can <i>never</i> be fear in the common meaning of
+that word, or what may be called practical or real
+fear. So far as we are <i>practically</i> afraid of a storm
+or a mountain, afraid, for instance, for ourselves as
+bodily beings in this particular spatial and temporal
+position, the storm or mountain is not sublime to
+us, it is simply terrible. <i>That</i> fear must be absent,
+or must not engage attention, or must be changed
+in character, if the object is to be for us <i>sublimely</i>
+terrible, something with which we identify ourselves
+in imaginative sympathy, and which so causes a great
+self-expansion. But, secondly, even if &lsquo;fear&rsquo; is understood
+rightly as indicating a feature in an aesthetic
+and not a practical experience, our question must
+obviously be answered in the negative. There is
+fear in the apprehension of some sublimity, but by
+no means in that of all. If there is a momentary
+check, for example, in the case of a rainbow, a
+glorious sunrise, the starry night, Socrates, or Tourgénieff&rsquo;s
+sparrow, &lsquo;fear,&rsquo; unless the meaning of the
+word is unnaturally extended, is surely not the name
+for this check.</p>
+
+<p>Burke&rsquo;s mistake, however, implies a recognition
+of the &lsquo;negative aspect&rsquo; in sublimity, and it may
+remind us of a truth. Instances of the sublime differ
+greatly in regard to the prominence and tone of this
+aspect. It is less marked, for example, and less
+obvious, in the case of a sublime rainbow or sunrise
+than in that of a sublime and &lsquo;terrible&rsquo; thunderstorm.
+And in general we may say that the <i>distinctive</i>
+nature of sublimity appears most clearly where
+this aspect is most prominent,&mdash;so prominent, perhaps,
+that we have a more or less explicit sense of
+the littleness and powerlessness of ourselves, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page55" id="page55"></a>55</span>
+indeed of the whole world of our usual experience.
+It is here that the object is most decidedly more
+than &lsquo;glorious,&rsquo; or even &lsquo;majestic,&rsquo; and that sublimity
+appears in antithesis to grace. Only we must
+not give an account of the sublime which fully applies
+to these cases <i>alone</i>, or suppose that the negative
+aspect is absent in other cases. If a rainbow or
+sunrise is really sublime, it is overwhelming as well
+as uplifting. Nor must we assume that the most
+distinctively sublime must also be the most sublime.
+The sunrise witnessed from an immense snowfield
+in the high Alps may be as sublime as an Alpine
+thunderstorm, though its sublimity is different.</p>
+
+<p>(2) Grace and &lsquo;beauty,&rsquo; it has been said, though
+not of course merely sensuous, are yet friendly to
+sense. It is their essence, in fact, to be a harmonious
+unity of sense and spirit, and so to reconcile
+powers which in much of our experience are conflicting
+and dissonant. But sublimity is harsh and
+hostile to sense. It makes us feel in ourselves and
+in the world the presence of something irresistibly
+superior to sense. And this is the reason why it
+does not soothe or delight, but uplifts us.</p>
+
+<p>This statement recalls some of the ideas we have
+been considering, but it may easily mislead. For
+one thing, it is impossible for any sublimity whatever
+to be <i>merely</i> hostile to &lsquo;sense,&rsquo; since everything
+aesthetic must appeal to sense or sensuous imagination,
+so that the sublime must at least express its
+hostility to sense by means of sense. And if we
+take the phrase in another meaning, the statement
+may mislead still, for it attributes to sublimity in
+general what is a characteristic only of certain forms
+of the sublime. Scores of examples could easily be
+quoted which show no hostility to sense: <i>e.g.</i> a
+sublime lion, or bull, or tree. And if we think of
+our old examples of the rainbow and the sunrise, or,
+better still, of a thunderstorm, or &lsquo;The horse and
+his rider,&rsquo; or the &lsquo;Sanctus&rsquo; in Bach&rsquo;s Mass, we find
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page56" id="page56"></a>56</span>
+the sublime thing actually making a powerful appeal
+to sense and depending for its sublimity on the
+vehemence or volume of this appeal. Diminish at
+all markedly in these cases the amount of light,
+colour, or sound, and the sublimity would vanish.
+Of course the appeal here is not merely to sense, but
+it <i>is</i> to sense.</p>
+
+<p>But undoubtedly there is another kind of sublimity;
+and it is particularly interesting. Here, it
+is true, a sort of despite is done to the senses and
+what speaks to them. As we have seen, the greatness
+of soul in the sparrow is enhanced by contrast
+with the smallness and feebleness of its body, and
+pours contempt on the visible magnitude of the
+hound; and the stillness of night or death is sublime
+from its active negation of sound and motion.
+Again, there is a famous passage which depends
+for its effect on this, that, first, sublime things are
+introduced which appeal powerfully to sense, and
+then something else, which does not so appeal, is
+made to appear even more sublime and to put them
+to shame: first a great and strong wind, an earthquake,
+a fire; and after the fire a still small voice.
+Sometimes, again, as Burke observed, sublimity
+depends on, or is increased by, darkness, obscurity,
+vagueness,&mdash;refusal of satisfaction to the sense of
+sight. Often in these cases the sublime object is
+terrible, and its terror is increased by inability to
+see or distinguish it. Examples are the image of
+&lsquo;the pestilence that walketh in darkness,&rsquo; or Milton&rsquo;s
+description of Death, or the lines in the <i>Book of Job</i>:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>In thoughts from the visions of the night</p>
+<p>When deep sleep falleth on men,</p>
+<p>Fear came upon me and trembling,</p>
+<p>Which made all my bones to shake.</p>
+<p>Then a spirit passed before my face;</p>
+<p>The hair of my flesh stood up.</p>
+<p>It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.</p>
+<p>An image was before mine eyes.</p>
+<p>There was silence, and I heard a voice.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page57" id="page57"></a>57</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">It has been observed that attempts to illustrate
+such passages as these dissipate their sublimity
+by diminishing the obscurity of the object.
+Blake&rsquo;s illustrations of the lines in Milton and
+in <i>Job</i><a name="fa12b" id="fa12b" href="#ft12b"><span class="sp">12</span></a> show this, while his design of the
+morning-stars singing together is worthy even of
+the words.</p>
+
+<p>We may trace this severity towards sense, again,
+in examples already mentioned, the ideas of Fate,
+of the eternal laws to which Antigone appeals, of
+Duty in Wordsworth&rsquo;s ode. We imagine these
+powers as removed from sight, and indeed wholly
+immaterial, and yet as exercising sovereign dominion
+over the visible and material world. And their
+sublimity would be endangered if we tried to bring
+them nearer to sense by picturing the means by
+which they exercise their control.</p>
+
+<p>I will take a last example. It has probably been
+mentioned in almost every account of the sublime
+since Longinus quoted it in his work on Elevation
+of Style. And it is of special interest here because
+it illustrates at one and the same time the two kinds
+of sublimity which we are engaged in distinguishing.
+&lsquo;God said, Let there be light, and there was light.&rsquo;
+The idea of the first and instantaneous appearance
+of light, and that the whole light of the whole
+world, is already sublime; and its primary appeal is
+to sense. The further idea that this transcendently
+glorious apparition is due to mere words, to a
+breath&mdash;our symbol of tenuity, evanescence, impotence
+to influence material bulk&mdash;heightens enormously
+the impression of absolutely immeasurable
+power.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up, then, on this matter. It is not safe
+to distinguish the sublime from the &lsquo;beautiful&rsquo; by
+its hostility to sense. The sublime may impress its
+overwhelming greatness in either of two ways, by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page58" id="page58"></a>58</span>
+an appeal to sense, or by a kind of despite done to
+it. Nor can we assert, if we think of the sunrise,
+the thunderstorm, or of sublime music, that the
+second of these ways is more distinctive of the
+sublime than the first. But perhaps we may say
+this. In &lsquo;beauty&rsquo; that which appears in a sensuous
+form seems to rest in it, to be perfectly embodied in
+it, and to have no tendency to pass beyond it. In
+the sublime, even where no such tendency is felt
+and sublimity is nearest to &lsquo;beauty,&rsquo; we still feel the
+presence of a power held in reserve, which could
+with ease exceed its present expression. In <i>some</i>
+forms of sublimity, again, the sensuous embodiment
+seems threatening to break in its effort to express
+what appears in it. And in others we definitely
+feel that the power which for a moment intimates
+its presence to sense is infinite and utterly uncontainable
+by any or all vehicles of its manifestation.
+Here we are furthest (in a way) from sense, and
+furthest also from &lsquo;beauty.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>(3) I come finally and, as it will at first seem,
+needlessly to an idea which has already been
+touched on. The words &lsquo;boundless,&rsquo; &lsquo;illimitable,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;infinite,&rsquo; constantly recur in discussions of sublimity,
+and it cannot be denied that our experience constantly
+provokes them. The sublime has been said
+to awake in us the consciousness of our own infinity.
+It has been said, again, to represent in all cases the
+inadequacy of all finite forms to express the infinite.
+And so we may be told that, even if we do not
+adopt some such formula, but continue to speak of
+&lsquo;greatness,&rsquo; we ought at least to go beyond the
+adjective &lsquo;exceeding&rsquo; or &lsquo;overwhelming,&rsquo; and to
+substitute &lsquo;immeasurable&rsquo; or &lsquo;incomparable&rsquo; or
+&lsquo;infinite.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now, at the point we have reached, it would
+seem we might at once answer that a claim is here
+being made for the sublime in general which really
+holds good only of one kind of sublimity. Sometimes
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page59" id="page59"></a>59</span>
+the sublime object <i>is</i> apprehended as the
+Infinite, or again as an expression of it. This is,
+for example, a point of view frequent in Hebrew
+poetry. Sometimes, again, the object (<i>e.g.</i> time or
+the heavens) is apprehended, not indeed as <i>the</i>
+Infinite, but still as infinite or immeasurable. But
+how are we to say that a sublime lion or mountain,
+or Satan or Lady Macbeth, is apprehended as the
+Infinite, or as infinite, or (usually) as even an
+expression of the Infinite? And how are we to
+say that the greatness of most sublime objects is
+apprehended as incomparable or immeasurable?
+It is only failure to observe these distinctions that
+leads to errors like one recorded in Coleridge&rsquo;s
+Table-talk (July 25, 1832): &lsquo;Could you ever discover
+anything sublime, in our sense of the word,
+in the classic Greek literature? I never could.
+Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>This reply, however, though sound so far as it
+goes, does not settle the question raised. It may
+still be maintained that sublimity in all cases, and
+even when we have no idea of infinity before us,
+does represent the inadequacy of all finite forms
+to express the infinite. And it is unfortunately
+impossible for us to deal fully with this contention.
+It would carry us into the region of metaphysics;
+and, while believing that no theory of the sublime
+can be complete which stops short of that region,
+I am aiming in this lecture at no such theory, but
+only at a result which may hold good without
+regard to further developments. All that I can do
+is to add a few words on the question whether,
+going beyond the adjective &lsquo;exceeding&rsquo; or &lsquo;overwhelming,&rsquo;
+we can say that the sublime is the
+beautiful which has immeasurable, incomparable, or
+infinite greatness. And the answer which I suggest
+and will go on to explain may be put thus: the
+greatness is only sometimes immeasurable, but it
+is <i>always</i> unmeasured.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page60" id="page60"></a>60</span></p>
+
+<p>We cannot apprehend an object as sublime while
+we apprehend it as comparably, measurably, or
+finitely great. Let the thing be what it may&mdash;physical,
+vital, or spiritual&mdash;the moment we say to
+ourselves, &lsquo;It is very great, but I know <i>how</i> great,&rsquo;
+or &lsquo;It is very great, but something else is as great
+or greater,&rsquo; at that moment it has ceased to be
+sublime. Outside the consciousness of its sublimity
+we may be perfectly well aware that a thing is
+limited, measurable, equal or inferior to something
+else. But then we are <i>not</i> finding it sublime. And
+when we <i>are</i> so finding it, we are absorbed in <i>its</i>
+greatness, and have no thought either of the limits
+of that or of its equality or inferiority to anything
+else. The lion of whom we are thinking, &lsquo;An
+elephant could kill him,&rsquo; is no sublime lion. The
+Falls of Schaffhausen are sublime when you are
+lost in astonishment at them, but not when you are
+saying to yourself &lsquo;What must Niagara be!&rsquo; This
+seems indubitable, and hence we may say that, in
+one sense, all sublimity has unmeasured greatness,
+and that no greatness is sublime which we apprehend
+as finite.</p>
+
+<p>But the absence of a consciousness of measure or
+finitude is one thing; the presence of a consciousness
+of immeasurableness or infinity is another.
+The first belongs to all sublimity, the second only
+to one kind of it,&mdash;to that where we <i>attempt</i> to
+measure, or find limits to, the greatness of the thing.
+<i>If</i> we make this attempt, as when we try in
+imagination to number the stars or to find an end
+to time, then it is essential to sublimity that we
+should fail, and so fail that the idea of immeasurability
+or endlessness emerges. In like manner, <i>if</i>
+we compare things, nothing will appear sublime
+whose greatness is surpassed or even equalled by
+that of something else; and, if this process of comparison
+is pursued, in the end nothing will be found
+sublime except the absolute totality (however it may
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page61" id="page61"></a>61</span>
+be imagined). And this kind of sublimity, which
+arises from attempts to measure or compare, is often
+exceedingly striking. But it is only one kind. For
+it is an entire delusion&mdash;though a very common one
+in theories of the sublime&mdash;to suppose that we <i>must</i>
+attempt to measure or compare. On the contrary,
+in the majority of cases our impression of overwhelming
+greatness is accompanied neither by any
+idea that this greatness has a measure, nor by the
+idea that it is immeasurable or infinite.<a name="fa13b" id="fa13b" href="#ft13b"><span class="sp">13</span></a></p>
+
+<p>It will not do, then, to lay it down that the
+sublime is the beautiful which has immeasurable,
+incomparable, or infinite greatness. But I suggest
+that, after the explanations given, we may conveniently
+use the adjective &lsquo;unmeasured,&rsquo; so long
+as we remember that this means one thing where
+we do not measure at all, and another thing where
+we try to measure and fail. And, this being so, it
+seems that we may say that <i>all</i> sublimity, and not
+only that in which the idea of infinite greatness or
+of the Infinite emerges, is an image of infinity;
+for in all, through a certain check or limitation and
+the overcoming of it, we reach the perception or
+the imaginative idea of something which, on the
+one hand, has a positive nature, and, on the other,
+is either <i>not</i> determined as finite or <i>is</i> determined
+as infinite. But we must not add that this makes
+the sublime superior to the &lsquo;beautiful.&rsquo; For the
+&lsquo;beautiful&rsquo; too, though in a different way, is an image
+of infinity. In &lsquo;beauty,&rsquo; as we said, that which
+appears in a sensuous form seems to rest in that
+form, to be wholly embodied in it; it shows no
+tendency to pass beyond it, and intimates no reserve
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page62" id="page62"></a>62</span>
+of force that might strain or break it. So that the
+&lsquo;beautiful&rsquo; thing is a whole complete in itself, and
+in moments when beauty fills our souls we know
+what Wordsworth meant when he said &lsquo;the least of
+things seemed infinite,&rsquo; though each thing, being but
+one of many, must from another point of view, here
+suppressed, be finite. &lsquo;Beauty,&rsquo; then, we may perhaps
+say, is the image of the total presence of the Infinite
+within any limits it may choose to assume; sublimity
+the image of its boundlessness, and of its
+rejection of any pretension to independence or
+absoluteness on the part of its finite forms; the one
+the image of its immanence, the other of its transcendence.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">Within an hour I could attempt no more than
+an outline of our subject. That is inevitable; and
+so is another defect, which I regret more. In
+analysing any kind of aesthetic experience we have
+to begin by disentangling the threads that meet in
+it; and when we can only make a beginning, no
+time is left for the further task of showing how
+they are interwoven. We distinguish, for example,
+one kind of sublimity from another, and we must
+do so; but in the actual experience, the single
+instance, these kinds often melt together. I take
+one case of this. Trying to overlook the field in
+which sublimity appears, we say that there is a
+sublimity of inorganic things, and of things vital,
+and of things spiritual, and that these kinds differ.
+And this is true; and perhaps it is also true that
+sometimes we experience one of these kinds, so to
+say, quite pure and unmixed with others. But it is
+not always, perhaps not usually so. More frequently
+kind mingles with kind, and we mutilate the experience
+when we name it after one of them. In life
+the imagination, touched at one point, tingles all
+over and responds at all points. It is offered an
+impression of physical or vital greatness, but at
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page63" id="page63"></a>63</span>
+once it brings from the other end of its world
+reminiscences of quite another order, and fuses the
+impression with them. Or an appeal is made to
+the sense of spiritual greatness, but there rises
+before the imagination a vision with the outlines
+and hues of material Nature. Offer it a sunset&mdash;a
+mere collection of coloured lines and spots&mdash;and
+they become to it regrets and hopes and longings
+too deep for tears. Tell it of souls made perfect
+in bliss, and it sees an immeasurable rose, or city-walls
+that flash with the light of all the gems on
+earth. The truth that a sparrow and a mountain
+are different, and that Socrates is not Satan, interests
+it but little. What it cares for is the truth that,
+when they are sublime, they are all the same;
+for each becomes infinite, and it feels in each its
+own infinity.</p>
+
+<p class="f80">1903.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page64" id="page64"></a>64</span></p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTES<a name="fa14b" id="fa14b" href="#ft14b"><span class="sp">14</span></a></p>
+
+<p>I add here a few remarks on some points which it was not
+convenient to discuss in the lecture.</p>
+
+<p>1. We have seen that in the apprehension of sublimity we
+do not always employ comparison or attempt to measure. To
+feel a thing overwhelmingly great it is not necessary to have
+before the mind either the idea of something less great, or any
+standard of greatness. To argue that this must be necessary
+because &lsquo;great&rsquo; means nothing except as opposed to &lsquo;small,&rsquo; is
+like arguing that I cannot have a perception of pride without
+thinking of humility.</p>
+
+<p>This point seems to me quite clear. But a question remains.
+If we go below consciousness, what is it that happens in us?
+The apprehension of sublimity implies that we have received
+an exceedingly strong impression. This as a matter of fact must
+mean an impression very much stronger than something else; and
+this something else must be, so to say, a standard with which
+the impression is unconsciously compared. What then is it?</p>
+
+<p>Stated in the most general terms, it must apparently be the
+usual or average strength of impressions.</p>
+
+<p>But this unconscious standard takes particular concrete forms
+in various classes of cases. Not seldom it seems to be our
+sense of our own power or of average human power. This is
+especially so where the thing felt to be sublime is, in the
+relevant respect, <i>in eodem genere</i> with ourselves. A sublime
+lion, for example, is immensely superior to us, or to the average
+man, in muscular force and so in dangerousness, Tourgénieff&rsquo;s
+sparrow in courage and love, a god in all sorts of ways. And
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page65" id="page65"></a>65</span>
+the use of this unconscious standard is probably the reason of
+the fact, noted in the lecture, that it is difficult to feel sublimity,
+as regards vital force, in a creature smaller than ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>But this is not the only standard. A sublime lion is not only
+immensely stronger than we are, but is generally also exceptional
+among lions; and so with a sublime tree or bridge or thunderstorm.
+So that we seem also to use as unconscious standard
+the idea of the average of the kind to which the thing belongs.
+An average thunderstorm hardly seems sublime, and yet it is
+overwhelmingly superior to us in power.<a name="fa15b" id="fa15b" href="#ft15b"><span class="sp">15</span></a></p>
+
+<p>What, again, is the psychical machinery employed when we
+attempt to measure the shoreless sea, or time, and find them
+immeasurable? Is there any standard of the &lsquo;usual&rsquo; here? I
+will leave this question to more skilled psychologists than myself.</p>
+
+<p>2. Since the impression produced by sublimity is one of very
+exceptional strength, we are not able to feel it continuously for
+long, though we can repeat it after a pause. In this the sublime
+differs from the &lsquo;beautiful,&rsquo; on which we like to <i>dwell</i> after our
+first surprise is over. A tragedy or symphony that was sublime
+from beginning to end could not be so experienced. Living
+among mountains, we feel their beauty more or less constantly,
+their sublimity only by flashes.</p>
+
+<p>3. If our account of the impression produced by sublimity is
+true, why should not any sensation whatever produce this impression
+merely by gaining extraordinary strength? It seems to
+me it would, supposing at its normal strength it conformed to
+the general requirements of aesthetic experience, and supposing
+the requisite accession of strength did not remove this conformity.
+But this, in one respect at least, it would do. It
+would make the light, sound, smell, physiologically painful, and
+we should feel it as painful or even dangerous. We find this
+in the case of lightning. If it is to be felt as aesthetic it must
+not pass a certain degree of brightness; or, as we sometimes
+say, it must not be too &lsquo;near.&rsquo;</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1b" id="ft1b" href="#fa1b"><span class="fn">1</span></a> I have learned something from many discussions of this subject.
+In its outline the view I have taken is perhaps nearer to Hartmann&rsquo;s
+than to any other.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2b" id="ft2b" href="#fa2b"><span class="fn">2</span></a> Popular usage coincides roughly with this sense. Indeed, it can
+hardly be said to recognise the wider one at all. &lsquo;Beauty&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;beautiful,&rsquo; in that wider sense, are technical terms of Aesthetics.
+It is a misfortune that the language of Aesthetics should thus differ
+from the ordinary language of speech and literature; but the misfortune
+seems to be unavoidable, for there is no word in the ordinary
+language which means &lsquo;whatever gives aesthetic satisfaction,&rsquo; and yet
+that idea <i>must</i> have a name in Aesthetics.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3b" id="ft3b" href="#fa3b"><span class="fn">3</span></a> I do not mean to imply that in aesthetic apprehension itself we
+always, or generally, make conscious use of a standard or, indeed,
+think of greatness. But here we are <i>reflecting</i> on this apprehension.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4b" id="ft4b" href="#fa4b"><span class="fn">4</span></a> Thus, it may be noticed, the sparrow&rsquo;s size, which is the reverse of
+sublime, is yet indirectly essential to the sublimity of the sparrow.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5b" id="ft5b" href="#fa5b"><span class="fn">5</span></a> The poet&rsquo;s language here has done our analysis for us.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6b" id="ft6b" href="#fa6b"><span class="fn">6</span></a> A word may be added here on a disputed point as to &lsquo;spiritual&rsquo;
+sublimity. It has been held that intellect cannot be sublime; but
+surely in the teeth of facts. Not to speak of intellect as it appears in
+the sphere of practice, how can it be denied that the intellect of
+Aristotle or Shakespeare or Newton may produce the impression of
+sublimity? All that is true is, first, that the intellect must be apprehended
+imaginatively and not thought abstractly (otherwise it can
+produce <i>no</i> aesthetic impression), and, secondly, that it appears
+sublime in virtue not of its quality alone but of the quantity, or force,
+of that quality.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7b" id="ft7b" href="#fa7b"><span class="fn">7</span></a> The same principle applies to other cases. If, for example, the
+desolation of a landscape is felt to be sublime, it is so not as the mere
+negation of life, verdure, etc., but as their <i>active</i> negation.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8b" id="ft8b" href="#fa8b"><span class="fn">8</span></a> The reader will remember that in one sense of the question, Is
+there no more in the sublime than overwhelming greatness? this
+question must of course be answered in the affirmative. Sublimity is a
+mode of beauty: the sublime is not the overwhelmingly great, it is the
+beautiful which has overwhelming greatness; and it affects us through
+its whole nature, not by mere greatness.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9b" id="ft9b" href="#fa9b"><span class="fn">9</span></a> I am warning the reader against a mistake which may arise from
+the complexity of aesthetic experience. We may make a broad
+distinction between &lsquo;glad&rsquo; and &lsquo;sad&rsquo; modes of beauty; but that does
+not coincide with the distinction of modes with which we are concerned
+in this lecture. What is lovely or &lsquo;beautiful&rsquo; may be glad or
+sad, and so may what is grand or sublime.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft10b" id="ft10b" href="#fa10b"><span class="fn">10</span></a> In what follows I have spoken as if the two were always successive
+stages, and as if these always came in the same order. It is easier to
+make the matter quickly clear by taking this view, which also seemed
+to answer to my own experience. But I do not wish to commit myself
+to an opinion on the point, which is of minor importance. What
+is essential is to recognise the presence of the two &lsquo;aspects&rsquo; or &lsquo;stages,&rsquo;
+and to see that both are requisite to sublimity.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft11b" id="ft11b" href="#fa11b"><span class="fn">11</span></a> &lsquo;Ich fühlte mich so klein, so gross,&rsquo; says Faust, remembering the
+vision of the Erdgeist, whom he addresses as &lsquo;Erhabener Geist.&rsquo; He
+was at once overwhelmed and uplifted.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft12b" id="ft12b" href="#fa12b"><span class="fn">12</span></a> At least if the &lsquo;Vision&rsquo; is sublime its sublimity is not that of the
+original. We can &lsquo;discern the form thereof&rsquo; distinctly enough.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft13b" id="ft13b" href="#fa13b"><span class="fn">13</span></a> To avoid complication I have passed by the case where we
+compare the sublime thing with another thing and find it much
+greater without finding it immeasurably great. Here the greatness,
+it appears to me, is still unmeasured. That is to say, we do not
+attempt to determine its amount, and if we did we should lose the
+impression of sublimity. We may <i>say</i>, perhaps, that it is ten, fifty, or
+a million times, as great; but these words no more represent mathematical
+calculations than Hamlet&rsquo;s &lsquo;forty thousand brothers.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft14b" id="ft14b" href="#fa14b"><span class="fn">14</span></a> I am far from being satisfied with the ideas imperfectly expressed in
+the first and third of these Notes, but they require more consideration
+than I can give to them during the printing of the Second Edition. The
+reader is requested to take them as mere suggestions.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft15b" id="ft15b" href="#fa15b"><span class="fn">15</span></a> Hence a creature much less powerful than ourselves <i>may</i>, I suppose, be
+sublime, even from the mere point of view of vital energy. But I doubt if
+this is so in my own case. I have seen &lsquo;magnificent&rsquo; or &lsquo;glorious&rsquo; cocks
+and cats, but if I called them &lsquo;sublime&rsquo; I should say rather more than I
+feel. I mention cocks, because Ruskin somewhere mentions a sublime cock;
+but I cannot find the passage, and this cock may have been sublime (if it
+really was so to Ruskin) from some other than &lsquo;vital&rsquo; greatness.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page66" id="page66"></a>66<br />67</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">HEGEL&rsquo;S THEORY OF TRAGEDY</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page68" id="page68"></a>68<br />69</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2"><span class="chap2">HEGEL&rsquo;S THEORY OF TRAGEDY</span><a name="fa1c" id="fa1c" href="#ft1c"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">Since</span> Aristotle dealt with tragedy, and, as usual,
+drew the main features of his subject with those
+sure and simple strokes which no later hand has
+rivalled, the only philosopher who has treated it in
+a manner both original and searching is Hegel. I
+propose here to give a sketch of Hegel&rsquo;s theory, and
+to add some remarks upon it. But I cannot possibly
+do justice in a sketch to a theory which fills many
+pages of the <i>Aesthetik</i>; which I must tear from its
+connections with the author&rsquo;s general view of poetry,
+and with the rest of his philosophy<a name="fa2c" id="fa2c" href="#ft2c"><span class="sp">2</span></a>; and which I
+must try to exhibit as far as possible in the language
+of ordinary literature. To estimate this theory,
+therefore, from my sketch would be neither safe nor
+just&mdash;all the more because, in the interest of
+immediate clearness, I have not scrupled to insert
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page70" id="page70"></a>70</span>
+without warning various remarks and illustrations
+for which Hegel is not responsible.</p>
+
+<p>On certain characteristics of tragedy the briefest
+reminder will suffice. A large part of the nature of
+this form of drama is common to the drama in all its
+forms; and of this nothing need be said. It will be
+agreed, further, that in all tragedy there is some sort
+of collision or conflict&mdash;conflict of feelings, modes of
+thought, desires, wills, purposes; conflict of persons
+with one another, or with circumstances, or with
+themselves; one, several, or all of these kinds of
+conflict, as the case may be. Again, it may be
+taken for granted that a tragedy is a story of
+unhappiness or suffering, and excites such feelings
+as pity and fear. To this, if we followed the present
+usage of the term, we should add that the story of
+unhappiness must have an unhappy end; by which
+we mean in effect that the conflict must close with
+the death of one or more of the principal characters.
+But this usage of the word &lsquo;tragedy&rsquo; is comparatively
+recent; it leaves us without a name for many
+plays, in many languages, which deal with unhappiness
+without ending unhappily; and Hegel takes
+the word in its older and wider sense.</p>
+
+<p>Passing on from these admitted characteristics of
+tragedy, we may best approach Hegel&rsquo;s peculiar
+view by observing that he lays particular stress on
+one of them. That a tragedy is a story of suffering
+is probably to many people the most obvious fact
+about it. Hegel says very little of this; partly,
+perhaps, because it is obvious, but more because
+the essential point to him is not the suffering but its
+cause, namely, the action or conflict. Mere suffering,
+he would say, is not tragic, but only the suffering
+that comes of a special kind of action. Pity for
+mere misfortune, like fear of it, is not tragic pity or
+fear. These are due to the spectacle of the conflict
+and its attendant suffering, which do not appeal
+simply to our sensibilities or our instinct of self-preservation,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page71" id="page71"></a>71</span>
+but also to our deeper mind or spirit
+(<i>Geist</i>, a word which, with its adjective, I shall
+translate &lsquo;spirit,&rsquo; &lsquo;spiritual,&rsquo; because our words
+&lsquo;mind&rsquo; and &lsquo;mental&rsquo; suggest something merely
+intellectual).</p>
+
+<p>The reason why the tragic conflict thus appeals to
+the spirit is that it is itself a conflict of the spirit.
+It is a conflict, that is to say, between powers that
+rule the world of man&rsquo;s will and action&mdash;his &lsquo;ethical
+substance.&rsquo; The family and the state, the bond of
+parent and child, of brother and sister, of husband
+and wife, of citizen and ruler, or citizen and citizen,
+with the obligations and feelings appropriate to
+these bonds; and again the powers of personal love
+and honour, or of devotion to a great cause or an
+ideal interest like religion or science or some kind
+of social welfare&mdash;such are the forces exhibited in
+tragic action; not indeed alone, not without others
+less affirmative and perhaps even evil, but still in
+preponderating mass. And as they form the substance
+of man, are common to all civilised men, and
+are acknowledged as powers rightfully claiming
+human allegiance, their exhibition in tragedy has
+that interest, at once deep and universal, which is
+essential to a great work of art.</p>
+
+<p>In many a work of art, in many a statue, picture,
+tale, or song, such powers are shown in solitary
+peace or harmonious co-operation. Tragedy shows
+them in collision. Their nature is divine, and in
+religion they appear as gods; but, as seen in the
+world of tragic action, they have left the repose of
+Olympus, have entered into human wills, and now
+meet as foes. And this spectacle, if sublime, is
+also terrible. The essentially tragic fact is the
+self-division and intestinal warfare of the ethical
+substance, not so much the war of good with evil as
+the war of good with good. Two of these isolated
+powers face each other, making incompatible demands.
+The family claims what the state refuses,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page72" id="page72"></a>72</span>
+love requires what honour forbids. The competing
+forces are both in themselves rightful, and so far
+the claim of each is equally justified; but the right
+of each is pushed into a wrong, because it ignores
+the right of the other, and demands that absolute
+sway which belongs to neither alone, but to the
+whole of which each is but a part.</p>
+
+<p>And one reason why this happens lies in the
+nature of the characters through whom these claims
+are made. It is the nature of the tragic hero, at
+once his greatness and his doom, that he knows no
+shrinking or half-heartedness, but identifies himself
+wholly with the power that moves him, and will
+admit the justification of no other power. However
+varied and rich his inner life and character may be,
+in the conflict it is all concentrated in one point.
+Antigone <i>is</i> the determination to do her duty to her
+dead brother; Romeo is not a son or a citizen as
+well as a lover, he is lover pure and simple, and
+his love is the whole of him.</p>
+
+<p>The end of the tragic conflict is the denial of both
+the exclusive claims. It is not the work of chance
+or blank fate; it is the act of the ethical substance
+itself, asserting its absoluteness against the excessive
+pretensions of its particular powers. In that sense,
+as proceeding from an absolute right which cancels
+claims based on right but pushed into wrong, it may
+be called the act of &lsquo;eternal justice.&rsquo; Sometimes it
+can end the conflict peacefully, and the tragedy
+closes with a solution. Appearing as a divine being,
+the spiritual unity reconciles by some adjustment
+the claims of the contending powers (<i>Eumenides</i>);
+or at its bidding one of them softens its demand
+(<i>Philoctetes</i>); or again, as in the more beautiful
+solution of the <i>Oedipus Coloneus</i>, the hero by his
+own self-condemnation and inward purification
+reconciles himself with the supreme justice, and is
+accepted by it. But sometimes the quarrel is
+pressed to extremes; the denial of the one-sided
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page73" id="page73"></a>73</span>
+claims involves the death of one or more of the
+persons concerned; and we have a catastrophe.
+The ultimate power thus appears as a destructive
+force. Yet even here, as Hegel insists, the end is
+not without an aspect of reconciliation. For that
+which is denied is not the rightful powers with
+which the combatants have identified themselves.
+On the contrary, those powers, and with them the
+only thing for which the combatants cared, are
+affirmed. What is denied is the exclusive and
+therefore wrongful assertion of their right.</p>
+
+<p>Such in outline is Hegel&rsquo;s main view. It may be
+illustrated more fully by two examples, favourites of
+his, taken from Aeschylus and Sophocles. Clytemnestra
+has murdered Agamemnon, her husband and
+king. Orestes, their son, is impelled by filial piety
+to avenge his father, and is ordered by Apollo to do
+so. But to kill a mother is to sin against filial piety.
+The spiritual substance is divided against itself.
+The sacred bond of father and son demands what
+the equally sacred bond of son and mother forbids.
+When, therefore, Orestes has done the deed, the
+Furies of his murdered mother claim him for their
+prey. He appeals to Apollo, who resists their claim.
+A solution is arrived at without a catastrophe. The
+cause is referred to Athene, who institutes at Athens
+a court of sworn judges. The votes of this court
+being equally divided, Athene gives her casting-vote
+for Orestes; while the Furies are at last appeased
+by a promise of everlasting honour at Athens.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Antigone</i>, on the other hand, to Hegel
+the &lsquo;perfect exemplar of tragedy,&rsquo; the solution is
+negative. The brother of Antigone has brought
+against his native city an army of foreigners bent
+on destroying it. He has been killed in the battle,
+and Creon, the ruler of the city, has issued an edict
+forbidding anyone on pain of death to bury the
+corpse. In so doing he not only dishonours the
+dead man, but violates the rights of the gods of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page74" id="page74"></a>74</span>
+the dead. Antigone without hesitation disobeys
+the edict, and Creon, despite the remonstrance of
+his son, who is affianced to her, persists in exacting
+the penalty. Warned by the prophet Teiresias, he
+gives way, but too late. Antigone, immured in a
+rocky chamber to starve, has anticipated her death.
+Her lover follows her example, and his mother
+refuses to survive him. Thus Antigone has lost
+her life through her absolute assertion of the family
+against the state; Creon has violated the sanctity
+of the family, and in return sees his own home
+laid in ruins. But in this catastrophe neither the
+right of the family nor that of the state is denied;
+what is denied is the absoluteness of the claim of
+each.</p>
+
+<p>The danger of illustrations like these is that they
+divert attention from the principle illustrated to
+questions about the interpretation of particular
+works. So it will be here. I cannot stay to
+discuss these questions, which do not affect Hegel&rsquo;s
+principle; but it will be well, before going further,
+to remove a misunderstanding of it which is generally
+to be found in criticisms of his treatment of the
+<i>Eumenides</i> and the <i>Antigone</i>. The main objection
+may be put thus: &lsquo;Hegel talks of equally justified
+powers or claims. But Aeschylus never meant that
+Orestes and the Furies were equally justified; for
+Orestes was acquitted. Nor did Sophocles mean
+that Antigone and Creon were equally right. And
+how can it have been equally the duty of Orestes to
+kill his mother and not to kill her?&rsquo; But, in the
+first place, it is most important to observe that
+Hegel is not discussing at all what we should
+generally call the moral quality of the acts and
+persons concerned, or, in the ordinary sense, what
+it was their duty to do. And, in the second place,
+when he speaks of &lsquo;equally justified&rsquo; powers, what
+he means, and, indeed, sometimes says, is that these
+powers are <i>in themselves</i> equally justified. The
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page75" id="page75"></a>75</span>
+family and the state, the bond of father and son,
+the bond of mother and son, the bond of citizenship,
+these are each and all, one as much as another,
+powers rightfully claiming human allegiance. It is
+tragic that observance of one should involve the
+violation of another. These are Hegel&rsquo;s propositions,
+and surely they are true. Their truth is quite
+unaffected by the fact (assuming it is one) that in
+the circumstances the act combining this observance
+of one and violation of another was morally right,
+or by the fact (if so it is) that one such act (say
+Antigone&rsquo;s) was morally right, and another (say
+Creon&rsquo;s) was morally wrong. It is sufficient for
+Hegel&rsquo;s principle that the violation should take
+place, and that we should feel its weight. We do
+feel it. We may approve the act of Antigone or
+Orestes, but in approving it we still feel that it is
+no light matter to disobey the law or to murder a
+mother, that (as we might say) there is much justice
+in the pleas of the Furies and of Creon, and that the
+<i>tragic</i> effect depends upon these facts. If, again,
+it is objected that the underlying conflict in the
+<i>Antigone</i> is not between the family and the state,
+but between divine and human law, that objection,
+if sound, might touch Hegel&rsquo;s interpretation,<a name="fa3c" id="fa3c" href="#ft3c"><span class="sp">3</span></a> but
+it would not affect his principle, except for those
+who recognise no obligation in human law; and it
+will scarcely be contended that Sophocles is to be
+numbered among them. On the other hand, it is,
+I think, a matter for regret that Hegel employed
+such words as &lsquo;right,&rsquo; &lsquo;justified,&rsquo; and &lsquo;justice.&rsquo;
+They do not mislead readers familiar with his
+writings, but to others they suggest associations
+with criminal law, or our everyday moral judgments,
+or perhaps the theory of &lsquo;poetic justice&rsquo;; and these
+are all out of place in a discussion on tragedy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page76" id="page76"></a>76</span></p>
+
+<p>Having determined in outline the idea or principle
+of tragedy, Hegel proceeds to give an account of
+some differences between ancient and modern works.
+In the limited time at our disposal we shall do best
+to confine ourselves to a selection from his remarks
+on the latter. For in speaking of ancient tragedy
+Hegel, who finds something modern in Euripides,
+makes accordingly but little use of him for purposes
+of contrast, while his main point of view as
+to Aeschylus and Sophocles has already appeared
+in the illustrations we have given of the general
+principle. I will only add, by way of preface, that
+the pages about to be summarised leave on one,
+rightly or wrongly, the impression that to his mind
+the principle is more adequately realised in the best
+classical tragedies than in modern works. But the
+question whether this really was his deliberate
+opinion would detain us too long from weightier
+matters.<a name="fa4c" id="fa4c" href="#ft4c"><span class="sp">4</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Hegel considers first the cases where modern
+tragedy resembles ancient in dealing with conflicts
+arising from the pursuit of ends which may be called
+substantial or objective and not merely personal.
+And he points out that modern tragedy here shows
+a much greater variety. Subjects are taken, for
+example, from the quarrels of dynasties, of rivals
+for the throne, of kings and nobles, of state and
+church. Calderon shows the conflict of love and
+honour regarded as powers imposing obligations.
+Schiller in his early works makes his characters
+defend the rights of nature against convention, or
+of freedom of thought against prescription&mdash;rights
+in their essence universal. Wallenstein aims at the
+unity and peace of Germany; Karl Moor attacks
+the whole arrangement of society; Faust seeks to
+attain in thought and action union with the Absolute.
+In such cases the end is more than personal; it
+represents a power claiming the allegiance of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page77" id="page77"></a>77</span>
+individual; but, on the other hand, it does not
+always or generally represent a great <i>ethical</i> institution
+or bond like the family or the state. We have
+passed into a wider world.</p>
+
+<p>But, secondly, he observes, in regard to modern
+tragedy, that in a larger number of instances such
+public or universal interests either do not appear
+at all, or, if they appear, are scarcely more than
+a background for the real subject. The real subject,
+the impelling end or passion, and the ensuing conflict,
+is personal,&mdash;these particular characters with
+their struggle and their fate. The importance
+given to subjectivity&mdash;this is the distinctive mark
+of modern sentiment, and so of modern art; and
+such tragedies bear its impress. A part at least
+of Hegel&rsquo;s meaning may be illustrated thus. We
+are interested in the personality of Orestes or
+Antigone, but chiefly as it shows itself in one
+aspect, as identifying itself with a certain ethical
+relation; and our interest in the personality is
+inseparable and indistinguishable from our interest
+in the power it represents. This is not so with
+Hamlet, whose position so closely resembles that
+of Orestes. What engrosses our attention is the
+whole personality of Hamlet in his conflict, not with
+an opposing spiritual power, but with circumstances
+and, still more, with difficulties in his own nature.
+No one could think of describing Othello as the
+representative of an ethical family relation. His
+passion, however much nobility he may show in
+it, is personal. So is Romeo&rsquo;s love. It is not
+pursued, like Posa&rsquo;s freedom of thought, as something
+universal, a right of man. Its right, if it
+could occur to us to use the term at all, is Romeo&rsquo;s
+right.</p>
+
+<p>On this main characteristic of modern tragedy
+others depend. For instance, that variety of subject
+to which reference has just been made depends
+on it. For when so much weight is attached to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page78" id="page78"></a>78</span>
+personality, almost any fatal collision in which a
+sufficiently striking character is involved may yield
+material for tragedy. Naturally, again, characterisation
+has become fuller and more subtle, except in
+dramas which are more or less an imitation of the
+antique. The characters in Greek tragedy are far
+from being types or personified abstractions, as
+those of classical French tragedy tend to be: they
+are genuine individuals. But still they are comparatively
+simple and easy to understand, and have
+not the intricacy of the characters in Shakespeare.
+These, for the most part, represent simply themselves;
+and the loss of that interest which attached
+to the Greek characters from their identification
+with an ethical power, is compensated by an extraordinary
+subtlety in their portrayal, and also by
+their possession of some peculiar charm or some
+commanding superiority. Finally, the interest in
+personality explains the freedom with which characters
+more or less definitely evil are introduced in
+modern tragedy. Mephistopheles is as essentially
+modern as Faust. The passion of Richard or
+Macbeth is not only personal, like that of Othello;
+it is egoistic and anarchic, and leads to crimes done
+with a full knowledge of their wickedness; but to
+the modern mind the greatness of the personality
+justifies its appearance in the position of hero.
+Such beings as Iago and Goneril, almost portents
+of evil, are not indeed made the heroes of tragedies;
+but, according to Hegel, they would not have been
+admitted in Greek tragedy at all. If Clytemnestra
+had been cited in objection as a parallel to Lady
+Macbeth, he would have replied that Lady Macbeth
+had not the faintest ground of complaint against
+Duncan, while in reading the <i>Agamemnon</i> we are
+frequently reminded that Clytemnestra&rsquo;s husband
+was the sacrificer of their child. He might have
+added that Clytemnestra is herself an example of
+the necessity, where one of the principal characters
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page79" id="page79"></a>79</span>
+inspires hatred or horror, of increasing the subtlety
+of the drawing or adding grandeur to the evil will.</p>
+
+<p>It remains to compare ancient and modern tragedy
+in regard to the issue of the conflict. We have
+seen that Hegel attributes this issue in the former
+to the ethical substance or eternal justice, and so
+accounts for such reconciliation as we feel to be
+present even where the end is a catastrophe. Now,
+in the catastrophe of modern tragedy, he says, a
+certain justice is sometimes felt to be present; but
+even then it differs from the antique justice. It is
+in some cases more &lsquo;abstract&rsquo;: the end pursued by
+the hero, though it is not egoistic, is still presented
+rather as his particular end than as something rightful
+though partial; and hence the catastrophe
+appears as the reaction, not of an undivided ethical
+totality, but merely of the universal turning against
+a too assertive particular.<a name="fa5c" id="fa5c" href="#ft5c"><span class="sp">5</span></a> In cases, again, where
+the hero (Richard or Macbeth) openly attacks an
+ethical power and plunges into evil, we feel that he
+meets with justice, and only gets what he deserves;
+but then this justice is colder and more &lsquo;criminalistic&rsquo;
+than that of ancient tragedy. Thus even when the
+modern work seems to resemble the ancient in its
+issue, the sense of reconciliation is imperfect. And
+partly for this reason, partly from the concentration
+of our interest on individuality as such, we desire
+to see in the individual himself some sort of reconciliation
+with his fate. What shape this will take
+depends, of course, on the story and the character
+of the hero. It may appear in a religious form,
+as his feeling that he is exchanging his earthly
+being for an indestructible happiness; or again, in
+his recognition of the justice of his fall; or at least
+he may show us that, in face of the forces that
+crush him to death, he maintains untouched the
+freedom and strength of his own will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page80" id="page80"></a>80</span></p>
+
+<p>But there remain, says Hegel, many modern
+tragedies where we have to attribute the catastrophe
+not to any kind of justice, but to unhappy circumstances
+and outward accidents. And then we can
+only feel that the individual whose merely personal
+ends are thwarted by mere particular circumstances
+and chances, pays the penalty that awaits existence
+in a scene of contingency and finitude. Such a
+feeling cannot rise above sadness, and, if the hero
+is a noble soul, it may become the impression of
+a dreadful external necessity. This impression can
+be avoided only when circumstance and accident
+are so depicted that they are felt to coincide with
+something in the hero himself, so that he is not
+simply destroyed by an outward force. So it is
+with Hamlet. &lsquo;This bank and shoal of time&rsquo; is too
+narrow for his soul, and the death that seems to fall
+on him by chance is also within him. And so in
+<i>Romeo and Juliet</i> we feel that the rose of a love
+so beautiful is too tender to bloom in the storm-swept
+valley of its birth. But such a feeling of
+reconciliation is still one of pain, an unhappy
+blessedness.<a name="fa6c" id="fa6c" href="#ft6c"><span class="sp">6</span></a> And if the situation displayed in a
+drama is of such a kind that we feel the issue to
+depend <i>simply</i> on the turn the dramatist may choose
+to give to the course of events, we are fully justified
+in our preference for a happy ending.</p>
+
+<p>In this last remark (or rather in the pages misrepresented
+by it) Hegel, of course, is not criticising
+Shakespeare. He is objecting to the destiny-dramas
+of his own time, and to the fashionable
+indulgence in sentimental melancholy. Strongly as
+he asserted the essential function of negation throughout
+the universe, the affirmative power of the spirit,
+even in its profoundest divisions, was for him the
+deepest truth and the most inspiring theme. And
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page81" id="page81"></a>81</span>
+one may see this even in his references to Shakespeare.
+He appreciated Shakespeare&rsquo;s representation
+of extreme forms of evil, but, even if he was
+fully satisfied of its justification, his personal preference
+lay in another direction, and while I do not
+doubt that he thought <i>Hamlet</i> a greater work
+than <i>Iphigenie</i>, I suspect he loved Goethe&rsquo;s play
+the best.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">Most of those who have thought about this
+subject will agree that the ideas I have tried to
+sketch are interesting and valuable; but they suggest
+scores of questions. Alike in the account of
+tragedy in general, and in that of the differences
+between ancient and modern tragedy, everyone will
+find statements to doubt and omissions to regret;
+and scarcely one of Hegel&rsquo;s interpretations of particular
+plays will escape objection. It is impossible
+for me to touch on more than a few points; and
+to the main ideas I owe so much that I am more
+inclined to dwell on their truth than to criticise
+what seem to be defects. But perhaps after all
+an attempt to supplement and amend may be the
+best way of throwing some part of Hegel&rsquo;s meaning
+more into relief. And I will begin with the attempt
+to supplement.</p>
+
+<p>He seems to be right in laying emphasis on the
+action and conflict in tragedy rather than on the
+suffering and misfortune. No mere suffering or
+misfortune, no suffering that does not spring in
+great part from human agency, and in some degree
+from the agency of the sufferer, is tragic, however
+pitiful or dreadful it may be. But, sufficient connection
+with these agencies being present, misfortune,
+the fall from prosperity to adversity, with the
+suffering attending it, at once becomes tragic; and
+in many tragedies it forms a large ingredient, as
+does the pity for it in the tragic feeling. Hegel, I
+think, certainly takes too little notice of it; and by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page82" id="page82"></a>82</span>
+this omission he also withdraws attention from
+something the importance of which he would have
+admitted at once; I mean the way in which suffering
+is borne. Physical pain, to take an extreme
+instance, is one thing: Philoctetes, bearing it, is
+another. And the noble endurance of pain that
+rends the heart is the source of much that is best
+worth having in tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>Again, there is one particular kind of misfortune
+<i>not</i> obviously due to human agency, which undoubtedly
+may affect us in a tragic way. I mean
+that kind which suggests the idea of fate. Tragedies
+which represent man as the mere plaything of
+chance or a blank fate or a malicious fate, are never
+really deep: it is satisfactory to see that Maeterlinck,
+a man of true genius, has now risen above these
+ideas. But, where those factors of tragedy are
+present which Hegel emphasises, the impression of
+something fateful in what we call accident, the
+impression that the hero not only invites misfortune
+by his exceptional stature and exceptional daring,
+but is also, if I may so put it, strangely and terribly
+unlucky, is in many plays a genuine ingredient in
+tragic effect. It is so, for example, in the <i>Oedipus
+Tyrannus</i>. It is so even in dramas like Shakespeare&rsquo;s,
+which exemplify the saying that character
+is destiny. Hegel&rsquo;s own reference to the prominence
+of accident in the plot of <i>Hamlet</i> proves it. Othello
+would not have become Iago&rsquo;s victim if his own
+character had been different; but still, as we say, it
+is an extraordinary fatality which makes him the
+companion of the one man in the world who is at
+once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough
+to ensnare him. In the <i>Antigone</i> itself, and in the
+very catastrophe of it, accident plays its part: we
+can hardly say that it depends solely on the characters
+of Creon and Antigone that the one yields just
+too late to save the life of the other. Now, it may
+be said with truth that Hegel&rsquo;s whole account of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page83" id="page83"></a>83</span>
+ultimate power in tragedy is a rationalisation of the
+idea of fate, but his remarks on this particular aspect
+of fate are neither sufficient nor satisfactory.</p>
+
+<p>His insistence on the need for some element of
+reconciliation in a tragic catastrophe, and his
+remarks on the various forms it assumes, have the
+greatest value; but one result of the omissions just
+noticed is that he sometimes exaggerates it, and at
+other times rates it too low. When he is speaking
+of the kind of tragedy he most approves, his
+language almost suggests that our feeling at the
+close of the conflict is, or should be, one of complete
+reconciliation. This it surely neither is nor can be.
+Not to mention the suffering and death we have
+witnessed, the very existence of the conflict, even if
+a supreme ethical power is felt to be asserted in its
+close, remains a painful fact, and, in large measure,
+a fact not understood. For, though we may be said
+to see, in one sense, how the opposition of spiritual
+powers arises, something in us, and that the best,
+still cries out against it. And even the perception
+or belief that it must needs be that offences come
+would not abolish our feeling that the necessity is
+terrible, or our pain in the woe of the guilty and the
+innocent. Nay, one may conjecture, the feeling and
+the pain would not vanish if we fully understood
+that the conflict and catastrophe were by a rational
+necessity involved in the divine and eternally accomplished
+purpose of the world. But this exaggeration
+in Hegel&rsquo;s language, if partly due to his enthusiasm
+for the affirmative, may be mainly, like some other
+defects, an accident of lecturing. In the <i>Philosophy
+of Religion</i>, I may add, he plainly states that in the
+solution even of tragedies like the <i>Antigone</i> something
+remains unresolved (ii. 135).</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, his treatment of the aspect
+of reconciliation in modern tragedy is in several
+respects insufficient. I will mention only one. He
+does not notice that in the conclusion of not a few
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page84" id="page84"></a>84</span>
+tragedies pain is mingled not merely with acquiescence,
+but with something like exultation. Is there
+not such a feeling at the close of <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>,
+and <i>King Lear</i>; and that although the end in the
+last two cases touches the limit of legitimate pathos?
+This exultation appears to be connected with our
+sense that the hero has never shown himself so
+great or noble as in the death which seals his failure.
+A rush of passionate admiration, and a glory in the
+greatness of the soul, mingle with our grief; and the
+coming of death, so far from destroying these feelings,
+appears to leave them untouched, or even to
+be entirely in harmony with them. If in such dramas
+we may be said to feel that the ultimate power is no
+mere fate, but a spiritual power, then we also feel
+that the hero was never so near to this power as in
+the moment when it required his life.</p>
+
+<p>The last omission I would notice in Hegel&rsquo;s
+theory is that he underrates the action in tragedy of
+what may be called by a rough distinction moral
+evil rather than defect. Certainly the part played
+by evil differs greatly in different cases, but it is
+never absent, not even from tragedies of Hegel&rsquo;s
+favourite type. If it does not appear in the main
+conflict, it appears in its occasion. You may say
+that, while Iago and Macbeth have evil purposes,
+neither the act of Orestes nor the vengeance of the
+Furies, neither Antigone&rsquo;s breach of the edict nor
+even Creon&rsquo;s insistence on her punishment, springs
+from evil in them; but the situation with which
+Orestes or Antigone has to deal, and so in a sense
+the whole tragedy, arises from evil, the murder of
+Agamemnon, and the attempt of Polyneices to bring
+ruin on his native city. In fact, if we confine the
+title &lsquo;tragedy&rsquo; to plays ending with a catastrophe,
+it will be found difficult to name great tragedies,
+ancient or modern, in which evil has not directly or
+indirectly a prominent part. And its presence has
+an important bearing on the effect produced by the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page85" id="page85"></a>85</span>
+catastrophe. On the one hand, it deepens the sense
+of painful awe. The question why affirmative
+spiritual forces should collide is hard enough; but
+the question why, together with them, there should
+be generated violent evil and extreme depravity is
+harder and more painful still. But, on the other
+hand, the element of reconciliation in the catastrophe
+is strengthened by recognition of the part played by
+evil in bringing it about; because our sense that
+the ultimate power cannot endure the presence of
+such evil is implicitly the sense that this power is
+at least more closely allied with good. If it rejects
+the exaggerated claims of its own isolated powers,
+that which provokes from it a much more vehement
+reaction must be still more alien to its nature.
+This feeling is forcibly evoked by Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+tragedies, and in many Greek dramas it is directly
+appealed to by repeated reminders that what is
+at work in the disasters is the unsleeping Ate which
+follows an ancestral sin. If Aristotle did not in
+some lost part of the <i>Poetics</i> discuss ideas like
+this, he failed to give a complete rationale of Greek
+tragedy.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">I come lastly to the matter I have most at heart.
+What I take to be the central idea in Hegel&rsquo;s
+theory seems to me to touch the essence of tragedy.
+And I will not assert that his own statement of it
+fails to cover the whole field of instances. For he
+does not teach, as he is often said to do, that tragedy
+portrays only the conflict of such ethical powers as
+the family and the state. He adds to these, as we
+have seen, others, such as love and honour, together
+with various universal ends; and it may even be
+maintained that he has provided in his general
+statement for those numerous cases where, according
+to himself, no substantial or universal ends collide,
+but the interest is centred on &lsquo;personalities.&rsquo; Nevertheless,
+when these cases come to be considered
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page86" id="page86"></a>86</span>
+more fully&mdash;and, in Hegel&rsquo;s view, they are the most
+characteristically modern cases&mdash;we are not satisfied.
+They naturally tend to appear as declensions from
+the more ideal ancient form; for how can a personality
+which represents only itself claim the interest
+of one which represents something universal? And
+further, they are sometimes described in a manner
+which strikes the reader, let us say, of Shakespeare,
+as both insufficient and misleading. Without raising,
+then, unprofitable questions about the comparative
+merits of ancient and modern tragedy, I should like
+to propose a restatement of Hegel&rsquo;s general principle
+which would make it more obviously apply to
+both.</p>
+
+<p>If we omit all reference to ethical or substantial
+powers and interests, what have we left? We have
+the more general idea&mdash;to use again a formula not
+Hegel&rsquo;s own&mdash;that tragedy portrays a self-division
+and self-waste of spirit, or a division of spirit
+involving conflict and waste. It is implied in this
+that on <i>both</i> sides in the conflict there is a spiritual
+value. The same idea may be expressed (again, I
+think, not in Hegel&rsquo;s own words) by saying that the
+tragic conflict is one not merely of good with evil,
+but also, and more essentially, of good with good.
+Only, in saying this, we must be careful to observe
+that &lsquo;good&rsquo; here means anything that has spiritual
+value, not moral goodness alone,<a name="fa7c" id="fa7c" href="#ft7c"><span class="sp">7</span></a> and that &lsquo;evil&rsquo;
+has a similarly wide sense.</p>
+
+<p>Now this idea of a division of spirit involving
+conflict and waste covers the tragedies of ethical
+and other universal powers, and it covers much
+besides. According to it the collision of such
+powers would be one kind of tragic collision, but
+only one. <i>Why</i> are we tragically moved by the
+conflict of family and state? Because we set a high
+value on family and state. Why then should not
+the conflict of anything else that has sufficient value
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page87" id="page87"></a>87</span>
+affect us tragically? It does. The value must be
+sufficient&mdash;a moderate value will not serve; and
+other characteristics must be present which need
+not be considered here. But, granted these conditions,
+<i>any</i> spiritual conflict involving spiritual
+waste is tragic. And it is just one greatness of
+modern art that it has shown the tragic fact in
+situations of so many and such diverse kinds.
+These situations have not the peculiar effectiveness
+of the conflicts preferred by Hegel, but they
+may have an equal effectiveness peculiar to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Let me attempt to test these ideas by choosing a
+most unfavourable instance&mdash;unfavourable because
+the play seems at first to represent a conflict simply
+of good and evil, and so, according both to Hegel&rsquo;s
+statement and the proposed restatement, to be no
+tragedy at all: I mean <i>Macbeth</i>. What is the
+conflict here? It will be agreed that it does not
+lie between two ethical powers or universal ends,
+and that, as Hegel says, the main interest is in
+personalities. Let us take it first, then, to lie
+between Macbeth and the persons opposing him,
+and let us ask whether there is not spiritual value
+or good on both sides&mdash;not an equal amount of
+good (that is not necessary), but enough good on
+each to give the impression of spiritual waste. Is
+there not such good in Macbeth? It is not a
+question merely of moral goodness, but of good.
+It is not a question of the use made of good, but
+of its presence. And such bravery and skill in war
+as win the enthusiasm of everyone about him; such
+an imagination as few but poets possess; a conscience
+so vivid that his deed is to him beforehand
+a thing of terror, and, once done, condemns him to
+that torture of the mind on which he lies in restless
+ecstasy; a determination so tremendous and a
+courage so appalling that, for all this torment, he
+never dreams of turning back, but, even when he
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page88" id="page88"></a>88</span>
+has found that life is a tale full of sound and fury,
+signifying nothing, will tell it out to the end though
+earth and heaven and hell are leagued against him;
+are not these things, in themselves, good, and
+gloriously good? Do they not make you, for all
+your horror, admire Macbeth, sympathise with his
+agony, pity him, and see in him the waste of forces
+on which you place a spiritual value? It is simply
+on this account that he is for you, not the abstraction
+called a criminal who merely &lsquo;gets what he deserves&rsquo;
+(art, like religion, knows no such thing), but a tragic
+hero, and that his war with other forces of indubitable
+spiritual worth is a tragic war.<a name="fa8c" id="fa8c" href="#ft8c"><span class="sp">8</span></a></p>
+
+<p>It is required by the restatement of Hegel&rsquo;s
+principle to show that in the external conflict of
+persons there is good on both sides. It is not
+required that this should be true, secondly, of both
+sides in the conflict within the hero&rsquo;s soul; for the
+hero is only a part of the tragedy. Nevertheless in
+almost all cases, if not in all, it is true. It is
+obviously so where, as in the hero and also the
+heroine of the <i>Cid</i>, the contending powers in this
+internal struggle are love and honour. Even when
+love is of a quality less pure and has a destructive
+force, as in Shakespeare&rsquo;s Antony, it is clearly true.
+And it remains true even where, as in Hamlet and
+Macbeth, the contest seems to lie, and for most
+purposes might conveniently be said to lie, between
+forces simply good and simply the reverse. This is
+not really so, and the tragic effect depends upon the
+fact. It depends on our feeling that the elements
+in the man&rsquo;s nature are so inextricably blended that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page89" id="page89"></a>89</span>
+the good in him, that which we admire, instead of
+simply opposing the evil, reinforces it. Macbeth&rsquo;s
+imagination deters him from murder, but it also
+makes the vision of a crown irresistibly bright. If
+he had been less determined, nay, if his conscience
+had been less maddening in its insistence that he
+had thrown the precious jewel of his soul irretrievably
+away, he might have paused after his first deed,
+might even have repented. Yet his imagination,
+his determination, and his conscience were things
+good. Hamlet&rsquo;s desire to do his duty is a good
+thing, but what opposes this desire is by no means
+simply evil. It is something to which a substantial
+contribution is made by the qualities we most admire
+in him. Thus the nature of tragedy, as seen in the
+external conflict, repeats itself on each side of this
+conflict, and everywhere there is a spiritual value in
+both the contending forces.</p>
+
+<p>In showing that <i>Macbeth</i>, a tragedy as far removed
+as possible from the <i>Antigone</i> as understood
+by Hegel, is still of one nature with it, and equally
+answers to the account of tragedy proposed, it has
+been necessary to ignore the great difference between
+the two plays. But when once the common essence
+of all tragedies has been determined, their differences
+become the interesting subject. They could
+be distinguished according to the character of the
+collisions on which they are built, or of the main
+forces which move the principal agents. And it
+may well be that, other things being equal (as they
+never are), the tragedy in which the hero is, as we
+say, a good man, is more tragic than that in which
+he is, as we say, a bad one. The more spiritual
+value, the more tragedy in conflict and waste. The
+death of Hamlet or Othello is, so far, more tragic
+than that of Macbeth, that of Macbeth than that of
+Richard. Below Richard stands Iago, a figure still
+tragic, but unfit for the hero&rsquo;s part; below him
+persons like Regan or, in the very depth, Oswald,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page90" id="page90"></a>90</span>
+characters no longer (at least in the dramatic sense)
+tragic at all. Moral evil, that is to say, so greatly
+diminishes the spiritual value we ascribe to the
+personality that a very large amount of good of
+some kind is required to bring this personality up
+to the tragic level, the destruction of evil as such
+being in no degree tragic. And again, it may well
+be that, other things being equal, the more nearly
+the contending forces approach each other in goodness,
+the more tragic is the conflict; that the
+collision is, so far, more tragic in the <i>Antigone</i> than
+in <i>Macbeth</i>, and Hamlet&rsquo;s internal conflict than his
+struggle with outward enemies and obstacles. But
+it is dangerous to describe tragedy in terms that
+even appear to exclude <i>Macbeth</i>, or to describe
+<i>Macbeth</i>, even casually or by implication, in terms
+which imply that it portrays a conflict of mere evil
+with mere good.</p>
+
+<p>The restatement of Hegel&rsquo;s main principle as to
+the conflict would involve a similar restatement as
+to the catastrophe (for we need not consider here
+those &lsquo;tragedies&rsquo; which end with a solution). As
+before, we must avoid any reference to ethical or
+universal ends, or to the work of &lsquo;justice&rsquo; in the
+catastrophe. We might then simply say that, as
+the tragic action portrays a self-division or intestinal
+conflict of spirit, so the catastrophe displays the
+violent annulling of this division or conflict. But
+this statement, which might be pretty generally
+accepted, would represent only half of Hegel&rsquo;s idea,
+and perhaps nothing of what is most characteristic
+and valuable in it. For the catastrophe (if I may
+put his idea in my own way) has two aspects, a
+negative and an affirmative, and we have ignored
+the latter. On the one hand it is the act of a
+power immeasurably superior to that of the conflicting
+agents, a power which is irresistible and
+unescapable, and which overbears and negates
+whatever is incompatible with it. So far, it may
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page91" id="page91"></a>91</span>
+be called, in relation to the conflicting agents,<a name="fa9c" id="fa9c" href="#ft9c"><span class="sp">9</span></a>
+necessity or fate; and unless a catastrophe affects
+us in ways corresponding with this aspect it is not
+truly tragic. But then if this were all and this
+necessity were merely infinite, characterless, external
+force, the catastrophe would not only terrify (as it
+should), it would also horrify, depress, or at best
+provoke indignation or rebellion; and these are not
+tragic feelings. The catastrophe, then, must have
+a second and affirmative aspect, which is the source
+of our feelings of reconciliation, whatever form they
+may assume. And this will be taken into account if
+we describe the catastrophe as the violent self-restitution
+of the divided spiritual unity. The
+necessity which acts and negates in it, that is to
+say, is yet of one substance with both the agents.
+<i>It</i> is divided against itself in them; they are <i>its</i>
+conflicting forces; and in restoring its unity through
+negation it affirms them, so far as they are compatible
+with that unity. The qualification is essential,
+since the hero, for all his affinity with that power, is,
+as the living man we see before us, not so compatible.
+He must die, and his union with &lsquo;eternal
+justice&rsquo; (which is more than &lsquo;justice&rsquo;) must itself
+be &lsquo;eternal&rsquo; or ideal. But the qualification does
+not abolish what it qualifies. This is no occasion
+to ask how in particular, and in what various ways
+in various works, we feel the effect of this affirmative
+aspect in the catastrophe. But it corresponds
+at least with that strange double impression which
+is produced by the hero&rsquo;s death. He dies, and
+our hearts die with him; and yet his death
+matters nothing to us, or we even exult. He is
+dead; and he has no more to do with death than
+the power which killed him and with which he
+is one.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page92" id="page92"></a>92</span></p>
+
+<p>I leave it to students of Hegel to ask whether
+he would have accepted the criticisms and modifications
+I have suggested. Naturally I think he would,
+as I believe they rest on truth, and am sure he had a
+habit of arriving at truth. But in any case their
+importance is trifling, compared with that of the
+theory which they attempt to strengthen and to
+which they owe their existence.</p>
+
+<p class="f80">1901.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page93" id="page93"></a>93</span></p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE</p>
+
+<p>Why did Hegel, in his lectures on Aesthetics, so treat of
+tragedy as to suggest the idea that the kind of tragedy which
+he personally preferred (let us for the sake of brevity call it
+&lsquo;ancient&rsquo;) is also the most adequate embodiment of the idea
+of tragedy? This question can be answered, I think, only
+conjecturally, but some remarks on it may have an interest for
+readers of Hegel (they are too brief to be of use to others).</p>
+
+<p>One answer might be this. Hegel did not really hold that
+idea. But he was lecturing, not writing a book. He thought
+the principle of tragedy was more clearly and readily visible in
+ancient works than in modern; and so, for purposes of
+exposition, he emphasised the ancient form. And this fact,
+with his personal enthusiasm for certain Greek plays, leads the
+reader of the <i>Aesthetik</i> to misconstrue him.</p>
+
+<p>Again, we must remember the facts of Hegel&rsquo;s life. He seems
+first to have reflected on tragedy at a time when his enthusiasm
+for the Greeks and their &lsquo;substantial&rsquo; ethics was combined, not
+only with a contemptuous dislike for much modern &lsquo;subjectivity&rsquo;
+(this he never ceased to feel), but with a certain hostility to
+the individualism and the un-political character of Christian
+morality. His first view of tragedy was thus, in effect, a theory
+of Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy; and it appears in the
+early essay on <i>Naturrecht</i> and more fully in the <i>Phaenomenologie</i>.
+Perhaps, then, when he came to deal with the subject more
+generally, he insensibly regarded the ancient form as the typical
+form, and tended to treat the modern rather as a modification
+of this type than as an alternative embodiment of the general
+idea of tragedy. The note in the <i>Rechtsphilosophie</i> (p. 196)
+perhaps favours this idea.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page94" id="page94"></a>94</span></p>
+
+<p>But, whether it is correct or no, I believe that the impression
+produced by the <i>Aesthetik</i> is a true one, and that Hegel did
+deliberately consider the ancient form the more satisfactory.
+It would not follow, of course, from that opinion that he
+thought the advantage was all on one side, or considered this
+or that ancient poet greater than this or that modern, or wished
+that modern poets had tried to write tragedies of the Greek
+type. Tragedy would, in his view, be in somewhat the same
+position as Sculpture. Renaissance sculpture, he might say,
+has qualities in which it is superior to Greek, and Michael
+Angelo may have been as great an artist as Pheidias; but all
+the same for certain reasons Greek sculpture is, and probably
+will remain, sculpture <i>par excellence</i>. So, though not to the
+same extent, with tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>And such a view would cohere with his general view of Art.
+For he taught that, in a sense, Classical Art is Art <i>par excellence</i>,
+and that in Greece beauty held a position such as it never
+held before and will not hold again. To explain in a brief
+note how this position bears upon his treatment of modern
+tragedy would be impossible: but if the student of Hegel will
+remember in what sense and on what grounds he held it; that
+he describes Beauty as the &lsquo;<i>sinnliches</i> Scheinen der Idee&rsquo;;
+that for him the new idea that distinguished Christianity and
+Romantic Art from Greek religion and Classical Art is that
+&lsquo;<i>unendliche</i> Subjektivität&rsquo; which implies a negative, though not
+merely negative, relation to sense; and that in Romantic Art
+this idea is not only exhibited in the religious sphere, but
+appears in the position given to personal honour, love, and
+loyalty, and indirectly in what Hegel calls &lsquo;die formelle Selbstständigkeit
+der individuellen Besonderheiten,&rsquo; and in the fuller
+admission of common and un-beautiful reality into the realm of
+Beauty,&mdash;he will see how all this is connected with those
+characteristics of modern tragedy which Hegel regards as
+necessary and yet as, in part, drawbacks. This connection,
+which Hegel has no occasion to work out, will be apparent
+even from consideration of the introductory chapter on &lsquo;die
+romantische Kunstform,&rsquo; <i>Aesthetik</i>, ii. 120-135.</p>
+
+<p>There is one marked difference, I may add, between ancient
+and modern tragedy, which should be considered with reference
+to this subject, and which Hegel, I think, does not explicitly
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page95" id="page95"></a>95</span>
+point out. Speaking roughly, we may say that the former
+includes, while the latter tends to ignore, the accepted religious
+ideas of the time. The ultimate reason of this difference, on
+Hegel&rsquo;s view, would be that the Olympian gods are themselves
+the &lsquo;<i>sinnliches</i> Scheinen der Idee,&rsquo; and so are in the same
+element as Art, while this is, on the whole, not so with modern
+religious ideas. One result would be that Greek tragedy
+represents the total Greek mind more fully than modern
+tragedy can the total modern mind.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1c" id="ft1c" href="#fa1c"><span class="fn">1</span></a> See, primarily, <i>Aesthetik</i>, iii. 479-581, and especially 525-581.
+There is much in <i>Aesthetik</i>, i. 219-306, and a good deal in ii. 1-243,
+that bears on the subject. See also the section on Greek religion in
+<i>Religionsphilosophie</i>, ii. 96-156, especially 131-6, 152-6; and the
+references to the death of Socrates in <i>Geschichte der Philosophie</i>, ii.
+81 ff., especially 102-5. The works so far cited all consist of posthumous
+redactions of lecture-notes. Among works published by
+Hegel himself, the early essay on &lsquo;Naturrecht&rsquo; (<i>Werke</i>, i. 386 ff.), and
+<i>Phaenomenologie d. Geistes</i>, 320-348, 527-542, deal with or bear on
+<i>Greek</i> tragedy. See also <i>Rechtsphilosophie</i>, 196, note. There is a
+note on <i>Wallenstein</i> in <i>Werke</i>, xvii. 411-4. These references are to
+the second edition of the works cited, where there are two editions.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2c" id="ft2c" href="#fa2c"><span class="fn">2</span></a> His theory of tragedy is connected with his view of the function
+of negation in the universe. No statement therefore which ignores
+his metaphysics and his philosophy of religion can be more than a
+fragmentary account of that theory.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3c" id="ft3c" href="#fa3c"><span class="fn">3</span></a> I say &lsquo;might,&rsquo; because Hegel himself in the <i>Phaenomenologie</i> uses
+those very terms &lsquo;divine&rsquo; and &lsquo;human law&rsquo; in reference to the
+<i>Antigone</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4c" id="ft4c" href="#fa4c"><span class="fn">4</span></a> See Note at end of lecture.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5c" id="ft5c" href="#fa5c"><span class="fn">5</span></a> This interpretation of Hegel&rsquo;s &lsquo;abstract&rsquo; is more or less conjectural
+and doubtful.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6c" id="ft6c" href="#fa6c"><span class="fn">6</span></a> Hegel&rsquo;s meaning does not fully appear in the sentences here condensed.
+The &lsquo;blessedness&rsquo; comes from the sense of greatness or
+beauty in the characters.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7c" id="ft7c" href="#fa7c"><span class="fn">7</span></a> Hegel himself expressly guards against this misconception.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8c" id="ft8c" href="#fa8c"><span class="fn">8</span></a> The same point may be put thus, in view of that dangerous word
+&lsquo;personality.&rsquo; Our interest in Macbeth may be called interest in a
+personality; but it is not an interest in some bare form of self-consciousness,
+nor yet in a person in the legal sense, but in a personality
+full of matter. This matter is not an ethical or universal end, but it
+must in a sense be universal&mdash;human nature in a particular form&mdash;or
+it would not excite the horror, sympathy, and admiration it does
+excite. Nor, again, could it excite these feelings if it were not composed
+largely of qualities on which we set a high value.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9c" id="ft9c" href="#fa9c"><span class="fn">9</span></a> In relation to <i>both</i> sides in the conflict (though it may not need to
+negate life in both). For the ultimate agent in the catastrophe is
+emphatically not the finite power of one side. It is beyond both, and,
+at any rate in relation to them, boundless.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page96" id="page96"></a>96<br />97</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">WORDSWORTH</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page98" id="page98"></a>98<br />99</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2"><span class="chap2">WORDSWORTH</span><a name="fa1d" id="fa1d" href="#ft1d"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">&lsquo;Never</span> forget what, I believe, was observed to
+you by Coleridge, that every great and original
+writer, in proportion as he is great or original,
+must himself create the taste by which he is to be
+relished; he must teach the art by which he is
+to be seen.... My ears are stone-dead to this
+idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these
+petty stings.&rsquo; These sentences, from a letter written
+by Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may
+remind us of the common attitude of his reviewers
+in the dozen years when most of his best poetry
+was produced. A century has gone by, and there
+is now no English poet, either of that period or
+of any other, who has been the subject of criticism
+more just, more appreciative, we may even say more
+reverential. Some of this later criticism might have
+satisfied even that sense of wonder, awe, and solemn
+responsibility with which the poet himself regarded
+the operation of the spirit of poetry within him;
+and if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we
+shall find a really astonishing number of excellent
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page100" id="page100"></a>100</span>
+guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, Swinburne,
+Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,&mdash;how easy
+to add to this list of them! Only the other day
+there came another, Mr. Walter Raleigh. And
+that the best book on an English poet that has
+appeared for some years should be a study of
+Wordsworth is just what might have been expected.
+The whirligig of time has brought him a
+full revenge.</p>
+
+<p>I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures
+another study, or even an estimate, of Wordsworth.
+My purpose is much more limited. I think that
+in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the
+notions of his poetry prevalent among general
+readers, a disproportionate emphasis is often laid
+on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And
+I should like to offer some words of warning as
+to this tendency, and also some advice as to the
+spirit in which he should be approached. I will
+begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the
+last moment to omit it, and simply to refer you to
+Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book has practised
+what I am about to preach.</p>
+
+<p class="center pt2">1.</p>
+
+<p>There have been greater poets than Wordsworth,
+but none more original. He saw new
+things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally,
+this would have availed us little if his new things
+had been private fancies, or if his new perception
+had been superficial. But that was not so.
+If it had been, Wordsworth might have won
+acceptance more quickly, but he would not have
+gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it
+is, those in whom he creates the taste by which
+he is relished, those who learn to love him (and
+in each generation they are not a few), never let
+him go. Their love for him is of the kind that
+he himself celebrated, a settled passion, perhaps
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page101" id="page101"></a>101</span>
+&lsquo;slow to begin,&rsquo; but &lsquo;never ending,&rsquo; and twined
+around the roots of their being. And the reason
+is that they find his way of seeing the world,
+his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his
+&lsquo;criticism of life,&rsquo; to be something deep, and therefore
+something that will hold. It continues to bring
+them joy, peace, strength, exaltation. It does not
+thin out or break beneath them as they grow older
+and wiser; nor does it fail them, much less repel
+them, in sadness or even in their sorest need. And
+yet&mdash;to return to our starting-point&mdash;it continues to
+strike them as original, and something more. It
+is not like Shakespeare&rsquo;s myriad-mindedness; it
+is, for good or evil or both, peculiar. They can
+remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a
+cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first
+really understood what made him write this poem
+or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling,
+though now familiar and beloved, still brings them
+not only peace, strength, exaltation, but a &lsquo;shock of
+mild surprise&rsquo;; and his paradoxes, long known by
+heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.</p>
+
+<p>If this is so, the road into Wordsworth&rsquo;s mind
+must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes,
+and not round them. I do not mean that they are
+everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak
+of occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being
+peculiar or difficult; and some of this may be as
+valuable as that which is audacious or strange.
+But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s centre; and, if we have not a most
+unusual affinity to him, we cannot get hold of that
+unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to
+blunt the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for
+example, two or three of his statements; the statements
+of a poet, no doubt, and not of a philosopher,
+but still evidently statements expressing,
+intimating, or symbolising, what for him was the
+most vital truth. He said that the meanest
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page102" id="page102"></a>102</span>
+flower that blows could give him thoughts that
+often lie too deep for tears. He said, in a poem
+not less solemn, that Nature was the soul of all his
+moral being; and also that she can so influence us
+that nothing will be able to disturb our faith that
+all that we behold is full of blessings. After making
+his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale of Margaret,
+he makes him say that the beauty and
+tranquillity of her ruined cottage had once so affected
+him</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>That what we feel of sorrow and despair</p>
+<p>From ruin and from change, and all the grief</p>
+<p>The passing shows of Being leave behind,</p>
+<p>Appeared an idle dream, that could not live</p>
+<p>Where meditation was.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">He said that this same Wanderer could read in the
+silent faces of the clouds unutterable love, and that
+among the mountains all things for him breathed
+immortality. He said to &lsquo;Almighty God,&rsquo;</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>But thy most dreaded instrument</p>
+<p>For working out a pure intent</p>
+<p>Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter;</p>
+<p>Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement;
+but is it a whit more extraordinary than the others?
+It is so only if we assume that we are familiar
+with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we
+translate &lsquo;the soul of all my moral being&rsquo; into
+&lsquo;somehow concordant with my moral feelings,&rsquo; or
+convert &lsquo;all that we behold&rsquo; into &lsquo;a good deal that
+we behold,&rsquo; or transform the Wanderer&rsquo;s reading
+of the silent faces of the clouds into an argument
+from &lsquo;design.&rsquo; But this is the road round Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+mind, not into it.<a name="fa2d" id="fa2d" href="#ft2d"><span class="sp">2</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page103" id="page103"></a>103</span></p>
+
+<p>Again, with all Wordsworth&rsquo;s best poems, it is
+essential not to miss the unique tone of his
+experience. This doubtless holds good of any
+true poet, but not in the same way. With many
+poems there is little risk of our failing either to feel
+what is distinctive of the writer, or to appropriate
+what he says. What is characteristic, for example,
+in Byron&rsquo;s lines, <i>On this day I complete my thirty-sixth
+year</i>, or in Shelley&rsquo;s <i>Stanzas written in
+dejection near Naples</i>, cannot escape discovery,
+nor is there any difficulty in understanding the
+mood expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most
+readers, this risk is constantly present in some
+degree. Take, for instance, one of the most
+popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils
+by the lake. It is popular partly because it
+remains a pretty thing even to those who convert
+it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth.
+And it is comparatively easy, too, to
+perceive and to reproduce in imagination a good
+deal that <i>is</i> distinctive; for instance, the feeling of
+the sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the
+breeze in their glee, and the Wordsworthian
+&lsquo;emotion recollected in tranquillity&rsquo; expressed in
+the lines (written by his wife),</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>They flash upon that inward eye</p>
+<p>Which is the bliss of solitude.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">But there remains something still more intimately
+Wordsworthian:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>I wandered lonely as a Cloud</p>
+<p>That floats on high o&rsquo;er vales and hills.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">It is thrust into the reader&rsquo;s face, for these are the
+opening lines. But with many readers it passes
+unheeded, because it is strange and outside their
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page104" id="page104"></a>104</span>
+own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential
+to the effect of the poem.</p>
+
+<p>This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised,
+would remain, as I said, a pretty
+thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our
+point is best illustrated from the pieces by which
+Wordsworth most earned ridicule, the ballad poems.
+They arose almost always from some incident
+which, for him, had a novel and arresting character
+and came on his mind with a certain shock;
+and if we do not get back to this through the
+poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course,
+get back to this and yet consider the poem to be
+more or less a failure. There is here therefore
+room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr.
+Swinburne sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge
+did, the intention of <i>The Idiot Boy</i> and <i>The Thorn</i>,
+yet he calls them &lsquo;doleful examples of eccentricity
+in dullness,&rsquo; while Coleridge&rsquo;s judgment, though he
+criticised both poems, was very different. I believe
+(if I may venture into the company of such critics)
+that I see why Wordsworth wrote <i>Goody Blake and
+Harry Gill</i> and the <i>Anecdote for Fathers</i>, and yet I
+doubt if he has succeeded in either; but a great man,
+Charles James Fox, selected the former for special
+praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter
+in a selection from which he excluded <i>The Sailor&rsquo;s
+Mother</i>.<a name="fa3d" id="fa3d" href="#ft3d"><span class="sp">3</span></a> Indeed, of all the poems at first most
+ridiculed there is probably not one that has not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page105" id="page105"></a>105</span>
+been praised by some excellent judge. But they
+were ridiculed by men who judged them without
+attempting first to get inside them. And this is
+fatal.</p>
+
+<p>I may bring out the point by referring more fully
+to one of them. <i>Alice Fell</i> was beloved by the
+best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles
+Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that
+it was excluded &lsquo;in policy&rsquo; from edition after edition
+of Wordsworth&rsquo;s Poems; many still who admire
+<i>Lucy Gray</i> see nothing to admire in <i>Alice Fell</i>;
+and you may still hear the question asked, What
+could be made of a child crying for the loss of her
+cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of
+a man poking his stick into a pond to find leeches?
+What sense is there in asking questions about the
+subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject
+of all the individuality it possesses in the poem?
+Let me illustrate this individuality methodically.
+A child crying for the loss of her cloak is one thing,
+quite another is a child who has an imagination, and
+who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling
+in the wheel-spokes of a post-chaise fiercely driven
+by strangers on lonesome roads through a night
+of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was
+alone, and, having to reach the town she belonged
+to, she got up behind the chaise, and her cloak
+was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and
+motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called
+<i>Alice Fell, or Poverty</i>) is so extreme that for the loss
+of her weather-beaten rag she does not &lsquo;cry&rsquo;; she
+weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent
+heart would break; sits by the stranger who has
+placed her by his side and is trying to console
+her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob after
+sob as if her grief could never, never have an end;
+checks herself for a moment to answer a question,
+and then weeps on as if she had lost her only
+friend, and the thought would choke her very heart.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page106" id="page106"></a>106</span>
+It was <i>this</i> poverty and <i>this</i> grief that Wordsworth
+described with his reiterated hammering blows. Is
+it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was more.
+To him grief like this is sublime. It is the agony
+of a soul from which something is torn away that
+was made one with its very being. What does it
+matter whether the thing is a woman, or a kingdom,
+or a tattered cloak? It is the passion that counts.
+Othello must not agonise for a cloak, but &lsquo;the little
+orphan Alice Fell&rsquo; has nothing else to agonise
+for. Is all this insignificant? And then&mdash;for this
+poem about a child is right to the last line&mdash;next
+day the storm and the tragedy have vanished, and
+the new cloak is bought, of duffil grey, as warm a
+cloak as man can sell; and the child is as pleased
+as Punch.<a name="fa4d" id="fa4d" href="#ft4d"><span class="sp">4</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2">2.</p>
+
+<p>I pass on from this subject to another, allied to
+it, but wider. In spite of all the excellent criticism
+of Wordsworth, there has gradually been formed,
+I think, in the mind of the general reader a partial
+and misleading idea of the poet and his work. This
+partiality is due to several causes: for instance, to
+the fact that personal recollections of Wordsworth
+have inevitably been, for the most part, recollections
+of his later years; to forgetfulness of his position
+in the history of literature, and of the restricted
+purpose of his first important poems; and to the
+insistence of some of his most influential critics,
+notably Arnold, on one particular source of his
+power&mdash;an insistence perfectly just, but accompanied
+now and then by a lack of sympathy with other
+aspects of his poetry. The result is an idea of
+him which is mainly true and really characteristic,
+but yet incomplete, and so, in a sense, untrue; a
+picture, I might say, somewhat like Millais&rsquo; first
+portrait of Gladstone, which renders the inspiration,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page107" id="page107"></a>107</span>
+the beauty, the light, but not the sternness or
+imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire.
+Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless
+to say, I do not attribute, in the shape here given to
+it, to anyone in particular.</p>
+
+<p>It was not Wordsworth&rsquo;s function to sing, like
+most great poets, of war, or love, or tragic passions,
+or the actions of supernatural beings. His peculiar
+function was &lsquo;to open out the soul of little and
+familiar things,&rsquo; alike in nature and in human life.
+His &lsquo;poetry is great because of the extraordinary
+power with which he feels the joy offered to us in
+nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary
+affections and duties.&rsquo; His field was therefore
+narrow; and, besides, he was deficient in romance,
+his moral sympathies were somewhat limited, and
+he tended also to ignore the darker aspects of the
+world. But in this very optimism lay his strength.
+The gulf which for Byron and Shelley yawned
+between the real and the ideal, had no existence
+for him. For him the ideal was realised, and Utopia
+a country which he saw every day, and which, he
+thought, every man might see who did not strive,
+nor cry, nor rebel, but opened his heart in love
+and thankfulness to sweet influences as universal
+and perpetual as the air. The spirit of his poetry
+was also that of his life&mdash;a life full of strong but
+peaceful affections; of a communion with nature in
+keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect devotion
+to the mission with which he held himself
+charged; and of a natural piety gradually assuming
+a more distinctively religious tone. Some verses of
+his own best describe him, and some verses of
+Matthew Arnold his influence on his readers. These
+are his own words (from <i>A Poet&rsquo;s Epitaph</i>):</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>But who is he, with modest looks,</p>
+<p>And clad in homely russet brown?</p>
+<p>He murmurs near the running brooks</p>
+<p>A music sweeter than their own.
+  <span class="pagenum"><a name="page108" id="page108"></a>108</span></p>
+
+<p class="s">He is retired as noontide dew,</p>
+<p>Or fountain in a noon-day grove;</p>
+<p>And you must love him, ere to you</p>
+<p>He will seem worthy of your love.</p>
+
+<p class="s">The outward shows of sky and earth,</p>
+<p>Of hill and valley, he has viewed;</p>
+<p>And impulses of deeper birth</p>
+<p>Have come to him in solitude.</p>
+
+<p class="s">In common things that round us lie</p>
+<p>Some random truths he can impart,</p>
+<p>&mdash;The harvest of a quiet eye</p>
+<p>That broods and sleeps on his own heart.</p>
+
+<p class="s">But he is weak; both man and boy,</p>
+<p>Hath been an idler in the land:</p>
+<p>Contented if he might enjoy</p>
+<p>The things which others understand.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And these are the words from Arnold&rsquo;s <i>Memorial
+Verses</i>:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>He too upon a wintry clime</p>
+<p>Had fallen&mdash;on this iron time</p>
+<p>Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears</p>
+<p>He found us when the age had bound</p>
+<p>Our souls in its benumbing round&mdash;</p>
+<p>He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.</p>
+<p>He laid us as we lay at birth</p>
+<p>On the cool flowery lap of earth;</p>
+<p>Smiles broke from us and we had ease.</p>
+<p>The hills were round us, and the breeze</p>
+<p>Went o&rsquo;er the sunlit fields again;</p>
+<p>Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.</p>
+<p>Our youth returned: for there was shed</p>
+<p>On spirits that had long been dead,</p>
+<p>Spirits dried up and closely furled,</p>
+<p>The freshness of the early world.</p>
+
+<p class="s">Ah, since dark days still bring to light</p>
+<p>Man&rsquo;s prudence and man&rsquo;s fiery might,</p>
+<p>Time may restore us in his course</p>
+<p>Goethe&rsquo;s sage mind and Byron&rsquo;s force;</p>
+<p>But where will Europe&rsquo;s latter hour</p>
+<p>Again find Wordsworth&rsquo;s healing power?</p>
+<p>Others will teach us how to dare,</p>
+<p>And against fear our breast to steel;</p>
+<p>Others will strengthen us to bear&mdash;</p>
+<p>But who, ah who, will make us feel?
+  <span class="pagenum"><a name="page109" id="page109"></a>109</span></p>
+<p>The cloud of mortal destiny,</p>
+<p>Others will front it fearlessly&mdash;</p>
+<p>But who, like him, will put it by?</p>
+
+<p class="s">Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,</p>
+<p>O Rotha! with thy living wave.</p>
+<p>Sing him thy best! for few or none</p>
+<p>Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Those last words are enough to disarm dissent.
+No, that voice will never again be heard quite right
+now Wordsworth is gone. Nor is it, for the most
+part, dissent that I wish to express. The picture
+we have been looking at, though we may question
+the accuracy of this line or that, seems to me, I
+repeat, substantially true. But is there nothing
+missing? Consider this picture, and refuse to go
+beyond it, and then ask if it accounts for all
+that is most characteristic in Wordsworth. How
+did the man in the picture ever come to write
+the Immortality <i>Ode</i>, or <i>Yew-trees</i>, or why should
+he say,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink</p>
+<p>Deep&mdash;and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds</p>
+<p>To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil?</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">How, again, could he say that Carnage is God&rsquo;s
+daughter, or write the <i>Sonnets dedicated to National
+Liberty and Independence</i>, or the tract on the Convention
+of Cintra? Can it be true of him that
+many of his best-known poems of human life&mdash;perhaps
+the majority&mdash;deal with painful subjects,
+and not a few with extreme suffering? Should we
+expect him to make an &lsquo;idol&rsquo; of Milton, or to show
+a &lsquo;strong predilection for such geniuses as Dante
+and Michael Angelo&rsquo;? He might easily be &lsquo;reserved,&rsquo;
+but is it not surprising to find him described
+as haughty, prouder than Lucifer, inhumanly arrogant?
+Why should his forehead have been marked
+by the &lsquo;severe worn pressure of thought,&rsquo; or his
+eyes have looked so &lsquo;supernatural ... like fires,
+half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page110" id="page110"></a>110</span>
+fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of
+two caverns&rsquo;? In all this there need be nothing
+inconsistent with the picture we have been looking
+at; but that picture fails to suggest it. In that way
+the likeness it presents is only partial, and I propose
+to emphasise some of the traits which it omits or
+marks too faintly.<a name="fa5d" id="fa5d" href="#ft5d"><span class="sp">5</span></a></p>
+
+<p>And first as to the restriction of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+field. Certainly his field, as compared with that
+of some poets, is narrow; but to describe it as
+confined to external nature and peasant life, or
+to little and familiar things, would be absurdly
+untrue, as a mere glance at his Table of Contents
+suffices to show. And its actual restriction was not
+due to any false theory, nor mainly to any narrowness
+of outlook. It was due, apart from limitation
+of endowment, on the one hand to that diminution
+of poetic energy which in Wordsworth began comparatively
+soon, and on the other, especially in his
+best days, to deliberate choice; and we must not
+assume without question that he was inherently
+incapable of doing either what he would not do,
+or what, in his last five and thirty years, he could
+no longer do.</p>
+
+<p>There is no reason to suppose that Wordsworth
+undervalued or objected to the subjects of such
+poets as Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Spenser,
+Shakespeare and Milton. And when, after writing
+his part of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>, he returned from
+Germany and settled in the Lake Country, the
+subjects he himself revolved for a great poem were
+not concerned with rural life or humble persons.
+Some old &lsquo;romantic&rsquo; British theme, left unsung by
+Milton; some tale of Chivalry, dire enchantments,
+war-like feats; vanquished Mithridates passing
+north and becoming Odin; the fortunes of the
+followers of Sertorius; de Gourgues&rsquo; journey of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page111" id="page111"></a>111</span>
+vengeance to Florida; Gustavus; Wallace and his
+exploits in the war for his country&rsquo;s independence,&mdash;these
+are the subjects he names first. And, though
+his &lsquo;last and favourite aspiration&rsquo; was towards</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+             <p class="i4">Some philosophic song</p>
+<p>Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">&mdash;that  song which was never completed&mdash;yet, some
+ten years later, he still hoped, when it should be
+finished, to write an epic. Whether at any time
+he was fitted for the task or no, he wished to
+undertake it; and his addiction, by no means
+entire even in his earlier days, to little and
+familiar things was due, not at all to an opinion
+that they are the only right subjects or the best,
+nor merely to a natural predilection for them, but
+to the belief that a particular kind of poetry was
+wanted at that time to counteract its special
+evils. There prevailed, he thought, a &lsquo;degrading
+thirst after outrageous stimulation.&rsquo; The violent
+excitement of public events, and &lsquo;the increasing
+accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity
+of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary
+incident, which the rapid communication
+of intelligence hourly gratifies,&rsquo; had induced a
+torpor of mind which only yielded to gross and
+sensational effects&mdash;such effects as were produced
+by &lsquo;frantic novels,&rsquo; of the Radcliffe or Monk Lewis
+type, full of mysterious criminals, gloomy castles
+and terrifying spectres. He wanted to oppose to
+this tendency one as far removed from it as
+possible; to write a poetry even <i>more</i> alien to it
+than Shakespeare&rsquo;s tragedies or Spenser&rsquo;s stories of
+knights and dragons; to show men that wonder
+and beauty can be felt, and the heart be moved,
+even when the rate of the pulse is perfectly normal.
+In the same way, he grieved Coleridge by refusing
+to interest himself in the Somersetshire fairies, and
+declared that he desired for his scene no planet
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page112" id="page112"></a>112</span>
+but the earth, and no region of the earth stranger
+than England and the lowliest ways in England.
+And, being by no means merely a gentle shepherd,
+but a born fighter who was easily provoked and
+could swing his crook with uncommon force, he
+asserted his convictions defiantly and carried them
+out to extremes. And so in later days, after he
+had somewhat narrowed, when in the Seventh
+Book of the <i>Excursion</i> he made the Pastor protest
+that poetry was not wanted to multiply and aggravate
+the din of war, or to propagate the pangs and
+turbulence of passionate love, he did this perhaps
+because the world which would not listen to him<a name="fa6d" id="fa6d" href="#ft6d"><span class="sp">6</span></a>
+was enraptured by <i>Marmion</i> and the earlier poems
+of Byron.</p>
+
+<p>How great Wordsworth&rsquo;s success might have
+been in fields which he deliberately avoided, it is
+perhaps idle to conjecture. I do not suppose it
+would have been very great, but I see no reason
+to believe that he would have failed. With regard,
+for instance, to love, one cannot read without a
+smile his reported statement that, had he been a
+writer of love-poetry, it would have been natural
+to him to write it with a degree of warmth which
+could hardly have been approved by his principles,
+and which might have been undesirable for the
+reader. But one may smile at his naďveté without
+disbelieving his statement. And, in fact, Wordsworth
+neither wholly avoided the subject nor failed
+when he touched it. The poems about Lucy are
+not poems of passion, in the usual sense, but they
+surely are love-poems. The verses <i>&rsquo;Tis said that
+some have died for love</i>, excluded from Arnold&rsquo;s
+selection but praised by Ruskin, are poignant
+enough. And the following lines from <i>Vaudracour
+and Julia</i> make one wonder how this could be to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page113" id="page113"></a>113</span>
+Arnold the only poem of Wordsworth&rsquo;s that he
+could not read with pleasure:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Arabian fiction never filled the world</p>
+<p>With half the wonders that were wrought for him.</p>
+<p>Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring;</p>
+<p>Life turned the meanest of her implements,</p>
+<p>Before his eyes, to price above all gold;</p>
+<p>The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine;</p>
+<p>Her chamber-window did surpass in glory</p>
+<p>The portals of the dawn; all paradise</p>
+<p>Could, by the simple opening of a door,</p>
+<p>Let itself in upon him:&mdash;pathways, walks,</p>
+<p>Swarmed with enchantment, till his spirit sank,</p>
+<p>Surcharged, within him, overblest to move</p>
+<p>Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world</p>
+<p>To its dull round of ordinary cares;</p>
+<p>A man too happy for mortality!</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">As a whole, <i>Vaudracour and Julia</i> is a failure,
+but these lines haunt my memory, and I cannot
+think them a poor description of that which they
+profess to describe. This is not precisely &lsquo;passion,&rsquo;
+and, I admit, they do not prove Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+capacity to deal with passion. The main reason
+for doubting whether, if he had made the attempt,
+he would have reached his highest level, is that,
+so far as we can see, he did not strongly feel&mdash;perhaps
+hardly felt at all&mdash;that the <i>passion</i> of love
+is a way into the Infinite; and a thing must be
+no less than this to Wordsworth if it is to rouse
+all his power. Byron, it seemed to him, had</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+       <p class="i13">dared to take</p>
+<p>Life&rsquo;s rule from passion craved for passion&rsquo;s sake;<a name="fa7d" id="fa7d" href="#ft7d"><span class="sp">7</span></a></p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and he utterly repudiated that. &lsquo;The immortal
+mind craves objects that endure.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Then there is that &lsquo;romance&rsquo; which Wordsworth
+abjured. In using the word I am employing the
+familiar distinction between two tendencies of the
+Romantic Revival, one called naturalistic and one
+called, in a more special sense, romantic, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page114" id="page114"></a>114</span>
+signalised, among other ways, by a love of the
+marvellous, the supernatural, the exotic, the worlds
+of mythology. It is a just and necessary distinction:
+the <i>Ancient Mariner</i> and <i>Michael</i> are
+very dissimilar. But, like most distinctions of the
+kind, it becomes misleading when it is roughly
+handled or pushed into an antithesis; and it would
+be easy to show that these two tendencies exclude
+one another only in their inferior examples, and
+that the better the example of either, the more it
+shows its community with the other. There is
+not a great deal of truth to nature in <i>Lalla Rookh</i>,
+but there is plenty in the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>: in
+certain poems of Crabbe there is little romance, but
+there is no want of it in <i>Sir Eustace Grey</i> or in
+<i>Peter Grimes</i>. Taking the distinction, however,
+as we find it, and assuming, as I do, that it lay
+beyond Wordsworth&rsquo;s power to write an <i>Ancient
+Mariner</i>, or to tell us of</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+       <p class="i3">magic casements opening on the foam</p>
+<p>Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">we are not therefore to conclude that he was by
+nature deficient in romance and incapable of writing
+well what he refused to write. The indications are
+quite contrary. Not to speak here of his own
+peculiar dealings with the supernatural, his vehement
+defence (in the <i>Prelude</i>) of fairy-tales as food for
+the young is only one of many passages which show
+that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted
+only by the supernatural powers of nature. He
+delighted in &lsquo;Arabian fiction.&rsquo; The &lsquo;Arabian sands&rsquo;
+(<i>Solitary Reaper</i>) had the same glamour for him as
+for others. His dream of the Arab and the two
+books (<i>Prelude</i>, v.) has a very curious romantic
+effect, though it is not romance <i>in excelsis</i>, like
+<i>Kubla Khan</i>. His love of Spenser; his very
+description of him,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven</p>
+<p>With the moon&rsquo;s beauty and the moon&rsquo;s soft pace;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page115" id="page115"></a>115</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual
+attitude, in which he praises the Osmunda fern as</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i4">lovelier, in its own retired abode</p>
+<p>On Grasmere&rsquo;s beach, than Naiad by the side</p>
+<p>Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere</p>
+<p>Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,<a name="fa8d" id="fa8d" href="#ft8d"><span class="sp">8</span></a></p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">&mdash;these, and a score of other passages, all point the
+same way. He would not carry his readers to the
+East, like Southey and Moore and Byron, nor, like
+Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it
+suited his purpose, as in <i>Ruth</i>, he could write well
+enough of un-English scenery:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>He told of the magnolia, spread</p>
+<p>High as a cloud, high overhead,</p>
+<p>The cypress and her spire;</p>
+<p>Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam</p>
+<p>Cover a hundred leagues, and seem</p>
+<p>To set the hills on fire.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for
+a subject, for he was determined to speak of what
+Englishmen may see every day; but what he wrote
+of Greek religion in the <i>Excursion</i> is full of imagination
+and brought inspiration to Keats, and the
+most famous expression in English of that longing
+for the perished glory of Greek myth which appears
+in much Romantic poetry came from Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+pen:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+           <p class="i5">Great God! I&rsquo;d rather be</p>
+<p>A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;</p>
+<p>So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,</p>
+<p>Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;</p>
+<p>Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;</p>
+<p>Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor
+at all approved, that elementary love of fighting
+which, together with much nobler things, is gratified
+by some great poetry. And assuredly he could not,
+even if he would, have rivalled the last canto of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page116" id="page116"></a>116</span>
+<i>Marmion</i>, nor even the best passages in the <i>Siege of
+Corinth</i>. But he is not to be judged by his intentional
+failures. The martial parts of the <i>White Doe
+of Rylstone</i> are, with few exceptions, uninteresting, if
+not painfully tame. The former at least they were
+meant to be. The <i>Lay of the Last Minstrel</i> was on
+every tongue. The modest poet was as stiff-necked
+a person as ever walked the earth; and he was
+determined that no reader of his poem who missed
+its spiritual interest should be interested in anything
+else. Probably he overshot his mark. For readers
+who could understand him the effect he aimed at
+would not have been weakened by contrast with
+an outward action narrated with more spirit and
+sympathy. But, however that may be, he did what
+he meant to do. In the <i>Song at the Feast of
+Brougham Castle</i>, again, the war-like close of the
+Song was not written for its own sake. It was
+designed with a view to the transition to the longer
+metre, the thought of peace in communion with
+nature, and the wonderful stanza &lsquo;Love had he
+found in huts where poor men lie.&rsquo; But, for the
+effect of this transition, it was necessary for Wordsworth
+to put his heart into the martial close of the
+Song; and surely it has plenty of animation and
+glory. Its author need not have shrunk from the
+subject of war if he had wished to handle it <i>con amore</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The poet whose portrait we drew when we began
+might have been the author of the <i>White Doe</i>, and
+perhaps of <i>Brougham Castle</i>, and possibly of the
+<i>Happy Warrior</i>. He could no more have composed
+the <i>Poems dedicated to National Independence and
+Liberty</i> than the political sonnets of Milton. And yet
+Wordsworth wrote nothing more characteristic than
+these Poems, which I am not going to praise, since
+Mr. Swinburne&rsquo;s praise of them is, to my mind, not
+less just than eloquent. They are characteristic in
+many ways. The later are, on the whole, decidedly
+inferior to the earlier. Even in this little series,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page117" id="page117"></a>117</span>
+which occupies the first fifteen years of the century,
+the decline of Wordsworth&rsquo;s poetic power and the
+increasing use of theological ideas are clearly visible.
+The Odes, again, are much inferior to the majority
+of the Sonnets. And this too is characteristic.
+The entire success of the <i>Ode to Duty</i> is exceptional,
+and it is connected with the fact that the poem is
+written in regular stanzas of a simple metrical
+scheme. The irregular Odes are never thus successful.
+Wordsworth could not command the tone of
+sustained rapture, and where his metrical form is
+irregular his ear is uncertain. The Immortality Ode,
+like <i>King Lear</i>, is its author&rsquo;s greatest product, but
+not his best piece of work. The Odes among the
+<i>Poems</i> which we are now considering are declamatory,
+even violent, and yet they stir comparatively
+little emotion, and they do not sing. The sense of
+massive passion, concentrated, and repressing the
+utterance it permits itself, is that which most moves
+us in his political verse. And the Sonnet suited this.</p>
+
+<p>The patriotism of these <i>Poems</i> is equally characteristic.
+It illustrates Wordsworth&rsquo;s total rejection
+of the Godwinian ideas in which he had once in
+vain sought refuge, and his belief in the necessity
+and sanctity of forms of association arising from
+natural kinship. It is composed, we may say, of
+two elements. The first is the simple love of
+country raised to a high pitch, the love of &lsquo;a lover
+or a child&rsquo;; the love that makes it for some men
+a miserable doom to be forced to live in a foreign
+land, and that makes them feel their country&rsquo;s
+virtues and faults, and joys and sorrows, like
+those of the persons dearest to them. We talk as
+if this love were common. It is very far from
+common; but Wordsworth felt it.<a name="fa9d" id="fa9d" href="#ft9d"><span class="sp">9</span></a> The other
+element in his patriotism I must call by the dreaded
+name of &lsquo;moral,&rsquo; a name which Wordsworth did not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page118" id="page118"></a>118</span>
+dread, because it meant for him nothing stereotyped
+or narrow. His country is to him the representative
+of freedom, left, as he writes in 1803,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+        <p class="i8">the only light</p>
+<p>Of Liberty that yet remains on earth.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">This Liberty is, first, national independence; and
+that requires military power, the maintenance of
+which is a primary moral duty.<a name="fa10d" id="fa10d" href="#ft10d"><span class="sp">10</span></a> But neither military
+power nor even national independence is of value in
+itself; and neither could be long maintained without
+that which gives value to both. This is the freedom
+of the soul, plain living and high thinking, indifference
+to the externals of mere rank or wealth or
+power, domestic affections not crippled (as they may
+be) by poverty. Wordsworth fears for his country
+only when he doubts whether this inward freedom
+is not failing;<a name="fa11d" id="fa11d" href="#ft11d"><span class="sp">11</span></a> but he seldom fears for long.
+England, in the war against Napoleon, is to him
+almost what the England of the Long Parliament
+and the Commonwealth was to Milton,&mdash;an elect
+people, the chosen agent of God&rsquo;s purpose on the
+earth. His ideal of life, unlike Milton&rsquo;s in the stress
+he lays on the domestic affections and the influence
+of nature, is otherwise of the same Stoical cast.
+His country is to him, as to Milton,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>An old and haughty nation, proud in arms.<a name="fa12d" id="fa12d" href="#ft12d"><span class="sp">12</span></a></p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And his own pride in it is, like Milton&rsquo;s, in the
+highest degree haughty. It would be calumnious
+to say that it recalls the description of the English
+given by the Irishman Goldsmith,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,</p>
+<p>I see the lords of human kind pass by;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page119" id="page119"></a>119</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">for Wordsworth had not the faintest wish to see his
+countrymen the lords of human kind, nor is there
+anything vulgar in his patriotism; but there <i>is</i> pride
+in his port and defiance in his eye. And, lastly, the
+character of his ideal and of this national pride,
+with him as with Milton, is connected with personal
+traits,&mdash;impatience of constraint, severity, a certain
+austere passion, an inclination of imagination to the
+sublime.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">3.</p>
+
+<p>These personal traits, though quite compatible
+with the portrait on which I am commenting, are
+not visible in it. Nor are others, which belong
+especially, but not exclusively, to the younger
+Wordsworth. He had a spirit so vehement and
+affections so violent (it is his sister&rsquo;s word) as to
+inspire alarm for him. If he had been acquainted
+with that excuse for impotent idleness and selfishness,
+&lsquo;the artistic temperament,&rsquo; he might have
+made out a good claim to it. He was from the
+beginning self-willed, and for a long time he
+appeared aimless. He would not work at the
+studies of his university: he preferred to imagine
+a university in which he <i>would</i> work. He had a
+passion for wandering which was restrained only by
+want of means, and which opened his heart to every
+pedlar or tramp whom he met. After leaving
+Cambridge he would not fix on a profession. He
+remained, to the displeasure of his relatives, an idler
+in the land or out of it; and as soon as he had
+Ł900 of capital left to him he determined <i>not</i> to
+have a profession. Sometimes he worked hard at
+his poetry, even heroically hard; but he did not
+work methodically, and often he wrote nothing for
+weeks, but loafed and walked and enjoyed himself.
+He was not blind like Milton, but the act of
+writing was physically disagreeable to him, and
+he made his woman-kind write to his dictation.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page120" id="page120"></a>120</span>
+He would not conform to rules, or attend to the
+dinner-bell, or go to church (he made up for this
+neglect later). &lsquo;He wrote his <i>Ode to Duty</i>,&rsquo; said
+one of his friends, &lsquo;and then he had done with
+that matter.&rsquo; He never &lsquo;tired&rsquo; of his &lsquo;unchartered
+freedom.&rsquo; In age, if he wanted to go out, whatever
+the hour and whatever the weather, he must have
+his way. &lsquo;In vain one reminded him that a letter
+needed an answer or that the storm would soon be
+over. It was very necessary for him to do what he
+liked.&rsquo; If the poetic fit was on him he could attend
+to nothing else. He was passionately fond of his
+children, but, when the serious illness of one of
+them coincided with an onset of inspiration, it was
+impossible to rouse him to a sense of danger. At
+such times he was as completely possessed as any
+wild poet who ruins the happiness of everyone dependent
+on him. But he has himself described the
+tyranny of inspiration, and the reaction after it, in
+his <i>Stanzas written in Thomson&rsquo;s Castle of Indolence</i>.
+It is almost beyond doubt, I think, that the first
+portrait there is that of himself; and though it is
+idealised it is probably quite as accurate as the
+portrait in <i>A Poet&rsquo;s Epitaph</i>. In the <i>Prelude</i> he
+tells us that, though he rarely at Cambridge betrayed
+by gestures or looks his feelings about nature, yet,
+when he did so, some of his companions said he was
+mad. Hazlitt, describing his manner of reading his
+own poetry in much later years, says, &lsquo;It is clear
+that he is either mad or inspired.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth&rsquo;s lawlessness was of the innocuous
+kind, but it is a superstition to suppose that he was
+a disgustingly well-regulated person. It is scarcely
+less unjust to describe his poetic sympathies as
+narrow and his poetic morality as puritanical. The
+former, of course, had nothing like the range of
+minds like Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Browning,
+or the great novelists. Wordsworth&rsquo;s want of
+humour would by itself have made that impossible;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page121" id="page121"></a>121</span>
+and, in addition, though by no means wanting in
+psychological curiosity, he was not much interested
+in complex natures. Simple souls, and especially
+simple souls that are also deep, were the natures
+that attracted him: and in the same way the
+passions he loved to depict are not those that storm
+themselves out or rush to a catastrophe, but those
+that hold the soul in a vice for long years. But,
+these limitations admitted, it will not be found by
+anyone who reviews the characters in the smaller
+poems and the <i>Excursion</i> (especially Book vii.), that
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s poetic sympathies are narrow. They
+are wider than those of any imaginative writer of his
+time and country except Scott and perhaps Crabbe.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is his morality narrow. It is serious, but it
+is human and kindly and not in the least ascetic.
+&lsquo;It is the privilege of poetic genius,&rsquo; he says in his
+defence of Burns, &lsquo;to catch a spirit of pleasure
+wherever it can be found&mdash;in the walks of nature
+and in the business of men. The poet, trusting to
+primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of
+love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes
+the fairer aspects of war: nor does he shrink
+from the company of the passion of love though
+immoderate&mdash;from convivial pleasure though intemperate&mdash;nor
+from the presence of war though savage
+and recognised as the handmaid of desolation. Who
+but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded
+puritan in works of art ever read without delight
+the picture which Burns has drawn of the convivial
+exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o&rsquo; Shanter?&rsquo;
+There is no want of sympathy in Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+own picture of the &lsquo;convivial exaltation&rsquo; of his
+Waggoner. It is true that he himself never describes
+a scene in which, to quote his astonishing phrase,
+&lsquo;conjugal fidelity archly bends to the service of
+general benevolence,&rsquo; and that his treatment of
+sexual passion is always grave and, in a true sense,
+moral; but it is plain and manly and perfectly
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page122" id="page122"></a>122</span>
+free from timidity or monkishness. It would really
+be easier to make out against Wordsworth a charge
+of excessive tolerance than a charge of excessive
+rigidity. A beggar is the sort of person he likes.
+It is all very well for him to say that he likes the
+Old Cumberland Beggar because, by making people
+give, he keeps love alive in their hearts. It may be
+so&mdash;he says so, and I always believe him. But that
+was not his only reason; and it is clear to me that,
+when he met the tall gipsy-beggar, he gave her
+money because she was beautiful and queenly, and
+that he delighted in her two lying boys because of
+their gaiety and joy in life. Neither has he the
+least objection to a thief. The grandfather and
+grandson who go pilfering together, two infants
+separated by ninety years, meet with nothing but
+smiles from him. The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale,
+after thirty years of careless hospitality, found himself
+ruined. He borrowed money, spent some of it
+in paying a few of his other debts, and absconded
+to London.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>But this he did all in the <i>ease</i> of his heart.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And for this reason, and because in London he
+keeps the ease of his heart and continues to love the
+country, Wordsworth dismisses him with a blessing.
+What he cannot bear is torpor. He passes a knot
+of gipsies in the morning; and, passing them again
+after his twelve hours of joyful rambling, he finds
+them just as they were, sunk in sloth; and he breaks
+out,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+         <p class="i4">Oh, better wrong and strife,</p>
+<p>Better vain deeds and evil than such life.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">He changed this shocking exclamation later, but it
+represents his original feeling, and he might have
+trusted that only an &lsquo;impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded
+puritan&rsquo; would misunderstand him.<a name="fa13d" id="fa13d" href="#ft13d"><span class="sp">13</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page123" id="page123"></a>123</span></p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth&rsquo;s morality is of one piece with his
+optimism and with his determination to seize and
+exhibit in everything the element of good. But
+this is a subject far too large for treatment here,
+and I can refer to it only in the most summary way.
+What Arnold precisely meant when he said that
+Wordsworth &lsquo;put by&rsquo; the cloud of human destiny I
+am not sure. That Wordsworth saw this cloud and
+looked at it steadily is beyond all question. I am
+not building on such famous lines as</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The still sad music of humanity,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">or</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+        <p class="i3">the fierce confederate storm</p>
+<p>Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore</p>
+<p>Within the walls of cities;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">or</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills,</p>
+<p>The generations are prepared; the pangs,</p>
+<p>The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife</p>
+<p>Of poor humanity&rsquo;s afflicted will</p>
+<p>Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">for, although such quotations could be multiplied,
+isolated expressions, even when not dramatic,<a name="fa14d" id="fa14d" href="#ft14d"><span class="sp">14</span></a> would
+prove little. But I repeat the remark already made,
+that if we review the subjects of many of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+famous poems on human life,&mdash;the subjects,
+for example, of <i>The Thorn</i>, <i>The Sailor&rsquo;s Mother</i>,
+<i>Ruth</i>, <i>The Brothers</i>, <i>Michael</i>, <i>The Affliction of
+Margaret</i>, <i>The White Doe of Rylstone</i>, the story of
+Margaret in <i>Excursion</i>, i., half the stories told in
+<i>Excursion</i>, vi. and vii.&mdash;we find ourselves in the
+presence of poverty, crime, insanity, ruined innocence,
+torturing hopes doomed to extinction, solitary
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page124" id="page124"></a>124</span>
+anguish, even despair. Ignore the manner in which
+Wordsworth treated his subjects, and you will have
+to say that his world, so far as humanity is concerned,
+is a dark world,&mdash;at least as dark as that
+of Byron. Unquestionably then he saw the cloud
+of human destiny, and he did not avert his eyes
+from it. Nor did he pretend to understand its darkness.
+The world was to him in the end &lsquo;this
+unintelligible world,&rsquo; and the only &lsquo;adequate support
+for the calamities of mortal life&rsquo; was faith.<a name="fa15d" id="fa15d" href="#ft15d"><span class="sp">15</span></a> But he
+was profoundly impressed, through the experience
+of his own years of crisis, alike by the dangers of
+despondency, and by the superficiality of the views
+which it engenders. It was for him (and here, as
+in other points, he shows his natural affinity to
+Spinoza) a condition in which the soul, concentrated
+on its own suffering, for that very reason loses hold
+both of its own being and of the reality of which it
+forms a part. His experience also made it impossible
+for him to doubt that what he grasped</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>At times when most existence with herself</p>
+<p>Is satisfied,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">&mdash;and these are the times when existence is most
+united in love with other existence&mdash;was, in a special
+sense or degree, the truth, and therefore that the
+evils which we suffer, deplore, or condemn, cannot
+really be what they seem to us when we merely
+suffer, deplore, or condemn them. He set himself
+to <i>see</i> this, as far as he could, and to show it. He
+sang of pleasure, joy, glee, blitheness, love, wherever
+in nature or humanity they assert their indisputable
+power; and turning to pain and wrong, and gazing
+at them steadfastly, and setting himself to present
+the facts with a quiet but unsparing truthfulness, he
+yet endeavoured to show what he had seen, that
+sometimes pain and wrong are the conditions of a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page125" id="page125"></a>125</span>
+happiness and good which without them could not
+have been, that no limit can be set to the power
+of the soul to transmute them into its own substance,
+and that, in suffering and even in misery, there may
+still be such a strength as fills us with awe or with
+glory. He did not pretend, I repeat, that what he
+saw sufficed to solve the riddle of the painful earth.
+&lsquo;Our being rests&rsquo; on &lsquo;dark foundations,&rsquo; and &lsquo;our
+haughty life is crowned with darkness.&rsquo; But still
+what he showed was what he <i>saw</i>, and he saw it
+in the cloud of human destiny. We are not here
+concerned with his faith in the sun behind that
+cloud; my purpose is only to insist that he &lsquo;fronted&rsquo;
+it &lsquo;fearlessly.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">4.</p>
+
+<p>After quoting the lines from <i>A Poet&rsquo;s Epitaph</i>,
+and Arnold&rsquo;s lines on Wordsworth, I asked how
+the man described in them ever came to write
+the <i>Ode</i> on Immortality, or <i>Yew-trees</i>, or why he
+should say,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink</p>
+<p>Deep&mdash;and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds</p>
+<p>To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The aspect of Wordsworth&rsquo;s poetry which answers
+this question forms my last subject.</p>
+
+<p>We may recall this aspect in more than one way.
+First, not a little of Wordsworth&rsquo;s poetry either
+approaches or actually enters the province of the
+sublime. His strongest natural inclination tended
+there. He himself speaks of his temperament as
+&lsquo;stern,&rsquo; and tells us that</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+        <p>to the very going out of youth</p>
+<p>[He] too exclusively esteemed <i>that</i> love,</p>
+<p>And sought <i>that</i> beauty, which, as Milton says,</p>
+<p>Hath terror in it.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">This disposition is easily traced in the imaginative
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page126" id="page126"></a>126</span>
+impressions of his childhood as he describes them
+in the <i>Prelude</i>. His fixed habit of looking</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i4">with feelings of fraternal love</p>
+<p>Upon the unassuming things that hold</p>
+<p>A silent station in this beauteous world,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">was only formed, it would seem, under his sister&rsquo;s
+influence, after his recovery from the crisis that
+followed the ruin of his towering hopes in the
+French Revolution. It was a part of his endeavour
+to find something of the distant ideal in life&rsquo;s
+familiar face. And though this attitude of sympathy
+and humility did become habitual, the first
+bent towards grandeur, austerity, sublimity, retained
+its force. It is evident in the political poems, and
+in all those pictures of life which depict the unconquerable
+power of affection, passion, resolution,
+patience, or faith. It inspires much of his greatest
+poetry of Nature. It emerges occasionally with
+a strange and thrilling effect in the serene, gracious,
+but sometimes stagnant atmosphere of the later
+poems,&mdash;for the last time, perhaps, in that magnificent
+stanza of the <i>Extempore Effusion upon the
+Death of James Hogg</i> (1835),</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,</p>
+  <p class="i1">Or waves that own no curbing hand,</p>
+<p>How fast has brother followed brother</p>
+  <p class="i1">From sunshine to the sunless land!</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Wordsworth is indisputably the most sublime of
+our poets since Milton.</p>
+
+<p>We may put the matter, secondly, thus. However
+much Wordsworth was the poet of small and
+humble things, and the poet who saw his ideal
+realised, not in Utopia, but here and now before
+his eyes, he was, quite as much, what some would
+call a mystic. He saw everything in the light of
+&lsquo;the visionary power.&rsquo; He was, for himself,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The transitory being that beheld</p>
+<p>This Vision.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page127" id="page127"></a>127</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">He apprehended all things, natural or human, as
+the expression of something which, while manifested
+in them, immeasurably transcends them.
+And nothing can be more intensely Wordsworthian
+than the poems and passages most marked by this
+visionary power and most directly issuing from this
+apprehension. The bearing of these statements on
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s inclination to sublimity will be obvious
+at a glance.</p>
+
+<p>Now we may prefer the Wordsworth of the
+daffodils to the Wordsworth of the yew-trees, and
+we may even believe the poet&rsquo;s mysticism to be
+moonshine; but it is certain that to neglect or
+throw into the shade this aspect of his poetry
+is neither to take Wordsworth as he really was
+nor to judge his poetry truly, since this aspect
+appears in much of it that we cannot deny to
+be first-rate. Yet there is, I think, and has been
+for some time, a tendency to this mistake. It
+is exemplified in Arnold&rsquo;s Introduction and has
+been increased by it, and it is visible in some
+degree even in Pater&rsquo;s essay. Arnold wished to
+make Wordsworth more popular; and so he was
+tempted to represent Wordsworth&rsquo;s poetry as much
+more simple and unambitious than it really was,
+and as much more easily apprehended than it ever
+can be. He was also annoyed by attempts to
+formulate a systematic Wordsworthian philosophy;
+partly, doubtless, because he knew that, however
+great the philosophical value of a poet&rsquo;s ideas may
+be, it cannot by itself determine the value of his
+poetry; but partly also because, having himself
+but little turn for philosophy, he was disposed to
+regard it as illusory; and further because, even in
+the poetic sphere, he was somewhat deficient in
+that kind of imagination which is allied to metaphysical
+thought. This is one reason of his curious
+failure to appreciate Shelley, and of the evident
+irritation which Shelley produced in him. And
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page128" id="page128"></a>128</span>
+it is also one reason why, both in his <i>Memorial
+Verses</i> and in the introduction to his selection
+from Wordsworth, he either ignores or depreciates
+that aspect of the poetry with which we are just
+now concerned. It is not true, we must bluntly
+say, that the cause of the greatness of this poetry
+&lsquo;is simple and may be told quite simply.&rsquo; It is
+true, and it is admirably said, that this poetry &lsquo;is
+great because of the extraordinary power with
+which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in
+nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary
+affections and duties.&rsquo; But this is only half the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Pater&rsquo;s essay is not thus one-sided. It is, to my
+mind, an extremely fine piece of criticism. Yet the
+tendency to which I am objecting does appear in
+it. Pater says, for example, that Wordsworth is
+the poet of nature, &lsquo;and of nature, after all, in her
+modesty. The English Lake country has, of course,
+its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+genius, as carrying in it a power to open
+out the soul of apparently little and familiar things,
+would have found its true test had he become the
+poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.&rsquo;
+This last sentence is, in one sense, doubtless true.
+The &lsquo;function&rsquo; referred to could have been exercised
+in Surrey, and was exercised in Dorset and
+Somerset, as well as in the Lake country. And
+this function was a &lsquo;peculiar function of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+genius.&rsquo; But that it was <i>the</i> peculiar
+function of his genius, or more peculiar than that
+other function which forms our present subject, I
+venture to deny; and for the full exercise of this
+latter function, it is hardly hazardous to assert,
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s childhood in a mountain district, and
+his subsequent residence there, were indispensable.
+This will be doubted for a moment, I believe, only
+by those readers (and they are not a few) who
+ignore the <i>Prelude</i> and the <i>Excursion</i>. But the
+<i>Prelude</i> and the <i>Excursion</i>, though there are dull
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page129" id="page129"></a>129</span>
+pages in both, contain much of Wordsworth&rsquo;s best
+and most characteristic poetry. And even in a
+selection like Arnold&rsquo;s, which, perhaps wisely, makes
+hardly any use of them, many famous poems will be
+found which deal with nature but not with nature
+&lsquo;in her modesty.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>My main object was to insist that the &lsquo;mystic,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;visionary,&rsquo; &lsquo;sublime,&rsquo; aspect of Wordsworth&rsquo;s poetry
+must not be slighted. I wish to add a few remarks
+on it, but to consider it fully would carry us far
+beyond our bounds; and, even if I attempted the
+task, I should not formulate its results in a body of
+doctrines. Such a formulation is useful, and I see
+no objection to it in principle, as one method of
+exploring Wordsworth&rsquo;s mind with a view to the
+better apprehension of his poetry. But the method
+has its dangers, and it is another matter to put
+forward the results as philosophically adequate, or to
+take the position that &lsquo;Wordsworth was first and foremost
+a philosophical thinker, a man whose intention
+and purpose it was to think out for himself, faithfully
+and seriously, the questions concerning man and
+nature and human life&rsquo; (Dean Church). If this were
+true, he should have given himself to philosophy and
+not to poetry; and there is no reason to think that
+he would have been eminently successful. Nobody
+ever was so who was not forced by a special natural
+power and an imperious impulsion into the business
+of &lsquo;thinking out,&rsquo; and who did not develope this
+power by years of arduous discipline. Wordsworth
+does not show it in any marked degree; and,
+though he reflected deeply and acutely, he was
+without philosophical training. His poetry is immensely
+interesting as an imaginative expression
+of the same mind which, in his day, produced in
+Germany great philosophies. His poetic experience,
+his intuitions, his single thoughts, even his large
+views, correspond in a striking way, sometimes in
+a startling way, with ideas methodically developed
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page130" id="page130"></a>130</span>
+by Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer. They
+remain admirable material for philosophy; and a
+philosophy which found itself driven to treat them
+as moonshine would probably be a very poor affair.
+But they are like the experience and the utterances
+of men of religious genius: great truths are enshrined
+in them, but generally the shrine would have to be
+broken to liberate these truths in a form which
+would satisfy the desire to understand. To claim
+for them the power to satisfy that desire is an error,
+and it tempts those in whom that desire is predominant
+to treat them as mere beautiful illusions.</p>
+
+<p>Setting aside, then, any questions as to the
+ultimate import of the &lsquo;mystic&rsquo; strain in Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+poetry, I intend only to call attention to
+certain traits in the kind of poetic experience which
+exhibits it most plainly. And we may observe at
+once that in this there is always traceable a certain
+hostility to &lsquo;sense.&rsquo; I do not mean that hostility
+which is present in <i>all</i> poetic experience, and of
+which Wordsworth was very distinctly aware. The
+regular action of the senses on their customary
+material produces, in his view, a &lsquo;tyranny&rsquo; over the
+soul. It helps to construct that every-day picture of
+the world, of sensible objects and events &lsquo;in
+disconnection dead and spiritless,&rsquo; which we take
+for reality. In relation to this reality we become
+passive slaves;<a name="fa16d" id="fa16d" href="#ft16d"><span class="sp">16</span></a> it lies on us with a weight &lsquo;heavy
+as frost and deep almost as life.&rsquo; It is the origin
+alike of our torpor and our superficiality. <i>All</i> poetic
+experience frees us from it to some extent, or breaks
+into it, and so may be called hostile to sense. But
+this experience is, broadly speaking, of two different
+kinds. The perception of the daffodils as dancing
+in glee, and in sympathy with other gleeful beings,
+shows us a living, joyous, loving world, and so a
+&lsquo;spiritual&rsquo; world, not a merely &lsquo;sensible&rsquo; one. But
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page131" id="page131"></a>131</span>
+the hostility to sense is here no more than a hostility
+to <i>mere</i> sense: this &lsquo;spiritual&rsquo; world is itself the
+sensible world more fully apprehended: the daffodils
+do not change or lose their colour in disclosing their
+glee. On the other hand, in the kind of experience
+which forms our present subject, there is always
+some feeling of definite contrast with the limited
+sensible world. The arresting feature or object is
+felt in some way <i>against</i> this background, or even as
+in some way a denial of it. Sometimes it is a
+visionary unearthly light resting on a scene or on
+some strange figure. Sometimes it is the feeling
+that the scene or figure belongs to the world of
+dream. Sometimes it is an intimation of boundlessness,
+contradicting or abolishing the fixed limits of
+our habitual view. Sometimes it is the obscure
+sense of &lsquo;unknown modes of being,&rsquo; unlike the
+familiar modes. This kind of experience, further,
+comes often with a distinct shock, which may
+bewilder, confuse or trouble the mind. And, lastly,
+it is especially, though not invariably, associated
+with mountains, and again with solitude. Some of
+these bald statements I will go on to illustrate, only
+remarking that the boundary between these modes
+of imagination is, naturally, less marked and more
+wavering in Wordsworth&rsquo;s poetry than in my brief
+analysis.</p>
+
+<p>We may begin with a poem standing near this
+boundary, the famous verses <i>To the Cuckoo</i>, &lsquo;O
+blithe new-comer.&rsquo; It stands near the boundary
+because, like the poem on the Daffodils, it is
+entirely happy. But it stands unmistakably on the
+further side of the boundary, and is, in truth, more
+nearly allied to the <i>Ode</i> on Immortality than to the
+poem on the Daffodils. The sense of sight is
+baffled, and its tyranny broken. Only a cry is heard,
+which makes the listener look a thousand ways, so
+shifting is the direction from which it reaches him.
+It seems to come from a mere &lsquo;voice,&rsquo; &lsquo;an invisible
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page132" id="page132"></a>132</span>
+thing,&rsquo; &lsquo;a mystery.&rsquo; It brings him &lsquo;a tale of
+visionary hours,&rsquo;&mdash;hours of childhood, when he
+sought this invisible thing in vain, and the earth
+appeared to his bewildered but liberated fancy &lsquo;an
+unsubstantial fairy place.&rsquo; And still, when he hears
+it, the great globe itself, we may say, fades like an
+unsubstantial pageant; or, to quote from the
+Immortality <i>Ode</i>, the &lsquo;shades of the prison house&rsquo;
+melt into air. These words are much more solemn
+than the Cuckoo poem; but the experience is of
+the same type, and &lsquo;the visionary gleam&rsquo; of the ode,
+like the &lsquo;wandering voice&rsquo; of the poem, is the
+expression through sense of something beyond
+sense.</p>
+
+<p>Take another passage referring to childhood. It
+is from the <i>Prelude</i>, ii. Here there is something
+more than perplexity. There is apprehension, and
+we are approaching the sublime:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+  <p class="i1">One summer evening (led by her<a name="fa17d" id="fa17d" href="#ft17d"><span class="sp">17</span></a>) I found</p>
+<p>A little boat tied to a willow tree</p>
+<p>Within a rocky cave, its usual home.</p>
+<p>Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in</p>
+<p>Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth</p>
+<p>And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice</p>
+<p>Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;</p>
+<p>Leaving behind her still, on either side,</p>
+<p>Small circles glittering idly in the moon,</p>
+<p>Until they melted all into one track</p>
+<p>Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,</p>
+<p>Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point</p>
+<p>With an unswerving line, I fixed my view</p>
+<p>Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,</p>
+<p>The horizon&rsquo;s utmost boundary; far above</p>
+<p>Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.</p>
+<p>She was an elfin pinnace; lustily</p>
+<p>I dipped my oars into the silent lake,</p>
+<p>And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat</p>
+<p>Went heaving through the water like a swan;</p>
+<p>When, from behind that craggy steep till then</p>
+<p>The horizon&rsquo;s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,</p>
+<p>As if with voluntary power instinct,</p>
+<p>Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
+  <span class="pagenum"><a name="page133" id="page133"></a>133</span></p>
+<p>And growing still in stature the grim shape</p>
+<p>Towered up between me and the stars, and still,</p>
+<p>For so it seemed, with purpose of its own</p>
+<p>And measured motion like a living thing,</p>
+<p>Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,</p>
+<p>And through the silent water stole my way</p>
+<p>Back to the covert of the willow tree;</p>
+<p>There in her mooring-place I left my bark,&mdash;</p>
+<p>And through the meadows homeward went, in grave</p>
+<p>And serious mood; but after I had seen</p>
+<p>That spectacle, for many days, my brain</p>
+<p>Worked with a dim and undetermined sense</p>
+<p>Of unknown modes of being; o&rsquo;er my thoughts</p>
+<p>There hung a darkness, call it solitude</p>
+<p>Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes</p>
+<p>Remained, no pleasant images of trees,</p>
+<p>Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;</p>
+<p>But huge and mighty forms, that do not live</p>
+<p>Like living men, moved slowly through the mind</p>
+<p>By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The best commentary on a poem is generally to
+be found in the poet&rsquo;s other works. And those last
+dozen lines furnish the best commentary on that
+famous passage in the <i>Ode</i>, where the poet, looking
+back to his childhood, gives thanks for it,&mdash;not
+however for its careless delight and liberty,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+    <p class="i2">But for those obstinate questionings</p>
+    <p class="i2">Of sense and outward things,</p>
+    <p class="i2">Fallings from us, vanishings;</p>
+    <p class="i2">Blank misgivings of a Creature</p>
+<p>Moving about in worlds not realised,</p>
+<p>High instincts before which our mortal Nature</p>
+<p>Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Whether, or how, these experiences afford &lsquo;intimations
+of immortality&rsquo; is not in question here; but it
+will never do to dismiss them so airily as Arnold
+did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.</p>
+
+<p>The most striking recollections of his childhood
+have not in all cases this manifest affinity to the
+<i>Ode</i>, but wherever the visionary feeling appears in
+them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still
+traceable. There is, for instance, in <i>Prelude</i>, xii.,
+the description of the crag, from which, on a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page134" id="page134"></a>134</span>
+wild dark day, the boy watched eagerly the two
+highways below for the ponies that were coming to
+take him home for the holidays. It is too long to
+quote, but every reader of it will remember</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+         <p class="i4">the wind and sleety rain,</p>
+<p>And all the business of the elements,</p>
+<p>The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,</p>
+<p>And the bleak music from that old stone wall,</p>
+<p>The noise of wood and water, and the mist</p>
+<p>That on the line of each of those two roads</p>
+<p>Advanced in such indisputable shapes.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic.
+And we happen to know why. Wordsworth
+is describing the scene in the light of memory. In
+that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and
+the scene, as he recalled it, was charged with the
+sense of contrast between the narrow world of
+common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and
+the vast unseen world which encloses it in beneficent
+yet dark and inexorable arms. The visionary feeling
+has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or
+covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable,
+over-arching or breaking into the customary &lsquo;reality.&rsquo;
+Its character varies; and so sometimes at its touch
+the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts
+in rapture into that infinite being; while at other
+times the &lsquo;mortal nature&rsquo; stands dumb, incapable of
+thought, or shrinking from some presence</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks</p>
+<p>That threaten the profane.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+most characteristic poems that it may almost
+be called their soul; and failure to understand
+them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It
+appears in a mild and tender form, but quite openly,
+in the lines <i>To a Highland Girl</i>, where the child,
+and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her
+home, seem to the poet</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Like something fashioned in a dream.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page135" id="page135"></a>135</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">It gives to <i>The Solitary Reaper</i> its note of remoteness
+and wonder; and even the slight shock of
+bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening line of
+the most famous stanza:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Will no one tell me what she sings?</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the
+White Doe, and sounds faintly to us from far away
+through all the tale of failure and anguish. Without
+it such shorter narratives as <i>Hartleap Well</i> and
+<i>Resolution and Independence</i> would lose the imaginative
+atmosphere which adds mystery and grandeur
+to the apparently simple &lsquo;moral.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Hartleap Well</i> it is conveyed at first by slight
+touches of contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit
+of the Hart, has mounted his third horse.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Joy sparkled in the prancing courser&rsquo;s eyes;</p>
+<p>The horse and horseman are a happy pair;</p>
+<p>But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,</p>
+<p>There is a doleful silence in the air.</p>
+
+<p class="s">A rout this morning left Sir Walter&rsquo;s hall,</p>
+<p>That as they galloped made the echoes roar;</p>
+<p>But horse and man are vanished, one and all;</p>
+<p>Such race, I think, was never seen before.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one
+by one among the mountain fern.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?</p>
+<p>The bugles that so joyfully were blown?</p>
+<p>&mdash;This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;</p>
+<p>Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the
+old shepherd&rsquo;s description of the utter desolation of
+the spot where the waters of the little spring had
+trembled with the last deep groan of the dying
+stag, and where the Knight, to commemorate his
+exploit, had built a basin for the spring, three pillars
+to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a
+pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing
+plants, for the summer joy of himself and his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page136" id="page136"></a>136</span>
+paramour. But now &lsquo;the pleasure-house is dust,&rsquo;
+and the trees are grey, &lsquo;with neither arms nor
+head&rsquo;:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;</p>
+<p>The sun on drearier hollow never shone;</p>
+<p>So will it be, as I have often said,</p>
+<p>Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious
+inviolable Powers, behind the momentary powers of
+hard pleasure and empty pride, that justifies the
+solemnity of the stanza:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The Being, that is in the clouds and air,</p>
+<p>That is in the green leaves among the groves,</p>
+<p>Maintains a deep and reverential care</p>
+<p>For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><i>Hartleap Well</i> is a beautiful poem, but whether
+it is entirely successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There
+can be no sort of doubt as to <i>Resolution and
+Independence</i>, probably, if we must choose, the
+most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth&rsquo;s poems, and
+the best test of ability to understand him. The
+story, if given in a brief argument, would sound
+far from promising. We should expect for it, too,
+a ballad form somewhat like that of <i>Simon Lee</i>.
+When we read it, we find instead lines of extraordinary
+grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines
+more pedestrian than could be found in an impressive
+poem from any other hand,&mdash;for instance,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>And, drawing to his side, to him did say,</p>
+<p>&lsquo;This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.&rsquo;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">or,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>&lsquo;How is it that you live, and what is it you do?&rsquo;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and
+that helpless reiteration of a question (in this case
+one already clearly answered), which in other poems
+threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a
+writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would
+hardly have ventured. Yet with all this, and by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page137" id="page137"></a>137</span>
+dint of all this, we read with bated breath, almost
+as if we were in the presence of that &lsquo;majestical&rsquo;
+Spirit in <i>Hamlet</i>, come to &lsquo;admonish&rsquo; from another
+world, though not this time by terror. And one
+source of this effect is the confusion, the almost
+hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind,
+that falls on the poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer,
+and hears, without understanding, his
+plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the
+prosaic &lsquo;occupation&rsquo; he &lsquo;pursues&rsquo;:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The old man still stood talking by my side;</p>
+<p>But now his voice to me was like a stream</p>
+<p>Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;</p>
+<p>And the whole body of the man did seem</p>
+<p>Like one whom I had met with in a dream;</p>
+<p>Or like a man from some far region sent,</p>
+<p>To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The same question was asked again, and the answer
+was repeated. But</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>While he was talking thus, the lonely place,</p>
+<p>The old man&rsquo;s shape, and speech, all troubled me.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">&lsquo;Trouble&rsquo; is a word not seldom employed by the
+poet to denote the confusion caused by some visionary
+experience. Here are, again, the fallings from
+us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of
+the soul&rsquo;s infinity.</p>
+
+<p>Out of many illustrations I will choose three more.
+There is in the <i>Prelude</i>, iv., the passage (so strongly
+resembling <i>Resolution and Independence</i> that I
+merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an
+old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone
+on the moon-lit road, all alone:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>No living thing appeared in earth or air;</p>
+<p>And, save the flowing water&rsquo;s peaceful voice,</p>
+<p>Sound there was none ...</p>
+        <p class="i11">... still his form</p>
+<p>Kept the same awful steadiness&mdash;at his feet</p>
+<p>His shadow lay, and moved not.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghost
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page138" id="page138"></a>138</span>
+was never ghostlier than he. And by him we may
+place the London beggar of <i>Prelude</i>, vii.:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>How oft, amid those overflowing streets,</p>
+<p>Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said</p>
+<p>Unto myself, &lsquo;The face of every one</p>
+<p>That passes by me is a mystery!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed</p>
+<p>By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,</p>
+<p>Until the shapes before my eyes became</p>
+<p>A second-sight procession, such as glides</p>
+<p>Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;</p>
+<p>And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond</p>
+<p>The reach of common indication, lost</p>
+<p>Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten</p>
+<p>Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)</p>
+<p>Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,</p>
+<p>Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest</p>
+<p>Wearing a written paper, to explain</p>
+<p>His story, whence he came, and who he was.</p>
+<p>Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round</p>
+<p>As with the might of waters; an apt type</p>
+<p>This label seemed of the utmost we can know,</p>
+<p>Both of ourselves and of the universe;</p>
+<p>And, on the shape of that unmoving man,</p>
+<p>His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,</p>
+<p>As if admonished from another world.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Still more curious psychologically is the passage,
+in the preceding book of the <i>Prelude</i>, which tells
+us of a similar shock and leads to the description of
+its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the
+passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones (&lsquo;Jones,
+as from Calais southward you and I&rsquo;) set out to
+walk over the Simplon, then traversed only by a
+rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way,
+and, meeting a peasant, discovered from his answers
+to their questions that, without knowing it, they &lsquo;<i>had
+crossed the Alps</i>.&rsquo; This may not sound important,
+and the italics are Wordsworth&rsquo;s, not mine. But
+the next words are these:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+  <p class="i1">Imagination&mdash;here the Power so called</p>
+<p>Through sad incompetence of human speech,</p>
+<p>That awful Power rose from the mind&rsquo;s abyss</p>
+<p>Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
+  <span class="pagenum"><a name="page139" id="page139"></a>139</span></p>
+<p>At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;</p>
+<p>Halted without an effort to break through;</p>
+<p>But to my conscious soul I now can say&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I recognise thy glory&rsquo;: in such strength</p>
+<p>Of usurpation, when the light of sense</p>
+<p>Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed</p>
+<p>The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,</p>
+<p>There harbours; whether we be young or old,</p>
+<p>Our destiny, our being&rsquo;s heart and home,</p>
+<p>Is with infinitude, and only there;</p>
+<p>With hope it is, hope that can never die,</p>
+<p>Effort, and expectation, and desire,</p>
+<p>And something evermore about to be.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>And what was the result of this shock? The poet
+may answer for himself in some of the greatest lines
+in English poetry. The travellers proceeded on
+their way down the Defile of Gondo.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+                 <p class="i7">Downwards we hurried fast,</p>
+<p>And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,</p>
+<p>Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road</p>
+<p>Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,</p>
+<p>And with them did we journey several hours</p>
+<p>At a slow pace. The immeasurable height</p>
+<p>Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,</p>
+<p>The stationary blasts of waterfalls,</p>
+<p>And in the narrow rent at every turn</p>
+<p>Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,</p>
+<p>The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,</p>
+<p>The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,</p>
+<p>Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side</p>
+<p>As if a voice were in them, the sick sight</p>
+<p>And giddy prospect of the raving stream,</p>
+<p>The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,</p>
+<p>Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light&mdash;</p>
+<p>Were all like workings of one mind, the features</p>
+<p>Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;</p>
+<p>Characters of the great Apocalypse,</p>
+<p>The types and symbols of Eternity,</p>
+<p>Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.<a name="fa18d" id="fa18d" href="#ft18d"><span class="sp">18</span></a></p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page140" id="page140"></a>140</span></p>
+
+<p>I hardly think that &lsquo;the poet of Surrey, say, and
+the prophet of its life&rsquo; could have written thus. And
+of all the poems to which I have lately referred,
+and all the passages I have quoted, there are but
+two or three which do not cry aloud that their
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page141" id="page141"></a>141</span>
+birth-place was the moor or the mountain, and
+that severed from their birth-place they would
+perish. The more sublime they are, or the nearer
+they approach sublimity, the more is this true.
+The cry of the cuckoo in <i>O blithe new-comer</i>,
+though visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by
+the mountain, it is</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Like&mdash;but oh, how different!<a name="fa19d" id="fa19d" href="#ft19d"><span class="sp">19</span></a></p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as
+he says of his Wanderer, <i>felt</i> his faith. It was there
+that all things</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Breathed immortality, revolving life,</p>
+<p>And greatness still revolving; infinite.</p>
+<p>There littleness was not; the least of things</p>
+<p>Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped</p>
+<p>Her prospects, nor did he believe,&mdash;he <i>saw</i>.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still
+he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit
+of the mountains.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Two voices are there; one is of the sea,</p>
+<p>One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And of the second of these we may say that &lsquo;few
+or none hears it right&rsquo; now he is gone.</p>
+
+<p>Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is,
+even more pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For
+there are tones in the mountain voice scarcely
+audible except in solitude, and the reader whom
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s greatest poetry baffles could have no
+better advice offered him than to do what he has
+probably never done in his life&mdash;to be on a mountain
+alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page142" id="page142"></a>142</span>
+but all solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary
+fascination.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The outward shows of sky and earth,</p>
+<p>Of hill and valley, he has viewed;</p>
+<p>And impulses <i>of deeper birth</i></p>
+<p>Have come to him in solitude.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is
+essential to nearly all the poems and passages we
+have been considering, and to some of quite a
+different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas.
+And it is not merely that the poet is alone; what he
+sees is so too. If the leech-gatherer and the
+soldier on the moon-lit road had not been solitary
+figures, they would not have awaked &lsquo;the visionary
+power&rsquo;; and it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the
+boy who was watching for his father&rsquo;s ponies had
+had beside him any more than</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The <i>single</i> sheep and the <i>one</i> blasted tree,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">the mist would not have advanced along the roads
+&lsquo;in such indisputable shapes.&rsquo; With Wordsworth
+that power seems to have sprung into life at once
+on the perception of loneliness. What is lonely is a
+spirit. To call a thing lonely or solitary is, with
+him, to say that it opens a bright or solemn vista
+into infinity. He himself &lsquo;wanders lonely as a
+cloud&rsquo;: he seeks the &lsquo;souls of lonely places&rsquo;: he
+listens in awe to</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>One voice, the solitary raven ...</p>
+<p>An iron knell, with echoes from afar:</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>A solitary object and sublime,</p>
+<p>Above all height! like an aerial cross</p>
+<p>Stationed alone upon a spiry rock</p>
+<p>Of the Chartreuse, for worship.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I
+will refer only to two poems more. The editor of
+the <i>Golden Treasury</i>, a book never to be thought
+of without gratitude, changed the title <i>The Solitary</i>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page143" id="page143"></a>143</span>
+<i>Reaper</i> into <i>The Highland Reaper</i>. He may have
+had his reasons. Perhaps he had met some one who
+thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still
+the change was a mistake: the &lsquo;solitary&rsquo; in Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+title gave the keynote. The other poem is
+<i>Lucy Gray</i>. &lsquo;When I was little,&rsquo; a lover of Wordsworth
+once said, &lsquo;I could hardly bear to read <i>Lucy
+Gray</i>, it made me feel so lonely.&rsquo; Wordsworth
+called it <i>Lucy Gray, or Solitude</i>, and this young
+reader understood him. But there is too much,
+reason to fear that for half his readers his &lsquo;solitary
+child&rsquo; is generalised into a mere &lsquo;little girl,&rsquo; and
+that they never receive the main impression he
+wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced
+in the opening lines, and as clearly shown in the
+lovely final stanzas, which give even to this ballad
+the visionary touch which distinguishes it from <i>Alice
+Fell</i>:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Yet some maintain that to this day</p>
+<p>She is a living child;</p>
+<p>That you may see sweet Lucy Gray</p>
+<p>Upon the lonesome wild.</p>
+
+<p class="s">O&rsquo;er rough and smooth she trips along,</p>
+<p>And never looks behind;</p>
+<p>And sings a solitary song</p>
+<p>That whistles in the wind.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The solitariness which exerted so potent a spell
+on Wordsworth had in it nothing &lsquo;Byronic.&rsquo; He
+preached in the <i>Excursion</i> against the solitude of
+&lsquo;self-indulging spleen.&rsquo; He was even aware that he
+himself, though free from that weakness, had felt</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+         <p class="i7">perhaps too much</p>
+<p>The self-sufficing power of Solitude.<a name="fa20d" id="fa20d" href="#ft20d"><span class="sp">20</span></a></p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">No poet is more emphatically the poet of community.
+A great part of his verse&mdash;a part as
+characteristic and as precious as the part on which
+I have been dwelling&mdash;is dedicated to the affections
+of home and neighbourhood and country, and to
+that soul of joy and love which links together all
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page144" id="page144"></a>144</span>
+Nature&rsquo;s children, and &lsquo;steals from earth to man,
+from man to earth.&rsquo; And this soul is for him as
+truly the presence of &lsquo;the Being that is in the
+clouds and air&rsquo; and in the mind of man as are the
+power, the darkness, the silence, the strange gleams
+and mysterious visitations which startle and confuse
+with intimations of infinity. But solitude and
+solitariness were to him, in the main, one of these
+intimations. They had not for him merely the
+&lsquo;eeriness&rsquo; which they have at times for everyone,
+though that was essential to some of the poems we
+have reviewed. They were the symbol of power to
+stand alone, to be &lsquo;self-sufficing,&rsquo; to dispense with
+custom and surroundings and aid and sympathy&mdash;a
+self-dependence at once the image and the communication
+of &lsquo;the soul of all the worlds.&rsquo; Even when
+they were full of &lsquo;sounds and sweet airs that give
+delight and hurt not,&rsquo; the solitude of the Reaper or
+of Lucy, they so appealed to him. But they appealed
+also to that austerer strain which led him to love
+&lsquo;bare trees and mountains bare,&rsquo; and lonely places,
+and the bleak music of the old stone wall, and to
+dwell with awe, and yet with exultation, on the
+majesty of that &lsquo;unconquerable mind&rsquo; which through
+long years holds its solitary purpose, sustains its
+solitary passion, feeds upon its solitary anguish.
+For this mind, as for the blind beggar or the leech-gatherer,
+the &lsquo;light of sense&rsquo; and the sweetness of
+life have faded or &lsquo;gone out&rsquo;; but in it &lsquo;greatness
+makes abode,&rsquo; and it &lsquo;retains its station proud,&rsquo; &lsquo;by
+form or image unprofaned.&rsquo; Thus, in whatever
+guise it might present itself, solitariness &lsquo;carried far
+into his heart&rsquo; the haunting sense of an &lsquo;invisible
+world&rsquo;; of some Life beyond this &lsquo;transitory being&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;unapproachable by death&rsquo;;</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;</p>
+<p>That hath been, is, and where it was and is</p>
+<p>There shall endure,&mdash;existence unexposed</p>
+<p>To the blind walk of mortal accident;
+  <span class="pagenum"><a name="page145" id="page145"></a>145</span></p>
+<p>From diminution safe and weakening age;</p>
+<p>While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;</p>
+<p>And countless generations of mankind</p>
+<p>Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>For me, I confess, all this is far from being &lsquo;mere
+poetry&rsquo;&mdash;partly because I do not believe that any
+such thing as &lsquo;mere poetry&rsquo; exists. But whatever
+kind or degree of truth we may find in all this, everything
+in Wordsworth that is sublime or approaches
+sublimity has, directly or more remotely, to do with
+it. And without this part of his poetry Wordsworth
+would be &lsquo;shorn of his strength,&rsquo; and would
+no longer stand, as he does stand, nearer than any
+other poet of the Nineteenth Century to Milton.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page146" id="page146"></a>146</span></p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE.</p>
+
+<p>I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about <i>We are Seven</i>.
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s friend, James Tobin, who saw the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>
+while they were going through the press, told him that this poem
+would make him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in
+vain to cancel it. I have forgotten how it was received in 1798,
+but it has long been one of the most popular of the ballad poems,
+and I do not think I have ever heard it ridiculed. I wonder,
+however, what its readers take to be the &lsquo;moral&rsquo; of it, for I have
+never been able to convince myself that the &lsquo;moral&rsquo; given in
+the poem itself truly represents the imaginative impression from
+which the poem arose.</p>
+
+<p>The &lsquo;moral&rsquo; is in this instance put at the beginning, in the
+mutilated opening stanza:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;A simple child,</p>
+  <p class="i1">That lightly draws its breath,</p>
+<p>And feels its life in every limb,</p>
+  <p class="i1">What should it know of death?</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and
+when it was all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and
+Coleridge, and observed that a prefatory stanza was wanted,
+and that he should enjoy his tea better if he could add it first.
+Coleridge at once threw off the stanza as we have it, except that
+the first line ran, &lsquo;A simple child, dear brother Jim,&rsquo;&mdash;this Jim, who
+rhymes with &lsquo;limb,&rsquo; being the James Tobin who protested
+afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in the
+<i>Lyrical Ballads</i> as Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting
+to the words &lsquo;dear brother Jim&rsquo; as ludicrous, but (apparently)
+giving way for the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.</p>
+
+<p>Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page147" id="page147"></a>147</span>
+felicity of style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have
+achieved in expressing the idea. And the idea was not only
+accepted by Wordsworth, but, according to his own account, he
+had mentioned in substance what he wished to be expressed. It
+must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a doubt whether the
+stanza truly represents the imaginative experience from which the
+poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this doubt does
+not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge&rsquo;s
+authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having
+read <i>We are Seven</i> without feeling it or without saying to myself
+at the end, &lsquo;This means more than the first stanza says.&rsquo; And,
+however improbable, it cannot be called impossible that even so
+introspective a poet as Wordsworth might misconstrue the
+impression that stirred him to write. I will take courage, therefore,
+to confess the belief that what stirred him was the coincidence
+of the child&rsquo;s feelings with some of those feelings of his own
+childhood which he described in the Immortality <i>Ode</i>, and once
+or twice in conversation, and which, in a less individual and
+peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs, to children
+in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer to one
+or two passages. &lsquo;At that time I could not believe that I should
+lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder
+into dust&rsquo; (remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth, <i>Prose Works</i>,
+ed. Grosart, iii. 464). Is not this the condition of the child
+in <i>We are Seven</i>? &lsquo;Nothing,&rsquo; he says to Miss Fenwick, &lsquo;was
+more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of
+death as a state applicable to my own being&rsquo; (<i>ib.</i> iii. 194). He
+then quotes the first stanza of <i>We are Seven</i>. It is true that
+thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own case from the
+child&rsquo;s, attributing the difficulty in her case to &lsquo;animal vivacity.&rsquo;
+But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth&rsquo;s direct
+testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention
+to a passage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth
+begins by saying that the custom of raising monuments to
+the dead &lsquo;proceeded obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to
+guard the remains of the deceased from irreverent approach or
+from savage violation, and, secondly, to preserve their memory.&rsquo;
+But these desires, in his opinion, resolve themselves into one, and
+both proceed from the consciousness or fore-feeling of immortality,
+also described as &lsquo;an intimation or assurance within us,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page148" id="page148"></a>148</span>
+that some part of our nature is imperishable.&rsquo; And he goes on
+thus: &lsquo;If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall find
+that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our
+own individual Being, the mind was without this assurance....
+Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of
+his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense of
+immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same
+unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the
+lamb in the meadow or any other irrational creature is endowed;
+to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to
+come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of
+death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been
+instilled into him!&rsquo; Now Coleridge&rsquo;s stanza, and Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+own distinction between the child and himself, do come at least
+very near to attributing the child&rsquo;s inability to realise the fact of
+death to that very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient
+cause of it, is here indignantly repudiated. According to the
+present passage, this inability ought to have been traced to that
+&lsquo;sense&rsquo; or &lsquo;consciousness&rsquo; of immortality which is inherent in
+human nature. And (whether or no Wordsworth rightly describes
+this sense) it was <i>this</i>, I suggest, that, unknown to himself, arrested
+him in the child&rsquo;s persistent ignoring of the fact of death. The
+poem is thus allied to the Immortality <i>Ode</i>. The child is in
+possession of one of those &lsquo;truths that wake to perish never,&rsquo;
+though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of
+custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the
+conversation took place (in 1793), and even when the poem was
+written (1798), Wordsworth had not yet come to regard the
+experiences of his own childhood as he saw them later (<i>Tintern
+Abbey</i>, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to the poem a moral
+which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted from
+Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true
+even to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing
+as possibly significant that the child in <i>We are Seven</i> is not
+described as showing any particular &lsquo;animal vivacity&rsquo;: she strikes
+one as rather a quiet, though determined, little person.</p>
+
+<p>These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those
+readers who feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in
+reading the poem. But many, I think, must feel them.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1d" id="ft1d" href="#fa1d"><span class="fn">1</span></a> The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a
+short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April,
+1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of
+English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other
+lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the
+course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult
+Professor Herford&rsquo;s <i>The Age of Wordsworth</i>, a little book which is
+familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the more
+admired the more they use it?</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2d" id="ft2d" href="#fa2d"><span class="fn">2</span></a> These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen
+partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much
+the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in
+<i>The Tables Turned</i>, where occurs that outrageous stanza about &lsquo;one
+impulse from a vernal wood&rsquo; which Mr. Raleigh has well defended.
+When all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these
+statements, and many like them, are &lsquo;poetic,&rsquo; they ought to remain
+startling. Two of them&mdash;that from the story of Margaret (<i>Excursion</i>,
+I.), and that from the <i>Ode</i>, 1815&mdash;were made less so, to the
+injury of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had
+forgotten what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3d" id="ft3d" href="#fa3d"><span class="fn">3</span></a> <i>Goody Blake</i>, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of
+impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge&rsquo;s <i>Three Graves</i>. The
+question as to the <i>Anecdote for Fathers</i> is not precisely whether it
+makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in
+such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger
+is in the lines,</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>And five times to the child I said,</p>
+<p>Why, Edward, tell me why?</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim,
+is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is
+managed with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here
+the effect so delightfully reproduced in <i>Through the Looking-glass</i>
+(&lsquo;I&rsquo;ll tell thee everything I can&rsquo;).</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4d" id="ft4d" href="#fa4d"><span class="fn">4</span></a> Some remarks on <i>We are seven</i> are added in a note at the end of
+the lecture.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5d" id="ft5d" href="#fa5d"><span class="fn">5</span></a> The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from
+Hazlitt and De Quincey.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6d" id="ft6d" href="#fa6d"><span class="fn">6</span></a> The publication of the <i>Excursion</i> seems to have been postponed
+for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the
+world for thirteen years.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7d" id="ft7d" href="#fa7d"><span class="fn">7</span></a> <i>Evening Voluntaries</i>, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8d" id="ft8d" href="#fa8d"><span class="fn">8</span></a> <i>Poems on the Naming of Places</i>, iv. Keats need not have been
+ashamed to write the last line.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9d" id="ft9d" href="#fa9d"><span class="fn">9</span></a> &lsquo;&rsquo;Tis past, that melancholy dream,&rsquo;&mdash;so he describes his sojourn in
+Germany.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft10d" id="ft10d" href="#fa10d"><span class="fn">10</span></a> Wordsworth&rsquo;s Letter to Major-General Pasley (<i>Prose Works</i>, i.)
+contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and
+of his hostility to mere militarism.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft11d" id="ft11d" href="#fa11d"><span class="fn">11</span></a> I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost
+courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased
+to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft12d" id="ft12d" href="#fa12d"><span class="fn">12</span></a> [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh (<i>Comus</i>, 33);
+but it does not seem necessary to change the quotation.]</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft13d" id="ft13d" href="#fa13d"><span class="fn">13</span></a> In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of
+course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude,
+cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in
+his poetry or in his life. &lsquo;I could kick such a man across England
+with my naked foot,&rsquo; the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base
+action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality
+was not so very unlike Wordsworth&rsquo;s. And neither poet would have
+found it difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or
+&lsquo;the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft14d" id="ft14d" href="#fa14d"><span class="fn">14</span></a> The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary (<i>Excursion</i>,
+vi.).</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft15d" id="ft15d" href="#fa15d"><span class="fn">15</span></a> The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the
+<i>Excursion</i>, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft16d" id="ft16d" href="#fa16d"><span class="fn">16</span></a> This is just the opposite of the &lsquo;wise passiveness&rsquo; of imaginative
+but unreflective feeling.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft17d" id="ft17d" href="#fa17d"><span class="fn">17</span></a> Nature.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft18d" id="ft18d" href="#fa18d"><span class="fn">18</span></a> I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture,
+but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth&rsquo;s mind who cares
+to return to them.</p>
+
+<p>The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth,
+&lsquo;the visionary power&rsquo; arises from, and testifies to, the mind&rsquo;s
+infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united
+with, a feeling or idea of <i>the</i> infinite or &lsquo;one mind,&rsquo; and of union with
+it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague
+alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet&rsquo;s experience),
+is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought always to be
+borne in mind in regard to his language about &lsquo;immortality&rsquo; or
+&lsquo;eternity.&rsquo; His sense or consciousness of &lsquo;immortality,&rsquo; that is to say, is
+at once a consciousness that he (in some sense of that word) is potentially
+infinite, and a consciousness that &lsquo;he&rsquo; belongs to, is part of, is the home
+of, or is, an &lsquo;active principle&rsquo; which is eternal, indivisible, and the
+&lsquo;soul of all the worlds&rsquo; (cf. opening of <i>Excursion</i>, ix.). Whatever we
+may make of this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall
+remain entirely outside Wordsworth&rsquo;s mind in passages like that just
+referred to, and in passages where he talks of &lsquo;acts of immortality in
+Nature&rsquo;s course,&rsquo; or says that to the Wanderer &lsquo;all things among the
+mountains breathed immortality,&rsquo; or says that he has been unfolding
+&lsquo;far-stretching views of immortality,&rsquo; though he may not appear to us
+to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and Man (in one
+sense) are for Wordsworth &lsquo;transitory,&rsquo; but Nature always and everywhere
+<i>reveals</i> &lsquo;immortality,&rsquo; and Man (in another sense) is &lsquo;immortal.&rsquo;
+Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise sense he is
+so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only chance of
+discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except Wordsworth,
+may mean by &lsquo;man&rsquo; and &lsquo;immortal,&rsquo; and to try to get into <i>his</i> mind.</p>
+
+<p>There is an illuminating passage on &lsquo;the visionary power&rsquo; and the
+mind&rsquo;s infinity or immortality, in <i>Prelude</i>, ii.:</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+        <p class="i4">and hence, from the same source,</p>
+<p>Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,</p>
+<p>Under the quiet stars, and at that time</p>
+<p>Have felt whate&rsquo;er there is of power in sound</p>
+<p>To breathe an elevated mood, by form</p>
+<p>Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,</p>
+<p>If the night blackened with a coming storm,</p>
+<p>Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are</p>
+<p>The ghostly language of the ancient earth,</p>
+<p>Or make their dim abode in distant winds.</p>
+<p>Thence did I drink the visionary power;</p>
+<p>And deem not profitless those fleeting moods</p>
+<p>Of shadowy exultation: not for this,</p>
+<p>That they are kindred to our purer mind</p>
+<p>And intellectual life; but that the soul,</p>
+<p>Remembering how she felt, but what she felt</p>
+<p>Remembering not, retains an obscure sense</p>
+<p>Of possible sublimity, whereto</p>
+<p>With growing faculties she doth aspire,</p>
+<p>With faculties still growing, feeling still</p>
+<p>That whatsoever point they gain, they yet</p>
+<p>Have something to pursue.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of
+this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for
+instance, <i>Prelude</i>, xiii., &lsquo;Who doth not love to follow with his eye The
+windings of a public way?&rsquo; And compare the enchantment of the
+question, <i>What, are you stepping westward</i>?</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+        <p class="i9">&rsquo;twas a sound</p>
+<p>Of something without place or bound.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><a name="ft19d" id="ft19d" href="#fa19d"><span class="fn">19</span></a> <i>Yes, it was the mountain echo</i>, placed in Arnold&rsquo;s selection, with his
+usual taste, next to the earlier poem <i>To the Cuckoo</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft20d" id="ft20d" href="#fa20d"><span class="fn">20</span></a> This was Coleridge&rsquo;s opinion.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page149" id="page149"></a>149</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">SHELLEY&rsquo;S VIEW OF POETRY</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page150" id="page150"></a>150<br />151</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2 chap2">SHELLEY&rsquo;S VIEW OF POETRY</p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">The</span> ideas of Wordsworth and of Coleridge about
+poetry have often been discussed and are familiar.
+Those of Shelley are much less so, and in his
+eloquent exposition of them there is a radiance which
+almost conceals them from many readers. I wish,
+at the cost of all the radiance, to try to see them
+and show them rather more distinctly. Even if
+they had little value for the theory of poetry, they
+would still have much as material for it, since they
+allow us to look into a poet&rsquo;s experience in conceiving
+and composing. And, in addition, they
+throw light on some of the chief characteristics of
+Shelley&rsquo;s own poetry.</p>
+
+<p>His poems in their turn form one of the sources
+from which his ideas on the subject may be gathered.
+We have also some remarks in his letters and in
+prose pieces dealing with other topics. We have
+the prefaces to those of his works which he himself
+published. And, lastly, there is the <i>Defence of
+Poetry</i>. This essay was written in reply to an
+attack made on contemporary verse by Shelley&rsquo;s
+friend Peacock,&mdash;not a favourable specimen of
+Peacock&rsquo;s writing. The <i>Defence</i>, we can see, was
+hurriedly composed, and it remains a fragment,
+being only the first of three projected parts. It
+contains a good deal of historical matter, highly
+interesting, but too extensive to be made use of here.
+Being polemical, it no doubt exaggerates such of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page152" id="page152"></a>152</span>
+Shelley&rsquo;s views as collided with those of his antagonist.
+But, besides being the only full expression
+of these views, it is the most mature, for it was
+written within eighteen months of his death. It
+appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+Prefaces or to Coleridge&rsquo;s <i>Biographia Literaria</i>;
+but there are a few reminiscences of Sidney&rsquo;s
+<i>Apology</i>, which Shelley had read just before he
+wrote his own <i>Defence</i>; and it shows, like much
+of his mature poetry, how deeply he was influenced
+by the more imaginative dialogues of Plato.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">1.</p>
+
+<p>Any one familiar with the manner in which Shelley
+in his verse habitually represents the world could
+guess at his general view of poetry. The world to
+him is a melancholy place, a &lsquo;dim vast vale of tears,&rsquo;
+illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but
+glorious power. Nor is this power, as that favourite
+metaphor would imply, wholly outside the world.
+It works within it as a soul contending with obstruction
+and striving to penetrate and transform the
+whole mass. And though the fulness of its glory
+is concealed, its nature is known in outline. It
+is the realised perfection of everything good and
+beautiful on earth; or, in other words, all such
+goodness and beauty is its partial manifestation.
+&lsquo;All,&rsquo; I say: for the splendour of nature, the love of
+lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action
+or just law, the wisdom of philosophy, the creations
+of art, the truths deformed by superstitious religion,&mdash;all
+are equally operations or appearances of the
+hidden power. It is of the first importance for the
+understanding of Shelley to realise how strong in
+him is the sense and conviction of this unity in life:
+it is one of his Platonic traits. The intellectual
+Beauty of his <i>Hymn</i> is absolutely the same thing
+as the Liberty of his <i>Ode</i>, the &lsquo;Great Spirit&rsquo; of Love
+that he invokes to bring freedom to Naples, the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page153" id="page153"></a>153</span>
+One which in <i>Adonaďs</i> he contrasts with the Many,
+the Spirit of Nature of <i>Queen Mab</i>, and the Vision
+of <i>Alastor</i> and <i>Epipsychidion</i>. The skylark of the
+famous stanzas is free from our sorrows, not because
+it is below them, but because, as an embodiment of
+that perfection, it knows the rapture of love without
+its satiety, and understands death as we cannot.
+The voice of the mountain, if a whole nation could
+hear it with the poet&rsquo;s ear, would &lsquo;repeal large
+codes of fraud and woe&rsquo;; it is the same voice as
+the reformer&rsquo;s and the martyr&rsquo;s. And in the far-off
+day when the &lsquo;plastic stress&rsquo; of this power has
+mastered the last resistance and is all in all, outward
+nature, which now suffers with man, will be redeemed
+with him, and man, in becoming politically free, will
+become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then,
+poetry, as the world now is, must be one of the
+voices of this power, or one tone of its voice. To
+use the language so dear to Shelley, it is the revelation
+of those eternal ideas which lie behind the
+many-coloured, ever-shifting veil that we call reality
+or life. Or rather, it is one such revelation among
+many.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn to the <i>Defence of Poetry</i> we meet
+substantially the same view. There is indeed a
+certain change; for Shelley is now philosophising
+and writing prose, and he wishes not to sing from
+the mid-sky, but, for a while at least, to argue with
+his friend on the earth. Hence at first we hear
+nothing of that perfect power at the heart of things,
+and poetry is considered as a creation rather than
+a revelation. But for Shelley, we soon discover,
+this would be a false antithesis. The poet creates,
+but this creation is no mere fancy of his; it represents
+&lsquo;those forms which are common to universal
+nature and existence,&rsquo; and &lsquo;a poem is the very
+image of life expressed in its eternal truth.&rsquo; We
+notice, further, that the more voluntary and conscious
+work of invention and execution is regarded
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page154" id="page154"></a>154</span>
+as quite subordinate in the creative process. In
+that process the mind, obedient to an influence
+which it does not understand and cannot control,
+is driven to produce images of perfection which
+rather form themselves in it than are formed by it.
+The greatest stress is laid on this influence or
+inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin
+of the whole process lies in certain exceptional
+moments when visitations of thought and feeling,
+elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but
+always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden,
+reach the soul; that these are, as it were, the inter-penetration
+of a diviner nature through our own;
+and that the province of the poet is to arrest these
+apparitions, to veil them in language, to colour
+every other form he touches with their evanescent
+hues, and so to &lsquo;redeem from decay the visitations
+of the divinity in man.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Even more decided is the emphasis laid on the
+unity of all the forms in which the &lsquo;divinity&rsquo; or
+ideal power thus attests its presence. Indeed,
+throughout a large part of the essay, that &lsquo;Poetry&rsquo;
+which Shelley is defending is something very much
+wider than poetry in the usual sense. The enemy
+he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its
+influence steadily decline as civilisation advances,
+and that they are giving place, and ought to give
+place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility. His
+answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been,
+is, and always will be, the prime source of everything
+that has intrinsic value in life. Reasoning, he
+declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon the
+products of imagination. Further, he holds that the
+predominance of mere reasoning and mere utility
+has become in great part an evil; for while it has
+accumulated masses of material goods and moral
+truths, we distribute the goods iniquitously and fail
+to apply the truths, because, for want of imagination,
+we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not feel
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page155" id="page155"></a>155</span>
+what we know. The &lsquo;Poetry&rsquo; which he defends,
+therefore, is the whole creative imagination with all
+its products. And these include not merely literature
+in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied
+to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts;
+and, finally, all actions, inventions, institutions, and
+even ideas and moral dispositions, which imagination
+brings into being in its effort to satisfy the longing
+for perfection. Painters and musicians are poets.
+Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were
+poets, though there is much in their works which
+is not poetry. So were the men who invented the
+arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed,
+as sages or founders of religion, the excellence
+of justice and love. And every one, Shelley would
+say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined
+virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is
+so far a poet. For all these things come from
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Shelley&rsquo;s exposition of this, which is probably the
+most original part of his theory, is not very clear;
+but, if I understand his meaning, that which he
+takes to happen in all these cases might be thus
+described. The imagination&mdash;that is to say, the
+soul imagining&mdash;has before it, or feels within it,
+something which, answering perfectly to its nature,
+fills it with delight and with a desire to realise what
+delights it. This something, for the sake of brevity,
+we may call an idea, so long as we remember that
+it need not be distinctly imagined and that it is
+always accompanied by emotion. The reason why
+such ideas delight the imagining soul is that they
+are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own perfection&mdash;of
+itself become perfect&mdash;in one aspect or
+another. These aspects are as various as the
+elements and forms of its own inner life and outward
+existence; and so the idea may be that of the
+perfect harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of
+the perfect union of soul with soul (love), or of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page156" id="page156"></a>156</span>
+perfect order of certain social relations or forces (a
+law or institution), or of the perfect adjustment of
+intellectual elements (a truth); and so on. The
+formation and expression of any such idea is thus
+the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while at the
+same time (as we must add, to complete Shelley&rsquo;s
+thought) any such idea is a gleam or apparition of
+the perfect Intellectual Beauty.</p>
+
+<p>I choose this particular title of the hidden power
+or divinity in order to point out (what the reader is
+left to observe for himself) that the imaginative idea
+is always regarded by Shelley as beautiful. It is,
+for example, desirable for itself and not merely as a
+means to a further result; and it has the formal
+characters of beauty. For, as will have been noticed
+in the instances given, it is always the image of an
+order, or harmony, or unity in variety, of the elements
+concerned. Shelley sometimes even speaks of their
+&lsquo;rhythm.&rsquo; For example, he uses this word in
+reference to an action; and I quote the passage
+because, though it occurs at some distance from the
+exposition of his main view, it illustrates it well.
+He is saying that the true poetry of Rome, unlike
+that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems.
+&lsquo;The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions:
+for whatever of beautiful, true and majestic they
+contained, could have sprung only from the faculty
+which creates the order in which they consist. The
+life of Camillus; the death of Regulus; the expectation
+of the senators, in their god-like state, of the
+victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to
+make peace with Hannibal after the battle of
+Cannć&rsquo;&mdash;these he describes as &lsquo;a rhythm and order
+in the shows of life,&rsquo; an order not arranged with
+a view to utility or outward result, but due to the
+imagination, which, &lsquo;beholding the beauty of this
+order, created it out of itself according to its own
+idea.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page157" id="page157"></a>157</span></p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">2.</p>
+
+<p>If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest
+sense, how does the poet, in the special sense, differ
+from other unusually creative souls? Not essentially
+in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry,
+but in the kind of expression he gives to them. In
+so far as he is a poet, his medium of expression,
+of course, is not virtue, or action, or law; poetry
+is one of the acts. And, again, it differs from
+the rest, because its particular vehicle is language.
+We have now to see, therefore, what Shelley has
+to say of the form of poetry, and especially of poetic
+language.</p>
+
+<p>First, he claims for language the highest place
+among the vehicles of artistic expression, on the
+ground that it is the most direct and also the most
+plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead
+of being simply encountered by it, and it has no
+relation except to imagination; whereas any more
+material medium has a nature of its own, and
+relations to other things in the material world, and
+this nature and these relations intervene between
+the artist&rsquo;s conception and his expression of it in the
+medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that
+Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has
+always enjoyed as compared with other arts. He
+forgets (if I may interpose a word of criticism) that
+the media of the other arts have, on their side,
+certain advantages over language, and that these
+perhaps counterbalance the inferiority which he
+notices. He would also have found it difficult to
+show that language, on its physical side, is any more
+a product of imagination than stone or pigments.
+And his idea that the medium in the other arts
+is an obstacle intervening between conception and
+expression is, to say the least, one-sided. A
+sculptor, painter, or musician, would probably reply
+that it is only the qualities of his medium that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page158" id="page158"></a>158</span>
+enable him to express at all; that what he
+expresses is inseparable from the vehicle of expression;
+and that he has no conceptions which are
+not from the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or
+musical. It is true, no doubt, that his medium is
+an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is also
+true of language.</p>
+
+<p>But to resume. Language, Shelley goes on to
+say, receives in poetry a peculiar form. As it represents
+in its meaning a perfection which is always an
+order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much
+sound, <i>is</i> an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is
+measured language, which is not the proper vehicle
+for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning.
+For Shelley, however, this measured language is
+not of necessity metrical. The order or measure
+may remain at the stage which it reaches in beautiful
+prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose
+language, Shelley declares, is the most intense it is
+possible to conceive. It may again advance to
+metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient,
+popular, and preferable, especially in poetry
+containing much action. But he will not have any
+new great poet tied down to it. It is not essential,
+while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere
+accident of poetry that its language is measured,
+nor does a delight in this measure mean little. As
+sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds
+is always connected with sensitiveness to the order
+of the relations of thoughts, so also the harmony of
+the words is scarcely less indispensable than their
+meaning to the communication of the influence of
+poetry. &lsquo;Hence,&rsquo; says Shelley, &lsquo;the vanity of translation:
+it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible
+that you might discover the formal principle of its
+colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one
+language into another the creations of a poet.&rsquo;
+Strong words to come from the translator of the
+<i>Hymn to Mercury</i> and of Agathon&rsquo;s speech in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page159" id="page159"></a>159</span>
+<i>Symposium</i>!<a name="fa1e" id="fa1e" href="#ft1e"><span class="sp">1</span></a> And is not all that Shelley says of
+the difference between measured and unrhythmical
+language applicable, at least in some degree, to the
+difference between metrical and merely measured
+language? Could he really have supposed that
+metre is no more than a &lsquo;convenience,&rsquo; which contributes
+nothing of any account to the influence of
+poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather
+point out how surprising, at first sight, and how
+significant, is Shelley&rsquo;s insistence on the importance
+of measure or rhythm. No one could assert more
+absolutely than he the identity of the general substance
+of poetry with that of moral life and action, of
+the other arts, and of the higher kinds of philosophy.
+And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the
+emphasis of his statement that the formal element
+(as he understood it) is indispensable to the effect
+of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Shelley, however, nowhere considers this element
+more at length. He has no discussions, like those
+of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He
+never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases
+like a lover. We hear of his deep-drawn sigh of
+satisfaction as he finished reading a passage of
+Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he
+ramped through the meadows of Spenser, at some
+marvellous flower. When in his letters he refers
+to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions
+particular lines or expressions; and we have no
+evidence that, like Coleridge and Keats, he was a
+curious student of metrical effects or the relations of
+vowel-sounds. I doubt if all this is wholly accidental.
+Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of
+aspiration, love and worship, that we can imagine
+his feeling it almost an impiety to break up its unity
+even for purposes of study, and to give a separate
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page160" id="page160"></a>160</span>
+attention to its means of utterance. And what he
+does say on the subject confirms this impression.
+In the first place, as we have seen, he lays great
+stress on inspiration; and his statements, if exaggerated
+and misleading, must still reflect in some degree
+his own experience. No poem, he asserts, however
+inspired it may be, is more than a feeble shadow of
+the original conception; for when composition begins,
+inspiration is already on the decline. And so in a
+letter he speaks of the detail of execution destroying
+all wild and beautiful visions. Still, inspiration, if
+diminished by composition, is not wholly dispelled;
+and he appeals to the greatest poets of his day
+whether it is not an error to assert that the finest
+passages of poetry are produced by labour and study.
+Such toil he would restrict to those parts which
+connect the inspired passages, and he speaks with
+contempt of the fifty-six various readings of the first
+line of the <i>Orlando Furioso</i>. He seems to exaggerate
+on this matter because in the <i>Defence</i> his foe
+is cold reason and calculation. Elsewhere he writes
+more truly of the original conception as being obscure
+as well as intense;<a name="fa2e" id="fa2e" href="#ft2e"><span class="sp">2</span></a> from which it would seem to
+follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least
+more distinct than the original. He forgets, too,
+what is certainly the fact, that the poet in reshaping
+and correcting is able to revive in some degree the
+fire of the first impulse. And we know from himself
+that his greatest works cost him a severe labour not
+confined to the execution, while his manuscripts show
+plenty of various readings, if never so many as fifty-six
+in one line.</p>
+
+<p>Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his
+own practice in composition. He allowed the rush
+of his ideas to have its way, without pausing to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page161" id="page161"></a>161</span>
+complete a troublesome line or to find a word that
+did not come; and the next day (if ever) he filled
+up the gaps and smoothed the ragged edges. And
+the result answers to his theory. Keats was right
+in telling him that he might be more of an artist.
+His language, indeed, unlike Wordsworth&rsquo;s or
+Byron&rsquo;s, is, in his mature work, always that of a
+poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but
+he is frequently diffuse and obscure, and even in
+fine passages his constructions are sometimes trailing
+and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into
+the mould so vehemently that it overleaps the
+bounds and fails to find its way into all the
+little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly
+inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it
+is sometimes so inspired that it is impossible to
+wish it changed. It has the rapture of the mystic,
+and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly
+said of the hymn <i>Life of Life</i>: &lsquo;He seems to go
+up into the air and burst.&rsquo; It is true: and, if we
+are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not
+compare <i>Life of Life</i> with a great set piece of
+Homer or Shakespeare that illumines the whole
+sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling
+sight than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and
+it bursts at a height no other fire can reach.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to his praise of inspiration Shelley
+has some scattered remarks on another point which
+show the same spirit. He could not bear in poetic
+language any approach to artifice, or any sign that
+the writer had a theory or system of style. He
+thought Keats&rsquo;s earlier poems faulty in this respect,
+and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth
+in the following sentence from the Preface to the
+<i>Revolt of Islam</i>: &lsquo;Nor have I permitted any system
+relating to mere words to divert the attention of
+the reader, from whatever interest I may have
+succeeded in creating, to my own ingenuity in
+contriving,&mdash;to disgust him according to the rules
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page162" id="page162"></a>162</span>
+of criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in
+what appeared to me the most obvious and appropriate
+language. A person familiar with nature, and
+with the most celebrated productions of the human
+mind, can scarcely err in following the instinct,
+with respect to selection of language, produced by
+that familiarity.&rsquo;<a name="fa3e" id="fa3e" href="#ft3e"><span class="sp">3</span></a> His own poetic style certainly
+corresponds with his intention. It cannot give
+the kind of pleasure afforded by what may be
+called without disparagement a learned and artful
+style, such as Virgil&rsquo;s or Milton&rsquo;s; but, like the
+best writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is,
+with all its individuality, almost entirely free from
+mannerism and the other vices of self-consciousness,
+and appears to flow so directly from the thought
+that one is ashamed to admire it for itself. This
+is equally so whether the appropriate style is
+impassioned and highly figurative, or simple and
+even plain. It is indeed in the latter case that
+Shelley wins his greatest, because most difficult,
+triumph. In the dialogue part of <i>Julian and
+Maddalo</i> he has succeeded remarkably in keeping
+the style quite close to that of familiar though
+serious conversation, while making it nevertheless
+unmistakably poetic. And the <i>Cenci</i> is an example
+of a success less complete only because the problem
+was even harder. The ideal of the style of tragic
+drama in the nineteenth or twentieth century
+should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications
+the style of Shakespeare, but to do what
+Shakespeare did&mdash;to idealise, without deserting,
+the language of contemporary speech. Shelley in
+the <i>Cenci</i> seems to me to have come nearest to this
+ideal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page163" id="page163"></a>163</span></p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">3.</p>
+
+<p>So much for general exposition. If now we
+consider more closely what Shelley says of the
+substance of poetry, a question at once arises. He
+may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct
+expression of perfection in some form, and accordingly
+to imagine its effect as simply joy or delighted
+aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an
+expression; and we understand when we find him
+saying that Homer embodied the ideal perfection of
+his age in human character, and unveiled in Achilles,
+Hector, and Ulysses &lsquo;the truth and beauty of friendship,
+patriotism, and persevering devotion to an
+object.&rsquo; But poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly,
+perhaps not even mainly, of this kind. What is to
+be said, on Shelley&rsquo;s theory, of his own melancholy
+lyrics, those &lsquo;sweetest songs&rsquo; that &lsquo;tell of saddest
+thought&rsquo;? What of satire, of the epic of conflict
+and war, or of tragic exhibitions of violent and
+destructive passion? Does not his theory reflect
+the weakness of his own practice, his tendency to
+portray a thin and abstract ideal instead of interpreting
+the concrete detail of nature and life; and
+ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would
+consider poetry simply as a representation of fact?</p>
+
+<p>To this last question I should answer No.
+Shelley&rsquo;s theory, rightly understood, will take in,
+I think, everything really poetic. And to a considerable
+extent he himself shows the way to meet
+these doubts. He did not mean that the <i>immediate</i>
+subject of poetry must be perfection in some form.
+The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the
+ideal everything he touches. If so, he may write
+of absolutely anything so long as he <i>can</i> so colour
+it, and nothing would be excluded from his province
+except those things (if any such exist) in which no
+positive relation to the ideal, however indirect, can
+be shown or intimated. Thus to take the instance
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page164" id="page164"></a>164</span>
+of Shelley&rsquo;s melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament
+which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the
+evanescence of its visitations or the desolation of its
+absence, is indirectly an expression <i>of</i> the ideal; and
+so on his theory is the simplest song of unhappy
+love or the simplest dirge. Further, he himself
+observes that, though the joy of poetry is often
+unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the &lsquo;highest portions
+of our being is frequently connected with the pain
+of the inferior,&rsquo; that &lsquo;the pleasure that is in sorrow
+is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself,&rsquo; and
+that not sorrow only, but &lsquo;terror, anguish, despair
+itself, are often the chosen expressions of an
+approximation to the highest good.&rsquo; That, then,
+which appeals poetically to such painful emotions
+will again be an indirect portrayal of the ideal; and
+it is clear, I think, that this was how Shelley in the
+<i>Defence</i> regarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether
+narrative or dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect
+characters and its exhibition of conflict and wild
+passion. He had, it is true, another and an unsatisfactory
+way of explaining the presence of these
+things in poetry; and I will refer to this in a
+moment. But he tells us that the Athenian tragedies
+represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals)
+of passion and of power (not merely of virtue); and
+that in them we behold ourselves, &lsquo;under a thin
+disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but that
+ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to
+be the internal type of all that he loves, admires,
+and would become.&rsquo; He writes of Milton&rsquo;s Satan
+in somewhat the same strain. The Shakespearean
+tragedy from which he most often quotes is one
+in which evil holds the stage, <i>Macbeth</i>; and he was
+inclined to think <i>King Lear</i>, which certainly is no
+direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama
+in the world. Lastly, in the Preface to his own
+<i>Cenci</i> he truly says that, while the story is fearful
+and monstrous, &lsquo;the poetry which exists in these
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page165" id="page165"></a>165</span>
+tempestuous sufferings and crimes,&rsquo; if duly brought
+out, &lsquo;mitigates the pain of the contemplation of moral
+deformity&rsquo;: so that he regards Count Cenci himself
+as a <i>poetic</i> character, and therefore as in <i>some</i> sense
+an expression of the ideal. He does not further
+explain his meaning. Perhaps it was that the perfection
+which poetry is to exhibit includes, together
+with those qualities which win our immediate and
+entire approval or sympathy, others which are
+capable of becoming the instruments of evil. For
+these, the energy, power and passion of the soul,
+though they may be perverted, are in themselves
+elements of perfection; and so, even in their perversion
+or their combination with moral deformity,
+they retain their value, they are not simply ugly or
+horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly
+painful to the same love of the ideal which is directly
+satisfied by pictures of goodness and beauty. Now
+to these various considerations we shall wish to add
+others; but if we bear these in mind, I believe we
+shall find Shelley&rsquo;s theory wide enough, and must
+hold that the substance of poetry is never mere fact,
+but is always ideal, though its method of representation
+is sometimes more direct, sometimes more
+indirect.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his
+view quite clear to himself, or to hold to it consistently.
+We are left with the impression, not
+merely that he personally preferred the direct
+method (as he was, of course, entitled to do), but
+that his use of it shows a certain weakness, and
+also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to
+regard it as the primary and proper method, and
+to admit only by a reluctant after-thought the
+representation of imperfection. Let me point out
+some signs of this. He considered his own <i>Cenci</i>
+as a poem inferior in kind to his other main works,
+even as a sort of accommodation to the public.
+With all his modesty he knew what to think of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page166" id="page166"></a>166</span>
+neglected <i>Prometheus</i> and <i>Adonaďs</i>, but there is
+no sign that he, any more than the world, was
+aware that the character of Cenci was a creation
+without a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth
+century. His enthusiasm for some second-rate and
+third-rate Italian paintings, and his failure to understand
+Michael Angelo, seem to show the same
+tendency. He could not enjoy comedy: it seemed
+to him simply cruel: he did not perceive that to
+show the absurdity of the imperfect is to glorify the
+perfect. And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers
+in his view of the representation of heroic and tragic
+imperfection. We find in the Preface to <i>Prometheus
+Unbound</i> the strange notion that Prometheus is a
+more poetic character than Milton&rsquo;s Satan because
+he is free from Satan&rsquo;s imperfections, which are said
+to interfere with the interest. And in the <i>Defence</i>
+a similar error appears. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses,
+though they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits,
+imperfect. Why, then, did Homer make them so?
+Because, he seems to reply, Homer&rsquo;s contemporaries
+regarded their vices (<i>e.g.</i> revengefulness and deceitfulness)
+as virtues. Homer accordingly had to
+conceal in the costume of these vices the unspotted
+beauty that he himself imagined; and, like Homer,
+&lsquo;few poets of the highest class have chosen to
+exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked
+truth and splendour.&rsquo; Now, this idea, to say nothing
+of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer,
+and its probable baselessness in reference to most
+other poets, is quite inconsistent with that truer
+view of heroic and tragic character which was
+explained just now. It is an example of Shelley&rsquo;s
+tendency to abstract idealism or spurious Platonism.
+He is haunted by the fancy that if he could only
+get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete
+aloofness from the Many, from life with all its
+change, decay, struggle, sorrow and evil, he would
+have reached the true object of poetry: as if the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page167" id="page167"></a>167</span>
+whole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion,
+the sheer opposite of the infinite One, and in no
+way or degree its manifestation. Life, he says&mdash;</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,</p>
+<p>Stains the white radiance of eternity;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">but the other side, the fact that the many colours
+<i>are</i> the white light broken, he tends to forget, by
+no means always, but in one, and that not the least
+inspired, of his moods. This is the source of that
+thinness and shallowness of which his view of the
+world and of history is justly accused, a view in
+which all imperfect being is apt to figure as absolutely
+gratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure
+white or pitch black. Hence also his ideals of good,
+whether as a character or as a mode of life, resting
+as they do on abstraction from the mass of real
+existence, tend to lack body and individuality; and
+indeed, if the existence of the many is a mere
+calamity, clearly the next best thing to their disappearance
+is that they should all be exactly alike
+and have as little character as possible. But we
+must remember that Shelley&rsquo;s strength and weakness
+are closely allied, and it may be that the very
+abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that
+quivering intensity of aspiration towards it in which
+his poetry is unequalled. We must not go for this
+to Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe; and if we
+go for it to Dante, we shall find, indeed, a mind far
+vaster than Shelley&rsquo;s, but also that dualism of
+which we complain in him, and the description of
+a heaven which, equally with Shelley&rsquo;s regenerated
+earth, is no place for mere mortality. In any case,
+as we have seen, the weakness in his poetical practice,
+though it occasionally appears also as a defect
+in his poetical theory, forms no necessary part of it.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">4.</p>
+
+<p>I pass to his views on a last point. If the business
+of poetry is somehow to express ideal perfection, it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page168" id="page168"></a>168</span>
+may seem to follow that the poet should embody in
+his poems his beliefs about this perfection and the
+way to approach it, and should thus have a moral
+purpose and aim to be a teacher. And in regard
+to Shelley this conclusion seems the more natural
+because his own poetry allows us to see clearly some
+of his beliefs about morality and moral progress.
+Yet alike in his Prefaces and in the <i>Defence</i> he takes
+up most decidedly the position that the poet ought
+neither to affect a moral aim nor to express his own
+conceptions of right and wrong. &lsquo;Didactic poetry,&rsquo;
+he declares, &lsquo;is my abhorrence: nothing can be
+equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious
+and supererogatory in verse.&rsquo;<a name="fa4e" id="fa4e" href="#ft4e"><span class="sp">4</span></a> &lsquo;There was little
+danger,&rsquo; he tells us in the <i>Defence</i>, &lsquo;that Homer or
+any of the eternal poets&rsquo; should make a mistake in
+this matter; but &lsquo;those in whom the poetical faculty,
+though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan,
+Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral
+aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in
+exact proportion to the degree in which they compel
+us to advert to this purpose.&rsquo; These statements
+may appeal to us, but are they consistent with
+Shelley&rsquo;s main views of poetry? To answer this
+question we must observe what exactly it is that he
+means to condemn.</p>
+
+<p>Shelley was one of the few persons who can
+literally be said to <i>love</i> their kind. He held most
+strongly, too, that poetry does benefit men, and
+benefits them morally. The moral purpose, then,
+to which he objects cannot well be a poet&rsquo;s general
+purpose of doing moral as well as other good through
+his poetry&mdash;such a purpose, I mean, as he may
+cherish when he contemplates his life and his life&rsquo;s
+work. And, indeed, it seems obvious that nobody
+with any humanity or any sense can object to that,
+except through some intellectual confusion. Nor,
+secondly, does Shelley mean, I think, to condemn
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page169" id="page169"></a>169</span>
+even the writing of a particular poem with a view
+to a particular moral or practical effect; certainly,
+at least, if this was his meaning he was condemning
+some of his own poetry. Nor, thirdly, can he be
+referring to the portrayal of moral ideals; for that
+he regarded as one of the main functions of poetry,
+and in the very place where he says that didactic
+poetry is his abhorrence he also says, by way of
+contrast, that he has tried to familiarise the minds
+of his readers with beautiful idealisms of moral
+excellence. It appears, therefore, that what he is
+really attacking is the attempt to give, in the strict
+sense, moral <i>instruction</i>, to communicate doctrines,
+to offer argumentative statements of opinion on
+right and wrong, and more especially, I think, on
+controversial questions of the day. An example
+would be Wordsworth&rsquo;s discourse on education at
+the end of the <i>Excursion</i>, a discourse of which
+Shelley, we know, had a very low opinion. In
+short, his enemy is not the purpose of producing
+a moral effect, it is the appeal made for this purpose
+to the reasoning intellect. He says to the poet:
+By all means aim at bettering men; you are a man,
+and are bound to do so; but you are also a poet,
+and therefore your proper way of doing so is not
+by reasoning and preaching. His idea is of a
+piece with his general championship of imagination,
+and it is quite consistent with his main view of
+poetry.<a name="fa5e" id="fa5e" href="#ft5e"><span class="sp">5</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page170" id="page170"></a>170</span></p>
+
+<p>What, then, are the <i>grounds</i> of this position?
+They are not clearly set out, but we can trace
+several, and they are all solid. Reasoning on moral
+subjects, moral philosophy, was by no means &lsquo;tedious&rsquo;
+to Shelley; it seldom is to real poets. He loved it,
+and (outside his <i>Defence</i>) he rated its value very
+high.<a name="fa6e" id="fa6e" href="#ft6e"><span class="sp">6</span></a> But he thought it tedious and out of place
+in poetry, because it can be equally well expressed
+in &lsquo;unmeasured&rsquo; language&mdash;much better expressed,
+one may venture to add. You invent an art in
+order to effect by it a particular purpose which
+nothing else can effect as well. How foolish, then,
+to use this art for a purpose better served by something
+else! I know no answer to this argument,
+and its application is far wider than that given to
+it by Shelley. Secondly, Shelley remarks that a
+poet&rsquo;s own conceptions on moral subjects are usually
+those of his place and time, while the matter of his
+poem ought to be eternal, or, as we say, of permanent
+and universal interest. This, again, seems true, and
+has a wide application; and it holds good even
+when the poet, like Shelley himself, is in rebellion
+against orthodox moral opinion; for his heterodox
+opinions will equally show the marks of his place
+and time, and constitute a perishable element in his
+work. Doubtless no poetry can be without a perishable
+element; but that poetry has least of it which
+interprets life least through the medium of systematic
+and doctrinal ideas. The veil which time and place
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page171" id="page171"></a>171</span>
+have hung between Homer or Shakespeare and the
+general reader of to-day is almost transparent, while
+even a poetry so intense as that of Dante and Milton
+is impeded in its passage to him by systems which
+may be unfamiliar, and, if familiar, may be distasteful.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly&mdash;and this is Shelley&rsquo;s central argument&mdash;as
+poetry itself is directly due to imaginative inspiration
+and not to reasoning, so its true moral effect
+is produced through imagination and not through
+doctrine. Imagination is, for Shelley, &lsquo;the great
+instrument of moral good.&rsquo; The &lsquo;secret of morals
+is love.&rsquo; It is not &lsquo;for want of admirable doctrines
+that men hate and despise and censure and deceive
+and subjugate one another&rsquo;: it is for want of love.
+And love is &lsquo;a going out of our own nature, and an
+identification of ourselves with the beautiful which
+exists in thought, action or person not our own.&rsquo;
+&lsquo;A man,&rsquo; therefore, &lsquo;to be greatly good must
+imagine intensely and comprehensively.&rsquo; And
+poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by acting
+on its cause, imagination. It strengthens imagination
+as exercise strengthens a limb, and so it indirectly
+promotes morality. It also fills the imagination with
+beautiful impersonations of all that we should wish
+to be. But moral reasoning does not act upon the
+cause, it only analyses the effect; and the poet has
+no right to be content to analyse what he ought
+indirectly to create. Here, again, in his eagerness,
+Shelley cuts his antitheses too clean, but the defect
+is easily made good, and the main argument is
+sound.</p>
+
+<p>Limits of time will compel me to be guilty of the
+same fault in adding a consideration which is in the
+spirit of Shelley&rsquo;s. The chief moral effect claimed
+for poetry by Shelley is exerted, primarily, by
+imagination on the emotions; but there is another
+influence, exerted primarily through imagination on
+the understanding. Poetry is largely an interpretation
+of life; and, considering what life is, that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page172" id="page172"></a>172</span>
+must mean a moral interpretation. This, to have
+poetic value, must satisfy imagination; but we value
+it also because it gives us knowledge, a wider comprehension,
+a new insight into ourselves and the
+world.<a name="fa7e" id="fa7e" href="#ft7e"><span class="sp">7</span></a> Now, it may be held&mdash;and this view answers
+to a very general feeling among lovers of poetry
+now&mdash;that the most deep and original moral interpretation
+is not likely to be that which most shows
+a moral purpose or is most governed by reflective
+beliefs and opinions, and that as a rule we learn
+most from those who do not try to teach us, and
+whose opinions may even remain unknown to us:
+so that there is this weighty objection to the
+appearance of such purpose and opinions, that it
+tends to defeat its own intention. And the reason
+that I wish to suggest is this, that always we get
+most from the <i>genius</i> in a man of genius and not
+from the rest of him. Now, although poets often
+have unusual powers of reflective thought, the specific
+genius of a poet does not lie there, but in imagination.
+Therefore his deepest and most original interpretation
+is likely to come by the way of imagination.
+And the specific way of imagination is not to clothe
+in imagery consciously held ideas; it is to produce
+half-consciously a matter from which, when produced,
+the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry
+(I must exaggerate to be clear), psychologically
+considered, is not the <i>expression</i> of ideas or of a
+view of life; it is their discovery or creation, or
+rather both discovery and creation in one. The
+interpretation contained in <i>Hamlet</i> or <i>King Lear</i>
+was not brought ready-made to the old stories.
+What was brought to them was the huge substance
+of Shakespeare&rsquo;s imagination, in which all his
+experience and thought was latent; and this, dwelling
+and working on the stories with nothing but a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page173" id="page173"></a>173</span>
+dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion,
+gradually discovered or created in them a meaning
+and a mass of truth about life, which was brought
+to birth by the process of composition, but never
+preceded it in the shape of ideas, and probably
+never, even after it, took that shape to the poet&rsquo;s
+mind. And <i>this</i> is the interpretation which we find
+inexhaustibly instructive, because Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+<i>genius</i> is in it. On the other hand, however much
+from curiosity and personal feeling towards him we
+may wish to know his opinions and beliefs about
+morals or religion or his own poems or Queen
+Elizabeth, we have not really any reason to suppose
+that their value would prove extraordinary. And
+so, to apply this generally, the opinions, reasonings
+and beliefs of poets are seldom of the same quality
+as their purely imaginative product. Occasionally,
+as with Goethe, they are not far off it; but sometimes
+they are intense without being profound, and
+more eccentric than original; and often they are
+very sane and sound, but not very different from
+those of wise men without genius. And therefore
+poetry is not the place for them. For we want in
+poetry a moral interpretation, but not the interpretation
+we have already. As a rule the genuine
+artist&rsquo;s quarrel with &lsquo;morality&rsquo; in art is not really
+with morality, it is with a stereotyped or narrow
+morality; and when he refuses in his art to consider
+things from what he calls the moral point of view,
+his reasons are usually wrong, but his instinct is
+right.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry itself confirms on the whole this contention,
+though doubtless in these last centuries a great poet&rsquo;s
+work will usually reveal more of conscious reflection
+than once it did. Homer and Shakespeare show no
+moral aim and no system of opinion. Milton was
+far from justifying the ways of God to men by the
+argumentation he put into divine and angelic lips;
+his truer moral insight is in the creations of his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page174" id="page174"></a>174</span>
+genius; for instance, in the character of Satan or the
+picture of the glorious humanity of Adam and Eve.
+Goethe himself could never have told the world
+what he was going to express in the First Part of
+<i>Faust</i>: the poem told <i>him</i>, and it is one of the
+world&rsquo;s greatest. He knew too well what he was
+going to express in the Second Part, and with all
+its wisdom and beauty it is scarcely a great poem.
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s original message was delivered, not
+when he was a Godwinian semi-atheist, nor when
+he had subsided upon orthodoxy, but when his
+imagination, with a few hints from Coleridge, was
+creating a kind of natural religion; and this religion
+itself is more profoundly expressed in his descriptions
+of his experience than in his attempts to
+formulate it. The moral virtue of Tennyson is in
+poems like <i>Ulysses</i> and parts of <i>In Memoriam</i>,
+where sorrow and the consciousness of a deathless
+affection or an unquenchable desire for experience
+forced an utterance; but when in the <i>Idylls</i> he tried
+to found a great poem on explicit ideas about the
+soul and the ravages wrought in it by lawless
+passion, he succeeded but partially, because these
+ideas, however sound, were no product of his genius.
+And so the moral virtue of Shelley&rsquo;s poetry lay, not
+in his doctrines about the past and future of man,
+but in an intuition, which was the substance of his
+soul, of the unique value of love. In the end,
+for him, the truest name of that perfection called
+Intellectual Beauty, Liberty, Spirit of Nature, is
+Love. Whatever in the world has any worth is an
+expression of Love. Love sometimes talks. Love
+talking musically is Poetry.</p>
+
+<p class="f80">1904.</p>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1e" id="ft1e" href="#fa1e"><span class="fn">1</span></a> Statements equally emphatic on this subject may be found in a
+passage quoted by Mrs. Shelley in a footnote to Shelley&rsquo;s letter to
+John Gisborne, Nov. 16, 1819 (Letter XXX. in Mrs. Shelley&rsquo;s edition).
+Cf. also Letter XXXIII. to Leigh Hunt, Nov. 1819.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2e" id="ft2e" href="#fa2e"><span class="fn">2</span></a> I cannot find the passage or passages to which I referred in
+making this statement, and therefore I do not vouch for its accuracy.
+Cf. from the fragment <i>Fiordispina</i>,</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The ardours of a vision which obscure</p>
+<p>The very idol of its portraiture.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><a name="ft3e" id="ft3e" href="#fa3e"><span class="fn">3</span></a> Cf. from the Preface to the <i>Cenci</i>: &lsquo;I entirely agree with those
+modern critics who assert that, in order to move men to true sympathy,
+we must use the familiar language of men.... But it must be the
+real language of men in general, and not that of any particular class
+to whose society the writer happens to belong.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4e" id="ft4e" href="#fa4e"><span class="fn">4</span></a> Preface to <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5e" id="ft5e" href="#fa5e"><span class="fn">5</span></a> I do not discuss the adequacy of Shelley&rsquo;s position, or assert that
+he held it quite clearly or consistently. In support of my interpretation,
+of it I may refer to the Preface to the <i>Cenci</i>. There he repudiates the
+idea of making the dramatic exhibition of the story &lsquo;subservient to
+what is vulgarly called a moral purpose,&rsquo; and, as the context shows,
+he identifies such a treatment of the story with the &lsquo;enforcement&rsquo; of
+a &lsquo;dogma.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>This passage has a further interest. The dogma which Shelley
+would not enforce in his tragedy was that &lsquo;no person can truly be
+dishonoured by the act of another, and the fit return to make to the
+most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution
+to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love&rsquo;; and
+accordingly he held that &lsquo;if Beatrice had thought in this manner, she
+would have been wiser and better.&rsquo; How inexcusable then is the not
+uncommon criticism on the <i>Cenci</i> that he represents Beatrice as a
+perfect character and justifies her murder of &lsquo;the injurer.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Shelley&rsquo;s position in the <i>Defence</i>, it may be added, is in total
+disagreement with his youthful doctrine and practice. In 1811 he
+wrote to Miss Hitchener, &lsquo;My opinion is that all poetical beauty ought
+to be subordinate to the inculcated moral,&rsquo; and a large part of <i>Queen
+Mab</i> is frankly didactic. Even there, however, he reserved most of
+the formal instruction for the Notes, perceiving that &lsquo;a poem very
+didactic is ... very stupid.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6e" id="ft6e" href="#fa6e"><span class="fn">6</span></a> &lsquo;I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science,&rsquo;
+he says in a letter to Peacock, Jan. 1819.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7e" id="ft7e" href="#fa7e"><span class="fn">7</span></a> And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does it imaginatively,
+the more does it satisfy imagination, and the greater is its
+<i>poetic</i> value.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page175" id="page175"></a>175</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">THE LONG POEM<br />
+IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page176" id="page176"></a>176<br />177</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2"><span class="chap2">THE LONG POEM<br />
+IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH</span><a name="fa1f" id="fa1f" href="#ft1f"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">The</span> poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all
+agreed, is one of the glories of our literature. It is
+surpassed, many would add, by the poetry of no
+other period except the Elizabethan. But it has
+obvious flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming
+more and more distinctly conscious now; and, apart
+from these definite defects, it also leaves with us,
+when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment.
+It is great, we say to ourselves, but why is
+it not greater still? It shows a wonderful abundance
+of genius: why does it not show an equal
+accomplishment?</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">1.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew Arnold, in his essay on <i>The Function
+of Criticism at the Present Time</i>, gave an answer
+to this question. &lsquo;It has long seemed to me,&rsquo; he
+wrote, &lsquo;that the burst of creative activity in our
+literature, through the first quarter of this century,
+had about it, in fact, something premature.... And
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page178" id="page178"></a>178</span>
+this prematureness comes from its having proceeded
+without having its proper data, without sufficient
+materials to work with. In other words, the English
+poetry of the first quarter of this century, with
+plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not
+know enough. This makes Byron so empty of
+matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even,
+profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness
+and in variety.&rsquo; The statement that this poetry
+&lsquo;did not know enough&rsquo; means, of course, for Arnold,
+not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of a
+kind, but that it lacked &lsquo;criticism.&rsquo; And this means
+that it did not live and move freely in an atmosphere
+of the best available ideas, of ideas gained by
+a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology,
+philosophy, history, science, to see things as they
+are. In such an atmosphere Goethe lived. There
+was not indeed in Goethe&rsquo;s Germany, nor was there
+in the England of our poets, the &lsquo;national glow
+of life and thought&rsquo; that prevailed in the Athens of
+Pericles or the England of Elizabeth. That happiest
+atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both countries.
+But there was for Goethe &lsquo;a sort of equivalent for it
+in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a
+large body of Germans,&rsquo; a culture produced by a
+many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined
+critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.</p>
+
+<p>Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it
+may not have had all the importance he ascribes to
+it, but considerable importance it must have had.
+And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt.
+One of the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+age is the very unusual superiority of the
+imaginative literature to the scientific. I mean by
+the &lsquo;scientific&rsquo; literature that of philosophy, theology,
+history, politics, economics, not only that of the
+sciences of Nature, which for our present purpose
+are perhaps the least important. In this kind of
+literature Wordsworth&rsquo;s age has hardly an author
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page179" id="page179"></a>179</span>
+to show who could for a moment be placed
+on a level with some five of the poets, with
+the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the
+poetic critics Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It
+has no writers to compare with Bacon, Newton,
+Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the
+time of Paley, Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford,
+Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher and theologian.
+These are names worthy of all respect, but they
+represent a literature quite definitely of the second
+rank. And this great disproportion between the
+two kinds of literature, we must observe, is a
+peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the
+Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it.
+The one kind was doubtless superior to the
+other in Shakespeare&rsquo;s time, possibly even in
+Milton&rsquo;s; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and
+Clarendon and Hobbes are not separated from the
+best poets of their day by any startling difference
+of quality;<a name="fa2f" id="fa2f" href="#ft2f"><span class="sp">2</span></a> while in the later periods, right
+down to the age of Wordsworth, the scientific
+literature quite holds its own, to say no more, with
+the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+own time is there that gap between the two
+that we find in England. In respect of genius the
+philosophers, for example, though none of them was
+the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all
+inferior to the poets. The case of England in
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s age is anomalous.</p>
+
+<p>This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must
+have been influential. It confirms Arnold&rsquo;s view
+that the intellectual atmosphere of the time was not
+of the best. If we think of the periodical literature&mdash;of
+the <i>Quarterly</i> and <i>Edinburgh</i> and <i>Blackwood</i>&mdash;we
+shall be still more inclined to assent to that
+view. And when we turn to the poets themselves,
+and especially to their prose writings, letters, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page180" id="page180"></a>180</span>
+recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of
+Hazlitt, of Lamb, and of Coleridge, we cannot
+reject it. Assuredly we read with admiration, and
+the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance&mdash;in
+greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry
+and criticism of Germany, if Goethe is excepted.
+But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the superiority
+to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the
+openness to ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us
+when we read Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, we
+do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four
+either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the
+doctrines of Godwin? Could any of them have seen
+in the French Revolution no more significance than
+Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are
+the attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly
+all our poets towards the Christian religion! Could
+anything be more <i>borné</i> than Coleridge&rsquo;s professed
+reason for not translating <i>Faust</i>?<a name="fa3f" id="fa3f" href="#ft3f"><span class="sp">3</span></a> Is it possible
+that a German poet with the genius of Byron or
+Wordsworth could have inhabited a mental world
+so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened
+to us by the brilliant letters of the former, or could
+have sunk, like the latter, to suggesting that the
+cholera was a divine condemnation of Catholic
+Emancipation and the Reform Bill?</p>
+
+<p>But if we accept Arnold&rsquo;s statement as to the
+intellectual atmosphere of the poetry of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+time, a question will remain. Was he right
+in regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even
+as the chief, cause of the fact (if it is one) that the
+poetry does not fully correspond in greatness with
+the genius of the poets? And before we come to
+this question we must put another. Is the fact
+really as it has just been stated? I do not think
+so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it
+seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems.
+Reviewing these in memory, and asking ourselves
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page181" id="page181"></a>181</span>
+how many we can unreservedly call &lsquo;great,&rsquo; we
+hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in
+some of them, fine poetry in many; but that does
+not make a great whole. Which of them is great
+as a whole? Not the <i>Prelude</i> or the <i>Excursion</i>,
+still less <i>Endymion</i> or <i>The Revolt of Islam</i> or <i>Childe
+Harold</i>, which hardly pretends to unity. <i>Christabel</i>,
+the wonderful fragment, is a fragment; so is
+<i>Hyperion</i>; <i>Don Juan</i>, also unfinished, becomes
+more discursive the further it proceeds, and in
+spirit is nowhere great. All the principal poets
+wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and
+some readers think that in <i>Manfred</i>, and still more
+certainly in <i>Cain</i>, we have great poems, while others
+think this of <i>Prometheus Unbound</i> and <i>The Cenci</i>.
+But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our
+judgment quite confident, and can we say that any
+of them <i>satisfy</i> us, like some works of earlier times?
+We are thus satisfied, it seems to me, only when we
+come to poems of smaller dimensions, like <i>The
+Ancient Mariner</i>, or <i>The Eve of Saint Agnes</i>, or
+<i>Adonaďs</i>, or <i>The Vision of Judgment</i>, or when we
+read the lyrics. To save time I will confine myself
+to the latter.</p>
+
+<p>Within this sphere we have no longer that
+impression of genius which fails to reach full
+accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of
+course, of Wordsworth&rsquo;s age is the equal of Shakespeare
+or of Milton; and there are certain qualities,
+too, of lyrical verse in which the times of Shakespeare
+and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth.
+But if we take the better part of the lyrical
+poetry of these three periods in the mass, or again
+in a representative selection, it will not be the latest
+period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In
+the original edition of the <i>Golden Treasury</i>, Book I.
+(Wyatt to Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book
+II. (the rest of the seventeenth century) sixty-five;
+Book IV., which covers the very much shorter
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page182" id="page182"></a>182</span>
+period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a
+hundred and forty. &lsquo;Book I.,&rsquo; perhaps most of us
+would say, &lsquo;should be longer, and Book IV. a good
+deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in
+it, and Wordsworth is over-represented. And the
+Elizabethan poems are mostly quite short, while the
+Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the
+longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded
+the old ballads, but admitted poems like Coleridge&rsquo;s
+<i>Love</i> and Wordsworth&rsquo;s <i>Ruth</i> (seven whole pages).
+And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.&rsquo;
+No; but still quantity must count for something,
+and the <i>Golden Treasury</i> is a volume excellent in
+selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think,
+leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth
+was our greatest period in lyrical poetry. And if
+Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book IV.,
+this impression would not be materially altered; it
+might even be deepened. For the change would
+force into notice the comparative monotony of the
+themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely
+wider range of the thought and emotion that attain
+expression in the later. It might also convince us
+that, on the whole, this more varied material is
+treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on
+this point it is difficult to be sure, since we recognise
+what may be called the conventions of an earlier
+age, and are perhaps a little blind to those of a time
+near our own.</p>
+
+<p>Now the eminence of Wordsworth&rsquo;s age in lyrical
+poetry, even if it is not also a pre-eminence, is a
+significant fact. It may mean that the whole poetic
+spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this
+may indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment
+which mingles with our admiration of
+the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to
+two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of
+Campbell are already dead; he survives only in
+lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite of fine
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page183" id="page183"></a>183</span>
+passages (and the battle in <i>Marmion</i> is in certain
+qualities superior to anything else of the time)
+Scott&rsquo;s longer poems cannot be classed with the
+best contemporary poetry; but in some of his
+ballads and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again,
+much of the most famous narrative poetry is semi-lyrical
+in form, as a moment&rsquo;s thought of Scott,
+Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for
+instance, several of Byron&rsquo;s tales, or Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+<i>White Doe of Rylstone</i>) is strongly tinged with the
+lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It
+is an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than
+in scenes, events, actions, which express and re-act
+on emotions, thoughts, will. It would hardly be
+going too far to say that in the most characteristic
+narrative poetry the balance of outward and inward
+is rarely attained.<a name="fa4f" id="fa4f" href="#ft4f"><span class="sp">4</span></a> (3) The same tendencies are
+visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron&rsquo;s
+regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived,
+are almost forgotten; but <i>Heaven and Earth</i>,
+which is still alive, is largely composed of lyrics,
+and the first two acts of <i>Manfred</i> are full of them.
+<i>Prometheus Unbound</i> is called &lsquo;a lyrical drama.&rsquo;
+Though it has some very fine and some very
+beautiful blank verse passages (usually undramatic),
+its lyrics are its glory; and this is even
+more the case with <i>Hellas</i>. It would be untrue to
+say that the comparative failure of most of the
+dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical
+spirit, but many of them show it. (4) The strength
+of this spirit may be illustrated lastly by a curious
+fact. The ode is one of the longest and most
+ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page184" id="page184"></a>184</span>
+famous poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats
+are odes. But the greatest of the lyrists, who wrote
+the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West
+Wind, found the limits even of the ode too narrow
+for his &lsquo;flight of fire.&rsquo; If <i>Lycidas</i> and <i>L&rsquo;Allegro</i>
+and Spenser&rsquo;s <i>Epithalamion</i> are lyrical poems, and
+if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing
+shall be called lyrical which exceeds a certain
+length, <i>Adonaďs</i> will be a lyrical elegy in fifty-five
+Spenserian stanzas, and the <i>Lines written among
+the Euganean Hills</i> and <i>Epipsychidion</i> will be lyrics
+consisting respectively of 370 and 600 lines.</p>
+
+<p>It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical
+poem may be called short as compared with a narrative
+or drama. It is usual, further, to say that
+lyrical poetry is &lsquo;subjective,&rsquo; since, instead of telling
+or representing a story of people, actions, and
+events, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of
+the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous and
+in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to
+have a basis in fact. It may be suggested, then,
+that the excellence of the lyrical poetry of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+time, and the imperfection of the long
+narratives and dramas, may have a common origin.
+Just as it was most natural to Homer or to Shakespeare
+to express the imaginative substance of
+his mind in the &lsquo;objective&rsquo; shape of a world of
+persons and actions ostensibly severed from his
+own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some
+reason or reasons, it was most natural to the best
+poets of this later time to express that substance
+in the shape of impassioned reflections, aspirations,
+prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of
+peace. The matter of these might, in another
+sense of the word, be &lsquo;objective&rsquo; enough, a matter
+of general human interest, not personal in any exclusive
+way; but it appeared in the form of the poet&rsquo;s
+thought and feeling. Just because he most easily
+expressed it thus, he succeeded less completely
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page185" id="page185"></a>185</span>
+when he attempted the more objective form of
+utterance; and for the same reason it was especially
+important that he should be surrounded and penetrated
+by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal
+&lsquo;criticism.&rsquo; For he not only lived among ideas; he
+expressed ideas, and expressed them <i>as</i> ideas.</p>
+
+<p>These suggestions seem to be supported by
+other phenomena of the poetry. The &lsquo;subjective&rsquo;
+spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer
+poems. This is obvious when it can plausibly
+be said, as in Byron&rsquo;s case, that the poet&rsquo;s one
+hero is himself. It appears in another way when
+the poem, through its story or stories, displays the
+poet&rsquo;s favourite ideas and beliefs. The <i>Excursion</i>
+does this; most of Shelley&rsquo;s longer poems do it.
+And the strength of this tendency may be seen in
+an apparent contradiction. One of the marks of the
+Romantic Revival is a disposition to substitute the
+more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and
+drama for the eighteenth century form of satiric
+or so-called didactic reflection. Yet most of the
+greater poets, especially in their characteristic beginnings,
+show a strong tendency to reflective verse;
+Coleridge, for example, in <i>Religious Musings</i>, Byron
+in the first two cantos of <i>Childe Harold</i>, Shelley in
+<i>Queen Mab</i>, and Keats in <i>Sleep and Poetry</i>. These
+are not, like the <i>Pleasures of Memory</i> and <i>Pleasures
+of Hope</i>, continuations of the traditional style; they
+are thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective.
+Scott, indeed, goes straight to the objective
+forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was little
+affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time.
+Those who were deeply affected by it, directly or
+indirectly, had their minds full of theoretic ideas.
+They were groping after, or were already inflamed
+by, some explicit view of life, and of life seen in
+relation to an ideal which it revealed or contradicted.
+And this view of life, at least at first,
+pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page186" id="page186"></a>186</span>
+shape, or became a sort of soul or second meaning
+within those appearances of nature, or actions of
+men, or figures and fantasies of youthful imagination,
+which formed the ostensible subject of the
+poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Considered in this light, the following facts become
+very significant. Wordsworth, now about
+thirty, and the author of many characteristic lyrics,
+on returning from Germany and settling at Grasmere,
+begins to meditate a long poem. He tells us
+in the <i>Prelude</i> of the subjects he thought of. They
+are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories
+of action, not at all theoretical.<a name="fa5f" id="fa5f" href="#ft5f"><span class="sp">5</span></a> But it will not
+do: his mind &lsquo;turns recreant to her task.&rsquo; He has
+another hope, a &lsquo;favourite aspiration&rsquo; towards &lsquo;a
+philosophic song of Truth.&rsquo; But even this will
+not do; it is premature; even Truth (I venture to
+suggest) is not inward enough. He must first tell
+the story of his own mind: the subject of his long
+poem must be Poetry itself. He tells this story, to
+our great gain, in the <i>Prelude</i>; and it is the story
+of the steps by which he came to see reality, Nature
+and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of
+an all-embracing and perfect spiritual life or Being.
+Not till this is done can he proceed to the <i>Excursion</i>,
+which, together with much reflection and even
+argumentation, contains pictures of particular men.</p>
+
+<p>&lsquo;This for our greatest&rsquo;; but it is not his history
+alone. The first longer poem of Shelley which
+can be called mature was <i>Alastor</i>. And what is
+its subject? The subject of the <i>Prelude</i>; the
+story of a Poet&rsquo;s soul, and of the effect on it
+of the revelation of its ideal. The first long
+poem of Keats was <i>Endymion</i>. The tendency to
+the concrete was strong in Keats; he has been
+called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of due
+time; and <i>Endymion</i>, like <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, is a
+mythological story. But it is by no means that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page187" id="page187"></a>187</span>
+alone. The infection of his time was in him. The
+further subject of <i>Endymion</i> is again the subject of the
+<i>Prelude</i>, the story of a poet&rsquo;s soul smitten by love of
+its ideal, the Principle of Beauty, and striving for
+union with it, for the &lsquo;wedding&rsquo; of the mind of man
+&lsquo;with this goodly universe in love and holy passion.&rsquo;
+What, again, is the subject of <i>Epipsychidion</i>? The
+same.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>There was a Being whom my spirit oft</p>
+<p>Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft</p>
+<p>In the clear golden prime of my youth&rsquo;s dawn.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The poem is all about the search of the poet&rsquo;s soul
+for this ideal Being. And the <i>Sensitive Plant</i> is
+this soul, and the Lady of the Garden this Being,
+And <i>Prince Athanase</i> is the same soul, and if the
+poem had been continued the Being would soon
+have appeared. Is it not an astonishing proof of
+Shelley&rsquo;s powers that the <i>Cenci</i> was ever written?
+Shelley, when he died, had half escaped&mdash;Keats,
+some time before he died, had quite escaped&mdash;from
+that bewitching inward world of the poet&rsquo;s soul
+and its shadowy adventures. Could that well be
+the world of what we call emphatically a &lsquo;great
+poem&rsquo;?</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">2.</p>
+
+<p>Let us review for a moment the course of our
+discussion. I have been suggesting that, if our
+pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+age is tinged with disappointment, this does not
+extend to the lyrical poetry; that the lyrical spirit,
+or, more generally, an inward or subjective tendency,
+shows itself in many of the longer works;
+and that their imperfection is partly due to it.
+Now, let me suggest that the atmosphere of adequate
+&lsquo;criticism&rsquo; which Arnold misses in the age
+and its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced
+favourably even the lyrics, and much more
+the larger works, could hardly have diminished the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page188" id="page188"></a>188</span>
+force of that tendency, and that the main difficulty
+lay <i>there</i>. But, before developing this idea further,
+I propose to leave for a time the English poetry of
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s age, to look beyond it, and to ask
+certain questions.</p>
+
+<p>First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of
+&lsquo;criticism&rsquo; was more favourable in Germany than in
+England, how many long poems were produced in
+Germany that we can call without hesitation or
+qualification &lsquo;great&rsquo;? Were <i>any</i> produced except
+by Goethe? And, if we admit (as I gladly do) that
+he produced several, was not the <i>main</i> reason simply
+that he was born with more poetic genius than any
+of his contemporaries, just as Dante and Shakespeare
+and Milton were? And again, with this native
+genius and his long laborious life, did he produce
+anything like as many great poems as might have
+been expected? And, if not, why not? I do not
+suggest that his general culture, so superior to that
+of his English contemporaries, did not help him;
+but are we sure that it did not also hinder him?
+And is it not also significant that, in spite of his
+love of new ideas, he felt an instinctive dread of the
+influence of philosophy, in the strict sense, as of
+something dangerous to the poetic modes of vision
+and creation?</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, if we look beyond the first quarter of
+the century to the second and third, do we find in
+Europe a large number of those emphatically great
+poems, solid coherent structures of concrete imagination?
+It seems more than doubtful. To confine
+ourselves to English examples, is it not the case
+that Tennyson is primarily a lyrical poet, that the
+best of his longer poems, <i>Maud</i> and <i>In Memoriam</i>,
+are lyrical, and that the most ambitious, the narrative
+<i>Idylls of the King</i>, is, as a whole, not great?
+Is the <i>Ring and the Book</i>, however fine in parts, a
+great whole, or comparable as a whole with <i>Andrea
+del Sarto</i> or <i>Rabbi ben Ezra</i>? And is any one of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page189" id="page189"></a>189</span>
+Browning&rsquo;s dramas a great play? What these questions
+suggest is that, while the difficulty about the
+long poem affects in an extreme degree the age of
+Wordsworth, it affects in some degree the time that
+follows. Its beginnings, too, are traceable before
+the nineteenth century. In fact it is connected
+with essential characteristics of modern poetry and
+art; and these characteristics are connected with
+the nature of modern life, and the position of the
+artist within that life. I wish to touch on this huge
+subject before returning to the age of Wordsworth.</p>
+
+<p>Art, we may say, has become free, and, in a sense,
+universal. The poet is no longer the minstrel of
+king or nobles, nor even of a city or country.
+Literature, as Goethe foretold, becomes increasingly
+European, and more than European; and the poet,
+however national, is a citizen of the Republic of
+Letters. No class of subject, again, has any prerogative
+claim on him. Whatever, in any time or
+place, is human, whatever has been conceived as
+divine, whatever belongs even to external nature, he
+may choose, as it suits his bent or offers a promising
+material. The world is all before him; and it is a
+world which the increase of knowledge has made
+immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has
+asserted its independence. Its public exhibition
+must conform to the law; but otherwise it neither
+asks the approval nor submits to the control of any
+outward authority; and it is the handmaid of nothing.
+It claims a value for itself, as an expression of mind
+co-ordinate with other expressions, theoretic and
+practical; satisfying a need and serving a purpose
+that none of them can fulfil; subject only, as they too
+are subject, to the unity of human nature and human
+good. Finally, in respect of the methods of his art
+the poet claims and enjoys the same freedom. The
+practice of the past, the &lsquo;rules&rsquo; of the past (if they
+existed or exist), are without authority for him. It
+is improbable beforehand that a violent breach with
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page190" id="page190"></a>190</span>
+them will lead him to a real advance, just as it is
+improbable that such a breach with the morals or
+the science of his day will do so. But there is no
+certainty beforehand; and if he fails, he expects
+blame not because he innovates, but because he has
+failed by innovating.</p>
+
+<p>The freedom of modern art, and the universality
+of its field, are great things, and the value of the
+second is easily seen in the extraordinary variety of
+subject-matter in the longer poems of the nineteenth
+century. But in candid minds most recitals of our
+modern advantages are followed by a melancholy
+sense of our feebleness in using them. And so in
+some degree it is here. The unrivalled opportunities
+fail to produce unrivalled works. And we can see
+that the deepest cause of this is not a want of native
+genius or of acquired skill or even of conscientious
+labour, but the fact that the opportunities themselves
+bring danger and difficulty. The poet who knows
+everything and may write about anything has, after
+all, a hard task. Things must have been easier, it
+seems to us, for an artist whose choice, if his aim
+was high, was restricted to a cycle of ideas and
+stories, mythological, legendary, or historical, or all
+together, concerning beings divine, daemonic,
+angelic, or heroic. His matter, as it existed in the
+general imagination, was already highly poetical.
+If not created by imagination, it was shaped or
+coloured by it; a world not of bodiless thoughts and
+emotions, but of scenes, figures, actions, and events.
+For the most part he lived in unity with it; it
+appealed to his own religious and moral feelings and
+beliefs, sometimes to his patriotic feelings; and he
+wrote, painted, or carved, for people who shared
+with him both his material and his attitude towards
+it. It belonged usually to the past, but he did not
+view it over a great gulf of time with the eye of a
+scientific historian. If he wished to robe it in the
+vesture of the life around him, he was checked by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page191" id="page191"></a>191</span>
+no scruples as to truth; and the life around him can
+seldom, we think, have appeared to him repulsively
+prosaic. Broad statements like these require much
+qualification; but, when it is supplied, they may still
+describe periods in which perhaps most of the
+greatest architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry
+has come into being.</p>
+
+<p>How different the position of the artist has now
+become we see at a glance, and I confine myself to
+some points which specially concern the difficulty of
+the long poem. If a poem is to be anything like
+great it must, in one sense, be concerned with the
+present. Whatever its &lsquo;subject&rsquo; may be, it must
+express something living in the mind from which it
+comes and the minds to which it goes. Wherever
+its body is, its soul must be here and now. What
+subject, then, in the measureless field of choice, is the
+poet to select and fashion into a body? The outward
+life around him, as he and his critics so often lament,
+appears uniform, ugly, and rationally regulated, a
+world of trousers, machinery and policemen. Law&mdash;the
+rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable
+will&mdash;is a vast achievement and priceless
+possession; but it is not favourable to striking
+events or individual actions on the grand scale.
+Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there
+is doubtless an infinity of poetic matter; but this is
+inward, or it fails to appear in impressive forms;
+and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the
+monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel,
+but hardly the long poem or high tragedy. Even
+war, for reasons not hard to find, is no longer the
+subject that it was.</p>
+
+<p>But when the poet turns to a subject distant in
+place or time or both, new troubles await him. If
+he aims at complete truth to time and place the soul
+of the present will hardly come into his work. Yet
+he lives in an age of history and science, and these
+hamper as well as help him. The difficulty is not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page192" id="page192"></a>192</span>
+that he is bound to historical or scientific truth, for
+in principle, I venture to say, he is free. If he <i>can</i>
+satisfy imagination by violating them he is justified.
+It is no function of his to attain or propagate them;
+and a critic who objected, say, to the First Part of
+<i>Faust</i> on the ground that it puts a modern spirit
+into the legend, would rightly be laughed at. It is
+its triumph to do so and yet to succeed. But then
+success is exceedingly difficult. For the poet lives
+in a time when the violation of truth is <i>prima facie</i>
+felt to be a fault, something that does require justification
+by the result. Further, he has himself to
+start from a clear consciousness of difference between
+the present and the past, the spirit and the story,
+and has to produce on this basis a harmony of spirit
+and story. And again, living in an age of analytical
+thought, he is likely&mdash;all the more likely, if he has
+much greatness of mind&mdash;to be keenly interested in
+ideas; and so he is exposed to the temptation of
+using as the spirit of the old story some highly
+reflective idea&mdash;an idea not only historically alien to
+his material, but perhaps not very poetical, or again
+not very deep, because it belongs to him rather as
+philosopher than poet, while his genius is that of a
+poet.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of some of these difficulties might
+readily be shown in the Second Part of <i>Faust</i> or in
+<i>Prometheus Unbound</i>, especially where we perceive
+in a figure or action some symbolical meaning, but
+find this meaning deficient in interest or poetic truth,
+or are vexed by the doubt how far it ought to be
+pursued.<a name="fa6f" id="fa6f" href="#ft6f"><span class="sp">6</span></a> But the matter is more easily illustrated
+by the partial failure of the <i>Idylls of the King</i>. We
+have no right to condemn beforehand an attempt
+to modernise the Arthurian legends. Tennyson&rsquo;s
+treatment of them, even his outrage on the story
+of Tristram, might conceivably have been justified
+by the result. And, indeed, in the <i>Holy Grail</i> and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page193" id="page193"></a>193</span>
+the <i>Passing of Arthur</i> his treatment, to my mind,
+was more than justified. But, in spite of countless
+beauties, the total result of the <i>Idylls</i> was disappointing,
+not merely from the defects of this or that poem,
+but because the old unity of spirit and story was
+broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old
+nor complete in itself. For the main semi-allegorical
+idea, having already the disadvantage of not being
+poetic in its origin, was, as a reflective idea, by no
+means profound, and it led to such inconsistency in
+the very centre of the story as the imagination
+refuses to accept. Tennyson&rsquo;s Lancelot might have
+wronged the Arthur who is merely a blameless king
+and represents Conscience; but Tennyson&rsquo;s Lancelot
+would much rather have killed himself than be
+systematically treacherous to the friend and lover-husband
+who appears in <i>Guinevere</i>.<a name="fa7f" id="fa7f" href="#ft7f"><span class="sp">7</span></a></p>
+
+<p>These difficulties belong in some measure to the
+whole modern time&mdash;the whole time that begins
+with the Renaissance; but they become so much
+clearer and so much more serious with the advance
+of knowledge and criticism, that in speaking of them
+I have been referring specially to the last century.
+There are other difficulties not so closely connected
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page194" id="page194"></a>194</span>
+with that advance, and I will venture some very
+tentative remarks on one of these, which also has
+increased with time. It has to do with the kind of
+life commonly lived by our poets. Is there not some
+significance in the fact that the most famous of our
+narrative poets were all three, in their various ways
+and degrees, public men, or in contact with great
+affairs; and that poets in earlier times no less must
+usually have seen something at first hand of adventure,
+political struggles, or war; whereas poets now,
+for the most part, live wholly private lives, and, like
+the majority of their readers, are acquainted only
+by report with anything of the kind? If Chaucer
+had never been at Court, or seen service in the
+French war, or gone on embassies abroad; if
+Spenser had not known Sidney and Raleigh and
+been secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland; if Milton
+had spent his whole life at Horton; would it have
+made no difference to their poetry? Again, if we turn
+to the drama and ask why the numerous tragedies
+of the nineteenth century poets so rarely satisfy,
+what is the answer? There are many reasons, and
+among them the poet&rsquo;s ignorance of the stage will
+doubtless count for much; but must we not also
+consider that he scarcely ever saw anything resembling
+the things he tried to portray? When we study
+the history of the time in which the Elizabethan
+dramas were composed, when we examine the portraits
+of the famous men, or read such a book as the
+autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we
+realise that the violent actions and passions which
+the dramatist depicted were like the things he saw.
+Whatever Shakespeare&rsquo;s own disposition was, he
+lived among these men, jested with the fellow-actor
+who had borne arms abroad and killed his man in a
+duel at home, conversed with nobles whose heads
+perhaps were no great way from the block. But the
+poet who strolls about the lanes or plods the London
+streets with an umbrella for a sword, and who has
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page195" id="page195"></a>195</span>
+probably never seen a violent deed in his life, or
+for a moment really longed to kill so much as a
+critic, how is he to paint the vengeance of Hamlet
+or the frenzy of Macbeth, and not merely to thrill
+you with the emotions of his actors but to make
+them <i>do</i> things that take your imagination by the
+throat?</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">3.</p>
+
+<p>Assuming, now, that (even if this last idea is
+doubtful or unimportant) there is some truth in the
+suggestion that the difficulties of the long poem
+arise largely from the conditions described, and
+especially from the nature of the intellectual atmosphere
+which the modern poet breathes, let us return
+to Wordsworth&rsquo;s age in particular. In that age
+these difficulties were aggravated in a quite exceptional
+way by special causes, causes responsible also
+in part for the unusual originality and intensity of
+the poetry. In it we find conditions removed to the
+extremest distance from those of the poet who wrote,
+in the midst of a generally accepted social order,
+for an audience with which he shared traditional
+ideas and beliefs and a more or less traditional
+imaginative material. It was, in a word, a revolutionary
+age, in the electric atmosphere of which the
+most potent intellectual influences were those of
+Rousseau and (for the English poets) of Godwin.
+Milton&rsquo;s time was not in the same sense revolutionary,
+much less Shakespeare&rsquo;s. The forces of the
+great movement of mind in Shakespeare&rsquo;s day <i>we</i>
+may formulate as &lsquo;ideas,&rsquo; but they were not the
+abstractly conceived ideas of Wordsworth&rsquo;s day.
+Such theoretical ideas were potent in Milton&rsquo;s time,
+but they were not ideas that made a total breach
+with the past, rejecting as worthless, or worse, the
+institutions, beliefs, and modes of life in which
+human nature had endeavoured to realise itself, and
+drawing airy pictures of a different human nature
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page196" id="page196"></a>196</span>
+on a new earth. Nor was the poetic mind of those
+ages enraptured or dejected by the haunting many-featured
+contrast of real and ideal. But the poetic
+mind in Wordsworth&rsquo;s age breathed this atmosphere
+of revolution, though it was not always sensitive to
+the influence. Nor is it a question of the acceptance
+or rejection of the &lsquo;ideas of the Revolution.&rsquo; That
+influence is clearly traceable in all the greater writers
+except Scott and Jane Austen. It is equally obvious
+in Wordsworth, who hungered for realities, recovered
+from his theoretic malady, sought for good in life&rsquo;s
+familiar face, yet remained a preacher; in Byron,
+who was too shrewd, sceptical, and selfish to contract
+that particular malady, but who suffered from
+the sickness from which Goethe freed himself by
+writing <i>Werther</i>,<a name="fa8f" id="fa8f" href="#ft8f"><span class="sp">8</span></a> and who punctuates his story in
+<i>Don Juan</i> with bursts of laughter and tears; and
+in Shelley, whose &lsquo;rapid spirit&rsquo; was quickened, and
+then clogged, by the abstractions of revolutionary
+theory.</p>
+
+<p>But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical
+example of this influence and of its effects. From
+the world of his imagination the shapes of the old
+world had disappeared, and their place was taken
+by a stream of radiant vapours, incessantly forming,
+shifting, and dissolving in the &lsquo;clear golden
+dawn,&rsquo; and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to
+the music of the stars and the &lsquo;singing rain,&rsquo; the
+sublime ridiculous formulas of Godwin. In his
+heart were emotions that responded to the vision,&mdash;an
+aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like
+those of spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over
+its ruin. And he wrote, not, like Shakespeare or
+Pope, for Londoners sitting in a theatre or a coffee-house,
+intelligences vivid enough but definitely
+embodied in a definite society; he wrote, or rather
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page197" id="page197"></a>197</span>
+he sang, to his own soul, to other spirit-sparks of
+the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark earth,
+to spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of
+Nature or Freedom or Love, his one place of rest
+and the one source of his vision, ecstasy, and sorrow.
+He sang <i>to</i> this, and he sang <i>of</i> it, and of the
+emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest
+with such shapes of darkness as Faith and Custom.
+And he made immortal music; now in melodies
+as exquisite and varied as the songs of Schubert,
+and now in symphonies where the crudest of
+Philosophies of History melted into golden harmony.
+But the songs were more perfect than the
+symphonies; and they could hardly fail to be so.
+For a single thought and mood, expressive of one
+aspect of things, suffices, with its melody, for a
+lyric, but not for a long poem. That requires
+a substance which implicitly contains a whole
+&lsquo;criticism&rsquo; or interpretation of life. And although
+there was something always working in Shelley&rsquo;s
+mind, and issuing in those radiant vapours, that
+was far deeper and truer than his philosophic
+creed, its expression and even its development
+were constantly checked or distorted by the hard
+and narrow framework of that creed. And it was
+one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of the
+human nature that has formed the material of the
+world&rsquo;s great poems.<a name="fa9f" id="fa9f" href="#ft9f"><span class="sp">9</span></a></p>
+
+<p>The second and third quarters of the century
+were not in the same degree as the first a
+revolutionary time, and we feel this change in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page198" id="page198"></a>198</span>
+poetry. The fever-heat is gone, the rapture and
+the dejection moderate, the culture is wider, the
+thought more staid and considerate, the fascination
+of abstractions less potent, and the formative or
+plastic impulse, if not stronger, less impeded. Late
+in the period, with Morris, the born teller of
+tales re-appears. If, as we saw, the lyrical spirit
+continues to prevail, no one would deny to Browning
+the full and robust sympathy of the dramatist
+with all the variety of character and passion. Yet
+these changes and others are far from obliterating
+those features of the earlier generation on which
+we have dwelt. To describe the atmosphere of
+&lsquo;criticism&rsquo; as that of a common faith or view of
+the world would be laughable. If not revolutionary,
+it was agitated, restless, and distressed by the conflict
+of theoretic ideas. To Arnold&rsquo;s mind it was
+indeed a most unhappy time for poetry, though the
+poetic impulse remained as yet, and even later,
+powerful. The past was dead, but he could share
+neither the soaring hope nor the passionate melancholy
+of the opening century. He was</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Wandering between two worlds, one dead,</p>
+  <p class="i1">The other powerless to be born,</p>
+<p>With nowhere yet to rest his head.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And the two greatest poets, as well as he, still
+offer not only, as poets always must, an interpretation,
+but a definite theory of life, and, more
+insistently than ever before, of death. Confidence
+in the detail, at least, of such theories has diminished,
+and with the rapid advance of the critical
+sciences the poets may prophesy less than their
+predecessors; but they probe, and weigh, and deliberate
+more. And the strength of the &lsquo;inward&rsquo;
+tendency, obvious in Tennyson and Arnold, may be
+clearly seen even in Browning, and not alone in
+such works as <i>Christmas Eve and Easter Day</i> or
+<i>La Saisiaz</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page199" id="page199"></a>199</span></p>
+
+<p>Objective and dramatic as Browning is called
+and by comparison is, he is surely most at home,
+and succeeds most completely, in lyrics, and in
+monologues divested of action and merely suggestive
+of a story or suggested by one. He too must
+begin, in <i>Pauline</i>, with the picture of a youthful
+poet&rsquo;s soul. Dramatic the drama of <i>Paracelsus</i>
+neither is nor tries to be: it consists of scenes in
+the history of souls. Of the narrative <i>Sordello</i>
+its author wrote: &lsquo;The historical decoration was
+purposely of no more importance than a background
+requires; and my stress lay on the incidents
+in the development of a soul: little else is
+worth study.&rsquo; Even if that is so, great narrative
+poems are not written thus. And what Browning
+says here applies more or less fully to most of his
+works. In the end, if we set aside the short lyrics,
+his best poems are all &lsquo;studies&rsquo; of souls. &lsquo;Well,&rsquo;
+it may be answered, &lsquo;so are Shakespeare&rsquo;s tragedies
+and tragi-comedies.&rsquo; But the difference is great.
+Shakespeare, doubtless, is little concerned with the
+accuracy of the historical background,&mdash;much less
+concerned than Browning. But his subject is not
+a soul, nor even souls: it is the actions of souls,
+or souls coming into action. It is more. It is that
+clash of souls which exhibits not them alone, but
+a whole of spiritual forces, appearing in them, but
+spreading beyond them into the visible society to
+which they essentially belong, and into invisible
+regions which enclose it. The thing shown, therefore,
+is huge, multiform, ponderous, yet quivering
+with an inward agitation which explodes into violent
+bodily expression and speaks to the <i>eye</i> of imagination.
+What specially interests Browning is not
+this. It is the soul moving in itself, often in its
+most secret windings and recesses; before action or
+after it, where there is action at all; and this soul
+not essentially as in its society (that is &lsquo;background&rsquo;
+or &lsquo;decoration&rsquo;), but alone, or in relation
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page200" id="page200"></a>200</span>
+to another soul, or to God. He exhibits it best,
+therefore, in monologue, musing, explaining, debating,
+pleading, overflowing into the expression of
+feeling or passion, but not acting. The &lsquo;men and
+women&rsquo; that haunt the reader&rsquo;s imagination are not
+so much men of action as lovers, artists, men of
+religion. And when they act (as for example in
+<i>The Ring and the Book</i>, or the dramas) what rivets
+attention, and is first recalled to memory by their
+names, is not the action, but its reflection in the
+soul of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my
+experience; and in the end a critic can only offer
+to others his considered experience. But with
+Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise.
+Even with Dante it is otherwise. I see not
+souls alone, but souls in visible attitudes, in outward
+movement, often in action. I see Paolo and
+Francesca drifting on the wind: I see them sitting
+and reading: I see them kiss: I <i>see</i> Dante&rsquo;s pity:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>E caddi come corpo morto cade.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">4.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke of Tennyson and Browning in order to
+point out that, although in their day the intellectual
+atmosphere was no longer &lsquo;revolutionary,&rsquo; it remained
+an atmosphere of highly reflective ideas
+representing no common &lsquo;faith&rsquo; or way of envisaging
+the world, and that the inward tendency still
+asserts itself in their poetry. We cannot pursue the
+history further, but it does not appear that in the
+last forty years culture has advanced much, or at all,
+towards such a faith or way, or shows the working
+of new semi-conscious creative ideas beneath the
+surface of warring theories and opinions. Only the
+younger among us can hope to see what Arnold
+descried in the distance,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>One mighty wave of thought and joy</p>
+  <p class="i1">Lifting mankind again.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page201" id="page201"></a>201</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">And even when, for them or their descendants,
+that hope is realised, and with it the hope of a
+new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly
+still be one of &lsquo;criticism,&rsquo; and Arnold&rsquo;s insistence
+on the necessity of the best criticism will still be as
+urgently required. It must indeed be more and
+more needed as the power of half-educated journalism
+grows. How poetry then will overcome the
+obstacles which, therefore, must in some measure
+still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable
+not by the reflections of critics, but by the
+creative deeds of poets themselves. Accordingly,
+while one may safely prophesy that their long
+poems will differ from those of any past age, I have
+no idea of predicting the nature of this difference,
+and will refer in conclusion only to certain views
+which seem to me delusive.</p>
+
+<p>It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an
+escape from modern difficulties by any attempt to
+withdraw himself from the atmosphere of free and
+scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity
+of view and concreteness of imagination, to live in
+a past century or a sanctuary of esoteric art, whether
+secular or religious. Whatever of value such an
+attempt may yield&mdash;and that it may yield much I
+do not deny&mdash;it will never yield poems at once long
+and great.</p>
+
+<p>Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will
+sometimes deal with much of the common and
+painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that sense
+more &lsquo;democratic&rsquo; or universal than any poetry of
+the past. But it is vain to imagine that this can
+be done by a refusal to &lsquo;interpret&rsquo; and an endeavour
+to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going
+prose &lsquo;realism&rsquo; there is selection; and, to go no
+further, selection itself is interpretation. And, as
+for poetry, the mirror which the least theoretical
+of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And
+that, whether he likes it or not, is an activity
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page202" id="page202"></a>202</span>
+which divides, and sifts, and recombines into a
+unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the
+crude material which experience thrusts upon it.
+This must be so; the only question is of the choice
+of matter and the method of treatment. Nor can
+the end to be achieved be anything but beauty,
+though the meaning of that word may be extended
+and deepened. And beauty in its essence is something
+that gives satisfaction, however much of pain,
+repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and
+overcome.</p>
+
+<p>&lsquo;But, even so,&rsquo; it may be said, &lsquo;why should the
+poet trouble himself about figures, events, and
+actions? That inward tendency in which you see
+danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply
+and solely what on one side you admit it to be, the
+sign of our advance. What we really need is to
+make our long poems <i>entirely</i> interior. We only
+want to know how Dante felt; we do not <i>wish</i> to
+see his pity felling him to the ground; and much
+less do we wish to hear Othello say &ldquo;and smote him
+thus,&rdquo; or even to imagine the blow. We are not
+children or savages.&rsquo; We do not want, I agree,
+attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But
+those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how
+many kinds of poem this inward tendency can
+display its power without any injury or drawback.
+They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a
+<i>long</i> poem so entirely &lsquo;interior&rsquo; can possibly have
+the clearness, variety, and solidity of effect that
+the best long poems have possessed; whether it
+can produce the same impression of a massive,
+building, organising, &lsquo;architectonic&rsquo; power of imagination;
+and whether all this and much else is of
+little value. They can hardly have realised, one
+must suspect, how much of life they wish to leave
+unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that
+perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at
+once to satisfy and to purify, the primitive instincts
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page203" id="page203"></a>203</span>
+from which it arises; and that, in the case of poetic
+art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures,
+scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts,
+and one that in the immense majority of men shows
+no sign of decay. And finally, if they suppose that
+the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is
+a symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of
+semi-barbarism, I am sure they are woefully mistaken.
+There is more virtue than their philosophy
+dreams of in deeds, in &lsquo;the motion of a muscle
+this way or that.&rsquo; Doubtless it is the soul that
+matters; but the soul that remains interior is not
+the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny
+can show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds,
+good and evil, will undeceive me.</p>
+
+<p>A last delusion remains. &lsquo;There is,&rsquo; we may be
+told, &lsquo;a simple, final, and comfortable answer to all
+these doubts and fears. The long poem is not
+merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and
+should be publicly buried, and there is not the least
+occasion to mourn it. It has become impossible
+not because we cannot write it, but because we see
+that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was
+written. The thing called a long poem was really,
+as any long poem must be, a number of short ones,
+linked together by passages of prose. And these
+passages <i>could</i> be nothing except prose; for poetry
+is the language of a state of crisis, and a crisis is
+brief. The long poem is an offence to art.&rsquo; I
+believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was,
+unless I mistake, the invention of Poe, and it is
+about as true as I conceive his story of the composition
+of <i>The Raven</i> to be. It became a gospel with
+some representatives of the Symbolist movement in
+France; and in fact it would condemn not only the
+long poem, but the middle-sized one, and indeed all
+sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to
+imply no want of gratitude for the lyrics of some of
+its adherents; but the theory itself seems strangely
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page204" id="page204"></a>204</span>
+thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not quite
+short, there must be many variations and grades of
+poetic intensity; but to represent the differences of
+these numerous grades as a simple antithesis
+between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying
+that, because the eyes are the most expressive part
+of the face, the rest of the face expresses nothing.
+To hold, again, that this variation of intensity is a
+defect is like holding that a face would be more
+beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the
+illumination were equally intense all over it, a
+symphony better if it consisted of one movement,
+and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a
+small poem could do all that a long one does, and
+do it much more completely, is to speak as though a
+humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty
+as an eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce
+the same effect as the rainbow in the sky, or a
+moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long
+poem, as we have seen, requires imaginative powers
+superfluous in a short one; and it would be easy to
+show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the
+highest value which the mere brevity of a short one
+excludes. That the long poem is doomed is a
+possible, however groundless, belief; but it is futile
+to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable
+worth will perish.<a name="fa10f" id="fa10f" href="#ft10f"><span class="sp">10</span></a></p>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1f" id="ft1f" href="#fa1f"><span class="fn">1</span></a> The material of these pages belongs in part to the course mentioned
+on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905.
+They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible
+to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a
+single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the prevalence
+of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which
+doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the long
+poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the false
+impression that the writer&rsquo;s admiration for those poems is lukewarm,
+or that he has any tendency to reaction against the Romantic Revival
+of Wordsworth&rsquo;s time.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2f" id="ft2f" href="#fa2f"><span class="fn">2</span></a> This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product,
+is the point.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3f" id="ft3f" href="#fa3f"><span class="fn">3</span></a> <i>Table-talk</i>, Feb. 16, 1833.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4f" id="ft4f" href="#fa4f"><span class="fn">4</span></a> The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they
+come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this
+balance. Such, for instance, are <i>The Eve of St. Agnes</i>, <i>Lamia</i>,
+<i>Michael</i>, <i>The Vision of Judgment</i>, some of Crabbe&rsquo;s tales. It does
+not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest
+poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the
+day in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of
+the time.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5f" id="ft5f" href="#fa5f"><span class="fn">5</span></a> See p. 110.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6f" id="ft6f" href="#fa6f"><span class="fn">6</span></a> Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7f" id="ft7f" href="#fa7f"><span class="fn">7</span></a> This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with which
+many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur&rsquo;s speech in that Idyll;
+but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies in the plan of
+the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far as Arthur is
+merely the blameless king and representative of Conscience, the
+attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is appropriate,
+and, again, Lancelot&rsquo;s treachery to him is intelligible and, however
+wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience could never
+be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or shock us by
+uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the other hand, these
+utterances are appropriate, and if all along Lancelot and Guinevere
+have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold and wholly absorbed in
+his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not merely wrongly but
+abominably, and as the Lancelot of the <i>Idylls</i> could not have behaved.
+The truth is that Tennyson&rsquo;s design requires Arthur to be at once
+perfectly ideal and completely human. And this is not imaginable.</p>
+
+<p>Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I
+think the depreciation of Tennyson&rsquo;s genius now somewhat prevalent a
+mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard
+him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8f" id="ft8f" href="#fa8f"><span class="fn">8</span></a> It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English
+poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge,
+and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9f" id="ft9f" href="#fa9f"><span class="fn">9</span></a> The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as
+an exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of
+the poetry of the time, and of Shelley&rsquo;s poetry in particular, and
+must supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may
+beg him to observe that Godwin&rsquo;s formulas are called sublime as
+well as ridiculous. <i>Political Justice</i> would never have fascinated
+such young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a
+great truth had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth
+can be felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on
+its misapprehension.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft10f" id="ft10f" href="#fa10f"><span class="fn">10</span></a> The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a
+misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is
+fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that
+this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it is <i>not</i> so in a
+narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we
+may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem
+than of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the
+whole poetic content of the <i>Divine Comedy</i> in a form not its own than
+you can the content of a song.</p>
+
+<p>The theory is connected in some minds with the view that &lsquo;music
+is the true type or measure of perfected art.&rsquo; That view again rests
+on the idea that &lsquo;it is the art of music which most completely realises
+[the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and matter,&rsquo; and
+that accordingly &lsquo;the arts may be represented as continually struggling
+after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone
+completely realises&rsquo; (Pater, <i>The Renaissance</i>, pp. 144, 145). I have by
+implication expressed dissent from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its
+truth is granted, what follows is that poetry should endeavour <i>in its
+own way</i> to achieve that perfect identification; but it does not in the
+least follow that it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as
+nearly as possible to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so
+far as I see) imply it. But others have.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page205" id="page205"></a>205<br />206<br />207</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">THE LETTERS OF KEATS</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page208" id="page208"></a>208<br />209</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2 chap2">THE LETTERS OF KEATS</p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">There</span> is no lack of good criticism on the poetry
+of Keats. It has been discussed by the leading
+poets of three generations or semi-generations; by
+Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much
+more fully, by Mr. Bridges. Lord Houghton&rsquo;s
+<i>Life and Letters</i> and Mr. Colvin&rsquo;s biography
+both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the
+poems. And (to go no further) they have lately
+been edited by Mr. de Sélincourt in a volume invaluable
+to students of Keats, and reflecting honour
+not only on its author but on the Oxford School of
+English, to the strength of which he has contributed
+so much. My principal object is to consider Keats&rsquo;s
+attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection
+with the ideas set forth in previous lectures on
+Shelley&rsquo;s views and on the age of Wordsworth. But
+I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to
+prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to
+any reader of the poems who may need it, to study
+the letters of Keats. If I may judge from my experience,
+such readers are still far too numerous;
+and I am sure that no one already familiar with the
+letters will be sorry to listen to quotations from them.<a name="fa1g" id="fa1g" href="#ft1g"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page210" id="page210"></a>210</span></p>
+
+<p>The best of Keats&rsquo;s poems, of course, can be fully
+appreciated without extraneous help; but the letters
+throw light on all, and they are almost necessary
+to the understanding of <i>Endymion</i> and of some
+of the earlier or contemporaneous pieces. They
+clearly reveal those changes in his mind and temper
+which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever
+of the fictions once current of a puny Keats who
+was &lsquo;snuffed out by an article,&rsquo; a sensual Keats
+who found his ideal in claret and &lsquo;slippery blisses,&rsquo;
+and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his
+country and his fellow-creatures. Written in his
+last four years by a man who died at twenty-five,
+they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity
+and his faults, but they disclose a nature and character
+which command on the whole not less respect
+than affection, and they show not a little of that
+general intellectual power which rarely fails to
+accompany poetic genius.</p>
+
+<p>Of Keats&rsquo;s character, as the letters manifest it,
+Arnold has written. While speaking plainly and
+decidedly of the weakness visible in those to Miss
+Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which
+proves that Keats &lsquo;had flint and iron in him,&rsquo; &lsquo;had
+virtue in the true and large sense of the word.&rsquo;
+And he selected passages, too, which illustrate the
+&lsquo;admirable wisdom and temper&rsquo; and the &lsquo;strength
+and clearness of judgment&rsquo; shown by Keats, alike
+in matters of friendship and in his criticisms of his
+own productions, of the public, and of the literary
+circles,&mdash;the &lsquo;jabberers about pictures and books,&rsquo; as
+Keats in a bitter mood once called them. We may
+notice, in addition, two characteristics. In spite of
+occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at
+the magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably
+plain from these letters, had a clear and habitual
+consciousness of his genius. He never dreamed of
+being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet;
+sometimes he hoped to be a great one. I remember
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page211" id="page211"></a>211</span>
+no sign that he felt himself the inferior of any living
+poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of
+Byron, whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious.
+When Shelley wrote, hinting a criticism, but
+referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius,
+he returned the criticism without the compliment.
+His few references to Coleridge are critical, and his
+amusing description of Coleridge&rsquo;s talk is not more
+reverential than Carlyle&rsquo;s. Something, indeed, of
+the native pugnacity which his friends ascribe to
+him seems to show itself in his allusions to contemporaries,
+including even Wordsworth. Yet with
+all this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame,
+no letters extant breathe a more simple and natural
+modesty than these; and from end to end they
+exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the
+irritable vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime
+egotism of Milton and Wordsworth. He was of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s tribe.</p>
+
+<p>The other trait that I wish to refer to appears
+in a particular series of letters&mdash;sometimes mere
+notes&mdash;scattered through the collection. They are
+addressed to Keats&rsquo;s school-girl sister Fanny, who
+was eight years younger than he, and who died in
+the same year as Browning.<a name="fa2g" id="fa2g" href="#ft2g"><span class="sp">2</span></a> Keats, as we see
+him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr.
+Colvin&rsquo;s collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm
+and ambition which his sister was too young to
+understand. During his last two years he was,
+besides, passionately and miserably in love, and,
+latterly, ill and threatened with death. His soul
+was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself,
+avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate
+friends. Yet, until he left England, he never ceased
+to visit his sister when he could; and, when he
+could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of
+amusing nonsense, full of brotherly care for her,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page212" id="page212"></a>212</span>
+and of excellent advice offered as by an equal who
+happened to be her senior; letters quite free from
+thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and
+the resentment against fate which in parts of his
+later correspondence with others betray his suffering.
+These letters to his sister are, in one sense,
+the least remarkable in the collection, yet it would
+lose much by their omission. They tell us next to
+nothing of his genius, but as we come upon them
+the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a
+moment hard or troubled, becomes once more soft
+and bright.</p>
+
+<p>To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from
+the character to the mind of Keats, if the reader has
+formed a notion of him as a youth with a genius for
+poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise
+not intellectually remarkable, this error will
+soon be dispelled by the letters. With Keats,
+no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were
+passions more glowing than we have reason to
+attribute to his contemporaries at the same time of
+life.<a name="fa3g" id="fa3g" href="#ft3g"><span class="sp">3</span></a> The letters remind us also that, compared
+with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual
+training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare
+among the University wits. They show, too&mdash;the
+earlier far more than the later&mdash;in certain
+literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence
+of Leigh Hunt and his circle. But everywhere we
+feel in them the presence of an intellectual nature,
+not merely sensitive and delicate, but open, daring,
+rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic,
+yet observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense
+without narrowness, and quite as various
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page213" id="page213"></a>213</span>
+both in its interests and its capacities as the mind
+of Wordsworth or of Shelley. Fundamentally, and
+in spite of abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense,
+the mind of Keats was very serious and
+thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative
+than an original mind should be in youth; an intelligence
+which now startles by flashes of sudden
+beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and
+deep thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty
+aid from theories, out of personal experience.
+In quality&mdash;and I speak of nothing else&mdash;the mind
+of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have
+been very different.</p>
+
+<p>Short extracts can give but little idea of all this;
+but they may at least illustrate the variety of
+Keats&rsquo;s mind, and the passages I am about to read
+have been chosen mainly with this intention, and
+not because the majority are among the most striking
+that might be found. The earliest belong to
+the September of 1817, and I take them partly for
+their local interest. Keats spent most of that
+month here in Oxford, staying in the Magdalen
+Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man
+whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly
+admired. &lsquo;We lead,&rsquo; he writes to his sister, &lsquo;very
+industrious lives&mdash;he in general studies, and I in
+proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem
+which I hope you will see early in the next year.&rsquo;
+It was <i>Endymion</i>: he wrote, it seems, the whole of
+the Third Book in Bailey&rsquo;s rooms. Unluckily the
+hero in that Book is wandering at the bottom of the
+sea; but even in those regions, as Keats imagined
+them, a diligent student may perhaps find some
+traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers
+and quadrangles, cloisters and groves; of the deer
+in Magdalen Park; and how</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+    <p class="i2">The mouldering arch,</p>
+    <p class="i2">Shaded o&rsquo;er by a larch,</p>
+<p>Lives next door to Wilson the hosier</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page214" id="page214"></a>214</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of
+the clear streams&mdash;&lsquo;more clear streams than ever I
+saw together.&rsquo; &lsquo;I take a walk by the side of one of
+them every evening.&rsquo; &lsquo;For these last five or six
+days,&rsquo; he writes to Reynolds, &lsquo;we have had regularly
+a boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams
+about, which are more in number than your eyelashes.
+We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes,
+and there become naturalised river-folks. There is
+one particularly nice nest, which we have christened
+&ldquo;Reynolds&rsquo;s Cove,&rdquo; in which we have read Wordsworth
+and talked as may be.&rsquo; Of those talks over
+Wordsworth with the grave religious Bailey came
+perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the best-known
+of all the letters (it is too well known to
+quote), thoughts which take their origin from the
+<i>Lines written near Tintern Abbey</i>.<a name="fa4g" id="fa4g" href="#ft4g"><span class="sp">4</span></a></p>
+
+<p>About a year after this, Keats went with his
+friend Brown on a walking-tour to the Highlands;
+and I will quote two passages from the letters
+written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast
+they exhibit between the two strains in
+Keats&rsquo;s mind. The first is the later. The letter
+is dated &lsquo;Cairn-something July 17th&rsquo;:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides,
+take a little from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown
+and I. The banks of the Clyde are extremely beautiful&mdash;the
+north end of Loch Lomond grand in excess&mdash;the entrance at the
+lower end to the narrow part is precious good&mdash;the evening was
+beautiful&mdash;nothing could surpass our fortune in the weather.
+Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges
+with trumpets and banners, just to die away before me into that
+blue place among the mountains.<a name="fa5g" id="fa5g" href="#ft5g"><span class="sp">5</span></a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noind">Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was
+written a fortnight earlier from Carlisle:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in
+Cumberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page215" id="page215"></a>215</span>
+holden at the Tun. It was indeed &lsquo;no new cotillion fresh
+from France.&rsquo; No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary,
+and whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go&rsquo;d it, and
+twirl&rsquo;d it and whirl&rsquo;d it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing
+the floor like mad. The difference between our country dances
+and these Scottish figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a
+cup o&rsquo; tea and beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely
+gratified to think that, if I had pleasures they knew nothing of,
+they had also some into which I could not possibly enter. I
+hope I shall not return without having got the Highland fling.
+There was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some
+beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near
+the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means a
+country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.<a name="fa6g" id="fa6g" href="#ft6g"><span class="sp">6</span></a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is little enough here of the young poet who
+believes himself to care for nothing but &lsquo;Art&rsquo;; and
+as little of the theoretic cosmopolitanism of some of
+Keats&rsquo;s friends.</p>
+
+<p>Some three months later we find Keats writing
+from London to his brother and his sister-in-law in
+America; and he tells them of a young lady from
+India whom he has just met:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She
+has a rich Eastern look. When she comes into a room she
+makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess....
+You will by this time think I am in love with her; so before I go
+any further I will tell you I am not&mdash;she kept me awake one
+night as a tune of Mozart&rsquo;s might do. I speak of the thing as a
+pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper
+than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very &lsquo;yes&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;no&rsquo; of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though,
+she has faults&mdash;the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have
+had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there
+are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,&mdash;the
+worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly,
+spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron,
+and this Charmian, hold the first place in our minds; in the
+latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child&rsquo;s cradle,
+and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings.<a name="fa7g" id="fa7g" href="#ft7g"><span class="sp">7</span></a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I do not read this passage merely for its
+biographical interest, but a word may be ventured
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page216" id="page216"></a>216</span>
+on that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less
+than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he
+immediately became her slave. When we observe
+the fact, and consider how very unlike the words I
+have quoted are to anything in Keats&rsquo;s previous
+letters, we can hardly help suspecting that he was
+at this time in a peculiar condition and ripe for his
+fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned
+from his Scotch tour, which was broken
+off because the Inverness doctor used the most
+menacing language about the state of his throat;
+and further, that he was now, in the late autumn,
+nursing his brother Tom, who died of consumption
+before the year was out. And an idea suggests
+itself which, if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some
+comfort in it. How often have readers of Keats&rsquo;s
+life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss
+Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does
+it not seem at least as probable that, if Miss Brawne
+had never existed, what happened would still have
+happened, and even that the fever of passion which
+helped to destroy him was itself a token of incipient
+disease?</p>
+
+<p>I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a
+passage on politics. The friends of Keats were, for
+the most part, advanced liberals. His own sympathies
+went that way. A number of lines in the
+poems of his boyhood show this, and so do many
+remarks in the letters. And his sympathies were
+not mere sentiments. &lsquo;I hope sincerely,&rsquo; he wrote
+in September, 1819, &lsquo;I shall be able to put a mite
+of help to the liberal side of the question before
+I die&rsquo;; and a few days later, when he tells Brown
+of his wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work
+for his livelihood, composing deliberate poems only
+when he can afford to, he says that he will write
+as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he
+makes it a condition that he is to write &lsquo;on the
+liberal side of the question.&rsquo; It is a mistake to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page217" id="page217"></a>217</span>
+suppose that he had no political interests. But he
+cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and
+Tory; a &lsquo;Radical&rsquo; was for him the type of an
+&lsquo;obstinate and heady&rsquo; man; and the perfectibility
+theories of friends like Shelley and Dilke slipped
+from his mind like water from a duck&rsquo;s back. We
+have seen the concrete shape his patriotism took.
+He always saw ideas embodied, and was &lsquo;convinced
+that small causes make great alterations.&rsquo; I could
+easily find passages more characteristic than the
+following; but it is short, it shows that Keats
+thought for himself, and it has a curious interest
+just now (1905):<a name="fa8g" id="fa8g" href="#ft8g"><span class="sp">8</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause
+of Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the
+life of Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the
+divine right gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good.
+No, they have taken a lesson of him, and will do all the further
+harm he would have done, without any of the good. The worst
+thing he has done is that he has taught them how to organise
+their monstrous armies. The Emperor Alexander, it is said,
+intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian, creating two
+Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch of
+the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years
+keep peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest
+even to China. I think it a very likely thing that China
+itself may fall; Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European
+North Russia will hold its horns against the rest of Europe,
+intriguing constantly with France.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is
+in these letters, I may take next one or two passages
+which have an interest also from their bearing
+on Keats&rsquo;s poems. Here we have, for example, the
+unmistakable origin of the <i>Ode on Indolence</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely
+careless. I long after a stanza or two of Thomson&rsquo;s <i>Castle of
+Indolence</i>. My passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered
+till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a
+delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness.
+If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies, I should call it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page218" id="page218"></a>218</span>
+languor, but as I am* I must call it laziness. In this state of
+effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the
+rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has
+no show of enticement, and pain no unbearable power.<a name="fa9g" id="fa9g" href="#ft9g"><span class="sp">9</span></a> Neither
+Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any alertness of countenance
+as they pass by me. They seem rather like figures on a Greek
+vase&mdash;a man and two women whom no one but myself could
+distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness,
+and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering
+the mind.<a name="fa10g" id="fa10g" href="#ft10g"><span class="sp">10</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="center">* Especially as I have a black eye.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&lsquo;This is the only happiness&rsquo;&mdash;the sentence will
+surprise no one who has even dipped into Keats&rsquo;s
+letters. It expresses a settled conviction. Happiness,
+he feels, belongs only to childhood and early
+youth. A young man thinks he can keep it, but a
+little experience shows him he must do without it.
+The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is
+fatal to it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because
+it is to realise the sorrow of the world and to feel
+the burden of the mystery. &lsquo;Health and spirits,&rsquo;
+he says, &lsquo;can only belong unalloyed to the selfish
+man.&rsquo;<a name="fa11g" id="fa11g" href="#ft11g"><span class="sp">11</span></a> Shelley might be speaking. &lsquo;To see an
+entirely disinterested girl quite happy is the most
+pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It
+depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my
+word it is extraordinary. Women must want
+Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and
+so may we, that a delicate being can feel happy
+without any sense of crime.&rsquo;<a name="fa12g" id="fa12g" href="#ft12g"><span class="sp">12</span></a> These passages,
+taken alone, even when we observe his qualifications,
+would give a false impression of Keats; but
+they supply a curious commentary on the legend of
+the sensuous Keats. We may connect with them
+his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of
+such &lsquo;dreaming&rsquo; poets as himself) to men of action.</p>
+
+<p>In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents
+several recently written poems, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page219" id="page219"></a>219</span>
+among them the ballad <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i>.
+He copies it without a word of introduction. He
+could not say, &lsquo;Here is the record of my love and
+my despair,&rsquo; for on this one subject he never opened
+his heart to his brother. But when he has finished
+the copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza
+(afterwards altered):</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>She took me to her elfin grot,</p>
+  <p class="i1">And there she wept and sighed full sore,</p>
+<p>And there I shut her wild wild eyes</p>
+  With kisses four.
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">&lsquo;Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because
+I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my
+Muse. She would have fain said &ldquo;score&rdquo; without
+hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the
+Imagination, as the Critics say, with Judgment.
+I was obliged to choose an even number that both
+eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I
+think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had
+said seven, there would have been three and a
+half apiece&mdash;a very awkward affair, and well got
+out of on my side.&rsquo; This is not very like the
+comments of Wordsworth on his best poems, but
+I dare say the author of <i>Hamlet</i> made such jests
+about it. Is it not strange, let me add, to think
+that Keats and his friends were probably unconscious
+of the extraordinary merit of this poem?
+It was not published with the Odes in the volume
+of 1820.</p>
+
+<p>I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in
+different ways Keats&rsquo;s insight into human nature.
+It appears, on the whole, more decidedly in the
+letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe
+that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope
+of ultimate success in dramatic poetry was well
+founded. The first is a piece of &lsquo;nonsense,&rsquo; rattled
+off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents,
+and worth quoting only for its last
+sentence. He has been describing &lsquo;three witty
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page220" id="page220"></a>220</span>
+people, all distinct in their excellence&rsquo;; and he goes
+on:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his
+excellence&mdash;A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is
+a negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you
+never see him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first,
+I forbear the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first
+is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt&mdash;he ought to be
+wiped up.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noind">C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often
+we have met and still shall meet him! Shakespeare,
+I think, would gladly have fathered the phrase that
+describes him, and the words that follow are not
+much out of the tune of Falstaff: &lsquo;C, they say, is not
+his mother&rsquo;s true child, but she bought him of the
+man who cries, Young lambs to sell.&rsquo;<a name="fa13g" id="fa13g" href="#ft13g"><span class="sp">13</span></a></p>
+
+<p>In the second passage Keats is describing one of
+his friends:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity
+unless he has made up his mind about everything. The only
+means of strengthening one&rsquo;s intellect is to make up one&rsquo;s mind
+about nothing&mdash;to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts,
+not a select party. The genus is not scarce in population: all
+the stubborn arguers you meet are of the same brood. They
+never begin on a subject they have not pre-resolved on. They
+want to hammer their nail into you, and if you turn the point,
+still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a truth so
+long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a
+Godwin Methodist.<a name="fa14g" id="fa14g" href="#ft14g"><span class="sp">14</span></a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These lines illustrate the instinctive feeling of
+Keats that it is essential to the growth of the poetic
+mind to preserve its natural receptiveness and to
+welcome all the influences that stream in upon it.
+They illustrate also his dislike of the fixed theories
+held and preached by some members of his circle.
+We shall have to consider later the meaning of his
+occasional outbreaks against &lsquo;thought,&rsquo; &lsquo;knowledge,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;philosophy.&rsquo; It is important not to be
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page221" id="page221"></a>221</span>
+misled by them, and not to forget the frequent
+expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and
+must strive to gain is this very &lsquo;knowledge&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;philosophy.&rsquo; Here I will only observe that his
+polemics against them, though coloured by his
+temperament, coincide to a large extent with
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s dislike of &lsquo;a reasoning self-sufficing
+thing,&rsquo; his depreciation of mere book-knowledge, and
+his praise of a wise passiveness. And, further, what
+he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is
+the &lsquo;Methodism,&rsquo; the stubborn argument, and the
+habit of bringing to the argument and maintaining
+throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his
+own thoughts and speculations freely enough to
+Bailey and to his brother&mdash;men willing to probe
+with him any serious idea&mdash;but not to Dilke. It is
+clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident
+assertions and negations of Shelley and his
+other Godwinian friends and acquaintances. Probably
+from his ignorance of theories he felt at a
+disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not
+dismiss their theories as something of no interest to
+a poet. He thought about them, convinced himself
+that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself
+philosophises in criticising them. The following
+passage, from a letter to George and Georgiana
+Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his
+writings to a theory of the world, a theology as he
+jestingly calls it; and although it is long, I make no
+apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he
+says, Robertson&rsquo;s <i>History of America</i> and Voltaire&rsquo;s
+<i>Sičcle de Louis XIV.</i>, and he observes that, though
+the two civilisations described are so different, the
+case of the great body of the people is equally
+lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>The whole appears to resolve into this&mdash;that man is originally a
+poor forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts
+of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind
+or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page222" id="page222"></a>222</span>
+and comforts, at each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for
+him a fresh set of annoyances&mdash;he is mortal, and there is still a
+heaven with its stars above his head. The most interesting
+question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering
+endeavours of a seldom-appearing Socrates mankind may be made
+happy. I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme, but
+what must it end in? Death&mdash;and who could in such a case bear
+with death? The whole troubles of life, which are now frittered
+away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last
+days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would leave
+this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all
+believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will
+not admit of it&mdash;the inhabitants of the world will correspond to
+itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in
+winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid
+delight of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa&mdash;whirlpools
+and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I
+will say that they may arrive at earthly happiness. The point at
+which man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate
+nature, and no further. For instance, suppose a rose to have
+sensation; it blooms on a beautiful morning; it enjoys itself; but
+then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It cannot escape it, it
+cannot destroy its annoyances&mdash;they are as native to the world as
+itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the worldly
+elements will prey upon his nature.</p>
+
+<p>The common cognomen of this world among the misguided
+and superstitious is &lsquo;a vale of tears,&rsquo; from which we are to be
+redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to
+Heaven. What a little circumscribed straitened notion! Call
+the world if you please &lsquo;The vale of Soul-making.&rsquo; Then you
+will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the
+highest terms for human nature, admitting it to be immortal,
+which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a
+thought which has struck me concerning it). I say &lsquo;<i>Soul-making</i>&rsquo;&mdash;Soul
+as distinguished from an Intelligence.<a name="fa15g" id="fa15g" href="#ft15g"><span class="sp">15</span></a> There may be
+intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not
+Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.
+Intelligences are atoms of perception&mdash;they know and they see
+and they are pure; in short they are God. How then are souls
+to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have
+identity given them&mdash;so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each
+one&rsquo;s individual existence? How but by the medium of a world
+like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I
+think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion&mdash;or
+rather it is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by
+three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page223" id="page223"></a>223</span>
+years. These three materials are the <i>Intelligence</i>, the <i>human heart</i>
+(as distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or
+elemental space suited for the proper action of <i>Mind</i> and <i>Heart</i>
+on each other for the purpose of forming the <i>Soul</i> or <i>Intelligence
+destined to possess the sense of Identity</i>. I can scarcely express
+what I but dimly perceive&mdash;and yet I think I perceive it. That
+you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely
+form possible. I will call the <i>world</i> a School instituted for the
+purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the <i>human
+heart</i> the horn-book read in that School. And I will call the
+<i>Child able to read</i>, the <i>Soul</i> made from that School and its horn-book.
+Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and
+troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A
+place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse
+ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the Mind&rsquo;s
+Bible, it is the mind&rsquo;s experience, it is the text from which the
+Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives of
+men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does God make
+individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own
+essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of
+Salvation which does not offend our reason and humanity.<a name="fa16g" id="fa16g" href="#ft16g"><span class="sp">16</span></a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Surely, when Keats&rsquo;s education is considered,
+this, with all its crudity, is not a little remarkable.
+It would not be easy to find anything written at the
+same age by another poet of the time which shows
+more openness of mind, more knowledge of human
+nature, or more original power of thought.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description
+of A, B, and C, he received what he recognised
+at once for his death-warrant. He had yet fourteen
+months to endure, but at this point the development
+of his mind was arrested. During the three preceding
+years it had been very rapid, and is easy to
+trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in
+spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided
+difference between the Keats of the earlier letters
+and the Keats of the later. The tour in Scotland
+in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient
+accuracy as a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is
+the youth who had written the <i>Sonnet on first</i>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page224" id="page224"></a>224</span>
+<i>looking into Chapman&rsquo;s Homer</i>, and <i>Sleep and
+Poetry</i>, and who was writing <i>Endymion</i>. He is
+thoughtful, often grave, sometimes despondent; but
+he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of the joy
+and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied
+the sense of poetic power. He is the poet who
+looked, we are told, as though he had been gazing
+on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose
+face worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields
+about Hampstead; who is described watching with
+rapture the billowing of the wind through the trees
+and over meadow-grasses and corn, and looking
+sometimes like a young eagle and sometimes like a
+wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest
+depths. This is the Keats who wrote &lsquo;A thing of
+beauty is a joy for ever&rsquo;; who found &lsquo;the Religion
+of Joy&rsquo; in the monuments of the Greek spirit, in
+sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere
+handbooks of mythology; who never ceased, he
+said, to wonder at all that incarnate delight, and
+would point out to Severn how essentially modern,
+how imperishable, the Greek spirit is&mdash;a joy for
+ever.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware,
+and we find him becoming more and more aware,
+that joy is not the only word. He had not read for
+nothing Wordsworth&rsquo;s great Ode, and <i>Tintern Abbey</i>,
+and the <i>Excursion</i>. We know it from <i>Endymion</i>,
+and the letter about the &lsquo;burden of the mystery&rsquo;
+was written before the tour in Scotland. But after
+this we feel a more decided change, doubtless
+hastened by outward events. The Blackwood and
+Quarterly reviews of <i>Endymion</i> appeared&mdash;reviews
+not less inexcusable because we understand their
+origin. Then came his brother&rsquo;s death. A few
+weeks later he met Miss Brawne. Henceforth his
+youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid
+feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are
+connected, I think, solely with his passion. His
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page225" id="page225"></a>225</span>
+brother&rsquo;s death deepened his sympathies. The
+reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him
+nothing but good. He rated them at their true
+value, but they gave him a salutary shock. They
+quickened his perception, already growing keen, of
+the weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt&rsquo;s verse and
+his own. Through them he saw a false but useful
+picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into self-worship
+by foolish friends, and posturing as a man
+of genius. He kept his faith in his genius, but he
+felt that he must prove it. He became impatient of
+dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and
+rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of
+fierceness. He turns against his old self harshly.
+Some of his friends, he says, think he has lost his
+old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He
+speaks slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the
+human heart is something finer,&mdash;not its dreams, but
+its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as intent as
+ever,&mdash;more intent; but the glory he would see walks
+in a fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and
+learn. He is young, he says, writing at random,
+straining his eyes at particles of light in the
+midst of a great darkness. He knows at times
+the &lsquo;agony&rsquo; of ignorance. In one year he writes
+six or seven of the best poems in the language, but
+he is little satisfied. &lsquo;Thus far,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;I have
+a consciousness of having been pretty dull and
+heavy, both in subject and phrase.&rsquo; Two months
+later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, &lsquo;I
+am afraid I shall pop off just when my mind is able
+to run alone.&rsquo; And so it was.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">It is important to remember this change in Keats
+in considering his ideas about poetry; but we
+have first to look at them in a more general
+way. Many of the most interesting occur in
+detached remarks or aphorisms, and these I must
+pass by. The others I intended at first to deal with
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page226" id="page226"></a>226</span>
+in connection with Shelley&rsquo;s view of poetry; and,
+although that plan proved to be too large for a
+single lecture, I do not wish altogether to abandon
+it, because in the extracts which I have been reading
+the difference between the minds of the two poets
+has already appeared, and because it re-appears both
+in their poetic practice and in their opinions about
+their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it might
+be thought unlikely that these opinions would show
+also a marked resemblance. For Keats, it may be
+said, was of all the great poets then alive the one
+least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that
+&lsquo;revolutionary&rsquo; atmosphere of which I spoke in a
+previous lecture. He did not concern himself, we
+may be told, with the progress of humanity, or with
+Manchester Massacres or risings in Naples. He
+cared nothing for theories, abstractions, or ideals.
+He worshipped Beauty, not Liberty; and the beauty
+he worshipped was not &lsquo;intellectual,&rsquo; but visible,
+audible, tangible. &lsquo;O for a life of sensations,&rsquo; he
+cried, &lsquo;rather than of thoughts.&rsquo; He was an artist,
+intent upon fashioning his material until the outward
+sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful.
+In all this he was at the opposite pole to Shelley;
+and he himself felt it. He refused to visit Shelley,
+in order that he might keep his own unfettered
+scope; and he never speaks of Shelley cordially.
+He told him, too, that he might be more of an artist
+and load every rift of his subject with ore; and that,
+while many people regard the purpose of a work as
+the God, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist
+must serve Mammon. And his practice, like his
+opinions, proves that, both in his strength and his
+limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.</p>
+
+<p>In such a plea there would certainly be much
+truth; and yet it is not <i>the</i> truth, for it ignores other
+truths which must somehow be combined with it.
+There are great differences between the two poets,
+but then in Keats himself there are contending
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page227" id="page227"></a>227</span>
+strains. Along with the differences, too, we find
+very close affinities. And these affinities with
+Shelley also show that Keats was deeply influenced
+by the spirit of his time. Let me illustrate these
+statements.</p>
+
+<p>The poet who cried, &lsquo;O for a life of sensations,&rsquo;
+was consoled, as his life withered away, by the
+remembrance that he &lsquo;had loved the principle of
+beauty in all things.&rsquo; And this is not a chance
+expression; it repeats, for instance, a phrase used
+two years before, &lsquo;the mighty abstract idea I have
+of Beauty in all things.&rsquo; If Shelley had used this
+language, it would be taken to prove his love of
+abstractions. How does it differ from the language
+of the <i>Hymn to Intellectual Beauty</i>?<a name="fa17g" id="fa17g" href="#ft17g"><span class="sp">17</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness
+between <i>Alastor</i> and <i>Endymion</i>, each the first
+poem of any length in which the writer&rsquo;s genius
+decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a
+young poet; of a dream in which his ideal appears
+in human form, and he knows the rapture of union
+with it; of the passion thus enkindled, and the
+search for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer
+to read <i>Endymion</i> simply as we read <i>Isabella</i>; but
+the question here is not of our preferences. If we
+examine the poem without regard to them, we shall
+be unable to doubt that to some extent the story
+symbolises or allegorises this pursuit of the principle
+of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of the
+causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not
+in himself the experience required by parts of his
+design, and hence in them he had to write from mere
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page228" id="page228"></a>228</span>
+imagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a
+flagrant degree the defect felt here and there in
+<i>Prometheus Unbound</i>. If we wish to read it as the
+author meant it, we must ask for the significance of
+the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear
+that not all of them are intended to have this further
+significance, and we are perplexed by the question
+where, and how far, we are to look for it.<a name="fa18g" id="fa18g" href="#ft18g"><span class="sp">18</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Take, again, some of the most famous of the
+lyrical poems. Is it true that Keats was untroubled
+by that sense of contrast between ideal and real
+which haunted Shelley and was so characteristic of
+the time? So far is this from being the case that a
+critic might more plausibly object to his monotonous
+insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known
+lyrics of the two poets are the stanzas <i>To a
+Skylark</i> and the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>. Well, if
+we summarise prosaically the subject of the one
+poem we have summarised that of the other. &lsquo;Our
+human life is all unrest and sorrow, an oscillation
+between longing and satiety, a looking before and
+after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot
+attain, and that leaves us dissatisfied by everything
+attainable. And we die, and do not understand
+death. But the bird is beyond this division and
+dissonance; it attains the ideal;</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Das Unzulängliche,</p>
+<p>Hier wird&rsquo;s Ereigniss.&rsquo;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre,
+tone, atmosphere, they are far apart; the &lsquo;idea&rsquo; is
+identical. And what else is the idea of the <i>Ode</i>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page229" id="page229"></a>229</span>
+<i>on a Grecian Urn</i>, where a moment, arrested in its
+ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the
+change and decay of reality? And what else is the
+idea of the playful lines <i>To Fancy</i>,&mdash;Fancy who
+brings together the joys which in life are parted by
+distances of time and place, and who holds in sure
+possession what life wins only to lose? Even a
+poem so pictorial and narrative and free from
+symbolism as the <i>The Eve of St. Agnes</i> rests on
+the same feeling. The contrast, so exquisitely
+imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the
+storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy
+enmity of the world outside Madeline&rsquo;s chamber,
+and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy bliss
+within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired the
+<i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would
+be easy, too, to show that Keats was far from
+indifferent to the &lsquo;progress of humanity.&rsquo; He conceived
+it in his own way, but it is as much the
+theme of <i>Hyperion</i> as of <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>. We
+are concerned however here not with the interpretation
+of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and
+especially with certain real or apparent inconsistencies
+in it. For in the letters he now praises
+&lsquo;sensation&rsquo; and decries thought or knowledge, and
+now cries out for &lsquo;knowledge&rsquo; as his greatest need;
+in one place declares that an artist must have self-concentration,
+perhaps selfishness, and in others
+insists that what he desires is to be of use to his
+fellow-men. We shall gain light on these matters
+and on his relation to Shelley if I try to reduce his
+general view to a precise and prosaic form.</p>
+
+<p>That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is
+a &lsquo;principle&rsquo;; it is One. All things beautiful manifest
+it, and so far therefore are one and the same.
+This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in
+many crucial passages in the poems and letters.
+I take a single example. The goddess Cynthia
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page230" id="page230"></a>230</span>
+in <i>Endymion</i> is the Principle of Beauty. In this
+story she is also identified with the Moon. Accordingly
+the hero, gazing at the moon, declares that in
+all that he ever loved he loved <i>her</i>:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+          <p class="i10">thou wast the deep glen&mdash;</p>
+<p>Thou wast the mountain-top&mdash;the sage&rsquo;s pen&mdash;</p>
+<p>The poet&rsquo;s harp&mdash;the voice of friends&mdash;the sun;</p>
+<p>Thou wast the river&mdash;thou wast glory won;</p>
+<p>Thou wast my clarion&rsquo;s blast&mdash;thou wast my steed&mdash;</p>
+<p>My goblet full of wine&mdash;my topmost deed:&mdash;</p>
+<p>Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!</p>
+<p>O what a wild and harmonised tune</p>
+<p>My spirit struck from all the beautiful!</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">When he says this he does not yet understand that
+the Moon and his strange visitant are one; he thinks
+they are rivals. So later, when he loves the Indian
+maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself
+therefore false to his goddess, he is in error; for she
+is only his goddess veiled, the shaded half of the
+moon.</p>
+
+<p>Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends
+differ. Indeed, the one Beauty is infinitely various.
+But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to fall into
+two main classes. On the one hand there is the
+kind of beauty that comes easily and is all sweetness
+and pleasure. In receiving it we seem to suppress
+nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely
+sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it
+speaks to sense and delights us. It is &lsquo;luxury.&rsquo;
+But the other kind is won through thought, and also
+through pain. And this second and more difficult
+kind is also the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the
+Principle. That it is won through pain is doubly
+true. First, because the poet cannot reach it unless
+he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which
+disturb his enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter
+beauty, and may even seem to lead him away from
+beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain
+union with his goddess only by leaving the green
+hill-sides where he met her first, and by wandering
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page231" id="page231"></a>231</span>
+unhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth
+and under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of
+other lovers, and to help them undertakes tasks
+which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia.
+Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a
+maiden devoted to sorrow, and gains his goddess
+just when he thinks he has resigned her. The
+highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet&rsquo;s
+pain; and, in the second place, it has pain in itself,
+or at least appears in objects that are painful. In
+his early poem <i>Sleep and Poetry</i> Keats asks himself
+the question,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>And can I ever bid these joys farewell?</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And he answers:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,</p>
+<p>Where I may find the agonies, the strife</p>
+<p>Of human hearts.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He
+never became equal to it, but the idea was realised
+to some extent in <i>Isabella</i> and <i>Lamia</i> and <i>Hyperion</i>.
+The first two of these are tales of passion, &lsquo;agony,&rsquo;
+and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a
+story of &lsquo;strife.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Such, in its bare outline, is Keats&rsquo;s habitual view
+of poetry. What, then, are the points where, in
+spite of its evident resemblance to Shelley&rsquo;s, we feel
+a marked difference? The most important seem to
+be two. In the first place Keats lays far the
+heavier stress on the idea that beauty is manifested
+in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is to
+be found in Shelley, but (as we saw in another
+lecture) it is not congenial to him; it appears
+almost incidentally and is stated half-heartedly;
+and of the further idea that beauty is not only
+manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested
+most fully, we find, I believe, no trace. And
+this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of
+Shelley&rsquo;s mind was to regard suffering and conflict
+with mere distress and horror as something senseless
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page232" id="page232"></a>232</span>
+and purely evil, and to look on the world as naturally
+a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an
+inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this
+world of woe his Intellectual Beauty does not really
+belong; it appears there only in flashes; its true
+home is a place where no contradictions, not even
+reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of
+Keats is much more concrete. He has no belief
+either in this natural paradise or in &lsquo;Godwinian
+perfectibility.&rsquo; Pain and conflict have a meaning
+to him. Without them souls could not be made;
+and the business of the world, he conjectures, is the
+making of souls. They are not therefore simply
+obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this
+world it manifests itself most fully in and through
+them. For &lsquo;scenery is fine, but human nature is
+finer&rsquo;;<a name="fa19g" id="fa19g" href="#ft19g"><span class="sp">19</span></a> and the passions and actions of man are
+finer than his enjoyments and dreams. In the same
+way, the conflict in <i>Hyperion</i> is not one between
+light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as
+in <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>. The Titans must yield
+to the Olympians because, in a word, they are less
+beautiful, and</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+      <p class="i7">&rsquo;tis the eternal law</p>
+<p>That first in beauty should be first in might.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">But the Titans, though less beautiful, <i>are</i> beautiful;
+it is one and the same &lsquo;principle&rsquo; that manifests
+itself in them and more fully in their victors. Their
+defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but the
+completion of their own being. This, it seems
+probable, the hero in <i>Hyperion</i> would have come
+to recognise, so that the poem, at least so far as
+he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation
+born of strife.</p>
+
+<p>Man is &lsquo;finer,&rsquo; Keats says, and the Titans must
+submit because they are less &lsquo;beautiful.&rsquo; The
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page233" id="page233"></a>233</span>
+second point of difference between him and Shelley
+lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with
+Shelley has many names, and one of them is beauty,
+but we hardly feel it to be the name nearest to his
+heart. The spirit of his worship is rather</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i6">that sustaining Love</p>
+<p>Which, through the web of being blindly wove</p>
+<p>By man and beast and earth and air and sea,</p>
+<p>Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of</p>
+<p>The fire for which all thirst;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and &lsquo;love&rsquo; is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the
+term must be used, than &lsquo;beauty.&rsquo; But the ideal for
+Keats is always and emphatically beauty or the
+&lsquo;principle of beauty.&rsquo; When he sets the agonies
+and strifes of human hearts above a painless or
+luxurious loveliness, it is because they are the more
+beautiful. He would not have said that the <i>Midsummer
+Night&rsquo;s Dream</i> is superior to <i>King Lear</i> in
+beauty, but inferior to it in some other respect; it is
+inferior in <i>beauty</i> to <i>King Lear</i>. Let art only be
+&lsquo;intense&rsquo; enough, let the poet only look hard
+enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain
+in his object is seen truly as the vesture of great
+passion and action, and all &lsquo;disagreeables&rsquo; will
+&lsquo;evaporate,&rsquo; and nothing will remain but beauty.<a name="fa20g" id="fa20g" href="#ft20g"><span class="sp">20</span></a>
+Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet
+of the great poet&rsquo;s power of vision, he is still
+content when he can feel that a poem of his has
+intensity, has (as he says of <i>Lamia</i>) &lsquo;that sort of
+fire in it that must take hold of people some way.&rsquo;<a name="fa21g" id="fa21g" href="#ft21g"><span class="sp">21</span></a>
+And an earlier and inferior poem, <i>Isabella</i>, may
+show his mind. The mere subject is exceedingly
+painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the
+painful incidents and details; but the poem can
+hardly be called painful at all; for the final impression
+is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as the
+final impression left by the blissful story of <i>St. Agnes&rsquo;
+Eve</i>. And this is most characteristic of Keats. If
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page234" id="page234"></a>234</span>
+the word beauty is used in his sense, and not in
+the common contracted sense, we may truly say
+that he was, and must have remained, more than
+any other poet of his time, a worshipper of Beauty.</p>
+
+<p>When, then&mdash;to come to his apparent inconsistencies&mdash;he
+exalts sensation and decries thought or
+knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty.
+The word &lsquo;sensation,&rsquo; as a comparison of passages
+would readily show, has not in his letters its usual
+meaning. It stands for <i>poetic</i> sensation, and, indeed,
+for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name for
+<i>all</i> poetic or imaginative experience; and the contents
+of the speech of Oceanus are, in kind, just as
+much &lsquo;sensation&rsquo; as the eating of nectarines (which
+may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I repeat,
+to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes
+in the earlier letters we find Keats false to his better
+mind. Knowing that the more difficult beauty is
+the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so
+entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that
+he rebels against everything that would disturb its
+magic or trouble his &lsquo;exquisite sense of the luxurious.&rsquo;
+And then he is tempted to see in thought
+only that vexatious questioning that &lsquo;spoils the
+singing of the nightingale,&rsquo; and to forget that it is
+necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of
+beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew
+that there was something wilful and weak about
+them; and they gradually disappear. On the
+whole, the gist of his attitude to &lsquo;thought&rsquo; or
+&lsquo;philosophy&rsquo; may be stated as follows.</p>
+
+<p>He was far from being indifferent to truth, or
+from considering it unimportant for poetry. In an
+early letter, when he criticises a poem of Wordsworth&rsquo;s,
+he ventures to say that &lsquo;if Wordsworth
+had thought a little deeper at that moment he would
+not have written it,&rsquo; and that &lsquo;it is a kind of sketchy
+intellectual landscape, not a search after truth.&rsquo;<a name="fa22g" id="fa22g" href="#ft22g"><span class="sp">22</span></a>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page235" id="page235"></a>235</span>
+He writes of a passage in <i>Endymion</i>: &lsquo;The whole
+thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are
+a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words,
+but I assure you that, when I wrote it, it was the
+regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.&rsquo;<a name="fa23g" id="fa23g" href="#ft23g"><span class="sp">23</span></a>
+And many passages show his conviction that for his
+progress towards this truth &lsquo;thought,&rsquo; &lsquo;knowledge,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;philosophy,&rsquo; are indispensable;<a name="fa24g" id="fa24g" href="#ft24g"><span class="sp">24</span></a> that he must submit
+to the toil and the solitude that they involve,
+just as he must undergo the pains of sympathy;
+that &lsquo;there is but one way for him,&rsquo; and that this
+one &lsquo;road lies through application, study, and
+thought.&rsquo;<a name="fa25g" id="fa25g" href="#ft25g"><span class="sp">25</span></a> On the other hand he had, in the first
+place, as we saw, a strong feeling that a man, and
+especially a poet, must not be in a hurry to arrive
+at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box
+of his supposed results, but must be content with
+half-knowledge, and capable of &lsquo;living in uncertainties,
+mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
+after fact and reason.&rsquo; And, in the second place,
+a poet, he felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts
+and reasonings which do not also satisfy imagination
+and give a truth which is also beauty; and
+in so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are
+<i>mere</i> thoughts and reasonings, they are no more
+than a means, though a necessary means, to an end,
+which end is beauty,&mdash;that beauty which is also truth.
+This alone is the poet&rsquo;s end, and therefore his law.
+&lsquo;With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes
+every other consideration, or rather obliterates all
+consideration.&rsquo;<a name="fa26g" id="fa26g" href="#ft26g"><span class="sp">26</span></a> Thought, knowledge, philosophy,
+if they fall short of this, are nothing but a &lsquo;road&rsquo;
+to his goal. They bring matter for him to mould
+to his purpose of beauty; but he must not allow
+them to impose <i>their</i> purpose on him, or to ask that
+it shall appear in his product. These statements
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page236" id="page236"></a>236</span>
+formulate Keats&rsquo;s position more than he formulates
+it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He
+was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or
+because, while his mind had much general power,
+he was, more than Wordsworth or Coleridge or
+Shelley, a poet pure and simple.<a name="fa27g" id="fa27g" href="#ft27g"><span class="sp">27</span></a></p>
+
+<p>We can now deal more briefly with another
+apparent inconsistency. Keats says again and again
+that the poet must not live for himself, but must
+feel for others and try to help them; that &lsquo;there
+is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some
+good for the world&rsquo;; that he is ambitious to do
+some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes
+to Shelley about the <i>Cenci</i>: &lsquo;There is only one part
+of it I am judge of&mdash;the poetry and dramatic effect,
+which by many spirits nowadays is considered the
+Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must have a
+purpose, which may be the God. An artist must
+serve Mammon; he must have &ldquo;self-concentration&rdquo;&mdash;selfishness,
+perhaps.&rsquo;<a name="fa28g" id="fa28g" href="#ft28g"><span class="sp">28</span></a> These are ungracious sentences,
+especially when we remember the letter to
+which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to
+Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of
+having an ultra-poetic purpose, and whose Count
+Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination
+than any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious
+too to criticise the irritability of a man
+condemned to death; and in any case these sentences
+are perfectly consistent with Keats&rsquo;s expressed
+desire to do good. The poet is to do good; yes,
+but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of
+doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page237" id="page237"></a>237</span>
+obtrude it in his poetry, or to show that he has a
+design upon us.<a name="fa29g" id="fa29g" href="#ft29g"><span class="sp">29</span></a> To make beauty is <i>his</i> philanthropy.
+He will not succeed in it best by making
+what is only in part beauty,&mdash;something like the
+<i>Excursion</i>, half poem and half lecture. He must be
+unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish;
+by refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic
+way of helping by the desire to help in another way.
+This is the drift of Keats&rsquo;s thought. If we remember
+what he means by &lsquo;beauty&rsquo; and &lsquo;poet,&rsquo; and how
+he distinguishes the poet from the &lsquo;dreamer,&rsquo;<a name="fa30g" id="fa30g" href="#ft30g"><span class="sp">30</span></a> we
+shall think it sound doctrine.</p>
+
+<p>Keats was by nature both dreamer and poet, and
+his ambition was to become poet pure and simple.
+There was, in a further sense, a double strain in his
+nature. He had in him the poetic temper of his
+time, the ever-present sense of an infinite, the
+tendency to think of this as an ideal perfection
+manifesting itself in reality, and yet surpassing
+reality, and so capable of being contrasted with it.
+He was allied here especially to Wordsworth and to
+Shelley, by the former of whom he was greatly
+influenced. But there was also in him another
+tendency; and this, it would seem, was strengthening
+at the expense of the first, and would in time
+have dominated it. It was perhaps the deeper and
+more individual. It may be called the Shakespearean
+strain, and it works against any inclination to erect
+walls between ideal and real, or to magnify differences
+of grade into oppositions of kind. Keats had
+the impulse to interest himself in everything he saw
+or heard of, to be curious about a thing, accept it,
+identify himself with it, without first asking whether
+it is better or worse than another, or how far it is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page238" id="page238"></a>238</span>
+from the ideal principle. It is this impulse that
+speaks in the words, &lsquo;If a sparrow come before my
+window, I take part in its existence and pick about
+the gravel&rsquo;;<a name="fa31g" id="fa31g" href="#ft31g"><span class="sp">31</span></a> and in the words, &lsquo;When she comes
+into a room she makes an impression the same as the
+beauty of a leopardess&rsquo;; and in the feeling that she
+is fine, though Bishop Hooker is finer. It too is the
+source of his complaint that he has no personal identity,
+and of his description of the poetical character;
+&lsquo;It has no self; it is everything and nothing.... It
+enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul
+or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.
+It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an
+Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher
+delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from
+its relish of the dark side of things, any more than
+from its taste for the bright one, because they both
+end in speculation.<a name="fa32g" id="fa32g" href="#ft32g"><span class="sp">32</span></a> A poet is the most unpoetical
+of anything in existence, because he has no identity.
+He is continually in, for, and filling some other
+body.&rsquo;<a name="fa33g" id="fa33g" href="#ft33g"><span class="sp">33</span></a> That is not a description of Milton or
+Wordsworth or Shelley; neither does it apply very
+fully to Keats; but it describes something at least
+of the spirit of Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>Now this spirit, it is obvious, tends in poetry,
+I do not say to a realistic, but to what may be
+called a concrete method of treatment; to the vivid
+presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in
+preference to the expression of unembodied thoughts
+and feelings. The atmosphere of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+age, as we have seen, was not, on the whole,
+favourable to it, and in various degrees it failed
+in strength, or it suffered, in all the greater poets.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page239" id="page239"></a>239</span>
+Scott had it in splendid abundance and vigour; but
+he had too little of the idealism or the metaphysical
+imagination which was common to those poets, and
+which Shakespeare united with his universal comprehension;
+nor was he, like Shakespeare and like
+some of them, a master of magic in language. But
+Keats had that magic in fuller measure, perhaps,
+than any of our poets since Milton; and, sharing
+the idealism of Wordsworth and Shelley, he possessed
+also wider sympathies, and, if not a more
+plastic or pictorial imagination than the latter, at
+least a greater freedom from the attraction of
+theoretic ideas. To what results might not this
+combination have led if his life had been as long as
+Wordsworth&rsquo;s or even as Byron&rsquo;s? It would be more
+than hazardous, I think, to say that he was the
+most highly endowed of all our poets in the nineteenth
+century, but he might well have written its
+greatest long poems.</p>
+
+<p class="f80">1905.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page240" id="page240"></a>240</span></p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE</p>
+
+<p>I have pointed out certain marked resemblances between
+<i>Alastor</i> and <i>Endymion</i>, and it would be easy to extend the
+list. These resemblances are largely due to similarities in the
+minds of the two poets, and to the action of a common influence
+on both. But I believe that, in addition, Keats was affected by
+the reading of <i>Alastor</i>, which appeared in 1816, while his own
+poem was begun in the spring of 1817.</p>
+
+<p>The common influence to which I refer was that of Wordsworth,
+and especially of the <i>Excursion</i>, published in 1814. There
+is a quotation, or rather a misquotation, from it in the Preface
+to <i>Alastor</i>. The <i>Excursion</i> is concerned in part with the danger
+of inactive and unsympathetic solitude; and this, treated of
+course in Shelley&rsquo;s own way, is the subject of <i>Alastor</i>, which
+also contains phrases reminiscent of Wordsworth&rsquo;s poem. Its
+Preface too reminds one immediately of the <i>Elegiac Stanzas on
+a Picture of Peele Castle</i>; of the main idea, and of the lines,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,</p>
+<p>Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">As for Keats, the reader of his letters knows how much he was
+occupied in 1817 and 1818 with thoughts due to the reading of
+Wordsworth, and how great, though qualified, was his admiration
+of the <i>Excursion</i>. These thoughts concerned chiefly the poetic
+nature, its tendency to &lsquo;dream,&rsquo; and the necessity that it should
+go beyond itself and feel for the sorrows of others. They may
+have been suggested <i>only</i> by Wordsworth; but we must remember
+that <i>Alastor</i> had been published, and that Keats would naturally
+read it. In comparing that poem with <i>Endymion</i> I am obliged
+to repeat remarks already made in the lecture.</p>
+
+<p><i>Alastor</i>, composed under the influence described, tells of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page241" id="page241"></a>241</span>
+fate of a young poet, who is &lsquo;pure and tender-hearted,&rsquo; but who,
+in his search for communion with the ideal influences of nature
+and of knowledge, keeps aloof from sympathies with his kind.
+&lsquo;So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards
+objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil
+and self-possessed.&rsquo; But a time comes when he thirsts for intercourse
+with an intelligence like himself. His ideal requirements
+are embodied in the form of a being who appears to him in a
+dream, and to whom he is united in passionate love. But his
+&lsquo;self-centred seclusion&rsquo; now avenges itself. The &lsquo;spirit of sweet
+human love&rsquo; vanishes as he wakes, and he wanders over the
+earth, vainly seeking the &lsquo;prototype&rsquo; of the vision until he dies.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Endymion</i> the story of a dream-vision, of rapturous union
+with it, and of the consequent pursuit of it, re-appears, though the
+beginning and the end are different. The hero, before the coming
+of the vision, has of course a poetic soul, but he is not self-secluded,
+or inactive, or fragile, or philosophic; and his pursuit
+of the goddess leads not to extinction but to immortal union
+with her. It does lead, however, to adventures of which the
+main idea evidently is that the poetic soul can only reach complete
+union with the ideal (which union is immortality) by
+wandering in a world which seems to deprive him of it; by
+trying to mitigate the woes of others instead of seeking the ideal
+for himself; and by giving himself up to love for what seems to
+be a mere woman, but is found to be the goddess herself. It
+seems almost beyond doubt that the story of Cynthia and
+Endymion would not have taken this shape but for <i>Alastor</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The reader will find this impression confirmed if he compares
+the descriptions in <i>Alastor</i> and <i>Endymion</i>, Book I., of the
+dreamer&rsquo;s feelings on awakening from his dream, of the disenchantment
+that has fallen on the landscape, and of his &lsquo;eager&rsquo;
+pursuit of the lost vision. Everything is, in one sense, different,
+for the two poets differ greatly, and Keats, of course, was writing
+without any conscious recollection of the passage in <i>Alastor</i>; but
+the conception is the same.<a name="fa34g" id="fa34g" href="#ft34g"><span class="sp">34</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page242" id="page242"></a>242</span></p>
+
+<p>Consider, again, the passage (near the beginning of <i>Endymion</i>,
+Book III.) quoted on p. 230 of the lecture. The hero is addressing
+the moon; and he says, to put it baldly, that from his
+boyhood everything that was beautiful to him was associated
+with his love of the moon&rsquo;s beauty. The passage continues
+thus:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>On some bright essence could I lean, and lull</p>
+<p>Myself to immortality: I prest</p>
+<p>Nature&rsquo;s soft pillow in a wakeful rest.</p>
+<p>But, gentle Orb! there came a nearer bliss&mdash;</p>
+<p>My strange love came&mdash;Felicity&rsquo;s abyss!</p>
+<p>She came, and thou didst fade, and fade away.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">In spite of the dissimilarities, surely the &lsquo;wakeful rest&rsquo; here
+corresponds to the condition of the poet in <i>Alastor</i> prior to the
+dream. &lsquo;So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards
+objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil
+and self-possessed&rsquo;; but when his &lsquo;strange love&rsquo; comes these
+objects, like the objects of Endymion&rsquo;s earlier desires, no longer
+suffice him.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, further evidence, indeed positive proof, of
+the effect of <i>Alastor</i>, and especially of its Preface, on Keats&rsquo;s
+mind. In the revised version of <i>Hyperion</i>, Book I., the dreamer
+in the Temple wonders why he has been preserved from death.
+The Prophetess tells him the reason (I italicise certain words):</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>&lsquo;None can usurp this height,&rsquo; returned that shade,</p>
+<p>&lsquo;But those to whom the <i>miseries of the world</i></p>
+<p>Are misery, and will not let them rest.</p>
+<p><i>All else</i> who find a haven in the world,</p>
+<p>Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,</p>
+<p>If by a chance into this fane they come,</p>
+<p>Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Are there not thousands in the world,&rsquo; said I,</p>
+<p>Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Who <i>love their fellows</i> even to the death,</p>
+<p>Who feel the giant agony of the world,</p>
+<p>And more, like slaves to poor humanity,</p>
+<p>Labour for mortal good?&rsquo;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">If the reader compares with this the following passage from the
+Preface to <i>Alastor</i>, and if he observes the words I have italicised
+in it, he will hardly doubt that some unconscious recollection of
+the Preface was at work in Keats&rsquo;s mind. Shelley is distinguishing
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page243" id="page243"></a>243</span>
+the self-centred seclusion of his poet from that of common selfish
+souls:</p>
+
+<p>&lsquo;The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The
+Poet&rsquo;s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an
+irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power
+which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness
+and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception
+of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those
+meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is
+more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible
+and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous
+error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped
+by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and
+cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with
+their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with
+human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned
+curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common
+nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor
+lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of
+their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human
+sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity
+and passion of their search after its communities, when the
+vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. <i>All else</i>, selfish,
+blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute,
+together with their own, the lasting <i>misery</i> and loneliness <i>of the
+world</i>. Those who <i>love not their fellow-beings</i>, live unfruitful
+lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.&rsquo;<a name="fa35g" id="fa35g" href="#ft35g"><span class="sp">35</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page244" id="page244"></a>244</span></p>
+
+<p>I have still a passage to refer to. Let the reader turn to the
+quotation on p. 236 from Keats&rsquo;s reply to Shelley&rsquo;s letter of invitation
+to his home in Italy; and let him ask himself why Keats
+puts the word &ldquo;self-concentration&rdquo; in inverted commas. He is
+not referring to anything in Shelley&rsquo;s letter, and he is not in the
+habit in the letters of using inverted commas except to mark a
+quotation. Without doubt, I think, he is referring from memory
+to the Preface to <i>Alastor</i> and the phrase &lsquo;self-centred seclusion.&rsquo;
+He has come to feel that this self-centred seclusion is <i>right</i> for a
+poet like himself, and that the direct pursuit of philanthropy in
+poetry (which he supposes Shelley to advocate) is wrong. But
+this is another proof how much he had been influenced by
+Shelley&rsquo;s poem; and it is perhaps not too rash to conjecture
+that his consciousness of this influence was one reason why he
+had earlier refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might &lsquo;have
+his own unfettered scope.&rsquo;<a name="fa36g" id="fa36g" href="#ft36g"><span class="sp">36</span></a></p>
+
+<p>If it seems to anyone that these conclusions are derogatory
+to Keats, either as a man or a poet, I can only say that I differ
+from him entirely. But I will add that there seems to me some
+reason to conjecture that Shelley had read the <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i>
+before he wrote the stanzas <i>To a Skylark</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1g" id="ft1g" href="#fa1g"><span class="fn">1</span></a> The Letters (except those to Miss Brawne, and a few others) have
+been edited by Colvin, and (without exception) by Forman (pub.
+Gowans &amp; Gray). I refer to them by their numbers, followed by the
+initial of the editor&rsquo;s name. Both editions reproduce peculiarities of
+punctuation, etc.; but for my present purpose these are usually without
+interest, and I have consulted the convenience of the reader in
+making changes.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2g" id="ft2g" href="#fa2g"><span class="fn">2</span></a> Keats himself, it is strange to think, was born in the same year as
+Carlyle.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3g" id="ft3g" href="#fa3g"><span class="fn">3</span></a> These passions were in his last two years overclouded at times, but
+they remained to the end. When, in the bitterness of his soul, he
+begged Severn to put on his tombstone no name, but only &lsquo;Here lies
+one whose name was writ in water,&rsquo; he was thinking not merely of
+the reviewers who had robbed him of fame in his short life, but also of
+those unwritten poems, of which &lsquo;the faint conceptions&rsquo; in happier days
+used to &lsquo;bring the blood into his forehead.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4g" id="ft4g" href="#fa4g"><span class="fn">4</span></a> <span class="scs">LII</span>, C., <span class="scs">LV</span>, F. The quotations above are from <span class="scs">XIV</span>, <span class="scs">XVI</span>, C.,
+<span class="scs">XV</span>, <span class="scs">XVII</span>, <span class="scs">XVIII</span>, F. The verses are a parody of Wordsworth&rsquo;s lines,
+&lsquo;The cock is crowing.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5g" id="ft5g" href="#fa5g"><span class="fn">5</span></a> <span class="scs">LXI</span>, C., <span class="scs">LXVI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6g" id="ft6g" href="#fa6g"><span class="fn">6</span></a> <span class="scs">LVI</span>, C., <span class="scs">LXI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7g" id="ft7g" href="#fa7g"><span class="fn">7</span></a> <span class="scs">LXXIII</span>, C., <span class="scs">LXXXI</span>, F. Mr. Hooker, I may remark, would not have
+thanked Keats for his bishopric.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8g" id="ft8g" href="#fa8g"><span class="fn">8</span></a> From the letter last quoted. See also <span class="scs">CXVI, CXVIII, CXIX</span>, C.,
+<span class="scs">CXXXVII, CXXXIV, CXXXV</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9g" id="ft9g" href="#fa9g"><span class="fn">9</span></a> &lsquo;Pain had no sting and pleasure&rsquo;s wreath no flower.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft10g" id="ft10g" href="#fa10g"><span class="fn">10</span></a> <span class="scs">XCII</span>, C., <span class="scs">CVI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft11g" id="ft11g" href="#fa11g"><span class="fn">11</span></a> <span class="scs">XIX</span>, C., <span class="scs">XXI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft12g" id="ft12g" href="#fa12g"><span class="fn">12</span></a> <span class="scs">LIV</span>, C., <span class="scs">LIX</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft13g" id="ft13g" href="#fa13g"><span class="fn">13</span></a> <span class="scs">CXXXI</span>, C., <span class="scs">CLII</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft14g" id="ft14g" href="#fa14g"><span class="fn">14</span></a> <span class="scs">CXVI</span>, C., <span class="scs">CXXXVII</span>, F. The word &lsquo;turn&rsquo; in the last sentence but
+two seems to be doubtful. Mr. Colvin reads &lsquo;have.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft15g" id="ft15g" href="#fa15g"><span class="fn">15</span></a> Keats&rsquo;s use of the word is suggested, probably, by Milton&rsquo;s &lsquo;pure
+intelligence of heaven.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft16g" id="ft16g" href="#fa16g"><span class="fn">16</span></a> <span class="scs">XCII</span>, C., <span class="scs">CVI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft17g" id="ft17g" href="#fa17g"><span class="fn">17</span></a> <span class="scs">CLXVI</span>, F., <span class="scs">LXXIII</span>, C., <span class="scs">LXXXI</span>, F. In <span class="scs">XLI</span>, C., <span class="scs">XLIV</span>, F., occurs a
+passage ending with the words, &lsquo;they are able to &ldquo;<i>consecrate whate&rsquo;er
+they look upon</i>.&rdquo;&rsquo; Is not this a quotation from the <i>Hymn</i>:</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Spirit of <span class="sc">Beauty</span> that dost consecrate</p>
+<p>With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon?</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">If so, and if my memory serves me, this is the only quotation from
+Shelley&rsquo;s poetry in the letters of Keats. The <i>Hymn</i> had been
+published in Hunt&rsquo;s <i>Examiner</i>, Jan., 1817.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft18g" id="ft18g" href="#fa18g"><span class="fn">18</span></a> The first critic, I believe, who seriously attempted to investigate
+Keats&rsquo;s mind, and the ideas that were trying to take shape in
+some of his poems, was F. M. Owen, whose <i>John Keats, a Study</i>
+(1880) never attracted in her too brief life-time the attention it
+deserved. Mr. Bridges&rsquo;s treatment of these ideas is masterly.
+To what is said above may be added that, although Keats was
+dissatisfied with <i>Endymion</i> even before he had finished it, he did not
+at any time criticise it on the ground that it tried to put too much
+meaning into the myth. On <i>Alastor</i> and <i>Endymion</i> see further the
+Note appended to this lecture.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft19g" id="ft19g" href="#fa19g"><span class="fn">19</span></a> A notable (but not isolated) remark, seeing that the poetic genius
+of Keats showed itself soonest and perhaps most completely in the
+rendering of Nature.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft20g" id="ft20g" href="#fa20g"><span class="fn">20</span></a> <span class="scs">XXIV</span>, C., <span class="scs">XXVI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft21g" id="ft21g" href="#fa21g"><span class="fn">21</span></a> <span class="scs">CXVI</span>, C., <span class="scs">CXXXVII</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft22g" id="ft22g" href="#fa22g"><span class="fn">22</span></a> <span class="scs">XIX</span>, C., <span class="scs">XXI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft23g" id="ft23g" href="#fa23g"><span class="fn">23</span></a> <span class="scs">XXXII</span>, C., <span class="scs">XXXIV</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft24g" id="ft24g" href="#fa24g"><span class="fn">24</span></a> He contemplates even the study of metaphysics, <span class="scs">LI</span>, C., <span class="scs">LIV</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft25g" id="ft25g" href="#fa25g"><span class="fn">25</span></a> <span class="scs">L</span>, C., <span class="scs">LIII</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft26g" id="ft26g" href="#fa26g"><span class="fn">26</span></a> <span class="scs">XXIV</span>, C., <span class="scs">XXVI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft27g" id="ft27g" href="#fa27g"><span class="fn">27</span></a> Cf. in addition to the letters already referred to, the obscure letter
+to Bailey, <span class="scs">XXII</span>, C., <span class="scs">XXIV</span>, F., which, however, is early, and not quite in
+agreement with later thoughts. I should observe perhaps that if
+Keats&rsquo;s position, as formulated above, is accepted, the question still
+remains whether a truth which is also beauty, or a beauty which is also
+truth, can be found by man; and, if so, whether it can, in strictness,
+be called by either of those names.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft28g" id="ft28g" href="#fa28g"><span class="fn">28</span></a> <span class="scs">CLV</span>, C., <span class="scs">CCVI</span>, F. See on these sentences the Note at the end of
+the lecture.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft29g" id="ft29g" href="#fa29g"><span class="fn">29</span></a> An expression used in reference to Wordsworth, <span class="scs">XXXIV</span>, C.,
+<span class="scs">XXXVI</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft30g" id="ft30g" href="#fa30g"><span class="fn">30</span></a> I have not space to dwell on this distinction, but I must warn the
+reader that he will probably misunderstand the important passage in
+the revised <i>Hyperion</i>, 161 ff., unless he consults Mr. de Sélincourt&rsquo;s
+edition.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft31g" id="ft31g" href="#fa31g"><span class="fn">31</span></a> <span class="scs">XXII</span>, C., <span class="scs">XXV</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft32g" id="ft32g" href="#fa32g"><span class="fn">32</span></a> That is, in &lsquo;half-knowledge,&rsquo; &lsquo;doubts,&rsquo; &lsquo;mysteries&rsquo; (see p. 235),
+while the philosopher is sometimes supposed by Keats to have a
+reasoned certainty about everything. It is curious to reflect that great
+metaphysicians, like Spinoza and Hegel, are often accused of the
+un-moral impartiality which Keats attributes to the poet.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft33g" id="ft33g" href="#fa33g"><span class="fn">33</span></a> <span class="scs">LXXVI</span>, C., <span class="scs">LXXX</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft34g" id="ft34g" href="#fa34g"><span class="fn">34</span></a> The ultimate origin of the dream-passage in both poems may well be
+Adam&rsquo;s dream in <i>Paradise Lost</i>, Book viii.:</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>She disappear&rsquo;d, and left me dark: I waked</p>
+<p>To find her, or for ever to deplore</p>
+<p>Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Keats alludes to this in <span class="scs">XXII</span>, C., <span class="scs">XXIV</span>, F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft35g" id="ft35g" href="#fa35g"><span class="fn">35</span></a> It is tempting to conjecture with Mr. Forman that the full-stop before the
+last sentence is a misprint, and that we should read &lsquo;the world,&mdash;those who,&rsquo;
+etc., so that the last two clauses would be relative clauses co-ordinate with
+&lsquo;who love not their fellow-beings.&rsquo; Not to speak of the run of the sentences,
+this conjecture is tempting because of the comma after &lsquo;fellow-beings,&rsquo; and
+because the paragraph is followed by the quotation (&lsquo;those&rsquo; should be &lsquo;they&rsquo;),</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+        <p class="i9">The good die first,</p>
+<p>And those whose hearts are dry as summer&rsquo;s dust</p>
+<p>Burn to the socket.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The good who die first correspond with the &lsquo;pure and tender-hearted&rsquo; who
+perish and, as we naturally suppose, perish young, like the poet in <i>Alastor</i>.
+But, as the last sentence stands, these, as well as the torpid, live to old age.
+It is hard to believe that Shelley meant this; but as he was in England when
+<i>Alastor</i> was printed, he probably revised the proofs, and it is perhaps easier to
+suppose that he wrote what is printed than that he passed unobserved the
+serious misprint supposed by Mr. Forman.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft36g" id="ft36g" href="#fa36g"><span class="fn">36</span></a> <span class="scs">XVIII</span>, C., <span class="scs">XX</span>, F.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page245" id="page245"></a>245</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page246" id="page246"></a>246<br />247</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2"><span class="chap2">THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF</span><a name="fa1h" id="fa1h" href="#ft1h"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">Of</span> the two persons principally concerned in the
+rejection of Falstaff, Henry, both as Prince and as
+King, has received, on the whole, full justice from
+readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has
+been in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+famous characters. All of them, in passing
+from the mind of their creator into other minds,
+suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony
+through the disproportionate attention bestowed on
+some one feature, or to lose their uniqueness by
+being conventionalised into types already familiar.
+But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself.
+The original character is to be found alive in the
+two parts of <i>Henry IV.</i>, dead in <i>Henry V.</i>, and
+nowhere else. But not very long after these plays
+were composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards
+revised, the very entertaining piece called
+<i>The Merry Wives of Windsor</i>. Perhaps his company
+wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as
+one would rather believe, the tradition may be true
+that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with the Falstaff
+scenes of <i>Henry IV.</i>, expressed a wish to see the
+hero of them again, and to see him in love. Now
+it was no more possible for Shakespeare to show his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page248" id="page248"></a>248</span>
+own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two into five.
+But he could write in haste&mdash;the tradition says, in a
+fortnight&mdash;a comedy or farce differing from all his
+other plays in this, that its scene is laid in English
+middle-class life, and that it is prosaic almost to the
+end. And among the characters he could introduce
+a disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and
+could call them Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym.
+And he could represent this knight assailing, for
+financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in
+the event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen,
+beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted, and, worst
+of all, repentant and didactic. It is horrible. It is
+almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare
+himself could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the
+<i>Two Noble Kinsmen</i>. But it no more touches the
+real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that
+parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like
+the Falstaff of the <i>Merry Wives</i> is like imagining
+Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky Sharp the dupe
+of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served
+the least of these tricks he would have had his
+brains taken out and buttered, and have given them
+to a dog for a New Year&rsquo;s gift. I quote the words
+of the impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him
+and gave to him a few sentences worthy of Falstaff
+himself. But they are only a few&mdash;one side of a
+sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet
+critics have solemnly debated at what period in his
+life Sir John endured the gibes of Master Ford, and
+whether we should put this comedy between the
+two parts of <i>Henry IV.</i>, or between the second
+of them and <i>Henry V.</i> And the Falstaff of the
+general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible
+conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the
+Falstaff of the mere play-goer is certainly much
+more like the impostor than the true man.</p>
+
+<p>The separation of these two has long ago been
+effected by criticism, and is insisted on in almost all
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page249" id="page249"></a>249</span>
+competent estimates of the character of Falstaff.
+I do not propose to attempt a full account either of
+this character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall
+connect the remarks I have to make on them with a
+question which does not appear to have been satisfactorily
+discussed&mdash;the question of the rejection of
+Falstaff by the Prince on his accession to the
+throne. What do we feel, and what are we meant
+to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what
+does our feeling imply as to the characters of
+Falstaff and the new King?</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">1.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire,
+engaged in borrowing a thousand pounds from
+Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding helter-skelter
+from London, brings him the great news
+that the old King is as dead as nail in door, and
+that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir John, in
+wild excitement, taking any man&rsquo;s horses, rushes to
+London; and he carries Shallow with him, for he
+longs to reward all his friends. We find him standing
+with his companions just outside Westminster
+Abbey, in the crowd that is waiting for the King
+to come out after his coronation. He himself is
+stained with travel, and has had no time to spend
+any of the thousand pounds in buying new liveries
+for his men. But what of that? This poor show
+only proves his earnestness of affection, his devotion,
+how he could not deliberate or remember or have
+patience to shift himself, but rode day and night,
+thought of nothing else but to see Henry, and put
+all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing
+else to be done but to see him. And now he stands
+sweating with desire to see him, and repeating and
+repeating this one desire of his heart&mdash;&lsquo;to see him.&rsquo;
+The moment comes. There is a shout within the
+Abbey like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page250" id="page250"></a>250</span>
+of trumpets, and the doors open and the procession
+streams out.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p class="i1"><span class="sc">Fal.</span> God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!</p>
+
+<p class="i1"><span class="sc">Pist.</span> The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal</p>
+<p>imp of fame!</p>
+
+<p class="i1"><span class="sc">Fal.</span> God save thee, my sweet boy!</p>
+
+<p class="i1"><span class="sc">King.</span> My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.</p>
+
+<p class="i1"><span class="sc">Ch. Just.</span> Have you your wits? Know you what &rsquo;tis</p>
+<p>you speak?</p>
+
+<p class="i1"><span class="sc">Fal.</span> My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!</p>
+
+<p><span class="sc">King.</span> I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.</p>
+<p>How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!</p>
+<p>I have long dream&rsquo;d of such a kind of man,</p>
+<p>So surfeit-swell&rsquo;d, so old and so profane;</p>
+<p>But being awaked I do despise my dream.</p>
+<p>Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;</p>
+<p>Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape</p>
+<p>For thee thrice wider than for other men.</p>
+<p>Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:</p>
+<p>Presume not that I am the thing I was;</p>
+<p>For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,</p>
+<p>That I have turn&rsquo;d away my former self;</p>
+<p>So will I those that kept me company.</p>
+<p>When thou dost hear I am as I have been,</p>
+<p>Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,</p>
+<p>The tutor and the feeder of my riots:</p>
+<p>Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,</p>
+<p>As I have done the rest of my misleaders,</p>
+<p>Not to come near our person by ten mile.</p>
+<p>For competence of life I will allow you,</p>
+<p>That lack of means enforce you not to evil:</p>
+<p>And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,</p>
+<p>We will, according to your strengths and qualities,</p>
+<p>Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,</p>
+<p>To see perform&rsquo;d the tenour of our word.</p>
+<p>Set on.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff
+and his friends remain. He shows no resentment.
+He comforts himself, or tries to comfort himself&mdash;first,
+with the thought that he has Shallow&rsquo;s thousand
+pounds, and then, more seriously, I believe, with
+another thought. The King, he sees, must look
+thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private
+when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page251" id="page251"></a>251</span>
+of his friends. But even as he speaks, the Chief
+Justice, accompanied by Prince John, returns, and
+gives the order to his officers:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;</p>
+<p>Take all his company along with him.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Falstaff breaks out, &lsquo;My lord, my lord,&rsquo; but he is
+cut short and hurried away; and after a few words
+between the Prince and the Chief Justice the scene
+closes, and with it the drama.</p>
+
+<p>What are our feelings during this scene? They
+will depend on our feelings about Falstaff. If we
+have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff scenes of the
+two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old
+reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward,
+but a cruel and dangerous ruffian, I suppose we
+enjoy his discomfiture and consider that the King
+has behaved magnificently. But if we <i>have</i> keenly
+enjoyed the Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed
+them as Shakespeare surely meant them to be
+enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us
+solely or even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we
+feel, I think, during the King&rsquo;s speech, a good deal
+of pain and some resentment; and when, without
+any further offence on Sir John&rsquo;s part, the Chief
+Justice returns and sends him to prison, we stare in
+astonishment. These, I believe, are, in greater or
+less degree, the feelings of most of those who really
+enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not).
+Nor are these feelings diminished when we remember
+the end of the whole story, as we find it in
+<i>Henry V.</i>, where we learn that Falstaff quickly
+died, and, according to the testimony of persons not
+very sentimental, died of a broken heart.<a name="fa2h" id="fa2h" href="#ft2h"><span class="sp">2</span></a> Suppose
+this merely to mean that he sank under the shame
+of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but
+the words of Mrs. Quickly, &lsquo;The king has killed his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page252" id="page252"></a>252</span>
+heart&rsquo;; of Nym, &lsquo;The king hath run bad humours
+on the knight; that&rsquo;s the even of it&rsquo;; of Pistol,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i2">Nym, thou hast spoke the right,</p>
+<p>His heart is fracted and corroborate,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">assuredly point to something more than wounded
+pride; they point to wounded affection, and remind
+us of Falstaff&rsquo;s own answer to Prince Hal&rsquo;s question,
+&lsquo;Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?&rsquo; &lsquo;A
+thousand pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth
+a million: thou owest me thy love.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a
+scene which, though undoubtedly striking, leaves an
+impression so unpleasant? I will venture to put
+aside without discussion the idea that he meant us
+throughout the two plays to regard Falstaff with
+disgust or indignation, so that we naturally feel
+nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies
+that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare
+with which it is idle to argue. And there is another
+and a much more ingenious suggestion which must
+equally be rejected as impossible. According to it,
+Falstaff, having listened to the King&rsquo;s speech, did
+not seriously hope to be sent for by him in private;
+he fully realised the situation at once, and was only
+making game of Shallow; and in his immediate
+turn upon Shallow when the King goes out, &lsquo;Master
+Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,&rsquo; we are meant
+to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that
+we end the play with the delightful feeling that,
+while Henry has done the right thing, Falstaff, in
+his outward overthrow, has still proved himself
+inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a
+critic who understands Falstaff, and in the suggestion
+itself shows that he understands him.<a name="fa3h" id="fa3h" href="#ft3h"><span class="sp">3</span></a> But it
+provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and
+could not account for, that which follows the short
+conversation with Shallow. Falstaff&rsquo;s dismissal to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page253" id="page253"></a>253</span>
+the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove beyond
+doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare
+to be taken as a catastrophe which not even his
+humour could enable him to surmount.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise
+admissible, would still leave our problem only partly
+solved. For what troubles us is not only the disappointment
+of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry.
+It was inevitable that on his accession he should
+separate himself from Sir John, and we wish nothing
+else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should have a
+competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly
+improbable case of his reforming himself. And if
+Henry could not trust himself within ten miles of so
+fascinating a companion, by all means let him be
+banished that distance: we do not complain. These
+arrangements would not have prevented a satisfactory
+ending: the King could have communicated
+his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in
+a private interview rich in humour and merely
+touched with pathos. But Shakespeare has so contrived
+matters that Henry could not send a private
+warning to Falstaff even if he wished to, and in
+their public meeting Falstaff is made to behave in so
+infatuated and outrageous a manner that great sternness
+on the King&rsquo;s part was unavoidable. And the
+curious thing is that Shakespeare did not stop here.
+If this had been all we should have felt pain for
+Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against
+Henry. But two things we do resent. Why,
+when this painful incident seems to be over, should
+the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison?
+Can this possibly be meant for an act of private
+vengeance on the part of the Chief Justice, unknown
+to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare
+would have shown at once that the King disapproved
+and cancelled it. It must have been the
+King&rsquo;s own act. This is one thing we resent; the
+other is the King&rsquo;s sermon. He had a right to turn
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page254" id="page254"></a>254</span>
+away his former self, and his old companions with
+it, but he had no right to talk all of a sudden like a
+clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and
+insincere to speak of them as his &lsquo;misleaders,&rsquo; as
+though in the days of Eastcheap and Gadshill he
+had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen his
+former self, and we know that it was nothing of the
+kind. He had shown himself, for all his follies, a
+very strong and independent young man, deliberately
+amusing himself among men over whom he
+had just as much ascendency as he chose to exert.
+Nay, he amused himself not only among them, but
+at their expense. In his first soliloquy&mdash;and first
+soliloquies are usually significant&mdash;he declares that
+he associates with them in order that, when at some
+future time he shows his true character, he may be
+the more wondered at for his previous aberrations.
+You may think he deceives himself here; you may
+believe that he frequented Sir John&rsquo;s company out
+of delight in it and not merely with this cold-blooded
+design; but at any rate he <i>thought</i> the
+design was his one motive. And, that being so,
+two results follow. He ought in honour long ago
+to have given Sir John clearly to understand that
+they must say good-bye on the day of his accession.
+And, having neglected to do this, he ought not to
+have lectured him as his misleader. It was not
+only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably
+like an attempt to buy the praise of the
+respectable at the cost of honour and truth. And it
+succeeded. Henry <i>always</i> succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>You will see what I am suggesting, for the
+moment, as a solution of our problem. I am suggesting
+that our fault lies not in our resentment at
+Henry&rsquo;s conduct, but in our surprise at it; that if
+we had read his character truly in the light that
+Shakespeare gave us, we should have been prepared
+for a display both of hardness and of policy at this
+point in his career, And although this suggestion
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page255" id="page255"></a>255</span>
+does not suffice to solve the problem before us, I am
+convinced that in itself it is true. Nor is it rendered
+at all improbable by the fact that Shakespeare has
+made Henry, on the whole, a fine and very attractive
+character, and that here he makes no one express
+any disapprobation of the treatment of Falstaff.
+For in similar cases Shakespeare is constantly misunderstood.
+His readers expect him to mark in
+some distinct way his approval or disapproval of
+that which he represents; and hence where <i>they</i>
+disapprove and <i>he</i> says nothing, they fancy that he
+does <i>not</i> disapprove, and they blame his indifference,
+like Dr. Johnson, or at the least are puzzled. But
+the truth is that he shows the fact and leaves the
+judgment to them. And again, when he makes us
+like a character we expect the character to have no
+faults that are not expressly pointed out, and when
+other faults appear we either ignore them or try to
+explain them away. This is one of our methods
+of conventionalising Shakespeare. We want the
+world&rsquo;s population to be neatly divided into sheep
+and goats, and we want an angel by us to say,
+&lsquo;Look, that is a goat and this is a sheep,&rsquo; and we
+try to turn Shakespeare into this angel. His impartiality
+makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear
+to see him, like the sun, lighting up everything and
+judging nothing. And this is perhaps especially
+the case in his historical plays, where we are always
+trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us
+that Richard II. was unworthy to be king, and we
+at once conclude that he thought Bolingbroke&rsquo;s
+usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely,
+what under the conditions was bound to exist,
+an inextricable tangle of right and unright. Or,
+Bolingbroke being evidently wronged, we suppose
+Bolingbroke&rsquo;s statements to be true, and are quite
+surprised when, after attaining his end through them,
+he mentions casually on his death-bed that they
+were lies. Shakespeare makes us admire Hotspur
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page256" id="page256"></a>256</span>
+heartily; and accordingly, when we see Hotspur discussing
+with others how large his particular slice
+of his mother-country is to be, we either fail to
+recognise the monstrosity of the proceeding, or,
+recognising it, we complain that Shakespeare is
+inconsistent. Prince John breaks a tottering rebellion
+by practising a detestable fraud on the
+rebels. We are against the rebels, and have heard
+high praise of Prince John, but we cannot help
+seeing that his fraud is detestable; so we say indignantly
+to Shakespeare, &lsquo;Why, you told us he
+was a sheep&rsquo;; whereas, in fact, if we had used our
+eyes we should have known beforehand that he was
+the brave, determined, loyal, cold-blooded, pitiless,
+unscrupulous son of a usurper whose throne was in
+danger.</p>
+
+<p>To come, then, to Henry. Both as prince and as
+king he is deservedly a favourite, and particularly so
+with English readers, being, as he is, perhaps the
+most distinctively English of all Shakespeare&rsquo;s men.
+In <i>Henry V.</i> he is treated as a national hero. In
+this play he has lost much of the wit which in him
+seems to have depended on contact with Falstaff,
+but he has also laid aside the most serious faults of
+his youth. He inspires in a high degree fear,
+enthusiasm, and affection; thanks to his beautiful
+modesty he has the charm which is lacking to
+another mighty warrior, Coriolanus; his youthful
+escapades have given him an understanding of
+simple folk, and sympathy with them; he is the
+author of the saying, &lsquo;There is some soul of goodness
+in things evil&rsquo;; and he is much more obviously
+religious than most of Shakespeare&rsquo;s heroes. Having
+these and other fine qualities, and being without
+certain dangerous tendencies which mark the tragic
+heroes, he is, perhaps, the most <i>efficient</i> character
+drawn by Shakespeare, unless Ulysses, in <i>Troilus
+and Cressida</i>, is his equal. And so he has been
+described as Shakespeare&rsquo;s ideal man of action;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page257" id="page257"></a>257</span>
+nay, it has even been declared that here for once
+Shakespeare plainly disclosed his own ethical creed,
+and showed us his ideal, not simply of a man of
+action, but of a man.</p>
+
+<p>But Henry is neither of these. The poet who
+drew Hamlet and Othello can never have thought
+that even the ideal man of action would lack that
+light upon the brow which at once transfigures them
+and marks their doom. It is as easy to believe that,
+because the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are not
+far apart, Shakespeare would have chosen never to
+have loved and sung. Even poor Timon, the most
+inefficient of the tragic heroes, has something in him
+that Henry never shows. Nor is it merely that his
+nature is limited: if we follow Shakespeare and look
+closely at Henry, we shall discover with the many
+fine traits a few less pleasing. Henry IV. describes
+him as the noble image of his own youth; and, for
+all his superiority to his father, he is still his father&rsquo;s
+son, the son of the man whom Hotspur called a &lsquo;vile
+politician.&rsquo; Henry&rsquo;s religion, for example, is genuine,
+it is rooted in his modesty; but it is also superstitious&mdash;an
+attempt to buy off supernatural vengeance
+for Richard&rsquo;s blood; and it is also in part
+political, like his father&rsquo;s projected crusade. Just as
+he went to war chiefly because, as his father told
+him, it was the way to keep factious nobles quiet
+and unite the nation, so when he adjures the Archbishop
+to satisfy him as to his right to the French
+throne, he knows very well that the Archbishop
+<i>wants</i> the war, because it will defer and perhaps
+prevent what he considers the spoliation of the
+Church. This same strain of policy is what Shakespeare
+marks in the first soliloquy in <i>Henry IV.</i>,
+where the prince describes his riotous life as a mere
+scheme to win him glory later. It implies that
+readiness to use other people as means to his own
+ends which is a conspicuous feature in his father;
+and it reminds us of his father&rsquo;s plan of keeping
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page258" id="page258"></a>258</span>
+himself out of the people&rsquo;s sight while Richard was
+making himself cheap by his incessant public
+appearances. And if I am not mistaken there is a
+further likeness. Henry is kindly and pleasant to
+every one as Prince, to every one deserving as
+King; and he is so not merely out of policy: but
+there is no sign in him of a strong affection for any
+one, such an affection as we recognise at a glance in
+Hamlet and Horatio, Brutus and Cassius, and many
+more. We do not find this in <i>Henry V.</i>, not even
+in the noble address to Lord Scroop, and in
+<i>Henry IV.</i> we find, I think, a liking for Falstaff
+and Poins, but no more: there is no more than a
+liking, for instance, in his soliloquy over the supposed
+corpse of his fat friend, and he never speaks
+of Falstaff to Poins with any affection. The truth
+is, that the members of the family of Henry IV.
+have love for one another, but they cannot spare
+love for any one outside their family, which stands
+firmly united, defending its royal position against
+attack and instinctively isolating itself from outside
+influence.</p>
+
+<p>Thus I would suggest that Henry&rsquo;s conduct in his
+rejection of Falstaff is in perfect keeping with his
+character on its unpleasant side as well as on its
+finer; and that, so far as Henry is concerned, we
+ought not to feel surprise at it. And on this view
+we may even explain the strange incident of the
+Chief Justice being sent back to order Falstaff to
+prison (for there is no sign of any such uncertainty
+in the text as might suggest an interpolation by the
+players). Remembering his father&rsquo;s words about
+Henry, &lsquo;Being incensed, he&rsquo;s flint,&rsquo; and remembering
+in <i>Henry V.</i> his ruthlessness about killing the
+prisoners when he is incensed, we may imagine that,
+after he had left Falstaff and was no longer
+influenced by the face of his old companion, he gave
+way to anger at the indecent familiarity which had
+provoked a compromising scene on the most ceremonial
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page259" id="page259"></a>259</span>
+of occasions and in the presence alike of
+court and crowd, and that he sent the Chief Justice
+back to take vengeance. And this is consistent with
+the fact that in the next play we find Falstaff shortly
+afterwards not only freed from prison, but unmolested
+in his old haunt in Eastcheap, well within ten miles
+of Henry&rsquo;s person. His anger had soon passed,
+and he knew that the requisite effect had been produced
+both on Falstaff and on the world.</p>
+
+<p>But all this, however true, will not solve our
+problem. It seems, on the contrary, to increase
+its difficulty. For the natural conclusion is that
+Shakespeare <i>intended</i> us to feel resentment against
+Henry. And yet that cannot be, for it implies that
+he meant the play to end disagreeably; and no one
+who understands Shakespeare at all will consider
+that supposition for a moment credible. No; he
+must have meant the play to end pleasantly, although
+he made Henry&rsquo;s action consistent. And hence it
+follows that he must have intended our sympathy
+with Falstaff to be so far weakened when the rejection-scene
+arrives that his discomfiture should be
+satisfactory to us; that we should enjoy this sudden
+reverse of enormous hopes (a thing always ludicrous
+if sympathy is absent); that we should approve the
+moral judgment that falls on him; and so should
+pass lightly over that disclosure of unpleasant traits
+in the King&rsquo;s character which Shakespeare was too
+true an artist to suppress. Thus our pain and resentment,
+if we feel them, are wrong, in the sense that
+they do not answer to the dramatist&rsquo;s intention. But
+it does not follow that they are wrong in a further
+sense. They may be right, because the dramatist
+has missed what he aimed at. And this, though
+the dramatist was Shakespeare, is what I would
+suggest. In the Falstaff scenes he overshot his
+mark. He created so extraordinary a being, and
+fixed him so firmly on his intellectual throne, that
+when he sought to dethrone him he could not. The
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page260" id="page260"></a>260</span>
+moment comes when we are to look at Falstaff in a
+serious light, and the comic hero is to figure as a
+baffled schemer; but we cannot make the required
+change, either in our attitude or in our sympathies.
+We wish Henry a glorious reign and much joy of
+his crew of hypocritical politicians, lay and clerical;
+but our hearts go with Falstaff to the Fleet, or, if
+necessary, to Arthur&rsquo;s bosom or wheresomever
+he is.<a name="fa4h" id="fa4h" href="#ft4h"><span class="sp">4</span></a></p>
+
+<p>In the remainder of the lecture I will try to make
+this view clear. And to that end we must go back
+to the Falstaff of the body of the two plays, the
+immortal Falstaff, a character almost purely humorous,
+and therefore no subject for moral judgments.
+I can but draw an outline, and in describing one
+aspect of this character must be content to hold
+another in reserve.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">2.</p>
+
+<p>Up to a certain point Falstaff is ludicrous in the
+same way as many other figures, his distinction
+lying, so far, chiefly in the mere abundance of
+ludicrous traits. <i>Why</i> we should laugh at a man
+with a huge belly and corresponding appetites; at
+the inconveniences he suffers on a hot day, or in
+playing the footpad, or when he falls down and there
+are no levers at hand to lift him up again; at the
+incongruity of his unwieldy bulk and the nimbleness
+of his spirit, the infirmities of his age and his youthful
+lightness of heart; at the enormity of his lies and
+wiles, and the suddenness of their exposure and
+frustration; at the contrast between his reputation
+and his real character, seen most absurdly when, at
+the mere mention of his name, a redoubted rebel
+surrenders to him&mdash;<i>why</i>, I say, we should laugh at
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page261" id="page261"></a>261</span>
+these and many such things, this is no place to
+inquire; but unquestionably we do. Here we have
+them poured out in endless profusion and with that
+air of careless ease which is so fascinating in Shakespeare;
+and with the enjoyment of them I believe
+many readers stop. But while they are quite essential
+to the character, there is in it much more. For
+these things by themselves do not explain why,
+beside laughing at Falstaff, we are made happy by
+him and laugh <i>with</i> him. He is not, like Parolles,
+a mere <i>object</i> of mirth.</p>
+
+<p>The main reason why he makes us so happy and
+puts us so entirely at our ease is that he himself is
+happy and entirely at his ease. &lsquo;Happy&rsquo; is too
+weak a word; he is in bliss, and we share his glory.
+Enjoyment&mdash;no fitful pleasure crossing a dull life,
+nor any vacant convulsive mirth&mdash;but a rich deep-toned
+chuckling enjoyment circulates continually
+through all his being. If you ask <i>what</i> he enjoys,
+no doubt the answer is, in the first place, eating and
+drinking, taking his ease at his inn, and the company
+of other merry souls. Compared with these things,
+what we count the graver interests of life are nothing
+to him. But then, while we are under his spell, it
+is impossible to consider these graver interests;
+gravity is to us, as to him, inferior to gravy; and
+what he does enjoy he enjoys with such a luscious
+and good-humoured zest that we sympathise and he
+makes us happy. And if any one objected, we
+should answer with Sir Toby Belch, &lsquo;Dost thou
+think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no
+more cakes and ale?&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>But this, again, is far from all. Falstaff&rsquo;s ease
+and enjoyment are not simply those of the happy
+man of appetite;<a name="fa5h" id="fa5h" href="#ft5h"><span class="sp">5</span></a> they are those of the humorist,
+and the humorist of genius. Instead of being comic
+to you and serious to himself, he is more ludicrous
+to himself than to you; and he makes himself out
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page262" id="page262"></a>262</span>
+more ludicrous than he is, in order that he and
+others may laugh. Prince Hal never made such
+sport of Falstaff&rsquo;s person as he himself did. It is
+<i>he</i> who says that his skin hangs about him like an
+old lady&rsquo;s loose gown, and that he walks before his
+page like a sow that hath o&rsquo;erwhelmed all her litter
+but one. And he jests at himself when he is alone
+just as much as when others are by. It is the same
+with his appetites. The direct enjoyment they bring
+him is scarcely so great as the enjoyment of laughing
+at this enjoyment; and for all his addiction to
+sack you never see him for an instant with a brain
+dulled by it, or a temper turned solemn, silly,
+quarrelsome, or pious. The virtue it instils into
+him, of filling his brain with nimble, fiery, and
+delectable shapes&mdash;this, and his humorous attitude
+towards it, free him, in a manner, from slavery to it;
+and it is this freedom, and no secret longing for
+better things (those who attribute such a longing to
+him are far astray), that makes his enjoyment contagious
+and prevents our sympathy with it from
+being disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>The bliss of freedom gained in humour is the
+essence of Falstaff. His humour is not directed
+only or chiefly against obvious absurdities; he is
+the enemy of everything that would interfere with
+his ease, and therefore of anything serious, and
+especially of everything respectable and moral. For
+these things impose limits and obligations, and make
+us the subjects of old father antic the law, and
+the categorical imperative, and our station and its
+duties, and conscience, and reputation, and other
+people&rsquo;s opinions, and all sorts of nuisances. I say
+he is therefore their enemy; but I do him wrong;
+to say that he is their enemy implies that he regards
+them as serious and recognises their power, when in
+truth he refuses to recognise them at all. They are
+to him absurd; and to reduce a thing <i>ad absurdum</i>
+is to reduce it to nothing and to walk about free
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page263" id="page263"></a>263</span>
+and rejoicing. This is what Falstaff does with all
+the would-be serious things of life, sometimes only
+by his words, sometimes by his actions too. He
+will make truth appear absurd by solemn statements,
+which he utters with perfect gravity and which he
+expects nobody to believe; and honour, by demonstrating
+that it cannot set a leg, and that neither the
+living nor the dead can possess it; and law, by
+evading all the attacks of its highest representative
+and almost forcing him to laugh at his own defeat;
+and patriotism, by filling his pockets with the bribes
+offered by competent soldiers who want to escape
+service, while he takes in their stead the halt and
+maimed and the gaol-birds; and duty, by showing
+how he labours in his vocation&mdash;of thieving; and
+courage, alike by mocking at his own capture of
+Colvile and gravely claiming to have killed Hotspur;
+and war, by offering the Prince his bottle of
+sack when he is asked for a sword; and religion,
+by amusing himself with remorse at odd times when
+he has nothing else to do; and the fear of death,
+by maintaining perfectly untouched, in the face of
+imminent peril and even while he <i>feels</i> the fear of
+death, the very same power of dissolving it in persiflage
+that he shows when he sits at ease in his inn.
+These are the wonderful achievements which he
+performs, not with the sourness of a cynic, but
+with the gaiety of a boy. And, therefore, we
+praise him, we laud him, for he offends none but
+the virtuous, and denies that life is real or life is
+earnest, and delivers us from the oppression of such
+nightmares, and lifts us into the atmosphere of perfect
+freedom.</p>
+
+<p>No one in the play understands Falstaff fully, any
+more than Hamlet was understood by the persons
+round him. They are both men of genius. Mrs.
+Quickly and Bardolph are his slaves, but they know
+not why. &lsquo;Well, fare thee well,&rsquo; says the hostess
+whom he has pillaged and forgiven; &lsquo;I have known
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page264" id="page264"></a>264</span>
+thee these twenty-nine years, come peas-cod time,
+but an honester and truer-hearted man&mdash;well, fare
+thee well.&rsquo; Poins and the Prince delight in him;
+they get him into corners for the pleasure of seeing
+him escape in ways they cannot imagine; but they
+often take him much too seriously. Poins, for
+instance, rarely sees, the Prince does not always
+see, and moralising critics never see, that when
+Falstaff speaks ill of a companion behind his back,
+or writes to the Prince that Poins spreads it abroad
+that the Prince is to marry his sister, he knows
+quite well that what he says will be repeated, or
+rather, perhaps, is absolutely indifferent whether it
+be repeated or not, being certain that it can only
+give him an opportunity for humour. It is the
+same with his lying, and almost the same with his
+cowardice, the two main vices laid to his charge
+even by sympathisers. Falstaff is neither a liar nor
+a coward in the usual sense, like the typical cowardly
+boaster of comedy. He tells his lies either for
+their own humour, or on purpose to get himself into
+a difficulty. He rarely expects to be believed, perhaps
+never. He abandons a statement or contradicts
+it the moment it is made. There is scarcely more
+intent in his lying than in the humorous exaggerations
+which he pours out in soliloquy just as much
+as when others are by. Poins and the Prince
+understand this in part. You see them waiting
+eagerly to convict him, not that they may really
+put him to shame, but in order to enjoy the greater
+lie that will swallow up the less. But their sense
+of humour lags behind his. Even the Prince seems
+to accept as half-serious that remorse of his which
+passes so suddenly into glee at the idea of taking a
+purse, and his request to his friend to bestride him
+if he should see him down in the battle. Bestride
+Falstaff! &lsquo;Hence! Wilt thou lift up Olympus?&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Again, the attack of the Prince and Poins on
+Falstaff and the other thieves on Gadshill is contrived,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page265" id="page265"></a>265</span>
+we know, with a view to the incomprehensible
+lies it will induce him to tell. But when, more than
+rising to the occasion, he turns two men in buckram
+into four, and then seven, and then nine, and then
+eleven, almost in a breath, I believe they partly
+misunderstand his intention, and too many of his
+critics misunderstand it altogether. Shakespeare
+was not writing a mere farce. It is preposterous to
+suppose that a man of Falstaff&rsquo;s intelligence would
+utter these gross, palpable, open lies with the serious
+intention to deceive, or forget that, if it was too
+dark for him to see his own hand, he could hardly
+see that the three misbegotten knaves were wearing
+Kendal green. No doubt, if he <i>had</i> been believed,
+he would have been hugely tickled at it, but he no
+more expected to be believed than when he claimed
+to have killed Hotspur. Yet he is supposed to be
+serious even then. Such interpretations would destroy
+the poet&rsquo;s whole conception; and of those who
+adopt them one might ask this out of some twenty
+similar questions:&mdash;When Falstaff, in the men in
+buckram scene, begins by calling twice at short
+intervals for sack, and then a little later calls for
+more and says, &lsquo;I am a rogue if I drunk to-day,&rsquo;
+and the Prince answers, &lsquo;O villain, thy lips are
+scarce wiped since thou drunk&rsquo;st last,&rsquo; do they think
+that <i>that</i> lie was meant to deceive? And if not,
+why do they take it for granted that the others
+were? I suppose they consider that Falstaff was in
+earnest when, wanting to get twenty-two yards of
+satin on trust from Master Dombledon the silk-mercer,
+he offered Bardolph as security; or when
+he said to the Chief Justice about Mrs. Quickly,
+who accused him of breaking his promise to marry
+her, &lsquo;My lord, this is a poor mad soul, and she says
+up and down the town that her eldest son is like
+you&rsquo;; or when he explained his enormous bulk by
+exclaiming, &lsquo;A plague of sighing and grief! It
+blows a man up like a bladder&rsquo;; or when he
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page266" id="page266"></a>266</span>
+accounted for his voice being cracked by declaring
+that he had &lsquo;lost it with singing of anthems&rsquo;; or
+even when he sold his soul on Good-Friday to the
+devil for a cup of Madeira and a cold capon&rsquo;s leg.
+Falstaff&rsquo;s lies about Hotspur and the men in buckram
+do not essentially differ from these statements.
+There is nothing serious in any of them except the
+refusal to take anything seriously.</p>
+
+<p>This is also the explanation of Falstaff&rsquo;s cowardice,
+a subject on which I should say nothing if
+Maurice Morgann&rsquo;s essay,<a name="fa6h" id="fa6h" href="#ft6h"><span class="sp">6</span></a> now more than a century
+old, were better known. That Falstaff sometimes
+behaves in what we should generally call a cowardly
+way is certain; but that does not show that he was
+a coward; and if the word means a person who feels
+painful fear in the presence of danger, and yields to
+that fear in spite of his better feelings and convictions,
+then assuredly Falstaff was no coward.
+The stock bully and boaster of comedy is one, but
+not Falstaff. It is perfectly clear in the first place
+that, though he had unfortunately a reputation for
+stabbing and caring not what mischief he did if his
+weapon were out, he had not a reputation for
+cowardice. Shallow remembered him five-and-fifty
+years ago breaking Scogan&rsquo;s head at the court-gate
+when he was a crack not thus high; and Shallow
+knew him later a good back-swordsman. Then we
+lose sight of him till about twenty years after, when
+his association with Bardolph began; and that
+association implies that by the time he was thirty-five
+or forty he had sunk into the mode of life we
+witness in the plays. Yet, even as we see him
+there, he remains a person of consideration in the
+army. Twelve captains hurry about London searching
+for him. He is present at the Council of War
+in the King&rsquo;s tent at Shrewsbury, where the only
+other persons are the King, the two princes, a nobleman
+and Sir Walter Blunt. The messenger who
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page267" id="page267"></a>267</span>
+brings the false report of the battle to Northumberland
+mentions, as one of the important incidents, the
+death of Sir John Falstaff. Colvile, expressly described
+as a famous rebel, surrenders to him as soon
+as he hears his name. And if his own wish that his
+name were not so terrible to the enemy, and his own
+boast of his European reputation, are not evidence
+of the first rank, they must not be entirely ignored
+in presence of these other facts. What do these
+facts mean? Does Shakespeare put them all in with
+no purpose at all, or in defiance of his own intentions?
+It is not credible.</p>
+
+<p>And when, in the second place, we look at
+Falstaff&rsquo;s actions, what do we find? He boldly confronted
+Colvile, he was quite ready to fight with
+him, however pleased that Colvile, like a kind fellow,
+gave himself away. When he saw Henry and Hotspur
+fighting, Falstaff, instead of making off in a
+panic, stayed to take his chance if Hotspur should
+be the victor. He <i>led</i> his hundred and fifty ragamuffins
+where they were peppered, he did not <i>send</i>
+them. To draw upon Pistol and force him downstairs
+and wound him in the shoulder was no great
+feat, perhaps, but the stock coward would have
+shrunk from it. When the Sheriff came to the inn
+to arrest him for an offence whose penalty was
+death, Falstaff, who was hidden behind the arras,
+did not stand there quaking for fear, he immediately
+fell asleep and snored. When he stood in the battle
+reflecting on what would happen if the weight of his
+paunch should be increased by that of a bullet, he
+cannot have been in a tremor of craven fear. He
+<i>never</i> shows such fear; and surely the man who, in
+danger of his life, and with no one by to hear him,
+meditates thus: &lsquo;I like not such grinning honour as
+Sir Walter hath. Give me life: which if I can save,
+so; if not, honour comes unlooked-for, and there&rsquo;s
+an end,&rsquo; is not what we commonly call a coward.</p>
+
+<p>&lsquo;Well,&rsquo; it will be answered, &lsquo;but he ran away on
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page268" id="page268"></a>268</span>
+Gadshill; and when Douglas attacked him he fell
+down and shammed dead.&rsquo; Yes, I am thankful to
+say, he did. For of course he did not want to be
+dead. He wanted to live and be merry. And as
+he had reduced the idea of honour <i>ad absurdum</i>, had
+scarcely any self-respect, and only a respect for
+reputation as a means of life, naturally he avoided
+death when he could do so without a ruinous loss of
+reputation, and (observe) with the satisfaction of
+playing a colossal practical joke. For <i>that</i> after all
+was his first object. If his one thought had been to
+avoid death he would not have faced Douglas at all,
+but would have run away as fast as his legs could
+carry him; and unless Douglas had been one of
+those exceptional Scotchmen who have no sense of
+humour, he would never have thought of pursuing so
+ridiculous an object as Falstaff running. So that, as
+Mr. Swinburne remarks, Poins is right when he
+thus distinguishes Falstaff from his companions in
+robbery: &lsquo;For two of them, I know them to be as
+true-bred cowards as ever turned back; and for the
+third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I&rsquo;ll
+forswear arms.&rsquo; And the event justifies this distinction.
+For it is exactly thus that, according to the
+original stage-direction, Falstaff behaves when
+Henry and Poins attack him and the others. The
+rest run away at once; Falstaff, here as afterwards
+with Douglas, fights for a blow or two, but, finding
+himself deserted and outmatched, runs away also.
+Of course. He saw no reason to stay. <i>Any</i> man
+who had risen superior to all serious motives would
+have run away. But it does not follow that he
+would run from mere fear, or be, in the ordinary
+sense, a coward.<a name="fa7h" id="fa7h" href="#ft7h"><span class="sp">7</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page269" id="page269"></a>269</span></p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">3.</p>
+
+<p>The main source, then, of our sympathetic delight
+in Falstaff is his humorous superiority to everything
+serious, and the freedom of soul enjoyed in it. But,
+of course, this is not the whole of his character.
+Shakespeare knew well enough that perfect freedom
+is not to be gained in this manner; we are ourselves
+aware of it even while we are sympathising with
+Falstaff; and as soon as we regard him seriously it
+becomes obvious. His freedom is limited in two
+main ways. For one thing he cannot rid himself
+entirely of respect for all that he professes to ridicule.
+He shows a certain pride in his rank: unlike the
+Prince, he is haughty to the drawers, who call him a
+proud Jack. He is not really quite indifferent to
+reputation. When the Chief Justice bids him pay
+his debt to Mrs. Quickly for his reputation&rsquo;s sake, I
+think he feels a twinge, though to be sure he proceeds
+to pay her by borrowing from her. He is
+also stung by any thoroughly serious imputation on
+his courage, and winces at the recollection of his
+running away on Gadshill; he knows that his
+behaviour there certainly looked cowardly, and
+perhaps he remembers that he would not have
+behaved so once. It is, further, very significant
+that, for all his dissolute talk, he has never yet
+allowed the Prince and Poins to <i>see</i> him as they saw
+him afterwards with Doll Tearsheet; not, of course,
+that he has any moral shame in the matter, but he
+knows that in such a situation he, in his old age,
+must appear contemptible&mdash;not a humorist but a
+mere object of mirth. And, finally, he has affection
+in him&mdash;affection, I think, for Poins and Bardolph,
+and certainly for the Prince; and that is a thing
+which he cannot jest out of existence. Hence, as
+the effect of his rejection shows, he is not really
+invulnerable. And then, in the second place, since
+he is in the flesh, his godlike freedom has consequences
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page270" id="page270"></a>270</span>
+and conditions; consequences, for there is
+something painfully wrong with his great toe; conditions,
+for he cannot eat and drink for ever without
+money, and his purse suffers from consumption, a
+disease for which he can find no remedy.<a name="fa8h" id="fa8h" href="#ft8h"><span class="sp">8</span></a> As
+the Chief Justice tells him, his means are very
+slender and his waste great; and his answer, &lsquo;I
+would it were otherwise; I would my means were
+greater and my waist slenderer,&rsquo; though worth
+much money, brings none in. And so he is driven
+to evil deeds; not only to cheating his tailor like
+a gentleman, but to fleecing Justice Shallow, and
+to highway robbery, and to cruel depredations on
+the poor woman whose affection he has secured.
+All this is perfectly consistent with the other side
+of his character, but by itself it makes an ugly
+picture.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, it makes an ugly picture when you look at it
+seriously. But then, surely, so long as the humorous
+atmosphere is preserved and the humorous attitude
+maintained, you do not look at it so. You no more
+regard Falstaff&rsquo;s misdeeds morally than you do the
+much more atrocious misdeeds of Punch or Reynard
+the Fox. You do not exactly ignore them, but you
+attend only to their comic aspect. This is the very
+spirit of comedy, and certainly of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+comic world, which is one of make-believe, not
+merely as his tragic world is, but in a further sense&mdash;a
+world in which gross improbabilities are accepted
+with a smile, and many things are welcomed as
+merely laughable which, regarded gravely, would
+excite anger and disgust. The intervention of a
+serious spirit breaks up such a world, and would
+destroy our pleasure in Falstaff&rsquo;s company. Accordingly
+through the greater part of these dramas
+Shakespeare carefully confines this spirit to the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page271" id="page271"></a>271</span>
+scenes of war and policy, and dismisses it entirely
+in the humorous parts. Hence, if <i>Henry IV.</i> had
+been a comedy like <i>Twelfth Night</i>, I am sure that
+he would no more have ended it with the painful
+disgrace of Falstaff than he ended <i>Twelfth Night</i>
+by disgracing Sir Toby Belch.<a name="fa9h" id="fa9h" href="#ft9h"><span class="sp">9</span></a></p>
+
+<p>But <i>Henry IV.</i> was to be in the main a historical
+play, and its chief hero Prince Henry. In the
+course of it his greater and finer qualities were to be
+gradually revealed, and it was to end with beautiful
+scenes of reconciliation and affection between his
+father and him, and a final emergence of the wild
+Prince as a just, wise, stern, and glorious King.
+Hence, no doubt, it seemed to Shakespeare that
+Falstaff at last must be disgraced, and must therefore
+appear no longer as the invincible humorist, but
+as an object of ridicule and even of aversion. And
+probably also his poet&rsquo;s insight showed him that
+Henry, as he conceived him, <i>would</i> behave harshly
+to Falstaff in order to impress the world, especially
+when his mind had been wrought to a high pitch by
+the scene with his dying father and the impression
+of his own solemn consecration to great duties.</p>
+
+<p>This conception was a natural and a fine one;
+and if the execution was not an entire success, it is
+yet full of interest. Shakespeare&rsquo;s purpose being to
+work a gradual change in our feelings towards
+Falstaff, and to tinge the humorous atmosphere
+more and more deeply with seriousness, we see him
+carrying out this purpose in the Second Part of
+<i>Henry IV.</i> Here he separates the Prince from
+Falstaff as much as he can, thus withdrawing him
+from Falstaff&rsquo;s influence, and weakening in our minds
+the connection between the two. In the First Part
+we constantly see them together; in the Second (it
+is a remarkable fact) only once before the rejection.
+Further, in the scenes where Henry appears apart
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page272" id="page272"></a>272</span>
+from Falstaff, we watch him growing more and
+more grave, and awakening more and more poetic
+interest; while Falstaff, though his humour scarcely
+flags to the end, exhibits more and more of his
+seamy side. This is nowhere turned to the full
+light in Part I.; but in Part II. we see him as the
+heartless destroyer of Mrs. Quickly, as a ruffian
+seriously defying the Chief Justice because his
+position as an officer on service gives him power
+to do wrong, as the pike preparing to snap up the
+poor old dace Shallow, and (this is the one scene
+where Henry and he meet) as the worn-out lecher,
+not laughing at his servitude to the flesh but sunk
+in it. Finally, immediately before the rejection, the
+world where he is king is exposed in all its sordid
+criminality when we find Mrs. Quickly and Doll
+arrested for being concerned in the death of one
+man, if not more, beaten to death by their bullies;
+and the dangerousness of Falstaff is emphasised in
+his last words as he hurries from Shallow&rsquo;s house to
+London, words at first touched with humour but at
+bottom only too seriously meant: &lsquo;Let us take any
+man&rsquo;s horses; the laws of England are at my commandment.
+Happy are they which have been my
+friends, and woe unto my Lord Chief Justice.&rsquo; His
+dismissal to the Fleet by the Chief Justice is the
+dramatic vengeance for that threat.</p>
+
+<p>Yet all these excellent devices fail. They cause
+us momentary embarrassment at times when repellent
+traits in Falstaff&rsquo;s character are disclosed; but
+they fail to change our attitude of humour into one
+of seriousness, and our sympathy into repulsion.
+And they were bound to fail, because Shakespeare
+shrank from adding to them the one device which
+would have ensured success. If, as the Second
+Part of <i>Henry IV.</i> advanced, he had clouded over
+Falstaff&rsquo;s humour so heavily that the man of genius
+turned into the Falstaff of the <i>Merry Wives</i>, we
+should have witnessed his rejection without a pang.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page273" id="page273"></a>273</span>
+This Shakespeare was too much of an artist to do&mdash;though
+even in this way he did something&mdash;and
+without this device he could not succeed. As I
+said, in the creation of Falstaff he overreached himself.
+He was caught up on the wind of his own
+genius, and carried so far that he could not descend
+to earth at the selected spot. It is not a misfortune
+that happens to many authors, nor is it one we can
+regret, for it costs us but a trifling inconvenience in
+one scene, while we owe to it perhaps the greatest
+comic character in literature. For it is in this
+character, and not in the judgment he brings
+upon Falstaff&rsquo;s head, that Shakespeare asserts his
+supremacy. To show that Falstaff&rsquo;s freedom of soul
+was in part illusory, and that the realities of life
+refused to be conjured away by his humour&mdash;this
+was what we might expect from Shakespeare&rsquo;s unfailing
+sanity, but it was surely no achievement
+beyond the power of lesser men. The achievement
+was Falstaff himself, and the conception of that
+freedom of soul, a freedom illusory only in part, and
+attainable only by a mind which had received from
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s own the inexplicable touch of infinity
+which he bestowed on Hamlet and Macbeth and
+Cleopatra, but denied to Henry the Fifth.</p>
+
+<p class="f80">1902.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page274" id="page274"></a>274</span></p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE</p>
+
+<p>For the benefit of readers unacquainted with Morgann&rsquo;s Essay
+I reproduce here, with additions, some remarks omitted from the
+lecture for want of time. &lsquo;Maurice Morgann, Esq. the ingenious
+writer of this work, descended from an antient and respectable
+family in Wales; he filled the office of under Secretary of State
+to the late Marquis of Lansdown, during his first administration;
+and was afterwards Secretary to the Embassy for ratifying the
+peace with America, in 1783. He died at his house in Knightsbridge,
+in the seventy-seventh year of his age, on the 28th March,
+1802&rsquo; (Preface to the edition of 1825). He was a remarkable
+and original man, who seems to have written a good deal, but,
+beyond this essay and some pamphlets on public affairs, all or
+nearly all anonymous, he published nothing, and at his death
+he left orders that all his papers should be destroyed. The
+<i>Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff</i> was first
+published in 1777. It arose out of a conversation in which
+Morgann expressed his belief that Shakespeare never meant
+Falstaff for a coward. He was challenged to explain and support
+in print what was considered an extraordinary paradox, and his
+essay bears on its title-page the quotation, &lsquo;I am not John of
+Gaunt, your grandfather: but yet no coward, Hal&rsquo;&mdash;one of
+Falstaff&rsquo;s few serious sentences. But Morgann did not confine
+himself to the question of Falstaff&rsquo;s cowardice; he analysed the
+whole character, and incidentally touched on many points in
+Shakespearean criticism. &lsquo;The reader,&rsquo; he observes, &lsquo;will not
+need to be told that this inquiry will resolve itself of course
+into a critique on the genius, the arts, and the conduct, of
+Shakespeare: for what is Falstaff, what Lear, what Hamlet, or
+Othello, but different modifications of Shakespeare&rsquo;s thought?
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page275" id="page275"></a>275</span>
+It is true that this inquiry is narrowed almost to a single point;
+but general criticism is as uninstructive as it is easy: Shakespeare
+deserves to be considered in detail;&mdash;a task hitherto unattempted.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>The last words are significant. Morgann was conscious that
+he was striking out a new line. The Eighteenth Century critics
+had done much for Shakespeare in the way of scholarship; some
+of them had praised him well and blamed him well; but they
+had done little to interpret the process of his imagination from
+within. This was what Morgann attempted. His attitude towards
+Shakespeare is that of Goethe, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt. The
+dangers of his method might be illustrated from the Essay, but
+in his hands it yielded most valuable results. And though he
+did not attempt the eloquence of some of his successors, but
+wrote like a cultivated ironical man of the world, he wrote
+delightfully; so that in all respects his Essay, which has long
+been out of print, deserves to be republished and better known.
+[It was republished in Mr. Nichol Smith&rsquo;s excellent <i>Eighteenth
+Century Essays on Shakespeare</i>, 1903; and, in 1912, by itself,
+with an introduction by W. A. Gill.]</p>
+
+<p>Readers of Boswell (under the year 1783) will remember that
+Morgann, who once met Johnson, favoured his biographer with
+two most characteristic anecdotes. Boswell also records Johnson&rsquo;s
+judgment of Morgann&rsquo;s Essay, which, says Mr. Swinburne, elicited
+from him &lsquo;as good a jest and as bad a criticism as might have
+been expected.&rsquo; Johnson, we are told, being asked his opinion
+of the Essay, answered: &lsquo;Why, Sir, we shall have the man come
+forth again; and as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he
+may prove Iago to be a very good character.&rsquo; The following
+passage from Morgann&rsquo;s <i>Essay</i> (p. 66 of the 1825 edition, p. 248
+of Mr. Nichol Smith&rsquo;s book) gives, I presume, his opinion of
+Johnson. Having referred to Warburton, he adds: &lsquo;Another has
+since undertaken the custody of our author, whom he seems to
+consider as a sort of wild Proteus or madman, and accordingly
+knocks him down with the butt-end of his critical staff, as often
+as he exceeds that line of sober discretion, which this learned
+Editor appears to have chalked out for him: yet is this Editor,
+notwithstanding, &ldquo;a man, take him for all in all,&rdquo; very highly
+respectable for his genius and his learning.&rsquo;</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1h" id="ft1h" href="#fa1h"><span class="fn">1</span></a> In this lecture and the three that follow it I have mentioned the
+authors my obligations to whom I was conscious of in writing or have
+discovered since; but other debts must doubtless remain, which from
+forgetfulness I am unable to acknowledge.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2h" id="ft2h" href="#fa2h"><span class="fn">2</span></a> See on this and other points Swinburne, <i>A Study of Shakespeare</i>,
+p. 106 ff.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3h" id="ft3h" href="#fa3h"><span class="fn">3</span></a> Rötscher, <i>Shakespeare in seinen höchsten Charaktergebilden</i>, 1864.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4h" id="ft4h" href="#fa4h"><span class="fn">4</span></a> That from the beginning Shakespeare intended Henry&rsquo;s accession
+to be Falstaff&rsquo;s catastrophe is clear from the fact that, when the two
+characters first appear, Falstaff is made to betray at once the hopes
+with which he looks forward to Henry&rsquo;s reign. See the First Part of
+<i>Henry IV.</i>, Act <span class="scs">I.</span>, Scene ii.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5h" id="ft5h" href="#fa5h"><span class="fn">5</span></a> Cf. Hazlitt, <i>Characters of Shakespear&rsquo;s Plays</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6h" id="ft6h" href="#fa6h"><span class="fn">6</span></a> See Note at end of lecture.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7h" id="ft7h" href="#fa7h"><span class="fn">7</span></a> It is to be regretted, however, that in carrying his guts away so
+nimbly he &lsquo;roared for mercy&rsquo;; for I fear we have no ground for
+rejecting Henry&rsquo;s statement to that effect, and I do not see my way to
+adopt the suggestion (I forget whose it is) that Falstaff spoke the
+truth when he swore that he knew Henry and Poins as well as he that
+made them.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8h" id="ft8h" href="#fa8h"><span class="fn">8</span></a> Panurge too was &lsquo;naturally subject to a kind of disease which at
+that time they called lack of money&rsquo;; it was a &lsquo;flux in his purse&rsquo;
+(Rabelais, Book II., chapters xvi., xvii.).</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9h" id="ft9h" href="#fa9h"><span class="fn">9</span></a> I seem to remember that, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare did
+disgrace Sir Toby&mdash;by marrying him to Maria!</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page276" id="page276"></a>276<br />277</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">SHAKESPEARE&rsquo;S <i>ANTONY AND
+CLEOPATRA</i></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page278" id="page278"></a>278<br />279</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2"><span class="chap2">SHAKESPEARE&rsquo;S <i>ANTONY AND
+CLEOPATRA</i></span><a name="fa1i" id="fa1i" href="#ft1i"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">Coleridge&rsquo;s</span> one page of general criticism on <i>Antony
+and Cleopatra</i> contains some notable remarks. &lsquo;Of
+all Shakespeare&rsquo;s historical plays,&rsquo; he writes, &lsquo;<i>Antony
+and Cleopatra</i> is by far the most wonderful. There
+is not one in which he has followed history so
+minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses
+the notion of angelic strength so much&mdash;perhaps
+none in which he impresses it more strongly.
+This is greatly owing to the manner in which the
+fiery force is sustained throughout.&rsquo; In a later
+sentence he refers to the play as &lsquo;this astonishing
+drama.&rsquo; In another he describes the style: &lsquo;<i>feliciter
+audax</i> is the motto for its style comparatively with
+that of Shakespeare&rsquo;s other works.&rsquo; And he translates
+this motto in the phrase &lsquo;happy valiancy of
+style.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>Coleridge&rsquo;s assertion that in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>
+Shakespeare followed history more minutely than in
+any other play might well be disputed; and his
+statement about the style of this drama requires
+some qualification in view of the results of later
+criticism as to the order of Shakespeare&rsquo;s works.
+The style is less individual than he imagined. On
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page280" id="page280"></a>280</span>
+the whole it is common to the six or seven dramas
+subsequent to <i>Macbeth</i>, though in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>,
+probably the earliest of them, its development
+is not yet complete. And we must add that this
+style has certain special defects, unmentioned by
+Coleridge, as well as the quality which he points out
+in it. But it is true that here that quality is almost
+continuously present; and in the phrase by which he
+describes it, as in his other phrases, he has signalised
+once for all some of the most salient features of the
+drama.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to notice, for example, alike in books
+and in conversation, how often the first epithets
+used in reference to <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> are
+&lsquo;wonderful&rsquo; and &lsquo;astonishing.&rsquo; And the main
+source of the feeling thus expressed seems to be
+the &lsquo;angelic strength&rsquo; or &lsquo;fiery force&rsquo; of which
+Coleridge wrote. The first of these two phrases is,
+I think, the more entirely happy. Except perhaps
+towards the close, one is not so conscious of fiery
+force as in certain other tragedies; but one is
+astonished at the apparent ease with which extraordinary
+effects are produced, the ease, if I may
+paraphrase Coleridge, of an angel moving with a
+wave of the hand that heavy matter which men find
+so intractable. We feel this sovereign ease in contemplating
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s picture of the world&mdash;a
+vast canvas, crowded with figures, glowing with
+colour and a superb animation, reminding one
+spectator of Paul Veronese and another of Rubens.
+We feel it again when we observe (as we can even
+without consulting Plutarch) the nature of the
+material; how bulky it was, and, in some respects,
+how undramatic; and how the artist, though he
+could not treat history like legend or fiction, seems
+to push whole masses aside, and to shift and
+refashion the remainder, almost with the air of an
+architect playing (at times rather carelessly) with a
+child&rsquo;s bricks.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page281" id="page281"></a>281</span></p>
+
+<p>Something similar is felt even in the portrait of
+Cleopatra. Marvellous as it is, the drawing of it
+suggests not so much the passionate concentration
+or fiery force of <i>Macbeth</i>, as that sense of effortless
+and exultant mastery which we feel in the portraits
+of Mercutio and Falstaff. And surely it is a total
+mistake to find in this portrait any trace of the
+distempered mood which disturbs our pleasure in
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i>. If the sonnets about the
+dark lady were, as need not be doubted, in some
+degree autobiographical, Shakespeare may well have
+used his personal experience both when he drew
+Cressida and when he drew Cleopatra. And, if he
+did, the story in the later play was the nearer to his
+own; for Antony might well have said what Troilus
+could never say,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>When my love swears that she is made of truth,</p>
+<p>I do believe her, though I know she lies.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">But in the later play, not only is the poet&rsquo;s vision
+unclouded, but his whole nature, emotional as well
+as intellectual, is free. The subject no more embitters
+or seduces him than the ambition of Macbeth.
+So that here too we feel the angelic strength of
+which Coleridge speaks. If we quarrelled with the
+phrase at all, it would be because we fancied we
+could trace in Shakespeare&rsquo;s attitude something of
+the irony of superiority; and this may not altogether
+suit our conception of an angel.</p>
+
+<p>I have still another sentence to quote from
+Coleridge: &lsquo;The highest praise, or rather form of
+praise, of this play which I can offer in my own
+mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions
+in me, whether the &ldquo;Antony and Cleopatra&rdquo;
+is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its
+strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival
+of &ldquo;Macbeth,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lear,&rdquo; &ldquo;Hamlet,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Othello.&rdquo;&rsquo;
+Now, unless the clause here about the &lsquo;giant power&rsquo;
+may be taken to restrict the rivalry to the quality of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page282" id="page282"></a>282</span>
+angelic strength, Coleridge&rsquo;s doubt seems to show a
+lapse in critical judgment. To regard this tragedy
+as a rival of the famous four, whether on the stage
+or in the study, is surely an error. The world
+certainly has not so regarded it; and, though the
+world&rsquo;s reasons for its verdicts on works of art may
+be worth little, its mere verdict is worth much.
+Here, it seems to me, that verdict must be accepted.
+One may notice that, in calling <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>
+wonderful or astonishing, we appear to be
+thinking first of the artist and his activity, while in
+the case of the four famous tragedies it is the
+product of this activity, the thing presented, that
+first engrosses us. I know that I am stating this
+difference too sharply, but I believe that it is often
+felt; and, if this is so, the fact is significant. It
+implies that, although <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> may
+be for us as wonderful an achievement as the
+greatest of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays, it has not an equal
+value. Besides, in the attempt to rank it with them
+there is involved something more, and more important,
+than an error in valuation. There is a
+failure to discriminate the peculiar marks of <i>Antony
+and Cleopatra</i> itself, marks which, whether or no it
+be the equal of the earlier tragedies, make it
+decidedly different. If I speak first of some of
+these differences it is because they thus contribute
+to the individuality of the play, and because they
+seem often not to be distinctly apprehended in
+criticism.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">1.</p>
+
+<p>Why, let us begin by asking, is <i>Antony and
+Cleopatra</i>, though so wonderful an achievement, a
+play rarely acted? For a tragedy, it is not painful.
+Though unfit for children, it cannot be called indecent;
+some slight omissions, and such a flattening
+of the heroine&rsquo;s part as might confidently be expected,
+would leave it perfectly presentable. It is, no doubt,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page283" id="page283"></a>283</span>
+in the third and fourth Acts, very defective in construction.
+Even on the Elizabethan stage, where
+scene followed scene without a pause, this must
+have been felt; and in our theatres it would be felt
+much more. There, in fact, these two and forty
+scenes could not possibly be acted as they stand.
+But defective construction would not distress the
+bulk of an audience, if the matter presented were
+that of <i>Hamlet</i> or <i>Othello</i>, of <i>Lear</i> or <i>Macbeth</i>.
+The matter, then, must lack something which is
+present in those tragedies; and it is mainly owing
+to this difference in substance that <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>
+has never attained their popularity either on
+the stage or off it.</p>
+
+<p>Most of Shakespeare&rsquo;s tragedies are dramatic, in
+a special sense of the word as well as in its general
+sense, from beginning to end. The story is not
+merely exciting and impressive from the movement
+of conflicting forces towards a terrible issue, but
+from time to time there come situations and events
+which, even apart from their bearing on this issue,
+appeal most powerfully to the dramatic feelings&mdash;scenes
+of action or passion which agitate the
+audience with alarm, horror, painful expectation, or
+absorbing sympathies and antipathies. Think of
+the street fights in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, the killing of
+Mercutio and Tybalt, the rapture of the lovers, and
+their despair when Romeo is banished. Think of
+the ghost-scenes in the first Act of <i>Hamlet</i>, the
+passion of the early soliloquies, the scene between
+Hamlet and Ophelia, the play-scene, the sparing
+of the King at prayer, the killing of Polonius. Is
+not <i>Hamlet</i>, if you choose so to regard it, the best
+melodrama in the world? Think at your leisure of
+<i>Othello</i>, <i>Lear</i>, and <i>Macbeth</i> from the same point of
+view; but consider here and now even the two
+tragedies which, as dealing with Roman history, are
+companions of <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>. Recall in
+<i>Julius Cćsar</i> the first suggestion of the murder, the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page284" id="page284"></a>284</span>
+preparation for it in a &lsquo;tempest dropping fire,&rsquo; the
+murder itself, the speech of Antony over the corpse,
+and the tumult of the furious crowd; in <i>Coriolanus</i>
+the bloody battles on the stage, the scene in which
+the hero attains the consulship, the scene of rage in
+which he is banished. And remember that in each
+of these seven tragedies the matter referred to is
+contained in the first three Acts.</p>
+
+<p>In the first three Acts of our play what is there
+resembling this? Almost nothing. People converse,
+discuss, accuse one another, excuse themselves,
+mock, describe, drink together, arrange a
+marriage, meet and part; but they do not kill, do
+not even tremble or weep. We see hardly one
+violent movement; until the battle of Actium is
+over we witness scarcely any vehement passion;
+and that battle, as it is a naval action, we do not
+see. Even later, Enobarbus, when he dies, simply
+dies; he does not kill himself.<a name="fa2i" id="fa2i" href="#ft2i"><span class="sp">2</span></a> We hear wonderful
+talk; but it is not talk, like that of Macbeth and
+Lady Macbeth, or that of Othello and Iago, at
+which we hold our breath. The scenes that we
+remember first are those that portray Cleopatra;
+Cleopatra coquetting, tormenting, beguiling her lover
+to stay; Cleopatra left with her women and longing
+for him; Cleopatra receiving the news of his marriage;
+Cleopatra questioning the messenger about
+Octavia&rsquo;s personal appearance. But this is to say
+that the scenes we remember first are the least
+indispensable to the plot. One at least is not essential
+to it at all. And this, the astonishing scene
+where she storms at the messenger, strikes him,
+and draws her dagger on him, is the one passage in
+the first half of the drama that contains either an
+explosion of passion or an exciting bodily action.
+Nor is this all. The first half of the play, though
+it forebodes tragedy, is not decisively tragic in
+tone. Certainly the Cleopatra scenes are not so.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page285" id="page285"></a>285</span>
+We read them, and we should witness them, in
+delighted wonder and even with amusement. The
+only scene that can vie with them, that of the revel
+on Pompey&rsquo;s ship, though full of menace, is in great
+part humorous. Enobarbus, in this part of the play,
+is always humorous. Even later, when the tragic
+tone is deepening, the whipping of Thyreus, in spite
+of Antony&rsquo;s rage, moves mirth. A play of which all
+this can truly be said may well be as masterly as
+<i>Othello</i> or <i>Macbeth</i>, and more delightful; but, in the
+greater part of its course, it cannot possibly excite
+the same emotions. It makes no attempt to do so;
+and to regard it as though it made this attempt is to
+miss its specific character and the intention of its
+author.</p>
+
+<p>That character depends only in part on Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+fidelity to his historical authority, a fidelity
+which, I may remark, is often greatly exaggerated.
+For Shakespeare did not merely present the story
+of ten years as though it occupied perhaps one fifth
+of that time, nor did he merely invent freely, but in
+critical places he effected startling changes in the
+order and combination of events. Still it may be
+said that, dealing with a history so famous, he could
+not well make the first half of his play very exciting,
+moving, or tragic. And this is true so far as mere
+situations and events are concerned. But, if he had
+chosen, he might easily have heightened the tone
+and tension in another way. He might have made
+the story of Antony&rsquo;s attempt to break his bondage,
+and the story of his relapse, extremely exciting, by
+portraying with all his force the severity of the
+struggle and the magnitude of the fatal step.</p>
+
+<p>And the structure of the play might seem at first
+to suggest this intention. At the opening, Antony
+is shown almost in the beginning of his infatuation;
+for Cleopatra is not sure of her power over him,
+exerts all her fascination to detain him, and plays
+the part of the innocent victim who has yielded to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page286" id="page286"></a>286</span>
+passion and must now expect to be deserted by
+her seducer. Alarmed and ashamed at the news
+of the results of his inaction, he rouses himself,
+tears himself away, and speeds to Italy. His very
+coming is enough to frighten Pompey into peace.
+He reconciles himself with Octavius, and, by his
+marriage with the good and beautiful Octavia, seems
+to have knit a bond of lasting amity with her
+brother, and to have guarded himself against the
+passion that threatened him with ruin. At this
+point his power, the world&rsquo;s peace, and his own
+peace, appear to be secured; his fortune has
+mounted to its apex. But soon (very much sooner
+than in Plutarch&rsquo;s story) comes the downward turn
+or counter-stroke. New causes of offence arise
+between the brothers-in-law. To remove them
+Octavia leaves her husband in Athens and hurries
+to Rome. Immediately Antony returns to Cleopatra
+and, surrendering himself at once and wholly
+to her enchantment is quickly driven to his doom.</p>
+
+<p>Now Shakespeare, I say, with his matchless power
+of depicting an inward struggle, might have made
+this story, even where it could not furnish him with
+thrilling incidents, the source of powerful tragic
+emotions; and, in doing so, he would have departed
+from his authority merely in his conception of the
+hero&rsquo;s character. But he does no such thing till
+the catastrophe is near. Antony breaks away from
+Cleopatra without any strenuous conflict. No
+serious doubt of his return is permitted to agitate
+us. We are almost assured of it through the impression
+made on us by Octavius, through occasional
+glimpses into Antony&rsquo;s mind, through the absence
+of any doubt in Enobarbus, through scenes in
+Alexandria which display Cleopatra and display her
+irresistible. And, finally, the downward turn itself,
+the fatal step of Antony&rsquo;s return, is shown without
+the slightest emphasis. Nay, it is not shown, it is
+only reported; and not a line portrays any inward
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page287" id="page287"></a>287</span>
+struggle preceding it. On this side also, then, the
+drama makes no attempt to rival the other tragedies;
+and it was essential to its own peculiar character and
+its most transcendent effects that this attempt should
+not be made, but that Antony&rsquo;s passion should be
+represented as a force which he could hardly even
+desire to resist. By the very scheme of the work,
+therefore, tragic impressions of any great volume or
+depth were reserved for the last stage of the conflict;
+while the main interest, down to the battle of
+Actium, was directed to matters exceedingly interesting
+and even, in the wider sense, dramatic, but not
+overtly either terrible or piteous: on the one hand,
+to the political aspect of the story; on the other, to
+the personal causes which helped to make the issue
+inevitable.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">2.</p>
+
+<p>The political situation and its development are
+simple. The story is taken up almost where it was
+left, years before, in <i>Julius Cćsar</i>. There Brutus
+and Cassius, to prevent the rule of one man, assassinate
+Cćsar. Their purpose is condemned to
+failure, not merely because they make mistakes, but
+because that political necessity which Napoleon
+identified with destiny requires the rule of one man.
+They spill Cćsar&rsquo;s blood, but his spirit walks abroad
+and turns their swords against their own breasts;
+and the world is left divided among three men, his
+friends and his heir. Here <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>
+takes up the tale; and its business, from this point
+of view, is to show the reduction of these three to
+one. That Lepidus will not be this one was clear
+already in <i>Julius Cćsar</i>; it must be Octavius or
+Antony. Both ambitious, they are also men of such
+opposite tempers that they would scarcely long agree
+even if they wished to, and even if destiny were not
+stronger than they. As it is, one of them has fixed
+his eyes on the end, sacrifices everything for it, uses
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page288" id="page288"></a>288</span>
+everything as a means to it. The other, though far
+the greater soldier and worshipped by his followers,
+has no such singleness of aim; nor yet is power,
+however desirable to him, the most desirable thing
+in the world. At the beginning he is risking it for
+love; at the end he has lost his half of the world,
+and lost his life, and Octavius rules alone. Whether
+Shakespeare had this clearly in his mind is a question
+neither answerable nor important; this is what came
+out of his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, I think, took little interest in the
+character of Octavius, and he has not made it
+wholly clear. It is not distinct in Plutarch&rsquo;s &lsquo;Life
+of Antony&rsquo;; and I have not found traces that the
+poet studied closely the &lsquo;Life of Octavius&rsquo; included
+in North&rsquo;s volume. To Shakespeare he is one of
+those men, like Bolingbroke and Ulysses, who have
+plenty of &lsquo;judgment&rsquo; and not much &lsquo;blood.&rsquo; Victory
+in the world, according to the poet, almost always
+goes to such men; and he makes us respect, fear,
+and dislike them. His Octavius is very formidable.
+His cold determination half paralyses Antony; it is
+so even in <i>Julius Cćsar</i>. In <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>
+Octavius is more than once in the wrong; but he
+never admits it; he silently pushes his rival a step
+backward; and, when he ceases to fear, he shows
+contempt. He neither enjoys war nor is great in it;
+at first, therefore, he is anxious about the power of
+Pompey, and stands in need of Antony. As soon
+as Antony&rsquo;s presence has served his turn, and he
+has patched up a union with him and seen him safely
+off to Athens, he destroys first Pompey and next
+Lepidus. Then, dexterously using Antony&rsquo;s faithlessness
+to Octavia and excesses in the East in
+order to put himself in the right, he makes for his
+victim with admirable celerity while he is still drunk
+with the joy of reunion with Cleopatra. For his
+ends Octavius is perfectly efficient, but he is so
+partly from his limitations. One phrase of his is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page289" id="page289"></a>289</span>
+exceedingly characteristic. When Antony in rage
+and desperation challenges him to single combat,
+Octavius calls him &lsquo;the old ruffian.&rsquo; There is a
+horrid aptness in the phrase, but it disgusts us. It
+is shameful in this boy, as hard and smooth as
+polished steel, to feel at such a time nothing of the
+greatness of his victim and the tragedy of his victim&rsquo;s
+fall. Though the challenge of Antony is absurd,
+we would give much to see them sword to sword.
+And when Cleopatra by her death cheats the conqueror
+of his prize, we feel unmixed delight.</p>
+
+<p>The doubtful point in the character is this. Plutarch
+says that Octavius was reported to love his
+sister dearly; and Shakespeare&rsquo;s Octavius several
+times expresses such love. When, then, he proposed
+the marriage with Antony (for of course it
+was he who spoke through Agrippa), was he honest,
+or was he laying a trap and, in doing so, sacrificing
+his sister? Did he hope the marriage would really
+unite him with his brother-in-law; or did he merely
+mean it to be a source of future differences; or did
+he calculate that, whether it secured peace or dissension,
+it would in either case bring him great
+advantage? Shakespeare, who was quite as intelligent
+as his readers, must have asked himself some
+such question; but he may not have cared to
+answer it even to himself; and, in any case, he has
+left the actor (at least the actor in days later than
+his own) to choose an answer. If I were forced to
+choose, I should take the view that Octavius was,
+at any rate, not wholly honest; partly because I
+think it best suits Shakespeare&rsquo;s usual way of conceiving
+a character of the kind; partly because
+Plutarch construed in this manner Octavius&rsquo;s behaviour
+in regard to his sister at a later time, and
+this hint might naturally influence the poet&rsquo;s way of
+imagining his earlier action.<a name="fa3i" id="fa3i" href="#ft3i"><span class="sp">3</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page290" id="page290"></a>290</span></p>
+
+<p>Though the character of Octavius is neither
+attractive nor wholly clear, his figure is invested
+with a certain tragic dignity, because he is felt to be
+the Man of Destiny, the agent of forces against
+which the intentions of an individual would avail
+nothing. He is represented as having himself some
+feeling of this sort. His lament over Antony, his
+grief that their stars were irreconcilable, may well
+be genuine, though we should be surer if it were
+uttered in soliloquy. His austere words to Octavia
+again probably speak his true mind:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Be you not troubled with the time, which drives</p>
+<p>O&rsquo;er your content these strong necessities;</p>
+<p>But let determined things to destiny</p>
+<p>Hold unbewailed their way.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">In any case the feeling of fate comes through to us.
+It is aided by slight touches of supernatural effect;
+first in the Soothsayer&rsquo;s warning to Antony that his
+genius or angel is overpowered whenever he is near
+Octavius; then in the strangely effective scene where
+Antony&rsquo;s soldiers, in the night before his last battle,
+hear music in the air or under the earth:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>&lsquo;Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,</p>
+<p>Now leaves him.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And to the influence of this feeling in giving
+impressiveness to the story is added that of the
+immense scale and world-wide issue of the conflict.
+Even the distances traversed by fleets and armies
+enhance this effect.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there seems to be something half-hearted
+in Shakespeare&rsquo;s appeal here, something even ironical
+in his presentation of this conflict. Its external
+magnitude, like Antony&rsquo;s magnificence in lavishing
+realms and gathering the kings of the East in his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page291" id="page291"></a>291</span>
+support, fails to uplift or dilate the imagination.
+The struggle in Lear&rsquo;s little island seems to us to
+have an infinitely wider scope. It is here that we
+are sometimes reminded of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>,
+and the cold and disenchanting light that is there
+cast on the Trojan War. The spectacle which he
+portrays leaves Shakespeare quite undazzled; he
+even makes it appear inwardly small. The lordship
+of the world, we ask ourselves, what is it worth, and
+in what spirit do these &lsquo;world-sharers&rsquo; contend for
+it? They are no champions of their country like
+Henry V. The conqueror knows not even the
+glory of battle. Their aims, for all we see, are as
+personal as if they were captains of banditti; and
+they are followed merely from self-interest or private
+attachment. The scene on Pompey&rsquo;s galley is full
+of this irony. One &lsquo;third part of the world&rsquo; is
+carried drunk to bed. In the midst of this mock
+boon-companionship the pirate whispers to his leader
+to cut first the cable of his ship and then the throats
+of the two other Emperors; and at the moment we
+should not greatly care if Pompey took the advice.
+Later, a short scene, totally useless to the plot and
+purely satiric in its purport, is slipped in to show
+how Ventidius fears to pursue his Parthian conquests
+because it is not safe for Antony&rsquo;s lieutenant to
+outdo his master.<a name="fa4i" id="fa4i" href="#ft4i"><span class="sp">4</span></a> A painful sense of hollowness
+oppresses us. We know too well what must happen
+in a world so splendid, so false, and so petty. We
+turn for relief from the political game to those who
+are sure to lose it; to those who love some human
+being better than a prize, to Eros and Charmian
+and Iras; to Enobarbus, whom the world corrupts,
+but who has a heart that can break with shame; to
+the lovers, who seem to us to find in death something
+better than their victor&rsquo;s life.</p>
+
+<p>This presentation of the outward conflict has two
+results. First, it blunts our feeling of the greatness
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page292" id="page292"></a>292</span>
+of Antony&rsquo;s fall from prosperity. Indeed this feeling,
+which we might expect to be unusually acute, is
+hardly so; it is less acute, for example, than the like
+feeling in the case of Richard II., who loses so much
+smaller a realm. Our deeper sympathies are focussed
+rather on Antony&rsquo;s heart, on the inward fall to
+which the enchantment of passion leads him, and
+the inward recovery which succeeds it. And the
+second result is this. The greatness of Antony and
+Cleopatra in their fall is so much heightened by
+contrast with the world they lose and the conqueror
+who wins it, that the positive element in the final
+tragic impression, the element of reconciliation, is
+strongly emphasised. The peculiar effect of the
+drama depends partly, as we have seen, on the
+absence of decidedly tragic scenes and events in its
+first half; but it depends quite as much on this
+emphasis. In any Shakespearean tragedy we watch
+some elect spirit colliding, partly through its error
+and defect, with a superhuman power which bears it
+down; and yet we feel that this spirit, even in the
+error and defect, rises by its greatness into ideal
+union with the power that overwhelms it. In some
+tragedies this latter feeling is relatively weak. In
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> it is unusually strong; stronger,
+with some readers at least, than the fear and grief
+and pity with which they contemplate the tragic
+error and the advance of doom.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">3.</p>
+
+<p>The two aspects of the tragedy are presented
+together in the opening scene. Here is the first.
+In Cleopatra&rsquo;s palace one friend of Antony is
+describing to another, just arrived from Rome, the
+dotage of their great general; and, as the lovers
+enter, he exclaims:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+        <p class="i7">Look, where they come:</p>
+<p>Take but good note, and you shall see in him</p>
+<p>The triple pillar of the world transformed</p>
+<p>Into a strumpet&rsquo;s fool: behold and see.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page293" id="page293"></a>293</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">With the next words the other aspect appears:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p><span class="sc">Cleo.</span> If it be love indeed, tell me how much.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sc">Ant.</span> There&rsquo;s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sc">Cleo.</span> I&rsquo;ll set a bourne how far to be beloved.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sc">Ant.</span> Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And directly after, when he is provoked by reminders
+of the news from Rome:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch</p>
+<p>Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.</p>
+<p>Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike</p>
+<p>Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life</p>
+<p>Is to do thus.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Here is the tragic excess, but with it the tragic
+greatness, the capacity of finding in something
+the infinite, and of pursuing it into the jaws of
+death.</p>
+
+<p>The two aspects are shown here with the exaggeration
+proper in dramatic characters. Neither the
+phrase &lsquo;a strumpet&rsquo;s fool,&rsquo; nor the assertion &lsquo;the
+nobleness of life is to do thus,&rsquo; answers to the total
+effect of the play. But the truths they exaggerate
+are equally essential; and the commoner mistake in
+criticism is to understate the second. It is plain
+that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is destructive;
+that in some way it clashes with the nature of
+things; that, while they are sitting in their paradise
+like gods, its walls move inward and crush them at
+last to death. This is no invention of moralising
+critics; it is in the play; and any one familiar with
+Shakespeare would expect beforehand to find it
+there. But then to forget because of it the other
+side, to deny the name of love to this ruinous
+passion, to speak as though the lovers had utterly
+missed the good of life, is to mutilate the tragedy
+and to ignore a great part of its effect upon us.
+For we sympathise with them in their passion;
+we feel in it the infinity there is in man; even
+while we acquiesce in their defeat we are exulting
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page294" id="page294"></a>294</span>
+in their victory; and when they have vanished
+we say,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+      <p class="i6">the odds is gone,</p>
+<p>And there is nothing left remarkable</p>
+<p>Beneath the visiting moon.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Though we hear nothing from Shakespeare of the
+cruelty of Plutarch&rsquo;s Antony, or of the misery caused
+by his boundless profusion, we do not feel the hero
+of the tragedy to be a man of the noblest type,
+like Brutus, Hamlet, or Othello. He seeks power
+merely for himself, and uses it for his own pleasure.
+He is in some respects unscrupulous; and, while it
+would be unjust to regard his marriage exactly as if
+it were one in private life, we resent his treatment
+of Octavia, whose character Shakespeare was obliged
+to leave a mere sketch, lest our feeling for the hero
+and heroine should be too much chilled. Yet, for
+all this, we sympathise warmly with Antony, are
+greatly drawn to him, and are inclined to regard
+him as a noble nature half spoiled by his time.</p>
+
+<p>It is a large, open, generous, expansive nature,
+quite free from envy, capable of great magnanimity,
+even of entire devotion. Antony is unreserved,
+naturally straightforward, we may almost say simple.
+He can admit faults, accept advice and even reproof,
+take a jest against himself with good-humour.
+He is courteous (to Lepidus, for example, whom
+Octavius treats with cold contempt); and, though
+he can be exceedingly dignified, he seems to prefer
+a blunt though sympathetic plainness, which is one
+cause of the attachment of his soldiers. He has
+none of the faults of the brooder, the sentimentalist,
+or the man of principle; his nature tends to splendid
+action and lusty enjoyment. But he is neither a
+mere soldier nor a mere sensualist. He has
+imagination, the temper of an artist who revels in
+abundant and rejoicing appetites, feasts his senses
+on the glow and richness of life, flings himself into
+its mirth and revelry, yet feels the poetry in all this,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page295" id="page295"></a>295</span>
+and is able also to put it by and be more than
+content with the hardships of adventure. Such a
+man could never have sought a crown by a murder
+like Macbeth&rsquo;s, or, like Brutus, have killed on principle
+the man who loved him, or have lost the world
+for a Cressida.</p>
+
+<p>Beside this strain of poetry he has a keen intellect,
+a swift perception of the lie of things, and much
+quickness in shaping a course to suit them. In
+<i>Julius Cćsar</i> he shows this after the assassination,
+when he appears as a dexterous politician as well as
+a warm-hearted friend. He admires what is fine,
+and can fully appreciate the nobility of Brutus; but
+he is sure that Brutus&rsquo;s ideas are moonshine, that
+(as he says in our play) Brutus is mad; and, since
+his mighty friend, who was incomparably the finest
+thing in the world, has perished, he sees no reason
+why the inheritance should not be his own. Full of
+sorrow, he yet uses his sorrow like an artist to work
+on others, and greets his success with the glee of a
+successful adventurer. In the earlier play he proves
+himself a master of eloquence, and especially of
+pathos; and he does so again in the later. With a
+few words about his fall he draws tears from his
+followers and even from the caustic humorist
+Enobarbus. Like Richard II., he sees his own fall
+with the eyes of a poet, but a poet much greater
+than the young Shakespeare, who could never have
+written Antony&rsquo;s marvellous speech about the sunset
+clouds. But we listen to Antony, as we do not to
+Richard, with entire sympathy, partly because he is
+never unmanly, partly because he himself is sympathetic
+and longs for sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>The first of living soldiers, an able politician, a
+most persuasive orator, Antony nevertheless was
+not born to rule the world. He enjoys being a
+great man, but he has not the love of rule for rule&rsquo;s
+sake. Power for him is chiefly a means to pleasure.
+The pleasure he wants is so huge that he needs a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page296" id="page296"></a>296</span>
+huge power; but half the world, even a third of it,
+would suffice. He will not pocket wrongs, but he
+shows not the slightest wish to get rid of his fellow
+Triumvirs and reign alone. He never minded
+being subordinate to Julius Cćsar. By women he
+is not only attracted but governed; from the effect
+of Cleopatra&rsquo;s taunts we can see that he had
+been governed by Fulvia. Nor has he either the
+patience or the steadfastness of a born ruler. He
+contends fitfully, and is prone to take the step that
+is easiest at the moment. This is the reason why
+he consents to marry Octavia. It seems the shortest
+way out of an awkward situation. He does not
+intend even to try to be true to her. He will not
+think of the distant consequences.</p>
+
+<p>A man who loved power as much as thousands
+of insignificant people love it, would have made a
+sterner struggle than Antony&rsquo;s against his enchantment.
+He can hardly be said to struggle at all.
+He brings himself to leave Cleopatra only because
+he knows he will return. In every moment of his
+absence, whether he wake or sleep, a siren music in
+his blood is singing him back to her; and to this
+music, however he may be occupied, the soul within
+his soul leans and listens. The joy of life had
+always culminated for him in the love of women:
+he could say &lsquo;no&rsquo; to none of them: of Octavia
+herself he speaks like a poet. When he meets
+Cleopatra he finds his Absolute. She satisfies,
+nay glorifies, his whole being. She intoxicates
+his senses. Her wiles, her taunts, her furies and
+meltings, her laughter and tears, bewitch him all
+alike. She loves what he loves, and she surpasses
+him. She can drink him to his bed, out-jest his
+practical jokes, out-act the best actress who ever
+amused him, out-dazzle his own magnificence. She
+is his play-fellow, and yet a great queen. Angling
+in the river, playing billiards, flourishing the sword
+he used at Philippi, hopping forty paces in a public
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page297" id="page297"></a>297</span>
+street, she remains an enchantress. Her spirit is
+made of wind and flame, and the poet in him
+worships her no less than the man. He is under
+no illusion about her, knows all her faults, sees
+through her wiles, believes her capable of betraying
+him. It makes no difference. She is his heart&rsquo;s
+desire made perfect. To love her is what he was
+born for. What have the gods in heaven to say
+against it? To imagine heaven is to imagine her;
+to die is to rejoin her. To deny that this is love is
+the madness of morality. He gives her every atom
+of his heart.</p>
+
+<p>She destroys him. Shakespeare, availing himself
+of the historic fact, portrays, on Antony&rsquo;s return
+to her, the suddenness and the depth of his descent.
+In spite of his own knowledge, the protests of his
+captains, the entreaties even of a private soldier,
+he fights by sea simply and solely because she
+wishes it. Then in mid-battle, when she flies, he
+deserts navy and army and his faithful thousands
+and follows her. &lsquo;I never saw an action of such
+shame,&rsquo; cries Scarus; and we feel the dishonour of
+the hero keenly. Then Shakespeare begins to
+raise him again. First, his own overwhelming sense
+of shame redeems him. Next, we watch the rage
+of the dying lion. Then the mere sally before the
+final defeat&mdash;a sally dismissed by Plutarch in three
+lines&mdash;is magnified into a battle, in which Antony
+displays to us, and himself feels for the last time,
+the glory of his soldiership. And, throughout, the
+magnanimity and gentleness which shine through his
+desperation endear him to us. How beautiful is
+his affection for his followers and even for his servants,
+and the devotion they return! How noble
+his reception of the news that Enobarbus has deserted
+him! How touchingly significant the refusal of Eros
+either to kill him or survive him! How pathetic
+and even sublime the completeness of his love for
+Cleopatra! His anger is born and dies in an hour.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page298" id="page298"></a>298</span>
+One tear, one kiss, outweighs his ruin. He believes
+she has sold him to his enemy, yet he kills himself
+because he hears that she is dead. When, dying,
+he learns that she has deceived him once more, no
+thought of reproach crosses his mind: he simply
+asks to be carried to her. He knows well that she
+is not capable of dying because he dies, but that
+does not sting him; when, in his last agony, he calls
+for wine that he may gain a moment&rsquo;s strength to
+speak, it is to advise her for the days to come.
+Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch the final
+speech of Antony. It is fine, but it is not miraculous.
+The miraculous speeches belong only to his
+own hero:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>I am dying, Egypt, dying; only</p>
+<p>I here importune death awhile, until</p>
+<p>Of many thousand kisses the poor last</p>
+<p>I lay upon thy lips;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">or the first words he utters when he hears of Cleopatra&rsquo;s
+death:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Unarm, Eros: the long day&rsquo;s task is done,</p>
+<p>And we must sleep.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">If he meant the task of statesman and warrior, that
+is not what his words mean to us. They remind us
+of words more familiar and less great&mdash;</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>No rest but the grave for the pilgrim of love.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And he is more than love&rsquo;s pilgrim; he is love&rsquo;s
+martyr.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">4.</p>
+
+<p>To reserve a fragment of an hour for Cleopatra,
+if it were not palpably absurd, would seem an insult.
+If only one could hear her own remarks upon it!
+But I had to choose between this absurdity and the
+plan of giving her the whole hour; and to that plan
+there was one fatal objection. She has been described
+(by Ten Brink) as a courtesan of genius.
+So brief a description must needs be incomplete,
+and Cleopatra never forgets, nor, if we read aright,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page299" id="page299"></a>299</span>
+do we forget, that she is a great queen. Still the
+phrase is excellent; only a public lecture is no
+occasion for the full analysis and illustration of the
+character it describes.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare has paid Cleopatra a unique compliment.
+The hero dies in the fourth Act, and the
+whole of the fifth is devoted to the heroine.<a name="fa5i" id="fa5i" href="#ft5i"><span class="sp">5</span></a> In
+that Act she becomes unquestionably a tragic character,
+but, it appears to me, not till then. This, no
+doubt, is a heresy; but as I cannot help holding it,
+and as it is connected with the remarks already
+made on the first half of the play, I will state it
+more fully. Cleopatra stands in a group with
+Hamlet and Falstaff. We might join with them
+Iago if he were not decidedly their inferior in one
+particular quality. They are inexhaustible. You
+feel that, if they were alive and you spent your
+whole life with them, their infinite variety could
+never be staled by custom; they would continue
+every day to surprise, perplex, and delight you.
+Shakespeare has bestowed on each of them, though
+they differ so much, his own originality, his genius.
+He has given it most fully to Hamlet, to whom
+none of the chambers of experience is shut, and
+perhaps more of it to Cleopatra than to Falstaff.
+Nevertheless, if we ask whether Cleopatra, in the
+first four Acts, is a tragic figure like Hamlet, we
+surely cannot answer &lsquo;yes.&rsquo; Naturally it does not
+follow that she is a comic figure like Falstaff. This
+would be absurd; for, even if she were ridiculous
+like Falstaff, she is not ridiculous to herself; she is
+no humorist. And yet there is a certain likeness.
+She shares a weakness with Falstaff&mdash;vanity; and
+when she displays it, as she does quite naively
+(for instance, in the second interview with the
+Messenger), she does become comic. Again,
+though like Falstaff she is irresistible and carries
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page300" id="page300"></a>300</span>
+us away no less than the people around her, we are
+secretly aware, in the midst of our delight, that her
+empire is built on sand. And finally, as his love for
+the Prince gives dignity and pathos to Falstaff in
+his overthrow, so what raises Cleopatra at last into
+pure tragedy is, in part, that which some critics
+have denied her, her love for Antony.</p>
+
+<p>Many unpleasant things can be said of Cleopatra;
+and the more that are said the more wonderful she
+appears. The exercise of sexual attraction is the
+element of her life; and she has developed nature
+into a consummate art. When she cannot exert it
+on the present lover she imagines its effects on him
+in absence. Longing for the living, she remembers
+with pride and joy the dead; and the past which
+the furious Antony holds up to her as a picture of
+shame is, for her, glory. She cannot see an ambassador,
+scarcely even a messenger, without desiring
+to bewitch him. Her mind is saturated with this
+element. If she is dark, it is because the sun himself
+has been amorous of her. Even when death is
+close at hand she imagines his touch as a lover&rsquo;s.
+She embraces him that she may overtake Iras and
+gain Antony&rsquo;s first kiss in the other world.</p>
+
+<p>She lives for feeling. Her feelings are, so to
+speak, sacred, and pain must not come near her.
+She has tried numberless experiments to discover
+the easiest way to die. Her body is exquisitely
+sensitive, and her emotions marvellously swift.
+They are really so; but she exaggerates them so
+much, and exhibits them so continually for effect,
+that some readers fancy them merely feigned. They
+are all-important, and everybody must attend to
+them. She announces to her women that she is
+pale, or sick and sullen; they must lead her to her
+chamber but must not speak to her. She is as
+strong and supple as a leopard, can drink down a
+master of revelry, can raise her lover&rsquo;s helpless heavy
+body from the ground into her tower with the aid
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page301" id="page301"></a>301</span>
+only of two women; yet, when he is sitting apart
+sunk in shame, she must be supported into his
+presence, she cannot stand, her head droops, she
+will die (it is the opinion of Eros) unless he comforts
+her. When she hears of his marriage and has discharged
+her rage, she bids her women bear her
+away; she faints; at least she would faint, but that
+she remembers various questions she wants put to
+the Messenger about Octavia. Enobarbus has seen
+her die twenty times upon far poorer moment than
+the news that Antony is going to Rome.</p>
+
+<p>Some of her feelings are violent, and, unless for a
+purpose, she does not dream of restraining them;
+her sighs and tears are winds and waters, storms
+and tempests. At times, as when she threatens to
+give Charmian bloody teeth, or hales the luckless
+Messenger up and down by the hair, strikes him
+and draws her knife on him, she resembles (if I dare
+say it) Doll Tearsheet sublimated. She is a mother;
+but the threat of Octavius to destroy her children if
+she takes her own life passes by her like the wind
+(a point where Shakespeare contradicts Plutarch).
+She ruins a great man, but shows no sense of the
+tragedy of his ruin. The anguish of spirit that
+appears in his language to his servants is beyond
+her; she has to ask Enobarbus what he means.
+Can we feel sure that she would not have sacrificed
+him if she could have saved herself by doing so?
+It is not even certain that she did not attempt it.
+Antony himself believes that she did&mdash;that the fleet
+went over to Octavius by her orders. That she
+and her people deny the charge proves nothing.
+The best we can say is that, if it were true, Shakespeare
+would have made that clear. She is willing
+also to survive her lover. Her first thought, to
+follow him after the high Roman fashion, is too
+great for her. She would live on if she could, and
+would cheat her victor too of the best part of her
+fortune. The thing that drives her to die is the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page302" id="page302"></a>302</span>
+certainty that she will be carried to Rome to grace
+his triumph. That alone decides her.<a name="fa6i" id="fa6i" href="#ft6i"><span class="sp">6</span></a></p>
+
+<p>The marvellous thing is that the knowledge of all
+this makes hardly more difference to us than it did
+to Antony. It seems to us perfectly natural, nay,
+in a sense perfectly right, that her lover should
+be her slave; that her women should adore her
+and die with her; that Enobarbus, who foresaw
+what must happen, and who opposes her wishes and
+braves her anger, should talk of her with rapture
+and feel no bitterness against her; that Dolabella,
+after a minute&rsquo;s conversation, should betray to her
+his master&rsquo;s intention and enable her to frustrate it.
+And when Octavius shows himself proof against her
+fascination, instead of admiring him we turn from
+him with disgust and think him a disgrace to his
+species. Why? It is not that we consider him
+bound to fall in love with her. Enobarbus did not;
+Dolabella did not; we ourselves do not. The feeling
+she inspires was felt then, and is felt now, by
+women no less than men, and would have been
+shared by Octavia herself. Doubtless she wrought
+magic on the senses, but she had not extraordinary
+beauty, like Helen&rsquo;s, such beauty as seems divine.<a name="fa7i" id="fa7i" href="#ft7i"><span class="sp">7</span></a>
+Plutarch says so. The man who wrote the sonnets
+to the dark lady would have known it for himself.
+He goes out of his way to add to her age, and tells
+us of her wrinkles and the waning of her lip. But
+Enobarbus, in his very mockery, calls her a wonderful
+piece of work. Dolabella interrupts her with the
+cry, &lsquo;Most sovereign creature,&rsquo; and we echo it.
+And yet Octavius, face to face with her and listening
+to her voice, can think only how best to trap her and
+drag her to public dishonour in the streets of Rome.
+We forgive him only for his words when he sees her
+dead:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i6">She looks like sleep,</p>
+<p>As she would catch another Antony</p>
+<p>In her strong toil of grace.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page303" id="page303"></a>303</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">And the words, I confess, sound to me more like
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s than his.</p>
+
+<p>That which makes her wonderful and sovereign
+laughs at definition, but she herself came nearest
+naming it when, in the final speech (a passage surpassed
+in poetry, if at all, only by the final speech of
+Othello), she cries,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>I am fire and air; my other elements</p>
+<p>I give to baser life.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The fire and air which at death break from union
+with those other elements, transfigured them during
+her life, and still convert into engines of enchantment
+the very things for which she is condemned. I can
+refer only to one. She loves Antony. We should
+marvel at her less and love her more if she loved
+him more&mdash;loved him well enough to follow him at
+once to death; but it is to blunder strangely to
+doubt that she loved him, or that her glorious
+description of him (though it was also meant to
+work on Dolabella) came from her heart. Only
+the spirit of fire and air within her refuses to be
+trammelled or extinguished; burns its way through
+the obstacles of fortune and even through the
+resistance of her love and grief; and would lead
+her undaunted to fresh life and the conquest of
+new worlds. It is this which makes her &lsquo;strong
+toil of grace&rsquo; unbreakable; speaks in her brows&rsquo;
+bent and every tone and movement; glorifies the
+arts and the rages which in another would merely
+disgust or amuse us; and, in the final scenes of her
+life, flames into such brilliance that we watch her
+entranced as she struggles for freedom, and thrilled
+with triumph as, conquered, she puts her conqueror
+to scorn and goes to meet her lover in the splendour
+that crowned and robed her long ago, when her
+barge burnt on the water like a burnished throne,
+and she floated to Cydnus on the enamoured
+stream to take him captive for ever.<a name="fa8i" id="fa8i" href="#ft8i"><span class="sp">8</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page304" id="page304"></a>304</span></p>
+
+<p>Why is it that, although we close the book in a
+triumph which is more than reconciliation, this is
+mingled, as we look back on the story, with a
+sadness so peculiar, almost the sadness of disenchantment?
+Is it that, when the glow has faded,
+Cleopatra&rsquo;s ecstasy comes to appear, I would not say
+factitious, but an effort strained and prodigious as
+well as glorious, not, like Othello&rsquo;s last speech, the
+final expression of character, of thoughts and emotions
+which have dominated a whole life? Perhaps this
+is so, but there is something more, something that
+sounds paradoxical: we are saddened by the very
+fact that the catastrophe saddens us so little; it
+pains us that we should feel so much triumph and
+pleasure. In <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>,
+though in a sense we accept the deaths of hero and
+heroine, we feel a keen sorrow. We look back,
+think how noble or beautiful they were, wish that
+fate had opposed to them a weaker enemy, dream
+possibly of the life they might then have led. Here
+we can hardly do this. With all our admiration and
+sympathy for the lovers we do not wish them to
+gain the world. It is better for the world&rsquo;s sake,
+and not less for their own, that they should fail and
+die. At the very first they came before us, unlike
+those others, unlike Coriolanus and even Macbeth,
+in a glory already tarnished, half-ruined by their
+past. Indeed one source of strange and most unusual
+effect in their story is that this marvellous
+passion comes to adepts in the experience and art of
+passion, who might be expected to have worn its
+charm away. Its splendour dazzles us; but, when
+the splendour vanishes, we do not mourn, as we
+mourn for the love of Romeo or Othello, that a thing
+so bright and good should die. And the fact that
+we mourn so little saddens us.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page305" id="page305"></a>305</span></p>
+
+<p>A comparison of Shakespearean tragedies seems
+to prove that the tragic emotions are stirred in the
+fullest possible measure only when such beauty or
+nobility of character is displayed as commands unreserved
+admiration or love; or when, in default of
+this, the forces which move the agents, and the
+conflict which results from these forces, attain a
+terrifying and overwhelming power. The four most
+famous tragedies satisfy one or both of these conditions;
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, though a great
+tragedy, satisfies neither of them completely. But
+to say this is not to criticise it. It does not attempt
+to satisfy these conditions, and then fail in the
+attempt. It attempts something different, and succeeds
+as triumphantly as <i>Othello</i> itself. In doing
+so it gives us what no other tragedy can give, and
+it leaves us, no less than any other, lost in astonishment
+at the powers which created it.</p>
+
+<p class="f80">1905</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page306" id="page306"></a>306</span></p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE A</p>
+
+<p>We are to understand, surely, that Enobarbus dies of &lsquo;thought&rsquo;
+(melancholy or grief), and has no need to seek a &lsquo;swifter mean.&rsquo;
+Cf. <span class="scs">IV.</span> vi. 34 <i>seq.</i>, with the death-scene and his address there to
+the moon as the &lsquo;sovereign mistress of true melancholy&rsquo; (<span class="scs">IV.</span> ix.).
+Cf. also <span class="scs">III.</span> xiii., where, to Cleopatra&rsquo;s question after Actium,
+&lsquo;What shall we do, Enobarbus?&rsquo; he answers, &lsquo;Think, and die.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>The character of Enobarbus is practically an invention of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s. The death-scene, I may add, is one of the many
+passages which prove that he often wrote what pleased his
+imagination but would lose half its effect in the theatre. The
+darkness and moonlight could not be represented on a public
+stage in his time.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE B</p>
+
+<p>The scene is the first of the third Act. Here Ventidius says:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Cćsar and Antony have ever won</p>
+<p>More in their officer than person: Sossius,</p>
+<p>One of my place in Syria, his lieutenant,</p>
+<p>For quick accumulation of renown,</p>
+<p>Which he achieved by the minute, lost his favour.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Plutarch (North, sec. 19) says that &lsquo;Sossius, one of Antonius&rsquo;
+lieutenants in Syria, did notable good service,&rsquo; but I cannot find
+in him the further statement that Sossius lost Antony&rsquo;s favour.
+I presume it is Shakespeare&rsquo;s invention, but I call attention to it
+on the bare chance that it may be found elsewhere than in
+Plutarch, when it would point to Shakespeare&rsquo;s use of a second
+authority.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page307" id="page307"></a>307</span></p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE C</p>
+
+<p>Since this lecture was published (<i>Quarterly Review</i>, April, 1906)
+two notable editions of <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> have been produced.
+Nothing recently written on Shakespeare, I venture to
+say, shows more thorough scholarship or better judgment than
+Mr. Case&rsquo;s edition in the Arden series; and Dr. Furness has
+added to the immense debt which students of Shakespeare owe
+to him, and (if that is possible) to the admiration and respect
+with which they regard him, by the appearance of <i>Antony and
+Cleopatra</i> in his New Variorum edition.</p>
+
+<p>On one question about Cleopatra both editors, Mr. Case more
+tentatively and Dr. Furness very decidedly, dissent from the
+interpretation given in the last pages of my lecture. The question
+is how we are to understand the fact that, although on Antony&rsquo;s
+death Cleopatra expresses her intention of following him, she
+does not carry out this intention until she has satisfied herself
+that Octavius means to carry her to Rome to grace his triumph.
+Though I do not profess to feel certain that my interpretation is
+right, it still seems to me a good deal the most probable, and
+therefore I have not altered what I wrote. But my object here
+is not to defend my view or to criticise other views, but merely
+to call attention to the discussion of the subject in Mr. Case&rsquo;s
+Introduction and Dr. Furness&rsquo;s Preface.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center chap">NOTE D</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, it seems clear, imagined Cleopatra as a gipsy.
+And this, I would suggest, may be the explanation of a word
+which has caused much difficulty. Antony, when &lsquo;all is lost,&rsquo;
+exclaims (<span class="scs">IV.</span> x. 38):</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,&mdash;</p>
+<p>Whose eye beck&rsquo;d forth my wars, and call&rsquo;d them home,</p>
+<p>Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,&mdash;</p>
+<p>Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,</p>
+<p>Beguil&rsquo;d me to the very heart of loss.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Pope changed &lsquo;grave&rsquo; in the first line into &lsquo;gay.&rsquo; Others conjecture
+&lsquo;great&rsquo; and &lsquo;grand.&rsquo; Steevens says that &lsquo;grave&rsquo; means
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page308" id="page308"></a>308</span>
+&lsquo;deadly,&rsquo; and that the word &lsquo;is often used by Chapman&rsquo; thus;
+and one of his two quotations supports his statement; but
+certainly in Shakespeare the word does not elsewhere bear this
+sense. It could mean &lsquo;majestic,&rsquo; as Johnson takes it here. But
+why should it not have its usual meaning? Cleopatra, we know,
+was a being of &lsquo;infinite variety,&rsquo; and her eyes may sometimes
+have had, like those of some gipsies, a mysterious gravity or
+solemnity which would exert a spell more potent than her gaiety.
+Their colour, presumably, was what is called &lsquo;black&rsquo;; but surely
+they were not, like those of Tennyson&rsquo;s Cleopatra, &lsquo;<i>bold</i> black
+eyes.&rsquo; Readers interested in seeing what criticism is capable of
+may like to know that it has been proposed to read, for the first
+line of the quotation above, &lsquo;O this false fowl of Egypt! haggard
+charmer.&rsquo; [Though I have not cancelled this note I have
+modified some phrases in it, as I have not much confidence in
+my suggestion, and am inclined to think that Steevens was right.]</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1i" id="ft1i" href="#fa1i"><span class="fn">1</span></a> As this lecture was composed after the publication of my <i>Shakespearean
+Tragedy</i> I ignored in it, as far as possible, such aspects of
+the play as were noticed in that book, to the Index of which I may
+refer the reader.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2i" id="ft2i" href="#fa2i"><span class="fn">2</span></a> See Note A.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3i" id="ft3i" href="#fa3i"><span class="fn">3</span></a> &lsquo;Now whilest Antonius was busie in this preparation, Octavia his
+wife, whom he had left at Rome, would needs take sea to come unto
+him. Her brother Octauius Cćsar was willing vnto it, not for his
+respect at all (as most authors do report) as for that he might haue an
+honest colour to make warre with Antonius if he did misuse her, and
+not esteeme of her as she ought to be.&rsquo;&mdash;<i>Life of Antony</i> (North&rsquo;s
+Translation), sect. 29. The view I take does not, of course, imply
+that Octavius had no love for his sister.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4i" id="ft4i" href="#fa4i"><span class="fn">4</span></a> See Note B.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5i" id="ft5i" href="#fa5i"><span class="fn">5</span></a> The point of this remark is unaffected by the fact that the play is
+not divided into acts and scenes in the folios.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6i" id="ft6i" href="#fa6i"><span class="fn">6</span></a> See Note C.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7i" id="ft7i" href="#fa7i"><span class="fn">7</span></a> See Note D.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8i" id="ft8i" href="#fa8i"><span class="fn">8</span></a> Of the &lsquo;good&rsquo; heroines, Imogen is the one who has most of this
+spirit of fire and air; and this (in union, of course, with other qualities)
+is perhaps the ultimate reason why for so many readers she is, what
+Mr. Swinburne calls her, &lsquo;the woman above all Shakespeare&rsquo;s women.&rsquo;</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page309" id="page309"></a>309</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">SHAKESPEARE THE MAN</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page310" id="page310"></a>310<br />311</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2 chap2">SHAKESPEARE THE MAN</p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">Such</span> phrases as &lsquo;Shakespeare the man&rsquo; or &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+personality&rsquo; are, no doubt, open to objection.
+They seem to suggest that, if we could subtract from
+Shakespeare the mind that produced his works,
+the residue would be the man himself; and that
+his mind was some pure impersonal essence unaffected
+by the accidents of physique, temperament,
+and character. If this were so, one could but
+echo Tennyson&rsquo;s thanksgiving that we know so
+little of Shakespeare. But as it is assuredly not
+so, and as &lsquo;Shakespeare the man&rsquo; really means
+the one indivisible Shakespeare, regarded for the
+time from a particular point of view, the natural
+desire to know whatever can be known of him is
+not to be repressed merely because there are people
+so foolish as to be careless about his works and yet
+curious about his private life. For my own part I
+confess that, though I should care nothing about the
+man if he had not written the works, yet, since we
+possess them, I would rather see and hear him for
+five minutes in his proper person than discover a
+new one. And though we may be content to die
+without knowing his income or even the surname
+of Mr. W. H., we cannot so easily resign the wish
+to find the man in his writings, and to form some
+idea of the disposition, the likes and dislikes, the
+character and the attitude towards life, of the human
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page312" id="page312"></a>312</span>
+being who seems to us to have understood best our
+common human nature.</p>
+
+<p>The answer of course will be that our biographical
+knowledge of Shakespeare is so small, and his
+writings are so completely dramatic, that this wish,
+however natural, is idle. But I cannot think so.
+Doubtless, in trying to form an idea of Shakespeare,
+we soon reach the limits of reasonable certainty;
+and it is also true that the idea we can form without
+exceeding them is far from being as individual as
+we could desire. But it is more distinct than is
+often supposed, and it <i>is</i> reasonably certain; and
+although we can add to its distinctness only by
+more or less probable conjectures, they are not
+mere guesses, they really have probability in various
+degrees. On this whole subject there is a tendency
+at the present time to an extreme scepticism, which
+appears to me to be justified neither by the circumstances
+of the particular case nor by our knowledge
+of human nature in general.</p>
+
+<p>This scepticism is due in part to the interest
+excited by Mr. Lee&rsquo;s discussion of the Sonnets in
+his <i>Life</i> of Shakespeare, and to the importance
+rightly attached to that discussion. The Sonnets
+are lyrical poems of friendship and love. In them
+the poet ostensibly speaks in his own person and
+expresses his own feelings. Many critics, no doubt,
+had denied that he really did so; but they had not
+Mr. Lee&rsquo;s knowledge, nor had they examined the
+matter so narrowly as he; and therefore they had not
+much weakened the general belief that the Sonnets,
+however conventional or exaggerated their language
+may sometimes be, do tell us a good deal about
+their author. Mr. Lee, however, showed far more
+fully than any previous writer that many of the
+themes, many even of the ideas, of these poems
+are commonplaces of Renaissance sonnet-writing;
+and he came to the conclusion that in the Sonnets
+Shakespeare &lsquo;unlocked,&rsquo; not &lsquo;his heart,&rsquo; but a very
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page313" id="page313"></a>313</span>
+different kind of armoury, and that the sole biographical
+inference deducible from them is that &lsquo;at
+one time in his career Shakespeare disdained no
+weapon of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise
+the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank.&rsquo;
+Now, if that inference is correct, it certainly tells
+us something about Shakespeare the man; but it
+also forbids us to take seriously what the Sonnets
+profess to tell us of his passionate affection, with its
+hopes and fears, its pain and joy; of his pride and
+his humility, his self-reproach and self-defence, his
+weariness of life and his consciousness of immortal
+genius. And as, according to Mr. Lee&rsquo;s statement,
+the Sonnets alone of Shakespeare&rsquo;s works &lsquo;can be
+held to throw any illumination on a personal trait,&rsquo;
+it seems to follow that, so far as the works are
+concerned (for Mr. Lee is not specially sceptical as to
+the external testimony), the only idea we can form
+of the man is contained in that single inference.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I venture to surmise that Mr. Lee&rsquo;s words
+go rather beyond his meaning. But that is not our
+business here, nor could a brief discussion do justice
+to a theory to which those who disagree with it
+are still greatly indebted. What I wish to deny
+is the presupposition which seems to be frequently
+accepted as an obvious truth. Even if Mr. Lee&rsquo;s
+view of the Sonnets were indisputably correct, nay,
+if even, to go much further, the persons and the
+story in the Sonnets were as purely fictitious as
+those of <i>Twelfth Night</i>, they might and would still
+tell us something of the personality of their author.
+For however free a poet may be from the emotions
+which he simulates, and however little involved in
+the conditions which he imagines, he cannot (unless
+he is a mere copyist) write a hundred and fifty
+lyrics expressive of those simulated emotions without
+disclosing something of himself, something of
+the way in which he in particular <i>would</i> feel and
+behave under the imagined conditions. And the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page314" id="page314"></a>314</span>
+same thing holds in principle of the dramas. Is it
+really conceivable that a man can write some five
+and thirty dramas, and portray in them an enormous
+amount and variety of human nature, without
+betraying anything whatever of his own disposition
+and preferences? I do not believe that he could
+do this, even if he deliberately set himself to the
+task. The only question is how much of himself
+he would betray.</p>
+
+<p>One is entitled to say this, I think, on general
+grounds; but we may appeal further to specific experience.
+Of many poets and novelists we know a
+good deal from external sources. And in these cases
+we find that the man so known to us appears also
+in his works, and that these by themselves would
+have left on us a personal impression which, though
+imperfect and perhaps in this or that point even
+false, would have been broadly true. Of course this
+holds of some writers much more fully than of
+others; but, except where the work is very scanty
+in amount, it seems to hold in some degree of all.<a name="fa1j" id="fa1j" href="#ft1j"><span class="sp">1</span></a>
+If so, there is an antecedent probability that it will
+apply to Shakespeare too. After all, he was human.
+We may exclaim in our astonishment that he was as
+universal and impartial as nature herself; but this
+is the language of religious rapture. If we assume
+that he was six times as universal as Sir Walter
+Scott, which is praise enough for a mortal, we may
+hope to form an idea of him from his plays only
+six times as dim as the idea of Scott that we should
+derive from the Waverley Novels.</p>
+
+<p>And this is not all. As a matter of fact, the great
+majority of Shakespeare&rsquo;s readers&mdash;lovers of poetry
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page315" id="page315"></a>315</span>
+untroubled by theories and questions&mdash;do form from
+the plays some idea of the man. Knowingly or
+not, they possess such an idea; and up to a certain
+point the idea is the same. Ask such a man
+whether he thinks Shakespeare was at all like
+Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Milton, and it will not
+occur to him to answer &lsquo;I have not the faintest
+notion&rsquo;; he will answer unhesitatingly No. Ask
+him whether he supposes that Shakespeare was at
+all like Fielding or Scott, and he will probably be
+found to imagine that, while differing greatly from
+both, he did belong to the same type or class. And
+such answers unquestionably imply an idea which,
+however deficient in detail, is definite.</p>
+
+<p>Again, to go a little further in the same direction,
+take this fact. After I had put together my notes
+for the present lecture, I re-read Bagehot&rsquo;s essay
+on Shakespeare the Man, and I read a book by
+Goldwin Smith and an essay by Leslie Stephen
+(who, I found, had anticipated a good deal that I
+meant to say).<a name="fa2j" id="fa2j" href="#ft2j"><span class="sp">2</span></a> These three writers, with all their
+variety, have still substantially the same idea of
+Shakespeare; and it is the idea of the competent
+&lsquo;general reader&rsquo; more fully developed. Nor is the
+value of their agreement in the least diminished by
+the fact that they make no claim to be Shakespeare
+scholars. They show themselves much abler than
+most scholars, and if they lack the scholar&rsquo;s
+knowledge they are free from his defects. When
+they wrote their essays they had not wearied
+themselves with rival hypotheses, or pored over
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page316" id="page316"></a>316</span>
+minutiae until they lost the broad and deep impressions
+which vivid reading leaves. Ultra-scepticism
+in this matter does not arise merely or mainly
+from the humility which every man of sense must
+feel as he creeps to and fro in Shakespeare&rsquo;s prodigious
+mind. It belongs either to the clever
+faddist who can see nothing straight, or it proceeds
+from those dangers and infirmities which the expert
+in any subject knows too well.</p>
+
+<p>The remarks I am going to make can have an
+interest only for those who share the position I have
+tried to indicate; who believe that the most dramatic
+of writers must reveal in his writings something of
+himself, but who recognise that in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+case we can expect a reasonable certainty only
+within narrow limits, while beyond them we have
+to trust to impressions, the value of which must
+depend on familiarity with his writings, on freedom
+from prejudice and the desire to reach any particular
+result, and on the amount of perception
+we may happen to possess. I offer my own impressions,
+insecure and utterly unprovable as I
+know them to be, simply because those of other
+readers have an interest for me; and I offer them
+for the most part without argument, because even
+where argument might be useful it requires more
+time than a lecture can afford. For the same
+reason I shall assume, without attempting to define
+it further, and without dilating on its implications,
+the truth of that general feeling about Shakespeare
+and Fielding and Scott.</p>
+
+<p>But, before we come to impressions at all, we
+must look at the scanty store of external evidence:
+for we may lay down at once the canon that impressions
+derived from the works must supplement
+and not contradict this evidence, so far as it appears
+trustworthy. It is scanty, but it yields a decided
+outline.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page317" id="page317"></a>317</span></p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>This figure that thou here seest put,</p>
+<p>It was for gentle Shakespeare cut:</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">&mdash;so Jonson writes of the portrait in the Folio, and
+the same adjective &lsquo;gentle&rsquo; is used elsewhere of
+Shakespeare. It had not in Elizabethan English
+so confined a meaning as it has now; but it meant
+something, and I do not remember that their contemporaries
+called Marlowe or Jonson or Marston
+&lsquo;gentle.&rsquo; Next, in the earliest extant reference that
+we have to Shakespeare, the writer says that he
+himself has seen his &lsquo;demeanour&rsquo; to be &lsquo;civil.&rsquo;<a name="fa3j" id="fa3j" href="#ft3j"><span class="sp">3</span></a> It
+is not saying much; but it is not the first remark an
+acquaintance would probably have made about Ben
+Jonson or Samuel Johnson. The same witness adds
+about Shakespeare that &lsquo;divers of worship have
+reported his uprightness of dealing which argues
+his honesty.&rsquo; &lsquo;Honesty&rsquo; and &lsquo;honest&rsquo; in an Elizabethan
+passage like this mean more than they would
+now; they answer rather to our &lsquo;honourable&rsquo; or
+&lsquo;honour.&rsquo; Lastly we have the witness borne by
+Jonson in the words: &lsquo;I loved the man, and do
+honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much
+as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open
+and free nature.&rsquo; With this notable phrase, to
+which I shall have to return, we come to an end
+of the testimony of eye-witnesses to Shakespeare
+the Man (for we have nothing to do with references
+to the mere actor or author). It is scanty, and
+insufficient to discriminate him from other persons
+who were gentle, civil, upright in their dealings,
+honourable, open, and free: but I submit that there
+have been not a few writers to whom all these
+qualities could not be truly ascribed, and that the
+testimony therefore does tell us something definite.
+To which must be added that we have absolutely
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page318" id="page318"></a>318</span>
+no evidence which conflicts with it. Whatever
+Greene in his jealous embitterment might have
+said would carry little weight, but in fact, apart
+from general abuse of actors, he only says that
+the upstart had an over-weening opinion of his own
+capacities.</p>
+
+<p>There remain certain traditions and certain facts;
+and without discussing them I will mention what
+seems to me to have a more or less probable
+significance. Stratford stories of drinking bouts
+may go for nothing, but not the consensus of tradition
+to the effect that Shakespeare was a pleasant
+and convivial person, &lsquo;very good company, and of a
+very ready and pleasant smooth wit.&rsquo;<a name="fa4j" id="fa4j" href="#ft4j"><span class="sp">4</span></a> That after
+his retirement to Stratford he spent at the rate of
+Ł1000 a year is incredible, but that he spent freely
+seems likely enough. The tradition that as a
+young man he got into trouble with Sir Thomas
+Lucy for deer-stealing (which would probably be
+an escapade rather than an essay in serious poaching)
+is supported by his unsavoury jest about the
+&lsquo;luces&rsquo; in Sir Robert Shallow&rsquo;s coat. The more
+general statement that in youth he was wild
+does not sound improbable; and, obscure as the
+matter is, I cannot regard as comfortable the
+little we know of the circumstances of his very
+early marriage. A contemporary story of an
+amorous adventure in London may well be pure
+invention, but we have no reason to reject it
+peremptorily as we should any similar gossip about
+Milton. Lastly, certain inferences may safely be
+drawn from the facts that, once securely started in
+London, Shakespeare soon began to prosper, and
+acquired, for an actor and playwright, considerable
+wealth; that he bought property in his native town,
+and was consulted sometimes by fellow-townsmen
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page319" id="page319"></a>319</span>
+on matters of business; that he enforced the payment
+of certain debts; and that he took the trouble
+to get a coat of arms. But what cannot with any
+logic or any safety be inferred is that he, any more
+than Scott, was impelled to write simply and solely
+by the desire to make money and improve his social
+position; and the comparative abundance of business
+records will mislead only those who are thoughtless
+enough to forget that, if they buy a house or sue a
+debtor, the fact will be handed down, while their
+kind or generous deeds may be recorded, if at all,
+only in the statement that they were &lsquo;of an open
+and free nature.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">That Shakespeare was a good and perhaps keen
+man of business, or that he set store by a coat of
+arms, we could not have inferred from his writings.
+But we could have judged from them that he worked
+hard, and have guessed with some probability that
+he would rather have been a &lsquo;gentleman&rsquo; than an
+actor. And most of the other characteristics that
+appear from the external evidence would, I think,
+have seemed probable from a study of the works.
+This should encourage us to hope that we may be
+right in other impressions which we receive from
+them. And we may begin with one on which the
+external evidence has a certain bearing.</p>
+
+<p>Readers of Shakespeare, I believe, imagine him
+to have been not only sweet-tempered but modest
+and unassuming. I do not doubt that they are
+right; and, vague as the Folio portrait and the
+Stratford bust are, it would be difficult to believe
+that their subject was an irritable, boastful, or pushing
+person. But if we confine ourselves to the
+works, it is not easy to give reasons for the idea that
+their author was modest and unassuming; and a
+man is not necessarily so because he is open, free,
+and very good company. Perhaps we feel that a
+man who was not so would have allowed much
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page320" id="page320"></a>320</span>
+more of himself to appear in his works than Shakespeare
+does. Perhaps again we think that anything
+like presumption or self-importance was incompatible
+with Shakespeare&rsquo;s sense of the ridiculous, his
+sublime common-sense, and his feeling of man&rsquo;s
+insignificance. And, lastly, it seems to us clear that
+the playwright admires and likes people who are
+modest, unassuming, and plain; while it may perhaps
+safely be said that those who lack these qualities
+rarely admire them in others and not seldom despise
+them. But, however we may justify our impression
+that Shakespeare possessed them, we certainly
+receive it; and assuming it to be as correct as the
+similar impression left by the Waverley Novels
+indubitably is, I go on to observe that the possession
+of them does not of necessity imply a want of spirit,
+or of proper self-assertion or insistence on rights.<a name="fa5j" id="fa5j" href="#ft5j"><span class="sp">5</span></a>
+It did not in Scott, and we have ground for saying
+that it did not in Shakespeare. If it had, he could
+not, being of an open and free nature, have prospered
+as he prospered. He took offence at Greene&rsquo;s attack
+on him, and showed that he took it. He was &lsquo;gentle,&rsquo;
+but he liked his debts to be paid. However his
+attitude as to the enclosure at Welcombe may be
+construed, it is clear that he had to be reckoned
+with. It appears probable that he held himself
+wronged by Sir Thomas Lucy, and, pocketing up
+the injury because he could not resent it, gave him
+tit for tat after some fifteen years. The man in the
+Sonnets forgives his friend easily, but it is not from
+humility; and towards the world he is very far from
+humble. Of the dedication of <i>The Rape of Lucrece</i>
+we cannot judge, for we do not know Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+relations with Lord Southampton at that date; but,
+as for the dedication of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, could
+modesty and dignity be better mingled in a letter
+from a young poet to a great noble than they are there?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page321" id="page321"></a>321</span></p>
+
+<p>Some of Shakespeare&rsquo;s writings point to a strain
+of deep reflection and of quasi-metaphysical imagination
+in his nature; and a few of them seem to
+reveal a melancholy, at times merely sad, at times
+embittered or profound, if never hopeless. It is
+on this side mainly that we feel a decided difference
+between him and Fielding, and even between him
+and Scott. Yet nothing in the contemporary allusions
+or in the traditions would suggest that he was
+notably thoughtful or serious, and much less that he
+was melancholy. And although we could lay no
+stress on this fact if it stood alone, it is probably
+significant. Shakespeare&rsquo;s writings, on the whole,
+leave a strong impression that his native disposition
+was much more gay than grave. They seem always
+to have made this impression. Fuller tells us that
+&lsquo;though his genius generally was jocular and inclining
+him to festivity, yet he could, when so disposed,
+be solemn and serious, as appears by his tragedies.&rsquo;<a name="fa6j" id="fa6j" href="#ft6j"><span class="sp">6</span></a>
+Johnson agreed with Rymer that his &lsquo;natural disposition&rsquo;
+led him to comedy; and, although Johnson
+after his manner distorts a true idea by wilful
+exaggeration and by perverting distinctions into
+antitheses, there is truth in his development of
+Rymer&rsquo;s remark. It would be easy to quote nineteenth
+century critics to the same effect; and the
+study of Shakespeare&rsquo;s early works leads to a similar
+result. It has been truly said that we feel ourselves
+in much closer contact with his personality in the
+early comedies and in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> than in
+<i>Henry VI.</i> and <i>Richard III.</i> and <i>Titus Andronicus</i>.
+In the latter, so far as we suppose them to be his
+own, he seems on the whole to be following, and
+then improving on, an existing style, and to be
+dealing with subjects which engage him as a playwright
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page322" id="page322"></a>322</span>
+without much appealing to him personally.
+With <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, on the other hand, and with
+<i>Richard II.</i> (which seems clearly to be his first
+attempt to write historical tragedy in a manner
+entirely his own), it is different, and we feel the
+presence of the whole man. The stories are tragic,
+but it is not precisely the <i>tragic</i> aspect of them that
+attracts him most; and even Johnson&rsquo;s statement,
+grotesquely false of the later tragedies, that &lsquo;in
+tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion
+to be comic,&rsquo; is no more than an exaggeration in
+respect to <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>.<a name="fa7j" id="fa7j" href="#ft7j"><span class="sp">7</span></a> From these tragedies,
+as from <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i> and the other early
+comedies, we should guess that the author was a
+young man, happy, alert, light-hearted, full of
+romance and poetry, but full also of fun; blessed
+with a keen enjoyment of absurdities, but, for all his
+intellectual subtlety and power, not markedly reflective,
+and certainly not particularly grave or much
+inclined to dejection. One might even suspect,
+I venture to think, that with such a flow of spirits
+and such exceeding alacrity of mind he might at
+present be a trifle wanting in feeling and disposed
+to levity. In any case, if our general impression is
+correct, we shall not find it hard to believe that
+the author of these plays and the creator of Falstaff
+was &lsquo;very good company&rsquo; and a convivial good-fellow;
+and it might easily happen that he was
+tempted at times to &lsquo;go here and there&rsquo; in society,
+and &lsquo;make himself a motley to the view&rsquo; in a fashion
+that left some qualms behind.<a name="fa8j" id="fa8j" href="#ft8j"><span class="sp">8</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page323" id="page323"></a>323</span></p>
+
+<p>There is a tradition that Shakespeare was &lsquo;a handsome
+well-shaped man.&rsquo; If the Stratford monument
+does not lie, he was not in later life a meagre man.
+And if our notion of his temperament has any truth,
+he can hardly have been physically feeble, bloodless,
+or inactive. Most readers probably imagine him the
+reverse. Even sceptical critics tell us that he was
+fond of field-sports; and of his familiar knowledge
+of them there can be no question. Yet&mdash;I can but
+record the impression without trying to justify it&mdash;his
+writings do not at all suggest to me that he was
+a splendidly powerful creature like Fielding, or that
+he greatly enjoyed bodily exertion, or was not easily
+tired. He says much of horses, but he does not
+make one think, as Scott does, that a gallop was a
+great delight to him. Nor again do I feel after
+reading him that he had a strong natural love of
+adventurous deeds, or longed to be an explorer or a
+soldier. The island of his boyish dreams&mdash;if he
+heard much of voyages as a boy&mdash;was, I fancy, the
+haunt of marmosets and hedgehogs, quaint moon-calves
+and flitting sprites, lovely colours, sounds
+and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,
+less like Treasure Island than the Coral Island of
+Ballantyne in the original illustrations, and more
+full of wonders than of dangers. He would have
+liked the Arabian Nights better than Dumas.
+Of course he admired men of action, understood
+them, and could express their feelings; but we do
+not feel particularly close to his personality as we
+read the warrior speeches of Hotspur, Henry,
+Othello, Coriolanus, as we do when we read of
+Romeo or Hamlet, or when we feel the attraction
+of Henry&rsquo;s modesty. In the same way, I suppose
+nobody feels Shakespeare&rsquo;s personal presence in the
+ambition of Macbeth or the pride of Coriolanus;
+many feel it in Macbeth&rsquo;s imaginative terrors, and in
+the disgust of Coriolanus at the idea of recounting
+his exploits in order to win votes. When we seem
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page324" id="page324"></a>324</span>
+to hear Shakespeare&rsquo;s voice&mdash;and we hear it from
+many mouths besides Romeo&rsquo;s or Hamlet&rsquo;s&mdash;it is the
+voice of a man with a happy, enjoying, but still
+contemplative and even dreamy nature, not of a
+man richly endowed with the impulses and feelings
+either of strenuous action or of self-assertion. If he
+had drawn a Satan, we should not have felt his
+personality, as we do Milton&rsquo;s, in Satan&rsquo;s pride and
+indomitable courage and intolerance of rule.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">We know how often Shakespeare uses the antithesis
+of blood or passion, and judgment or reason;
+how he praises the due commingling of the two, or
+the control of the first by the second; how frequently
+it is the want of such control that exposes
+his heroes to the attack of Fortune or Fate. What,
+then, were the passions or the &lsquo;affections of the
+blood&rsquo; most dangerous to himself? Not, if we have
+been right, those of pride or ambition; nor yet those
+of envy, hatred, or revenge; and still less that of
+avarice. But, in the first place, let us remember
+Jonson&rsquo;s words, &lsquo;he was honest and of an open and
+free nature,&rsquo; and let me repeat an observation, made
+elsewhere in passing, that these words are true also
+of the great majority of Shakespeare&rsquo;s heroes, and
+not least of his tragic heroes. Jonson almost quotes
+Iago:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The Moor is of a free and open nature,</p>
+<p>That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The king says that Hamlet,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+    <p class="i11">being remiss,</p>
+<p>Most generous, and free from all contrivings,</p>
+<p>Will not peruse the foils.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The words &lsquo;open and free&rsquo; apply no less eminently
+to Brutus, Lear, and Timon. Antony and Coriolanus
+are men naturally frank, liberal, and large.
+Prospero lost his dukedom through his trustfulness.
+Romeo and Troilus and Orlando, and many slighter
+characters, are so far of the same type. Now such
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page325" id="page325"></a>325</span>
+a free and open nature, obviously, is specially exposed
+to the risks of deception, perfidy, and ingratitude.
+If it is also a nature sensitive and intense, but not
+particularly active or (if the word may be excused)
+volitional, such experiences will tempt it to melancholy,
+embitterment, anger, possibly even misanthropy.
+If it <i>is</i> thus active or volitional, it may
+become the prey of violent and destructive passion,
+such as that of Othello and of Coriolanus, and such
+as Lear&rsquo;s would be if he were not so old. These
+affections, passions, and sufferings of free and open
+natures are Shakespeare&rsquo;s favourite tragic subject;
+and his favouritism, surely, goes so far as to constitute
+a decided peculiarity, not found thus in other
+tragic poets. Here he painted most, one cannot but
+think, what his own nature was most inclined to
+feel. But it would rather be melancholy, embitterment,
+an inactive rage or misanthropy, than any
+destructive passion; and it would be a further
+question whether, and how far, he may at any time
+have experienced what he depicts. I am speaking
+here only of his disposition.<a name="fa9j" id="fa9j" href="#ft9j"><span class="sp">9</span></a></p>
+
+<p>That Shakespeare was as much inclined to be a
+lover as most poets we may perhaps safely assume;
+but can we conjecture anything further on this
+subject? I will confine myself to two points. He
+treats of love romantically, and tragically, and
+humorously. In the earlier plays especially the
+humorous aspect of the matter, the aspect so
+prominent in the <i>Midsummer-Night&rsquo;s Dream</i>, the
+changefulness, brevity, irrationality, of the feeling, is
+at least as much dwelt on as the romantic, and with
+at least as much relish:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Lord! what fools these mortals be!</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page326" id="page326"></a>326</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">Now, if there is anything peculiar in the pictures
+here, it is, perhaps, the special interest that Shakespeare
+seems to take in what we may call the
+unreality of the feeling of love in an imaginative
+nature. Romeo as he first appears, and, in a later
+play, Orsino, are examples of this. They are
+perfectly sincere, of course, but neither of them is
+really in love with a woman; each is in love with
+the state of being in love. This state is able to
+attach itself to a particular object, but it is not
+induced by the particular qualities of that object;
+it is more a dream than a passion, and can melt
+away without carrying any of the lover&rsquo;s heart with
+it; and in that sense it is unreal. This weakness,
+no doubt, is not confined to imaginative natures,
+but they may well be specially disposed to it (as
+Shelley was), and Shakespeare may have drawn
+it from his own experience. The suspicion is
+strengthened when we think of <i>Richard II</i>. In
+Richard this imaginative weakness is exhibited
+again, though not in relation to love. He luxuriates
+in images of his royal majesty, of the angels who
+guard his divine right, and of his own pathetic
+and almost sacred sufferings. The images are not
+insincere, and yet they are like dreams, for they
+refuse to touch earth and to connect themselves
+either with his past misdeeds or with the actions he
+ought now to perform. A strain of a similar weakness
+appears again in Hamlet, though only as one
+strain in a much more deep and complex nature.
+But this is not a common theme in poetry, much
+less in dramatic poetry.<a name="fa10j" id="fa10j" href="#ft10j"><span class="sp">10</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page327" id="page327"></a>327</span></p>
+
+<p>To come to our second question. When Shakespeare
+painted Cressida or described her through
+the mouth of Ulysses (&lsquo;O these encounterers,&rsquo; etc.),
+or, again, when he portrayed the love of Antony for
+Cleopatra, was he using his personal experience?
+To answer that he <i>must</i> have done so would be as
+ridiculous as to argue that Iago must be a portrait
+of himself; and the two plays contain nothing
+which, by itself, would justify us even in thinking
+that he probably did so. But we have the series
+of sonnets about the dark lady; and if we accept
+the sonnets to the friend as to some considerable
+extent based on fact and expressive of personal
+feelings, how can we refuse to take the others
+on the same footing? Even if the stories of the
+two series were not intertwined, we should have
+no ground for treating the two in different ways,
+unless we could say that external evidence, or the
+general impression we derive from Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+works, forbids us to believe that he could ever have
+been entangled in an intrigue like that implied in
+the second series, or have felt and thought in the
+manner there portrayed. Being unable to say this,
+I am compelled, most regretfully, to hold it probable
+that this series is, in the main, based on personal
+experience. And I say &lsquo;most regretfully,&rsquo; not merely
+because one would regret to think that Shakespeare
+was the victim of a Cressida or even the lover of
+a Cleopatra, but because the story implied in these
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page328" id="page328"></a>328</span>
+sonnets is of quite another kind. They leave, on
+the whole, a very disagreeable impression. We
+cannot compare it with the impressions produced,
+for example, by the &lsquo;heathen&rsquo; spirit of Goethe&rsquo;s
+<i>Roman Elegies</i>, or by the passion of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+Antony. In these two cases, widely dissimilar of
+course, we may speak of &lsquo;immorality,&rsquo; but we are
+not discomfited, much less disgusted. The feeling
+and the attitude are poetic, whole-hearted, and in one
+case passionate in the extreme. But the state of
+mind expressed in the sonnets about the dark lady
+is half-hearted, often prosaic, and never worthy of
+the name of passion. It is uneasy, dissatisfied, distempered,
+the state of mind of a man who despises
+his &lsquo;passion&rsquo; and its object and himself, but, standing
+intellectually far above it, still has not resolution to
+end it, and only pains us by his gross and joyless
+jests. In <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>&mdash;not at all in the
+portrayal of Troilus&rsquo;s love, but in the atmosphere
+of the drama&mdash;we seem to trace a similar mood of
+dissatisfaction, and of intellectual but practically
+impotent contempt.</p>
+
+<p>In this connection it is natural to think of the
+&lsquo;unhappy period&rsquo; which has so often been surmised
+in Shakespeare&rsquo;s life. There is not time here to
+expand the summary remarks made elsewhere on
+this subject; but I may refer a little more fully to a
+persistent impression left on my mind by writings
+which we have reason to assign to the years 1602-6.<a name="fa11j" id="fa11j" href="#ft11j"><span class="sp">11</span></a>
+There is surely something unusual in their tone
+regarding certain &lsquo;vices of the blood,&rsquo; regarding
+drunkenness and sexual corruption. It does not
+lie in Shakespeare&rsquo;s <i>view</i> of these vices, but in an
+undertone of disgust. Read Hamlet&rsquo;s language
+about the habitual drunkenness of his uncle, or even
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page329" id="page329"></a>329</span>
+Cassio&rsquo;s words about his casual excess; then think
+of the tone of <i>Henry IV.</i> or <i>Twelfth Night</i> or the
+<i>Tempest</i>; and ask if the difference is not striking.
+And if you are inclined to ascribe it wholly to the
+fact that <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Othello</i> are tragedies, compare
+the passages in them with the scene on Pompey&rsquo;s
+galley in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>. The intent of that
+scene is terrible enough, but in the tone there is no
+more trace of disgust than in <i>Twelfth Night</i>. As to
+the other matter, what I refer to is not the transgression
+of lovers like Claudio and Juliet, nor even
+light-hearted irregularities like those of Cassio: here
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s speech has its habitual tone. But,
+when he is dealing with lechery and corruption, the
+undercurrent of disgust seems to become audible. Is
+it not true that in the plays from <i>Hamlet</i> to <i>Timon</i>
+that subject, in one shape or another, is continually
+before us; that the intensity of loathing in Hamlet&rsquo;s
+language about his mother&rsquo;s lust is unexampled in
+Shakespeare; that the treatment of the subject in
+<i>Measure for Measure</i>, though occasionally purely
+humorous, is on the whole quite unlike the treatment
+in <i>Henry IV.</i> or even in the brothel scenes of
+<i>Pericles</i>;<a name="fa12j" id="fa12j" href="#ft12j"><span class="sp">12</span></a> that while <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> is full of
+disgust and contempt, there is not a trace of either
+in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, though some of the jesting
+there is obscene enough; that this same tone is as
+plainly heard in the unquestioned parts of <i>Timon</i>;
+and that, while it is natural in Timon to inveigh
+against female lechery when he speaks to Alcibiades
+and his harlots, there is no apparent reason why
+Lear in his exalted madness should choose this
+subject for similar invectives? &lsquo;Pah! give me an
+ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my
+imagination&rsquo;&mdash;it is a fainter echo of this exclamation
+that one seems to hear in the plays of those
+years. Of course I am not suggesting that it is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page330" id="page330"></a>330</span>
+mainly due, or as regards drunkenness due in the
+least, to any private experience of Shakespeare&rsquo;s.
+It may have no connection whatever with that
+experience. It might well be connected with it
+only in so far as a man frequently wearied and
+depressed might be unusually sensitive to the ugly
+aspects of life. But, if we do not take the second
+series of sonnets to be purely fanciful, we shall think
+it probable that to some undefined extent it owed its
+origin to the experience depicted in them.<a name="fa13j" id="fa13j" href="#ft13j"><span class="sp">13</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="pt2">There remain the sonnets addressed to the friend.
+Even if it were possible to discuss the general
+question about them here, it would be needless;
+for I accept almost wholly, and in some points am
+greatly indebted to, the views put forward by Mr.
+Beeching in his admirable edition, to which I may
+therefore refer my hearers.<a name="fa14j" id="fa14j" href="#ft14j"><span class="sp">14</span></a> I intend only to state
+the main reason why I believe the sonnets to be,
+substantially, what they purport to be, and then to
+touch upon one or two of the points where they
+seem to throw light on Shakespeare&rsquo;s personality.</p>
+
+<p>The sonnets to the friend are, so far as we know,
+unique in Renaissance sonnet literature in being a
+prolonged and varied record of the intense affection
+of an older friend for a younger, and of other feelings
+arising from their relations. They have no real
+parallel in any series imitative of Virgil&rsquo;s second
+Eclogue, or in occasional sonnets to patrons or
+patron-friends couched in the high-flown language of
+the time. The intensity of the feelings expressed,
+however, ought not, by itself, to convince us that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page331" id="page331"></a>331</span>
+they are personal. The author of the plays could,
+I make no doubt, have written the most intimate
+of these poems to a mere creature of his imagination
+and without ever having felt them except in imagination.
+Nor is there any but an aesthetic reason why
+he should not have done so if he had wished. But
+an aesthetic reason there is; and this is the decisive
+point. No capable poet, much less a Shakespeare,
+intending to produce a merely &lsquo;dramatic&rsquo;
+series of poems, would dream of inventing a story
+like that of these sonnets, or, even if he did, of
+treating it as they treat it. The story is very
+odd and unattractive. Such capacities as it has
+are but slightly developed. It is left obscure,
+and some of the poems are unintelligible to us
+because they contain allusions of which we can make
+nothing. Now all this is perfectly natural if the
+story is substantially a real story of Shakespeare
+himself and of certain other persons; if the sonnets
+were written from time to time as the relations of
+the persons changed, and sometimes in reference to
+particular incidents; and if they were written <i>for</i>
+one or more of these persons (far the greater number
+for only one), and perhaps in a few cases for other
+friends,&mdash;written, that is to say, for people who
+knew the details and incidents of which we are
+ignorant. But it is all unnatural, well-nigh incredibly
+unnatural, if, with the most sceptical
+critics, we regard the sonnets as a free product
+of mere imagination.<a name="fa15j" id="fa15j" href="#ft15j"><span class="sp">15</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Assuming, then, that the persons of the story,
+with their relations, are real, I would add only two
+remarks about the friend. In the first place, Mr.
+Beeching seems to me right in denying that there is
+sufficient evidence of his standing to Shakespeare
+and the &lsquo;rival&rsquo; poet or poets in the position of a
+literary patron; while, even if he did, it appears to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page332" id="page332"></a>332</span>
+me quite impossible to take the language of many
+of the sonnets as that of interested flattery. And in
+the second place I should be inclined to push even
+further Mr. Beeching&rsquo;s view on another point. It
+is clear that the young man was considerably
+superior to the actor-dramatist in social position; but
+any gentleman would be so, and there is nothing to
+prove that he was more than a gentleman of some
+note, more than plain &lsquo;Mr. W. H.&rsquo; (for these, on
+the obvious though not compulsory interpretation of
+the dedication, seem to have been his initials). It
+is remarkable besides that, while the earlier sonnets
+show much deference, the later show very little, so
+little that, when the writer, finding that he has
+pained his young friend by neglecting him, begs to
+be forgiven, he writes almost, if not quite, as an
+equal. Read, for example, sonnets 109, 110, 120,
+and ask whether it is probable that Shakespeare is
+addressing here a great nobleman. It seems therefore
+most likely (though the question is not of much
+importance) that the sonnets are, to quote Meres&rsquo;s
+phrase,<a name="fa16j" id="fa16j" href="#ft16j"><span class="sp">16</span></a> his &lsquo;sonnets among his private friends.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>If then there is, as it appears, no obstacle of any
+magnitude to our taking the sonnets as substantially
+what they purport to be, we may naturally look in
+them for personal traits (and, indeed, to repeat a
+remark made earlier, we might still expect to find
+such traits even if we knew the sonnets to be purely
+dramatic). But in drawing inferences we have to
+bear in mind what is implied by the qualification
+&lsquo;substantially.&rsquo; We have to remember that <i>some</i>
+of these poems may be mere exercises of art; that
+all of them are poems, and not letters, much less
+<i>affidavits</i>; that they are Elizabethan poems; that
+the Elizabethan language of deference, and also of
+affection, is to our minds habitually extravagant and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page333" id="page333"></a>333</span>
+fantastic;<a name="fa17j" id="fa17j" href="#ft17j"><span class="sp">17</span></a> and that in Elizabethan plays friends
+openly express their love for one another as
+Englishmen now rarely do. Allowance being made,
+however, on account of these facts, the sonnets will
+still leave two strong impressions&mdash;that the poet
+was exceedingly sensitive to the charm of beauty,
+and that his love for his friend was, at least at one
+time, a feeling amounting almost to adoration, and
+so intense as to be absorbing. Those who are
+surprised by the first of these traits must have read
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s dramas with very inactive minds, and
+I must add that they seem to be somewhat ignorant
+of human nature. We do not necessarily love best
+those of our relatives, friends, and acquaintances
+who please our eyes most; and we should look
+askance on anyone who regulated his behaviour
+chiefly by the standard of beauty; but most of us,
+I suppose, love any human being, of either sex and
+of any age, the better for being beautiful, and are
+not the least ashamed of the fact. It is further
+the case that men who are beginning, like the
+writer of the sonnets, to feel tired and old, are
+apt to feel an increased and special pleasure
+in the beauty of the young.<a name="fa18j" id="fa18j" href="#ft18j"><span class="sp">18</span></a> If we remember, in
+addition, what some critics appear constantly to
+forget, that Shakespeare was a particularly poetical
+being, we shall hardly be surprised that the beginning
+of this friendship seems to have been something
+like a falling in love; and, if we must needs
+praise and blame, we should also remember that
+it became a &lsquo;marriage of true minds.&rsquo;<a name="fa19j" id="fa19j" href="#ft19j"><span class="sp">19</span></a> And as
+to the intensity of the feeling expressed in the
+sonnets, we can easily believe it to be characteristic
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page334" id="page334"></a>334</span>
+of the man who made Valentine and Proteus, Brutus
+and Cassius, Horatio and Hamlet; who painted
+that strangely moving portrait of Antonio, middle-aged,
+sad, and almost indifferent between life and
+death, but devoted to the young, brilliant spendthrift
+Bassanio; and who portrayed the sudden
+compelling enchantment exercised by the young
+Sebastian over the Antonio of <i>Twelfth Night</i>. &lsquo;If
+you will not murder me for your love, let me be
+your servant.&rsquo; Antonio is accused of piracy: he
+may lose his life if he is identified:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>I have many enemies in Orsino&rsquo;s court,</p>
+<p>But, come what may, I do adore thee so</p>
+<p>That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">The adoration, the &lsquo;prostration,&rsquo; of the writer of the
+sonnets is of one kind with this.</p>
+
+<p>I do not remember what critic uses the word
+&lsquo;prostration.&rsquo; It applies to Shakespeare&rsquo;s attitude
+only in some of the sonnets, but there it does apply,
+unless it is taken to suggest humiliation. <i>That</i> is
+the term used by Hallam, but chiefly in view of a
+particular point, namely the failure of the poet to
+&lsquo;resent,&rsquo; though he &lsquo;felt and bewailed,&rsquo; the injury
+done him in &lsquo;the seduction of his mistress.&rsquo; Though
+I think we should substitute &lsquo;resent more strongly&rsquo;
+for the mere &lsquo;resent,&rsquo; I do not deny that the poet&rsquo;s
+attitude in this matter strikes us at first as surprising
+as well as unpleasant to contemplate. But
+Hallam&rsquo;s explanation of it as perhaps due to the
+exalted position of the friend, would make it much
+more than unpleasant; and his language seems to
+show that he, like many critics, did not fully imagine
+the situation. It is not easy to speak of it in public
+with the requisite frankness; but it is necessary
+to realise that, whatever the friend&rsquo;s rank might
+be, he and the poet were intimate friends; that,
+manifestly, it was rather the mistress who seduced
+the friend than the friend the mistress; and that she
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page335" id="page335"></a>335</span>
+was apparently a woman not merely of no reputation,
+but of such a nature that she might readily be
+expected to be mistress to two men at one and the
+same time. Anyone who realises this may call the
+situation &lsquo;humiliating&rsquo; in one sense, and I cannot
+quarrel with him; but he will not call it &lsquo;humiliating&rsquo;
+in respect of Shakespeare&rsquo;s relation to his friend;
+nor will he wonder much that the poet felt more
+pain than resentment at his friend&rsquo;s treatment of
+him. There is something infinitely stranger in a
+play of Shakespeare&rsquo;s, and it may be symptomatic.
+Ten Brink called attention to it. Proteus actually
+offers violence to Sylvia, a spotless lady and the true
+love of his friend Valentine; and Valentine not only
+forgives him at once when he professes repentance,
+but offers to resign Sylvia to him! The incident
+is to us so utterly preposterous that we find it hard
+to imagine how the audience stood it; but, even if
+we conjecture that Shakespeare adopted it from
+the story he was using, we can hardly suppose that
+it was so absurd to him as it is to us.<a name="fa20j" id="fa20j" href="#ft20j"><span class="sp">20</span></a> And it is
+not the Sonnets alone which lead us to surmise
+that forgiveness was particularly attractive to him,
+and the forgiveness of a friend much easier than
+resentment. From the Sonnets we gather&mdash;and
+there is nothing in the plays or elsewhere to
+contradict the impression&mdash;that he would not be
+slow to resent the criticisms, slanders, or injuries of
+strangers or the world, and that he bore himself
+towards them with a proud, if silent, self-sufficiency.
+But, we surmise, for anyone whom he loved</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>He carried anger as a flint bears fire;</p>
+<p>Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark</p>
+<p>And straight is cold again;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and towards anyone so fondly loved as the friend of
+the Sonnets he was probably incapable of fierce or
+prolonged resentment.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page336" id="page336"></a>336</span></p>
+
+<p>The Sonnets must not occupy us further; and I
+will not dwell on the indications they afford that
+Shakespeare sometimes felt bitterly both the social
+inferiority of his position as an actor,<a name="fa21j" id="fa21j" href="#ft21j"><span class="sp">21</span></a> and its influence
+on his own character; or that (as we have
+already conjectured) he may sometimes have played
+the fool in society, sometimes felt weary of life, and
+often was over-tired by work. It is time to pass
+on to a few hesitating conjectures about what may
+be called his tastes.</p>
+
+<p>Some passages of his about music have become
+household words. It is not downright impossible
+that, like Bottom, having only a reasonable good
+ear, he liked best the tongs and the bones; that he
+wondered, with Benedick, how sheeps-guts should
+hale souls out of men&rsquo;s bodies; and that he wrote
+the famous lines in the <i>Merchant of Venice</i> and in
+<i>Twelfth Night</i> from mere observation and imagination.
+But it is futile to deal with scepticism run
+well-nigh mad, and certainly inaccessible to argument
+from the cases of poets whose tastes are
+matter of knowledge. Assuming therefore that
+Shakespeare was fond of music, I may draw attention
+to two points. Almost always he speaks of
+music as having a softening, tranquillising, or pensive
+influence. It lulls killing care and grief of heart to
+sleep. It soothes the sick and weary, and even
+makes them drowsy. Hamlet calls for it in his
+hysterical excitement after the success of the play
+scene. When it is hoped that Lear&rsquo;s long sleep will
+have carried his madness away, music is played as
+he awakes, apparently to increase the desired
+&lsquo;temperance.&rsquo; It harmonises with the still and
+moon-lit night, and the dreamy happiness of newly-wedded
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page337" id="page337"></a>337</span>
+lovers. Almost all the rare allusions to
+lively or exciting music, apart from dancing, refer, I
+believe, to &lsquo;the lofty instruments of <i>war</i>.&rsquo; These
+facts would almost certainly have a personal significance
+if Shakespeare were a more modern poet.
+Whether they have any, or have much, in an
+Elizabethan I do not venture to judge.</p>
+
+<p>The second point is diminutive, but it may be
+connected with the first. The Duke in <i>Measure
+for Measure</i> observes that music often has</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+    <p class="i8">a charm</p>
+<p>To make bad good and good provoke to harm.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">If we ask how it should provoke good to harm, we
+may recall what was said (p. 326) of the weaknesses
+of some poetic natures, and that no one speaks more
+feelingly of music than Orsino; further, how he
+refers to music as &lsquo;the food of love,&rsquo; and who it is
+that almost repeats the phrase.</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Give me some music: music, moody food</p>
+<p>Of us that trade in love:</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">&mdash;the words are Cleopatra&rsquo;s.<a name="fa22j" id="fa22j" href="#ft22j"><span class="sp">22</span></a> Did Shakespeare as
+he wrote them remember, I wonder, the dark lady
+to whose music he had listened (Sonnet 128)?</p>
+
+<p>We should be greatly surprised to find in Shakespeare
+signs of the nineteenth century feeling for
+mountain scenery, but we can no more doubt that
+within certain limits he was sensitive to the beauty
+of nature than that he was fond of music.<a name="fa23j" id="fa23j" href="#ft23j"><span class="sp">23</span></a> The only
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page338" id="page338"></a>338</span>
+question is whether we can guess at any preferences
+here. It is probably inevitable that the flowers
+most often mentioned should be the rose and the
+lily;<a name="fa24j" id="fa24j" href="#ft24j"><span class="sp">24</span></a> but hardly that the violet should come next
+and not far behind, and that the fragrance of the
+violet should be spoken of more often even than
+that of the rose, and, it seems, with special affection.
+This may be a fancy, and it will be thought a sentimental
+fancy too; but poets, like other people, may
+have favourite flowers; that of Keats, we happen to
+know, was the violet.</p>
+
+<p>Again, if we may draw any conclusion from the
+frequency and the character of the allusions, the lark
+held for Shakespeare the place of honour among
+birds; and the lines,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Hark! hark! the lark at heaven&rsquo;s gate sings,</p>
+  <p class="i1">And Ph&oelig;bus gins arise,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">may suggest one reason for this. The lark, as
+several other collocations show, was to him the bird
+of joy that welcomes the sun; and it can hardly be
+doubted that dawn and early morning was the time
+of day that most appealed to him. That he felt the
+beauty of night and of moonlight is obvious; but we
+find very little to match the lines in <i>Richard II.</i>,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The setting sun, and music at the close,</p>
+<p>As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and still less to prove that he felt the magic of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page339" id="page339"></a>339</span>
+evening twilight, the &lsquo;heavenliest hour&rsquo; of a famous
+passage in <i>Don Juan</i>. There is a wonderful line in
+Sonnet 132,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>And that full star that ushers in the even,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">but I remember little else of the same kind. Shakespeare,
+as it happens, uses the word &lsquo;twilight&rsquo; only
+once, and in an unforgetable passage:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>In me thou see&rsquo;st the twilight of such day</p>
+<p>As after sunset fadeth in the west:</p>
+<p>Which by and by black night doth take away,</p>
+<p>Death&rsquo;s second self that seals up all in rest.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And this feeling, though not often so solemn, is on
+the whole the prevailing sentiment in the references
+to sunset and evening twilight. It corresponds with
+the analogy between the times of the day and the
+periods of human life. The sun sets from the
+weariness of age; but he rises in the strength and
+freshness of youth, firing the proud tops of the
+eastern pines, and turning the hills and the sea into
+burnished gold, while jocund day stands tiptoe on
+the misty mountain tops, and the lark sings at the
+gate of heaven. In almost all the familiar lines
+about dawn one seems to catch that &lsquo;indescribable
+gusto&rsquo; which Keats heard in Kean&rsquo;s delivery of the
+words:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Stir with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Two suggestions may be ventured as to Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+feelings towards four-footed animals. The
+first must be very tentative. We do not expect in
+a writer of that age the sympathy with animals
+which is so beautiful a trait in much of the poetry
+of the last hundred and fifty years. And I can
+remember in Shakespeare scarcely any sign of <i>fondness</i>
+for an animal,&mdash;not even for a horse, though he
+wrote so often of horses. But there are rather
+frequent, if casual, expressions of pity, in references,
+for example, to the hunted hare or stag, or to the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page340" id="page340"></a>340</span>
+spurred horse:<a name="fa25j" id="fa25j" href="#ft25j"><span class="sp">25</span></a> and it may be questioned whether
+the passage in <i>As You Like It</i> about the wounded
+deer is quite devoid of personal significance. No
+doubt Shakespeare thought the tears of Jaques
+sentimental; but he put a piece of himself into
+Jaques. And, besides, it is not Jaques alone who
+dislikes the killing of the deer, but the Duke; and
+we may surely hear some tone of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+voice in the Duke&rsquo;s speech about the life in the
+forest. Perhaps we may surmise that, while he
+enjoyed field-sports, he felt them at times to be out
+of tune with the harmony of nature.</p>
+
+<p>On the second point, I regret to say, I can feel
+no doubt. Shakespeare did not care for dogs, as
+Homer did; he even disliked them, as Goethe did.
+Of course he can write eloquently about the points
+of hounds and the music of their voices in the
+chase, and humorously about Launce&rsquo;s love for his
+cur and even about the cur himself; but this is no
+more significant on the one side than is his conventional
+use of &lsquo;dog&rsquo; as a term of abuse on the
+other. What is significant is the absence of allusion,
+or (to be perfectly accurate) of sympathetic
+allusion, to the characteristic virtues of dogs, and
+the abundance of allusions of an insulting kind.
+Shakespeare has observed and recorded, in some
+instances profusely, every vice that I can think of
+in an ill-conditioned dog. He fawns and cringes
+and flatters, and then bites the hand that caressed
+him; he is a coward who attacks you from behind,
+and barks at you the more the farther off you
+go; he knows neither charity, humanity, nor gratitude;
+as he flatters power and wealth, so he takes
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page341" id="page341"></a>341</span>
+part against the poor and unfashionable, and if
+fortune turns against you so does he.<a name="fa26j" id="fa26j" href="#ft26j"><span class="sp">26</span></a> The plays
+swarm with these charges. Whately&rsquo;s exclamation&mdash;uttered
+after a College meeting or a meeting of
+Chapter, I forget which&mdash;&lsquo;The more I see of men,
+the more I like dogs,&rsquo; would never have been echoed
+by Shakespeare. The things he most loathed in men
+he found in dogs too. And yet all this might go for
+nothing if we could set anything of weight against it.
+But what can we set? Nothing whatever, so far as
+I remember, except a recognition of courage in bear-baiting,
+bull-baiting mastiffs. For I cannot quote as
+favourable to the spaniel the appeal of Helena:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,</p>
+<p>The more you beat me I will fawn on you:</p>
+<p>Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,</p>
+<p>Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,</p>
+<p>Unworthy as I am, to follow you.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">This may show that Shakespeare was alive to the
+baseness of a spaniel-owner, but not that he appreciated
+that self-less affection which he describes.
+It is more probable that it irritated him, as it does
+many men still; and, as for its implying fidelity,
+there is no reference, I believe, to the fidelity of
+the dog in the whole of his works, and he chooses
+the spaniel himself as a symbol of flattery and
+ingratitude: his Cćsar talks of</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Knee-crooked court&rsquo;sies and base spaniel-fawning;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">his Antony exclaims:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+          <p class="i11">the hearts</p>
+<p>That spaniel&rsquo;d me at heels, to whom I gave</p>
+<p>Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets</p>
+<p>On blossoming Cćsar.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">To all that he loved most in men he was blind in
+dogs. And then we call him universal!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page342" id="page342"></a>342</span></p>
+
+<p>This line of research into Shakespeare&rsquo;s tastes
+might be pursued a good deal further, but we must
+return to weightier matters. We saw that he could
+sympathise with anyone who erred and suffered
+from impulse, affections of the blood, or even such
+passions as were probably no danger to himself,&mdash;ambition,
+for instance, and pride. Can we learn
+anything more about him by observing virtues or
+types of character with which he appears to feel
+little sympathy, though he may approve them? He
+certainly does not show this imperfect sympathy
+towards self-control; we seem to feel even a special
+liking for Brutus, and again for Horatio, who has
+suffered much, is quietly patient, and has mastered
+both himself and fortune. But, not to speak of
+coldly selfish natures, he seems averse to bloodless
+people, those who lack, or those who have deadened,
+the natural desires for joy and sympathy, and those
+who tend to be precise.<a name="fa27j" id="fa27j" href="#ft27j"><span class="sp">27</span></a> Nor does he appear to
+be drawn to men who, as we say, try to live or to
+act on principle; nor to those who aim habitually
+at self-improvement; nor yet to the saintly type of
+character. I mean, not that he <i>could</i> not sympathise
+with them, but that they did not attract him.
+Isabella, in <i>Measure for Measure</i>, is drawn, of
+course, with understanding, but, it seems to me,
+with little sympathy. Her readiness to abandon her
+pleading for Claudio, out of horror at his sin and
+a sense of the justice of Angelo&rsquo;s reasons for refusing
+his pardon, is doubtless in character; but if
+Shakespeare had sympathised more with her at this
+point, so should we; while, as it is, we are tempted
+to exclaim,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>She loves him not, she wants the natural touch;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and perhaps if Shakespeare had liked her better and
+had not regarded her with some irony, he would
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page343" id="page343"></a>343</span>
+not have allowed himself, for mere convenience,
+to degrade her by marrying her to the Duke.
+Brutus and Cordelia, on the other hand, are drawn
+with the fullest imaginative sympathy, and they, it
+may be said, are characters of principle; but then
+(even if Cordelia could be truly so described) they
+are also intensely affectionate, and by no means
+inhumanly self-controlled.</p>
+
+<p>The mention of Brutus may carry us somewhat
+farther. Shakespeare&rsquo;s Brutus kills Cćsar, not
+because Cćsar aims at absolute power, but because
+Brutus fears that absolute power may make him
+cruel. That is not Plutarch&rsquo;s idea, it is Shakespeare&rsquo;s.
+He could fully sympathise with the
+gentleness of Brutus, with his entire superiority to
+private aims and almost entire freedom from personal
+susceptibilities, and even with his resolution
+to sacrifice his friend; but he could not so sympathise
+with mere horror of monarchy or absolute
+power. And now extend this a little. Can you
+imagine Shakespeare an enthusiast for an &lsquo;idea&rsquo;; a
+devotee of divine right, or the rights of Parliament,
+or any particular form of government in Church or
+State; a Fifth Monarchy man, or a Quaker, or a
+thick-and-thin adherent of any compact, exclusive,
+abstract creed, even if it were as rational and noble
+as Mazzini&rsquo;s? This type of mind, even at its best,
+is alien from his. Scott is said, rightly or wrongly,
+to have portrayed the Covenanters without any deep
+understanding of them; it would have been the
+same with Shakespeare. I am not praising him,
+or at least not merely praising him. One may even
+suggest that on this side he was limited. In any
+age he would have been safe against fanaticism and
+one-sided ideas; but perhaps in no age would he
+have been the man to insist with the necessary
+emphasis on those one-sided ideas which the moment
+may need, or even to give his whole heart to men
+who join a forlorn hope or are martyred for a faith.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page344" id="page344"></a>344</span>
+And though it is rash to suggest that anything in
+the way of imagination was beyond his reach,
+perhaps the legend of Faust, with his longings for
+infinite power and knowledge and enjoyment of
+beauty, would have suited him less well than Marlowe;
+and if he had written on the subject that
+Cervantes took, his Don Quixote would have been
+at least as laughable as the hero we know, but would
+he have been a soul so ideally noble and a figure
+so profoundly pathetic?</p>
+
+<p>This would be the natural place to discuss Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+politics if we were to discuss them at all.
+But even if the question whether he shows any
+interest in the political differences of his time, or any
+sympathies or antipathies in regard to them, admits
+of an answer, it could be answered only by an
+examination of details; and I must pass it by, and
+offer only the briefest remarks on a wider question.
+Shakespeare, as we might expect, shows no sign of
+believing in what is sometimes called a political
+&lsquo;principle.&rsquo; The main ideas which, consciously or
+unconsciously, seem to govern or emerge from his
+presentation of state affairs, might perhaps be put
+thus. National welfare is the end of politics, and
+the criterion by which political actions are to be
+judged. It implies of necessity &lsquo;degree&rsquo;; that is,
+differences of position and function in the members
+of the body politic.<a name="fa28j" id="fa28j" href="#ft28j"><span class="sp">28</span></a> And the first requisites of
+national welfare are the observance of this degree,
+and the concordant performance of these functions
+in the general interest. But there appear to be no
+further absolute principles than these: beyond them
+all is relative to the particular case and its particular
+conditions. We find no hint, for example, in <i>Julius
+Cćsar</i> that Shakespeare regarded a monarchical
+form of government as intrinsically better than a
+republican, or <i>vice versa</i>; no trace in <i>Richard II.</i>
+that the author shares the king&rsquo;s belief in his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page345" id="page345"></a>345</span>
+inviolable right, or regards Bolingbroke&rsquo;s usurpation
+as justifiable. We perceive, again, pretty clearly
+in several plays a dislike and contempt of demagogues,
+and an opinion that mobs are foolish, fickle,
+and ungrateful. But these are sentiments which the
+most determined of believers in democracy, if he has
+sense, may share; and if he thinks that the attitude
+of aristocrats like Volumnia and Coriolanus is
+inhuman and as inexcusable as that of the mob, and
+that a mob is as easily led right as wrong and has
+plenty of good nature in it, he has abundant ground
+for holding that Shakespeare thought so too. That
+Shakespeare greatly liked and admired the typical
+qualities of the best kind of aristocrat seems highly
+probable; but then this taste has always been compatible
+with a great variety of political opinions.
+It is interesting but useless to wonder what his own
+opinions would have been at various periods of
+English history: perhaps the only thing we can be
+pretty sure of in regard to them is that they would
+never have been extreme, and that he would never
+have supposed his opponents to be entirely wrong.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2">We have tried to conjecture the impulses,
+passions, and errors with which Shakespeare could
+easily sympathise, and the virtues and types of
+character which he may have approved without
+much sympathy. It remains to ask whether we can
+notice tendencies and vices to which he felt any
+special antipathy; and it is obvious and safe to
+point to those most alien to a gentle, open, and
+free nature, the vices of a cold and hard disposition,
+self-centred and incapable of fusion with others.
+Passing over, again, the plainly hideous forms or
+extremes of such vice, as we see them in characters
+like Richard III., Iago, Goneril and Regan, or the
+Queen in <i>Cymbeline</i>, we seem to detect a particular
+aversion to certain vices which have the common
+mark of baseness; for instance, servility and flattery
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page346" id="page346"></a>346</span>
+(especially when deliberate and practised with a
+view to self-advancement), feigning in friendship,
+and ingratitude. Shakespeare&rsquo;s <i>animus</i> against the
+dog arises from the attribution of these vices to him,
+and against them in men are directed the invectives
+which seem to have a personal ring. There appears
+to be traceable also a feeling of a special, though
+less painful, kind against unmercifulness. I do not
+mean, of course, cruelty, but unforgivingness, and
+even the tendency to prefer justice to mercy. From
+no other dramatic author, probably, could there be
+collected such prolonged and heart-felt praises of
+mercy as from Shakespeare. He had not at all
+strongly, I think, that instinct and love of justice
+and retribution which in many men are so powerful;
+but Prospero&rsquo;s words,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i5">they being penitent,</p>
+<p>The sole drift of my purpose doth extend</p>
+<p>Not a jot further,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">came from his heart. He perceived with extreme
+clearness the connection of acts with their consequences;
+but his belief that in this sense &lsquo;the gods
+are just&rsquo; was accompanied by the strongest feeling
+that forgiveness ought to follow repentance, and (if I
+may so put it) his favourite petition was the one that
+begins &lsquo;Forgive us our trespasses.&rsquo; To conclude,
+I have fancied that he shows an unusual degree
+of disgust at slander and dislike of censoriousness;
+and where he speaks in the Sonnets of those who
+censured him he betrays an exceptionally decided
+feeling that a man&rsquo;s offences are his own affair and
+not the world&rsquo;s.<a name="fa29j" id="fa29j" href="#ft29j"><span class="sp">29</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Some of the vices which seem to have been
+particularly odious to Shakespeare have, we may
+notice, a special connection with prosperity and
+power. Men feign and creep and flatter to please
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page347" id="page347"></a>347</span>
+the powerful and to win their own way to ease or
+power; and they envy and censure and slander
+their competitors in the race; and when they
+succeed, they are ungrateful to their friends and
+helpers and patrons; and they become hard and
+unmerciful, and despise and bully those who are
+now below them. So, perhaps, Shakespeare said
+to himself in those years when, as we imagine,
+melancholy and embitterment often overclouded his
+sky, though they did not obscure his faith in goodness
+and much less his intellectual vision. And
+prosperity and power, he may have added, come
+less frequently by merit than by those base arts
+or by mere fortune. The divorce of goodness and
+power was, to Shelley, the &lsquo;woe of the world&rsquo;;
+if we substitute for &lsquo;goodness&rsquo; the wider word
+&lsquo;merit,&rsquo; we may say that this divorce, with the evil
+bred by power, is to Shakespeare also the root of
+bitterness. This fact, presented in its extreme form
+of the appalling cruelty of the prosperous, and the
+heart-rending suffering of the defenceless, forms
+the problem of his most tremendous drama. We
+have no reason to surmise that his own sufferings
+were calamitous; and the period which seems to
+be marked by melancholy and embitterment was
+one of outward, or at least financial, prosperity; but
+nevertheless we can hardly doubt that he felt on
+the small scale of his own life the influence of that
+divorce of power and merit. His complaint against
+Fortune, who had so ill provided for his life, runs
+through the Sonnets. Even if we could regard as
+purely conventional the declarations that his verses
+would make his friend immortal, it is totally impossible
+that he can have been unaware of the gulf
+between his own gifts and those of others, or can
+have failed to feel the disproportion between his position
+and his mind. Hamlet had never experienced</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+       <p class="i8">the spurns</p>
+<p>That patient merit of the unworthy takes,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page348" id="page348"></a>348</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">and that make the patient soul weary of life; the
+man who had experienced them was the writer of
+Sonnet 66, who cried for death because he was tired
+with beholding</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i4">desert a beggar born,</p>
+<p>And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">&mdash;a beggarly soul flaunting in brave array. Neither
+had Hamlet felt in his own person &lsquo;the insolence of
+office&rsquo;; but the actor had doubtless felt it often
+enough, and we can hardly err in hearing his own
+voice in dramatic expressions of wonder and contempt
+at the stupid pride of mere authority and at
+men&rsquo;s slavish respect for it. Two examples will
+suffice. &lsquo;Thou hast seen a farmer&rsquo;s dog bark at a
+beggar, and the creature run from the cur? There
+thou mightst behold the great image of authority.
+A dog&rsquo;s obeyed in office&rsquo;: so says Lear, when
+madness has cleared his vision, and indignation
+makes the Timon-like verses that follow. The
+other example is almost too famous for quotation
+but I have a reason for quoting it:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+         <p class="i5">man, proud man,</p>
+<p>Drest in a little brief authority,</p>
+<p>Most ignorant of what he&rsquo;s most assured,</p>
+<p>His glassy essence, like an angry ape,</p>
+<p>Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven</p>
+<p>As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,</p>
+<p>Would all themselves laugh mortal.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">It is Isabella who says that; but it is scarcely in
+character; Shakespeare himself is speaking.<a name="fa30j" id="fa30j" href="#ft30j"><span class="sp">30</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="pt2">It is with great hesitation that I hazard a few
+words on Shakespeare&rsquo;s religion. Any attempt to
+penetrate his reserve on this subject may appear a
+crowning impertinence; and, since his dramas are
+almost exclusively secular, any impressions we
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page349" id="page349"></a>349</span>
+may form must here be even more speculative than
+usual. Yet it is scarcely possible to read him much
+without such speculations; and there are at least
+some theories which may confidently be dismissed.
+It cannot be called absolutely impossible that Shakespeare
+was indifferent to music and to the beauty of
+Nature, and yet the idea is absurd; and in the same
+way it is barely possible, and yet it is preposterous,
+to suppose that he was an ardent and devoted
+atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic, and that
+all the indications to the contrary are due to his
+artfulness and determination not to get into trouble.
+There is no absurdity, on the other hand, nor of
+necessity anything hopeless, in the question whether
+there are signs that he belonged to this or that
+church, and was inclined to one mode of thought
+within it rather than to another. Only the question
+is scarcely worth asking for our present purpose,
+unless there is some reason to believe that he took
+a keen interest in these matters. Suppose, for
+example, that we had ground to accept a tradition
+that he &lsquo;died a papist,&rsquo; this would not tell us much
+about him unless we had also ground to think that
+he lived a papist, and that his faith went far into
+his personality. But in fact we receive from his
+writings, it appears to me, a rather strong impression
+that he concerned himself little, if at all, with
+differences of doctrine or church government.<a name="fa31j" id="fa31j" href="#ft31j"><span class="sp">31</span></a> And
+we may go further. Have we not reason to surmise
+that he was not, in the distinctive sense of the
+word, a religious man&mdash;a man, that is to say, whose
+feelings and actions are constantly and strongly
+influenced by thoughts of his relation to an object of
+worship? If Shakespeare had been such a man, is
+it credible that we should find nothing in tradition
+or in his works to indicate the fact; and is it likely
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page350" id="page350"></a>350</span>
+that we should find in his works some things that
+we do find there?<a name="fa32j" id="fa32j" href="#ft32j"><span class="sp">32</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Venturing with much doubt a little farther I will
+put together certain facts and impressions without
+at once drawing any conclusion from them. Almost
+all the speeches that can be called pronouncedly
+religious and Christian in phraseology and spirit are
+placed in the mouths of persons to whom they are
+obviously appropriate, either from their position
+(<i>e.g.</i> bishops, friars, nuns), or from what Shakespeare
+found in histories (<i>e.g.</i> Henry IV., V., and VI.), or
+for some other plain reason. We cannot build,
+therefore, on these speeches in the least. On the
+other hand (except, of course, where they are
+hypocritical or politic), we perceive in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+tone in regard to them not the faintest trace of dislike
+or contempt; nor can we find a trace anywhere
+of such feelings, or of irreverence, towards Christian
+ideas, institutions, or customs (mere humorous
+irreverence is not relevant here); and in the
+case of &lsquo;sympathetic&rsquo; characters, living in Christian
+times but not in any decided sense religious, no
+disposition is visible to suppress or ignore their
+belief in, and use of, religious ideas. Some characters,
+again, Christian or heathen, who appear to
+be drawn with rather marked sympathy, have strong,
+if simple, religious convictions (e.g. Horatio, Edgar,
+Hermione); and in others, of whom so much can
+hardly be said, but who strike many readers, rightly
+or wrongly, as having a good deal of Shakespeare in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page351" id="page351"></a>351</span>
+them (<i>e.g.</i> Romeo and Hamlet), we observe a quiet
+but deep sense that they and other men are neither
+their own masters nor responsible only to themselves
+and other men, but are in the hands of
+&lsquo;Providence&rsquo; or guiding powers &lsquo;above.&rsquo;<a name="fa33j" id="fa33j" href="#ft33j"><span class="sp">33</span></a></p>
+
+<p>To this I will add two remarks. To every one, I
+suppose, certain speeches sound peculiarly personal.
+Perhaps others may share my feeling about Hamlet&rsquo;s
+words:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>There&rsquo;s a divinity that shapes our ends,</p>
+<p>Rough-hew them how we will;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and about those other words of his:</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,</p>
+<p>Than are dreamt of in your philosophy;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and about the speech of Prospero ending, &lsquo;We are
+such stuff as dreams are made on.&rsquo;<a name="fa34j" id="fa34j" href="#ft34j"><span class="sp">34</span></a> On the other
+hand, we observe that Hamlet seems to have arrived
+at that conviction as to the &lsquo;divinity&rsquo; after reflection,
+and that, while he usually speaks as one who accepts
+the received Christian ideas, yet, when meditating
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page352" id="page352"></a>352</span>
+profoundly, he appears to ignore them.<a name="fa35j" id="fa35j" href="#ft35j"><span class="sp">35</span></a> In the
+same way the Duke in <i>Measure for Measure</i> is for
+the most part, and necessarily, a Christian; yet
+nobody would guess it from the great speech, &lsquo;Be
+absolute for death,&rsquo; addressed by a supposed friar to
+a youth under sentence to die, yet containing not a
+syllable about a future life.<a name="fa36j" id="fa36j" href="#ft36j"><span class="sp">36</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Without adducing more of the endless but baffling
+material for a conclusion, I will offer the result left
+on my mind, and, merely for the sake of brevity,
+will state it with hardly any of the qualifications it
+doubtless needs. Shakespeare, I imagine, was not,
+in the sense assigned to the word some minutes ago,
+a religious man. Nor was it natural to him to
+regard good and evil, better and worse, habitually
+from a theological point of view. But (this appears
+certain) he had a lively and serious sense of &lsquo;conscience,&rsquo;
+of the pain of self-reproach and self-condemnation,
+and of the torment to which this
+pain might rise.<a name="fa37j" id="fa37j" href="#ft37j"><span class="sp">37</span></a> He was not in the least disposed
+to regard conscience as somehow illusory or a
+human invention, but on the contrary thought of
+it (I use the most non-committal phrase I can find)
+as connected with the power that rules the world
+and is not escapable by man. He realised very
+fully and felt very keenly, after his youth was past
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page353" id="page353"></a>353</span>
+and at certain times of stress, the sufferings and
+wrongs of men, the strength of evil, the hideousness
+of certain forms of it, and its apparent incurability
+in certain cases. And he must sometimes
+have felt all this as a terrible problem. But, however
+he may have been tempted, and may have
+yielded, to exasperation and even despair, he never
+doubted that it is best to be good; felt more and
+more that one must be patient and must forgive;<a name="fa38j" id="fa38j" href="#ft38j"><span class="sp">38</span></a>
+and probably maintained unbroken a conviction,
+practical if not formulated, that to be good is to be at
+peace with that unescapable power. But it is unlikely
+that he attempted to theorise further on the nature of
+the power. All was for him, in the end, mystery;
+and, while we have no reason whatever to attribute
+to him a belief in the ghosts and oracles he used in
+his dramas, he had no inclination to play the spy on
+God or to limit his power by our notions of it.
+That he had dreams and ponderings about the
+mystery such as he never put into the mouths of
+actors I do not doubt; but I imagine they were
+no more than dreams and ponderings and movings
+about in worlds unrealised.</p>
+
+<p>Whether to this &lsquo;religion&rsquo; he joined a more or
+less conventional acceptance of some or all of the
+usual Christian ideas, it is impossible to tell. There
+is no great improbability to me in the idea that he
+did not, but it is more probable to me that he did,&mdash;that,
+in fact, though he was never so tormented as
+Hamlet, his position in this matter was, at least in
+middle life (and he never reached old age), much
+like Hamlet&rsquo;s. If this were so it might naturally
+happen that, as he grew older and wearier of labour,
+and perhaps of the tumult of pleasure and thought
+and pain, his more personal religion, the natural piety
+which seems to gain in weight and serenity in the
+latest plays, came to be more closely joined with
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page354" id="page354"></a>354</span>
+Christian ideas. But I can find no clear indications
+that this did happen; and though some have
+believed that they discovered these ideas displayed
+in full, though not explicitly, in the <i>Tempest</i>, I am
+not able to hear there more than the stream of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s own &lsquo;religion&rsquo; moving with its fullest
+volume and making its deepest and most harmonious
+music.<a name="fa39j" id="fa39j" href="#ft39j"><span class="sp">39</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="pt2">This lecture must end, though its subject is endless,
+and I will touch on only one point more,&mdash;one
+that may to some extent recall and connect the
+scattered suggestions I have offered.</p>
+
+<p>If we were obliged to answer the question which
+of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays contains, not indeed the
+fullest picture of his mind, but the truest expression
+of his nature and habitual temper, unaffected by
+special causes of exhilaration or gloom, I should be
+disposed to choose <i>As You Like It</i>. It wants, to
+go no further, the addition of a touch of Sir Toby
+or Falstaff, and the ejection of its miraculous
+conversions of ill-disposed characters. But the
+misbehaviour of Fortune, and the hardness and
+ingratitude of men, form the basis of its plot, and
+are a frequent topic of complaint. And, on the
+other hand, he who is reading it has a smooth brow
+and smiling lips, and a heart that murmurs,</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i4">Happy is your grace,</p>
+<p>That can translate the stubbornness of fortune</p>
+<p>Into so quiet and so sweet a style.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page355" id="page355"></a>355</span></p>
+
+<p class="noind">And it is full not only of sweetness, but of romance,
+fun, humour of various kinds, delight in the oddities
+of human nature, love of modesty and fidelity and
+high spirit and patience, dislike of scandal and censure,
+contemplative curiosity, the feeling that in the
+end we are all merely players, together with a touch
+of the feeling that</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Then is there mirth in heaven</p>
+<p>When earthly things made even</p>
+  <p class="i1">Atone together.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">And, finally, it breathes the serene holiday mood of
+escape from the toil, competition, and corruption of
+city and court into the sun and shadow and peace
+of the country, where one can be idle and dream
+and meditate and sing, and pursue or watch the deer
+as the fancy takes one, and make love or smile at
+lovers according to one&rsquo;s age.<a name="fa40j" id="fa40j" href="#ft40j"><span class="sp">40</span></a></p>
+
+<p>If, again, the question were put to us, which of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s characters reveals most of his personality,
+the majority of those who consented to
+give an answer would answer &lsquo;Hamlet.&rsquo; This
+impression may be fanciful, but it is difficult to
+think it wholly so, and, speaking for those who share
+it, I will try to trace some of its sources. There is
+a good deal of Shakespeare that is not in Hamlet.
+But Hamlet, we think, is the only character in
+Shakespeare who could possibly have composed his
+plays (though it appears unlikely, from his verses to
+Ophelia, that he could have written the best songs).
+Into Hamlet&rsquo;s mouth are put what are evidently
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s own views on drama and acting.
+Hamlet alone, among the great serious characters,
+can be called a humorist. When in some trait of
+another character we seem to touch Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page356" id="page356"></a>356</span>
+personality, we are frequently reminded of Hamlet.<a name="fa41j" id="fa41j" href="#ft41j"><span class="sp">41</span></a>
+When in a profound reflective speech we hear
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s voice, we usually hear Hamlet&rsquo;s too,
+and his peculiar humour and turns of phrase appear
+unexpectedly in persons otherwise unlike him and
+unlike one another. The most melancholy group
+of Sonnets (71-74) recalls Hamlet at once, here and
+there recalls even his words; and he and the writer
+of Sonnet 66 both recount in a list the ills that
+make men long for death. And then Hamlet &lsquo;was
+indeed honest and of an open and free nature&rsquo;;
+sweet-tempered and modest, yet not slow to resent
+calumny or injury; of a serious but not a melancholy
+disposition; and the lover of his friend. And, with
+these traits, we remember his poet ecstasy at the
+glory of earth and sky and the marvellous endowments
+of man; his eager affectionate response to
+everything noble or sweet in human nature; his
+tendency to dream and to live in the world of
+his own mind; his liability to sudden vehement
+emotion, and his admiration for men whose blood
+and judgment are better commingled; the overwhelming
+effect of disillusionment upon him; his
+sadness, fierceness, bitterness and cynicism. All
+this, and more: his sensitiveness to the call of
+duty; his longing to answer to it, and his anguish
+over his strange delay; the conviction gathering in
+his tortured soul that man&rsquo;s purposes and failures
+are divinely shaped to ends beyond his vision; his
+incessant meditation, and his sense that there are
+mysteries which no meditation can fathom; nay,
+even little traits like his recourse to music to calm
+his excitement, or his feeling on the one hand that
+the peasant should not tread on the courtier&rsquo;s heels,
+and on the other that the mere courtier is spacious
+in the possession of dirt&mdash;all this, I say, corresponds
+with our impression of Shakespeare, or rather of
+characteristic traits in Shakespeare, probably here
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page357" id="page357"></a>357</span>
+and there a good deal heightened, and mingled
+with others not characteristic of Shakespeare at
+all. And if this is more than fancy, it may explain
+to us why Hamlet is the most fascinating character,
+and the most inexhaustible, in all imaginative
+literature. What else should he be, if the world&rsquo;s
+greatest poet, who was able to give almost the
+reality of nature to creations totally unlike himself,
+put his own soul straight into this creation, and when
+he wrote Hamlet&rsquo;s speeches wrote down his own
+heart?<a name="fa42j" id="fa42j" href="#ft42j"><span class="sp">42</span></a></p>
+
+<p class="f80">1904.</p>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1j" id="ft1j" href="#fa1j"><span class="fn">1</span></a> Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning,
+who in <i>At the Mermaid</i> and <i>House</i> wrote as though he imagined that
+neither his own work nor Shakespeare&rsquo;s betrayed anything of the inner
+man. But if we are to criticise those two poems as arguments, we
+must say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we
+have to choose between a self-revelation like Byron&rsquo;s and no self-revelation
+at all, and that the relation between a poet and his work is
+like that between the inside and the outside of a house.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2j" id="ft2j" href="#fa2j"><span class="fn">2</span></a> Almost all Shakespearean criticism, of course, contains something
+bearing on our subject; but I have a practical reason for mentioning
+in particular Mr. Frank Harris&rsquo;s articles in the <i>Saturday Review</i> for
+1898. A good many of Mr. Harris&rsquo;s views I cannot share, and I had
+arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some
+on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers. But I found in
+them also valuable ideas which were quite new to me and would
+probably be so to many readers. It is a great pity that the articles are
+not collected and published in a book. [Mr. Harris has published, in
+<i>The Man Shakespeare</i>, the substance of the articles, and also matter
+which, in my judgment, has much less value.]</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3j" id="ft3j" href="#fa3j"><span class="fn">3</span></a> He is apologising for an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet
+of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4j" id="ft4j" href="#fa4j"><span class="fn">4</span></a> It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not played
+some kingly parts in sport (<i>i.e.</i> on the stage), he would have been a
+companion for a king.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5j" id="ft5j" href="#fa5j"><span class="fn">5</span></a> Nor, <i>vice versa</i>, does the possession of these latter qualities at all
+imply, as some writers seem to assume, the absence of the former or
+of gentleness.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6j" id="ft6j" href="#fa6j"><span class="fn">6</span></a> Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to
+assume this. His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare
+and Jonson, in their wit combats, to an English man-of-war and a
+Spanish great galleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating
+on the reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7j" id="ft7j" href="#fa7j"><span class="fn">7</span></a> See, for example, Act <span class="scs">IV.</span> Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in the
+later tragedies.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8j" id="ft8j" href="#fa8j"><span class="fn">8</span></a> I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching&rsquo;s note on which seems to be
+unquestionably right: &lsquo;There is no reference to the poet&rsquo;s profession
+of player. The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of society.&rsquo;
+This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it begins with
+107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend, though there
+are <i>also</i> references to his profession and its effect on his nature and
+his reputation. (By a slip Mr. Beeching makes the neglect last for
+three years.)</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9j" id="ft9j" href="#fa9j"><span class="fn">9</span></a> It is perhaps most especially in his rendering of the shock and the
+effects of <i>disillusionment</i> in open natures that we seem to feel
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s personality. The nature of this shock is expressed in
+Henry&rsquo;s words to Lord Scroop:</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i6">I will weep for thee;</p>
+<p>For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like</p>
+<p>Another fall of man.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><a name="ft10j" id="ft10j" href="#fa10j"><span class="fn">10</span></a> There is nothing of this semi-reality, of course, in the <i>passion</i> of
+love as portrayed, for example, in men so different as Orlando, Othello,
+Antony, Troilus, whose love for Cressida resembles that of Romeo for
+Juliet. What I have said of Romeo&rsquo;s &lsquo;love&rsquo; for Rosaline corresponds
+roughly with Coleridge&rsquo;s view; and, without subscribing to all of
+Coleridge&rsquo;s remarks, I believe he was right in finding an intentional
+contrast between this feeling and the passion that displaces it (though
+it does not follow that the feeling would not have become a genuine
+passion if Rosaline had been kind). Nor do I understand the notion
+that Coleridge&rsquo;s view is refuted and even rendered ridiculous by the
+mere fact that Shakespeare found the Rosaline story in Brooke
+(Halliwell-Phillipps, <i>Outlines</i>, 7th ed., illustrative note 2). Was he
+compelled then to use whatever he found? Was it his practice to
+do so? The question is always <i>why</i> he used what he found, and
+<i>how</i>. Coleridge&rsquo;s view of this matter, it need hardly be said, is far
+from indisputable; but it must be judged by our knowledge of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s mind and not of his material alone. I may add, as I
+have referred to Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare made changes
+in the story he found; that it is arbitrary to assume (not that it
+matters) that Coleridge, who read Steevens, was unaware of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+use of Brooke; and that Brooke was by no means a
+&lsquo;wretched poetaster.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft11j" id="ft11j" href="#fa11j"><span class="fn">11</span></a> <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Measure for Measure</i>, <i>Othello</i>, <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, <i>King
+Lear</i>, <i>Timon of Athens</i>. See <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i>, pp. 79-85,
+275-6. I should like to insist on the view there taken that the tragedies
+subsequent to <i>Lear</i> and <i>Timon</i> do not show the pressure of painful
+feelings.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft12j" id="ft12j" href="#fa12j"><span class="fn">12</span></a> It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare&rsquo;s; but
+I see no sufficient ground for decisively rejecting them.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft13j" id="ft13j" href="#fa13j"><span class="fn">13</span></a> That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs
+to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in the
+<i>Passionate Pilgrim</i>. But I see no difficulty in that. What bears
+little fruit in a normal condition of spirits may bear abundant fruit
+later, in moods of discouragement and exasperation induced largely by
+other causes.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft14j" id="ft14j" href="#fa14j"><span class="fn">14</span></a> <i>The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes.</i>
+Ginn &amp; Co., 1904.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft15j" id="ft15j" href="#fa15j"><span class="fn">15</span></a> I find that Mr. Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare
+(1907), has also urged these considerations.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft16j" id="ft16j" href="#fa16j"><span class="fn">16</span></a> I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the
+sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been written
+by 1598.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft17j" id="ft17j" href="#fa17j"><span class="fn">17</span></a> A fact to be remembered in regard to references to the social
+position of the friend.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft18j" id="ft18j" href="#fa18j"><span class="fn">18</span></a> Mr. Beeching&rsquo;s illustration of the friendship of the sonnets from
+the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of argument.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft19j" id="ft19j" href="#fa19j"><span class="fn">19</span></a> In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is too
+much based on beauty.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft20j" id="ft20j" href="#fa20j"><span class="fn">20</span></a> This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as the <i>Two
+Gentlemen of Verona</i>, and much less that they are earlier.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft21j" id="ft21j" href="#fa21j"><span class="fn">21</span></a> This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of Hereford,
+reprinted in Ingleby&rsquo;s <i>Shakespeare&rsquo;s Centurie of Prayse</i>, second
+edition, pp. 58, 84, 94. In the first of these passages, dated 1603 (and
+perhaps in the second, 1609), there are signs that Davies had read
+Sonnet 111, a fact to be noted with regard to the question of the
+chronology of the Sonnets.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft22j" id="ft22j" href="#fa22j"><span class="fn">22</span></a> &lsquo;Mistress Tearsheet&rsquo; too &lsquo;would fain hear some music,&rsquo; and &lsquo;Sneak&rsquo;s
+noise&rsquo; had to be sent for (2 <i>Henry IV.</i>, <span class="scs">II.</span> iv. 12).</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft23j" id="ft23j" href="#fa23j"><span class="fn">23</span></a> It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from the <i>Tempest</i> and the
+great passage in <i>Pericles</i> that Shakespeare must have been in a storm
+at sea; but that he felt the poetry of a sea-storm is beyond all doubt.
+Few moments in the reading of his works are more overwhelming
+than that in which, after listening not without difficulty to the writer
+of the first two Acts of <i>Pericles</i>, suddenly, as the third opens, one
+hears the authentic voice:</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges</p>
+<p>That wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman&rsquo;s whistle</p>
+<p>Is as a whisper in the ears of death,</p>
+<p>Unheard.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Knowing that this is coming, I cannot stop to read the Prologue to
+Act <span class="scs">III.</span>, though I believe Shakespeare wrote it. How it can be
+imagined that he did more than touch up Acts <span class="scs">I.</span> and <span class="scs">II.</span> passes my
+comprehension.</p>
+
+<p>I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is
+nothing in Shakespeare&rsquo;s authorities, as known to us, which corresponds
+with the feeling of Timon&rsquo;s last speech, beginning,</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Come not to me again: but say to Athens,</p>
+<p>Timon hath made his everlasting mansion</p>
+<p>Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">a feeling made more explicit in the final speech of Alcibiades.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft24j" id="ft24j" href="#fa24j"><span class="fn">24</span></a> The lily seems to be in almost all cases the Madonna lily. It is
+very doubtful whether the lily of the valley is referred to at all.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft25j" id="ft25j" href="#fa25j"><span class="fn">25</span></a> But there is something disappointing, and even estranging, in
+Sonnet 50, which, promising to show a real sympathy, cheats us in
+the end. I may observe, without implying that the fact has any
+personal significance, that the words about &lsquo;the poor beetle that
+we tread upon&rsquo; are given to a woman (Isabella), and that it is Marina
+who says:</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>I trod upon a worm against my will,</p>
+<p>But I wept for it.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p><a name="ft26j" id="ft26j" href="#fa26j"><span class="fn">26</span></a> Three times in one drama Shakespeare refers to this detestable
+trait. See <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i>, p. 268, where I should like to
+qualify still further the sentence containing the qualification &lsquo;on the
+whole.&rsquo; Good judges, at least, assure me that I have admitted too
+much against the dog.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft27j" id="ft27j" href="#fa27j"><span class="fn">27</span></a> Nor can I recall any sign of liking, or even approval, of that
+&lsquo;prudent, <i>cautious</i>, self-control&rsquo; which, according to a passage in
+Burns, is &lsquo;wisdom&rsquo;s root.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft28j" id="ft28j" href="#fa28j"><span class="fn">28</span></a> The <i>locus classicus</i>, of course, is <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, <span class="scs">I.</span> iii. 75 ff.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft29j" id="ft29j" href="#fa29j"><span class="fn">29</span></a> Of all the evils inflicted by man on man those chosen for mention
+in the dirge in <i>Cymbeline</i>, one of the last plays, are the frown o&rsquo; the
+great, the tyrant&rsquo;s stroke, slander, censure rash.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft30j" id="ft30j" href="#fa30j"><span class="fn">30</span></a> Having written these paragraphs, I should like to disclaim the
+belief that Shakespeare was habitually deeply discontented with his
+position in life.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft31j" id="ft31j" href="#fa31j"><span class="fn">31</span></a> Allusions to puritans show at most what we take almost for
+granted, that he did not like precisians or people hostile to the
+stage.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft32j" id="ft32j" href="#fa32j"><span class="fn">32</span></a> In the Sonnets, for example, there is an almost entire absence of
+definitely religious thought or feeling. The nearest approach to it
+is in Sonnet 146 (&lsquo;Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth&rsquo;), where,
+however, there is no allusion to a divine law or judge. According to
+Sonnet 129, lust in action is</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>The expense of spirit in a waste of shame;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">but no word shows that it is also felt as alienation from God. It must
+be added that in 108 and 110 there are references to the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer
+and, perhaps, to the First Commandment, from which a decidedly
+religious Christian would perhaps have shrunk. Of course I am not
+saying that we can draw any <i>necessary</i> inference from these facts.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft33j" id="ft33j" href="#fa33j"><span class="fn">33</span></a> It is only this &lsquo;quiet but deep sense&rsquo; that is significant. No
+inference can be drawn from the fact that the mere belief in powers
+above seems to be taken as a matter of course in practically all the
+characters, good and bad alike. On the other hand there may well
+be something symptomatic in the apparent absence of interest in
+theoretical disbelief in such powers and in the immortality of the
+soul. I have observed elsewhere that the atheism of Aaron does not
+increase the probability that the conception of the character is
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft34j" id="ft34j" href="#fa34j"><span class="fn">34</span></a> With the first compare, what to me has, though more faintly, the
+same ring, Hermione&rsquo;s</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+     <p class="i7">If powers divine</p>
+<p>Behold our human actions, as they do:</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">with the second, Helena&rsquo;s</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>It is not so with Him that all things knows</p>
+<p>As &rsquo;tis with us that square our guess by shows;</p>
+<p>But most it is presumption in us when</p>
+<p>The help of heaven we count the act of men:</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">followed soon after by Lafeu&rsquo;s remark:</p>
+
+<div class="condensed">
+<p>They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to
+make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is
+that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge,
+when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="ft35j" id="ft35j" href="#fa35j"><span class="fn">35</span></a> It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the First
+Quarto version of &lsquo;To be or not to be,&rsquo; to &lsquo;an everlasting judge,&rsquo;
+disappears in the revised versions.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft36j" id="ft36j" href="#fa36j"><span class="fn">36</span></a> The suggested inference, of course, is that this speech, thus out of
+character, and Hamlet&rsquo;s &lsquo;To be or not to be&rsquo; (though that is in
+character), show us Shakespeare&rsquo;s own mind. It has force, I think,
+but not compulsory force. The topics of these speeches are, in the
+old sense of the word, commonplaces. Shakespeare may have felt,
+Here is my chance to show what I can do with certain feelings and
+thoughts of supreme interest to men of all times and places and modes
+of belief. It would not follow from this that they are not &lsquo;personal,&rsquo; but
+any inference to a non-acceptance of received religious ideas would be
+much weakened. (&lsquo;All the world&rsquo;s a stage&rsquo; is a patent example of the
+suggested elaboration of a commonplace.)</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft37j" id="ft37j" href="#fa37j"><span class="fn">37</span></a> What actions in particular <i>his</i> conscience approved and disapproved
+is another question and one not relevant here.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft38j" id="ft38j" href="#fa38j"><span class="fn">38</span></a> This does not at all imply to Shakespeare, so far as we see, that
+evil is never to be forcibly resisted.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft39j" id="ft39j" href="#fa39j"><span class="fn">39</span></a> I do not mean to reject the idea that in some passages in the
+<i>Tempest</i> Shakespeare, while he wrote them with a dramatic purpose,
+also thought of himself. It seems to me likely. And if so, there <i>may</i>
+have been such a thought in the words,</p>
+
+<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>And thence retire me to my Milan, where</p>
+<p>Every third thought shall be my grave;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and also in those lines about prayer and pardon which close the
+Epilogue, and to my ear come with a sudden effect of great seriousness,
+contrasting most strangely with their context. If they <i>had</i> a
+grave and personal under-meaning it cannot have been intended for
+the audience, which would take the prayer as addressed to itself.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft40j" id="ft40j" href="#fa40j"><span class="fn">40</span></a> It may be added that <i>As You Like It</i>, though idyllic, is not so
+falsely idyllic as some critics would make it. It is based, we may
+roughly say, on a contrast between court and country; but those who
+inhale virtue from the woodland are courtiers who bring virtue with
+them, and the country has its churlish masters and unkind or uncouth
+maidens.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft41j" id="ft41j" href="#fa41j"><span class="fn">41</span></a> This has been strongly urged and fully illustrated by Mr. Harris.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft42j" id="ft42j" href="#fa42j"><span class="fn">42</span></a> It may be suggested that, in the catalogue above, I should have
+mentioned that imaginative &lsquo;unreality&rsquo; in love referred to on p. 326.
+But I do not see in Hamlet either this, or any sign that he took
+Ophelia for an Imogen or even a Juliet, though naturally he was
+less clearly aware of her deficiencies than Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>I may add, however, another item to the catalogue. We do not
+feel that the problems presented to most of the tragic heroes could
+have been fatal to Shakespeare himself. The immense breadth
+and clearness of his intellect would have saved him from the fate of
+Othello, Troilus, or Antony. But we do feel, I think, and he himself
+may have felt, that he could not have coped with Hamlet&rsquo;s
+problem; and there is no improbability in the idea that he may
+have experienced in some degree the melancholia of his hero.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="center art1"><img style="width:150px; height:35px; vertical-align: middle;" src="images/img001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page358" id="page358"></a>358<br />359</span></p>
+
+<p class="center chap">SHAKESPEARE&rsquo;S THEATRE AND
+AUDIENCE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page360" id="page360"></a>360<br />361</span></p>
+
+<p class="center pt2 chap2">SHAKESPEARE&rsquo;S THEATRE AND
+AUDIENCE.</p>
+
+<p class="noind"><span class="sc chap1 fo">Why</span> should we concern ourselves with Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+theatre and audience? The vast majority
+of his readers since the Restoration have known
+nothing about them, and have enjoyed his plays
+enormously. And if they have enjoyed without fully
+understanding, it was for want of imagination and of
+knowledge of human nature, and not from ignorance
+of the conditions under which his plays were produced.
+At any rate, such ignorance does not exclude
+us from the <i>soul</i> of Shakespearean drama, any
+more than from the soul of Homeric epic or Athenian
+tragedy; and it is the soul that counts and endures.
+For the rest, we all know that Shakespeare&rsquo;s time
+was rough, indecorous, and inexpert in regard to
+machinery; and so we are prepared for coarse
+speech and primitive stage-arrangements, and we
+make allowance for them without thinking about the
+matter. Antiquarians may naturally wish to know
+more; but what more is needed for intelligent enjoyment
+of the plays?</p>
+
+<p>I have begun with these questions because I sympathise
+with their spirit. Everything I am going to
+speak of in this lecture is comparatively unimportant
+for the appreciation of that which is most vital in
+Shakespeare; and if I were allowed my choice between
+an hour&rsquo;s inspection of a performance at the
+Globe and a glimpse straight into his mind when he
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page362" id="page362"></a>362</span>
+was planning the <i>Tempest</i>, I should not hesitate which
+to choose. Nevertheless, to say nothing of the intrinsic
+interest of antiquarian knowledge, we cannot
+make a clear division between the soul and body, or
+the eternal and the perishable, in works of art. Nor
+can we lay the finger on a line which separates that
+which has poetic interest from that which has none.
+Nor yet can we assume that any knowledge of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s theatre and audience, however trivial
+it may appear, may not help us to appreciate, or
+save us from misapprehending, the &lsquo;soul&rsquo; of a
+play or a scene. If our own souls were capacious
+and vivid enough, every atom of information on
+these subjects, or again on the material he used
+in composing, would so assist us. The danger of
+devotion to such knowledge lies merely in our weakness.
+Research, though toilsome, is easy; imaginative
+vision, though delightful, is difficult; and we
+may be tempted to prefer the first. Or we note that
+in a given passage Shakespeare has used what he
+found in his authority; and we excuse ourselves
+from asking why he used it and what he made of it.
+Or we see that he has done something that would
+please his audience; and we dismiss it as accounted
+for, forgetting that perhaps it also pleased <i>him</i>, and
+that we have to account for <i>that</i>. Or knowledge of
+his stage shows us the stage-convenience of a scene;
+and we say that the scene was due to stage-convenience,
+as if the cause of a thing must needs be single
+and simple. Such errors provoke the man who
+reads his Shakespeare poetically, and make him
+blaspheme our knowledge. But we ought not to
+fall into them; and we cannot reject any knowledge
+that may help us into Shakespeare&rsquo;s mind because
+of the danger it brings.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot attempt to describe Shakespeare&rsquo;s theatre
+and audience, and much less to discuss the evidence
+on which a description must be based, or the difficult
+problems it raises. I must confine myself for the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page363" id="page363"></a>363</span>
+most part to a few points which are not always fully
+realised, or on which there is a risk of misapprehension.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">1.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, we know, was a popular playwright.
+I mean not only that many of his plays were
+favourites in his day, but that he wrote, mainly at
+least, for the more popular kind of audience, and
+that, within certain limits, he conformed to its tastes.
+He was not, to our knowledge, the author of
+masques composed for performance at Court or in a
+great mansion, or of dramas intended for a University
+or one of the Inns of Court; and though his
+company for some time played at the Blackfriars, we
+may safely assume that the great majority of his
+works were meant primarily for a common or &lsquo;public&rsquo;
+theatre like the Globe. The broad distinction between
+a &lsquo;private&rsquo; and a &lsquo;public&rsquo; theatre is familiar,
+and I need only remind you that at the former,
+which was smaller, provided seats even in the area,
+and was nowhere open to the weather, the audience
+was more select. Accordingly, dramatists who express
+their contempt for the audience, and their
+disapproval of those who consult its tastes, often
+discriminate between the audiences at the private
+and public theatres, and reserve their unmeasured
+language for the latter. It was for the latter that
+Shakespeare mainly wrote; and it is pretty clear
+that Jonson, who greatly admired and loved him,
+was still of opinion that he condescended to his
+audience.<a name="fa1k" id="fa1k" href="#ft1k"><span class="sp">1</span></a></p>
+
+<p>So far we seem to be on safe ground; and yet
+even here there is some risk of mistake. We are
+not to imagine that the audience at a private theatre
+(say the Blackfriars) accepted Jonson&rsquo;s dramatic
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page364" id="page364"></a>364</span>
+theories, while the audience at the Globe rejected
+them; or that the one was composed chiefly of
+cultured and &lsquo;judicious&rsquo; gentlemen, and the other of
+riotous and malodorous plebeians; and still less that
+Shakespeare tried to please the latter section in
+preference to the former, and was beloved by the
+one more than by the other. The two audiences
+must have had the same general character, differing
+only in degree. Neither of them accepted
+Jonson&rsquo;s theories, nor were the &lsquo;judicious&rsquo; of one
+mind on that subject. The same play was frequently
+offered to both. Both were very mixed. The tastes
+to which objection was taken cannot have been confined
+to the mob. From our knowledge of human
+nature generally, and of the Elizabethan nobility
+and gentry in particular, we may be sure of this;
+and Jonson himself implies it. Nor is it credible
+that an appreciation of the best things was denied
+to the mob, which doubtless loved what we should
+despise, but appears also to have admired what we
+admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than most
+of us can stomach. Neither can these groundlings
+have formed the majority of the &lsquo;public&rsquo; audience
+or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it
+was possible for dramatists (Shakespeare included)
+to say such rude things of them to their faces. We
+must not delude ourselves as to these matters; and
+in particular we must realise that the mass of the
+audience in both kinds of theatre must have been
+indifferent to the unities of time and place, and
+more or less so to improbabilities and to decorum
+(at least as we conceive it) both in manners and in
+speech; and that it must have liked excitement, the
+open exhibition of violent and bloody deeds, and
+the intermixture of seriousness and mirth. What
+distinguished the more popular audience, and the
+more popular section in it, was a higher degree of
+this indifference and this liking, and in addition a
+special fondness for certain sources of inartistic joy.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page365" id="page365"></a>365</span>
+The most prominent of these, perhaps, were noise;
+rant; mere bawdry; &lsquo;shews&rsquo;; irrelevant songs,
+ballads, jokes, dances, and clownage in general;
+and, lastly, target-fighting and battles.<a name="fa2k" id="fa2k" href="#ft2k"><span class="sp">2</span></a></p>
+
+<p>We may describe Shakespeare&rsquo;s practice in broad
+and general terms by saying that he neither resisted
+the wishes of his audience nor gratified them without
+reserve. He accepted the type of drama that
+he found, and developed it without altering its
+fundamental character. And in the same way, in
+particular matters, he gave the audience what it
+wanted, but in doing so gave it what it never
+dreamed of. It liked tragedy to be relieved by
+rough mirth, and it got the Grave-diggers in <i>Hamlet</i>
+and the old countryman in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>.
+It liked a &lsquo;drum and trumpet&rsquo; history, and it got
+<i>Henry V.</i> It liked clowns or fools, and it got Feste
+and the Fool in <i>King Lear</i>. Shakespeare&rsquo;s practice
+was by no means always on this level, but this was
+its tendency; and I imagine that (unless perhaps in
+early days) he knew clearly what he was doing, did
+it deliberately, and, when he gave the audience poor
+stuff, would not seriously have defended himself.
+Jonson, it would seem, did not understand this position.
+A fool was a fool to him; and if a play could
+be called a drum and trumpet history it was at once
+condemned in his eyes. One can hardly doubt that
+he was alluding to the <i>Tempest</i> and the <i>Winter&rsquo;s
+Tale</i> when, a few years after the probable date of
+their appearance, he spoke of writers who &lsquo;make
+nature afraid in their plays,&rsquo; begetting &lsquo;tales, tempests,
+and such like drolleries,&rsquo; and bringing in &lsquo;a
+servant-monster&rsquo; or &lsquo;a nest of antiques.&rsquo; Caliban
+was a &lsquo;monster,&rsquo; and the London public loved to
+gape at monsters; and so, it appears, that wonderful
+creation was to Jonson something like the fat
+woman, or the calf with five legs, that we pay a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page366" id="page366"></a>366</span>
+penny to see at a fair. In fact (how could he fail to
+take the warning?) he saw Caliban with the eyes of
+Trinculo and Stephano. &lsquo;A strange fish!&rsquo; says
+Trinculo: &lsquo;were I in England now, as once I was,
+and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool
+there but would give a piece of silver.&rsquo; &lsquo;If I can
+recover him,&rsquo; says Stephano, &lsquo;and keep him tame
+and get to Naples with him, he&rsquo;s a present for any
+emperor that ever trod on neat&rsquo;s-leather.&rsquo; Shakespeare
+understood his monster otherwise; but, I
+fancy, when Jonson fulminated at the Mermaid
+against Caliban, he smiled and said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>But my present subject is rather the tastes of the
+audience than Shakespeare&rsquo;s way of meeting them.<a name="fa3k" id="fa3k" href="#ft3k"><span class="sp">3</span></a>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page367" id="page367"></a>367</span>
+Let me give two illustrations of them which may have
+some novelty. His public, in the first place, dearly
+loved to see soldiers, combats, and battles on the
+stage. They swarm in some of the dramas a little
+earlier than Shakespeare&rsquo;s time, and the cultured
+dramatists speak very contemptuously of these productions,
+if not of Shakespeare&rsquo;s historical plays.
+We may take as an example the First Part of
+<i>Henry VI.</i>, a feeble piece, to which Shakespeare
+probably contributed touches throughout, and perhaps
+one or two complete scenes. It appears from
+the stage directions (which may be defective, but
+cannot well be redundant) that in this one play there
+were represented a pitched battle of two armies, an
+attack on a city wall with scaling-ladders, two street-scuffles,
+four single combats, four skirmishes, and
+seven excursions. No genuine play of Shakespeare&rsquo;s,
+I suppose, is so military from beginning to
+end; and we know how in <i>Henry V.</i> he laments
+that he must disgrace the name of Agincourt by
+showing four or five men with vile and ragged foils</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">Still he does show them; and his serious dramas
+contain such a profusion of combats and battles as
+no playwright now would dream of exhibiting. We
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page368" id="page368"></a>368</span>
+expect these things perhaps in the English history-plays,
+and we find them in abundance there: but
+not there alone. The last Act in <i>Julius Cćsar</i>,
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, and
+<i>Cymbeline</i>; the fourth Act of <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>;
+the opening Acts of <i>Coriolanus</i>,&mdash;these are all full of
+battle-scenes. If battle cannot be shown, it can be
+described. If it cannot be described, still soldiers
+can be shown, and twice in <i>Hamlet</i> Fortinbras
+and his army march upon the stage.<a name="fa4k" id="fa4k" href="#ft4k"><span class="sp">4</span></a> At worst
+there can be street-brawls and single fights, as in
+<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>. In reading Shakespeare we
+scarcely realise how much of this kind is exhibited.
+In seeing him acted we do not fully realise it, for
+much of it is omitted. But beyond doubt it helped
+to make him the most popular dramatist of his time.</p>
+
+<p>If we examine Shakespeare&rsquo;s battles we shall
+observe a certain peculiarity, which is connected with
+the nature of his theatre and also explains the treatment
+of them in ours. In most cases he does not
+give a picture of two whole armies engaged, but
+makes a pair of combatants rush upon the stage,
+fight, and rush off again; and this pair is succeeded
+by a second, and perhaps by a third. This hurried
+series of single combats admitted of speech-making;
+perhaps it also gave some impression of the changes
+and confusion of a battle. Our tendency, on the
+other hand, is to contrive one spectacle with scenic
+effects, or even to exhibit one magnificent tableau in
+which nobody says a word. And this plan, though
+it has the advantage of getting rid of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+poetry, is not exactly dramatic. It is adopted chiefly
+because the taste of our public is, or is supposed to
+be, less dramatic than spectacular, and because,
+unlike the Elizabethans, we are able to gratify such
+a taste. But there is another fact to be remembered
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page369" id="page369"></a>369</span>
+here. Few playgoers now can appreciate a fencing-match,
+and much fewer a broad-sword and target
+fight. But the Elizabethan public went to see performances
+of this kind as we go to see cricket or
+football matches. They might watch them in the
+very building which at other times was used as a
+playhouse.<a name="fa5k" id="fa5k" href="#ft5k"><span class="sp">5</span></a> They could judge of the merit of the
+exhibition when Hotspur and Prince Henry fought,
+when Macduff &lsquo;laid on,&rsquo; or when Tybalt and Mercutio
+used their rapiers. And this was probably
+another reason why Shakespeare&rsquo;s battles so often
+consist of single combats, and why these scenes
+were beloved by the simpler folk among his
+audience.</p>
+
+<p>Our second illustration concerns the popular
+appetite for musical and other sounds. The introduction
+of songs and dances<a name="fa6k" id="fa6k" href="#ft6k"><span class="sp">6</span></a> was censured as a
+corrupt gratification of this appetite. And so it was
+when the songs and dances were excessive in
+number, irrelevant, or out of keeping with the scene.
+I do not remember that in Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays this
+is ever the case; but, in respect of songs, we may
+perhaps take Marston&rsquo;s <i>Antonio and Mellida</i> as an
+instance of abuse. For in each of the two Parts
+of that play there are directions for five songs;
+and, since not even the first lines of these songs
+are printed, we must suppose that the leader of
+the band, or the singing actor in the company,
+introduced whatever he chose. In addition to
+songs and dances, the musicians, at least in some
+plays, performed between the Acts; and the practice
+of accompanying certain speeches by low
+music&mdash;a practice which in some performances of
+Shakespeare now has become a pest&mdash;has the
+sanction of several Elizabethan playwrights, and
+(to a slight extent) of Shakespeare. It seems
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page370" id="page370"></a>370</span>
+clear, for example, that in <i>Twelfth Night</i> low
+music was played while the lovely opening lines
+(&lsquo;That strain again&rsquo;) were being spoken, and also
+during a part of the dialogue preceding the song
+&lsquo;Come away, come away, death.&rsquo; Some lines, too,
+of Lorenzo&rsquo;s famous speech about music in the
+<i>Merchant of Venice</i> were probably accompanied;
+and there is a still more conspicuous instance in
+the scene where Lear wakes from his long sleep
+and sees Cordelia standing by his side.</p>
+
+<p>But, beyond all this, if we attend to the stage-directions
+we shall realise that in the serious plays
+of Shakespeare other musical sounds were of frequent
+occurrence. Almost always the ceremonial
+entrance of a royal person is marked by a &lsquo;flourish&rsquo;
+or a &lsquo;sennet&rsquo; on trumpets, cornets, or hautboys;
+and wherever we have armies and battles we find
+directions for drums, or for particular series of notes
+of trumpets or cornets appropriate to particular
+military movements. In the First Part of <i>Henry VI.</i>,
+to take that early play again, we must imagine a
+dead march, two other marches, three retreats, three
+sennets, seven flourishes, eighteen alarums; and
+there are besides five directions for drums, one for a
+horn, and five for soundings, of a kind not specified,
+by trumpets. In the last three scenes of the first
+Act in <i>Coriolanus</i>&mdash;scenes containing less than three
+hundred and fifty lines&mdash;there are directions for a
+parley, a retreat, five flourishes, and eight alarums,
+with three, less specific, for trumpets, and four for
+drums. We find about twenty such directions in
+<i>King Lear</i>, and about twenty-five in <i>Macbeth</i>,
+a short play in which hautboys seem to have
+been unusually favoured.<a name="fa7k" id="fa7k" href="#ft7k"><span class="sp">7</span></a> It is evident that the
+audience loved these sounds, which, from their
+prevalence in passages of special kinds, seem to
+have been intended chiefly to stimulate excitement,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page371" id="page371"></a>371</span>
+and sometimes to heighten impressions of grandeur
+or of awe.</p>
+
+<p>But this is not all. Such purposes were also
+served by noises not musical. Four times in <i>Macbeth</i>,
+when the Witches appear, thunder is heard.
+It thunders and lightens at intervals through the
+storm-scenes in <i>King Lear</i>. Casca and Cassius,
+dark thoughts within them, walk the streets of
+Rome in a terrific thunderstorm. That loud insistent
+knocking which appalled Macbeth is repeated
+thrice at intervals while Lady Macbeth in vain
+endeavours to calm him, and five times while the
+Porter fumbles with his keys. The gate has hardly
+been opened and the murder discovered when the
+castle-bell begins its hideous alarum. The alarm-bell
+is used for the same purpose of intensifying
+excitement in the brawl that ruins Cassio, and its
+effect is manifest in Othello&rsquo;s immediate order,
+&lsquo;Silence that dreadful bell.&rsquo; I will add but one
+instance more. In the days of my youth, before
+the melodrama audience dreamed of seeing chariot-races,
+railway accidents, or the infernal regions,
+on the stage, it loved few things better than the
+explosion of fire-arms; and its favourite weapon was
+the pistol. The Elizabethans had the same fancy
+for fire-arms, only they preferred cannon. Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+theatre was burnt down in 1613 at a performance
+of <i>Henry VIII.</i>, not, I suppose, as Prynne
+imagined, by a Providence which shared his opinion
+of the drama, but because the wadding of a cannon
+fired during the play flew to the thatch of the roof
+and set it ablaze. In <i>Hamlet</i> Shakespeare gave the
+public plenty that they could not understand, but he
+made it up to them in explosions. While Hamlet,
+Horatio, and Marcellus are waiting for the Ghost, a
+flourish is heard, and then the roar of cannon. It
+is the custom to fire them when the King drinks a
+pledge; and this King drinks many. In the fencing-scene
+at the end he proposes to drink one for every
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page372" id="page372"></a>372</span>
+hit scored by his beloved nephew; and the first hit
+is duly honoured by the cannon. Unexpected events
+prevented the celebration of the second, but the
+audience lost nothing by that. While Hamlet lies
+dying, a sudden explosion is heard. Fortinbras is
+coming with his army. And, as if that were not
+enough, the very last words of the play are, &lsquo;Go,
+bid the soldiers shoot,&rsquo; and the very last sound of
+the performance is a peal of ordnance. Into this
+most mysterious and inward of his works, it would
+seem, the poet flung, as if in derision of his cultured
+critics, well-nigh every stimulant of popular excitement
+he could collect: &lsquo;carnal, bloody, and unnatural
+acts&rsquo;; five deaths on the open stage, three appearances
+of a ghost, two of a mad woman, a dumb-show,
+two men raving and fighting in a grave at a
+funeral, the skulls and bones of the dead, a clown
+bandying jests with a prince, songs at once indecent
+and pathetic, marching soldiers, a fencing-match,
+then a litter of corpses, and explosions in the first
+Act and explosions in the last. And yet out of this
+sensational material&mdash;not in spite of it, but out of
+it&mdash;he made the most mysterious and inward of his
+dramas, which leaves us haunted by thoughts beyond
+the reaches of our souls; and he knew that the very
+audience that rejoiced in ghosts and explosions
+would listen, even while it was waiting for the
+ghost, to that which the explosion had suggested,&mdash;a
+general disquisition, twenty-five lines long, on the
+manner in which one defect may spoil a noble
+reputation. In this strange harmony of discords,
+surely unexampled before or since, we may see at
+a glance the essence of Elizabethan drama, of its
+poet, and of its audience.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">2.</p>
+
+<p>We have been occupied so far with characteristics
+of the drama which reflect the more distinctively
+popular tastes objected to by critics like Jonson.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page373" id="page373"></a>373</span>
+We may now pass on to arrangements common to
+all public theatres, whether the play performed were
+Jonson&rsquo;s or Shakespeare&rsquo;s; and in the first instance
+to a characteristic common to the public and private
+theatres alike.</p>
+
+<p>As everyone knows, the female parts in stage-plays
+were taken by boys, youths, or men (a mask
+being sometimes worn in the last case). The indecorous
+Elizabethans regarded this custom almost
+entirely from the point of view of decorum and
+morality. And as to morality, no one, I believe,
+who examines the evidence, especially as it concerns
+the state of things that followed the introduction of
+actresses at the Restoration, will be very ready to
+dissent from their opinion. But it is often assumed
+as a matter beyond dispute that, on the side of
+dramatic effect, the Elizabethan practice was extremely
+unfortunate, if not downright absurd. This
+idea appears to me, to say the least, exaggerated.
+Our practice may be the better; for a few Shakespearean
+parts it <i>ought</i> to be much better; but that,
+on the whole, it is decidedly so, or that the old
+custom had anything absurd about it, there seems
+no reason to believe. In the first place, experience
+in private and semi-private performances shows that
+female parts may be excellently acted by youths or
+men, and that the most obvious drawback, that of
+the adult male voice, is not felt to be nearly so
+serious as we might anticipate. For a minute or
+two it may call for a slight exertion of imagination
+in the audience; but there is no more radical error
+than to suppose that an audience finds this irksome,
+or to forget that the use of imagination at one point
+quickens it at other points, and so is a positive gain.
+And we have further to remember that the Elizabethan
+actor of female parts was no amateur, but a
+professional as carefully trained as an actress now;
+while dramatically he had this advantage over the
+actress, that he was regarded simply as a player,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page374" id="page374"></a>374</span>
+and not also as a woman with an attractive or
+unattractive person.<a name="fa8k" id="fa8k" href="#ft8k"><span class="sp">8</span></a></p>
+
+<p>In the second place, if the current ideas on this
+subject were true, there would be, it seems to me,
+more evidence of their truth. We should find, for
+example, that when first the new fashion came in, it
+was hailed by good judges as a very great improvement
+on the old. But the traces of such an opinion
+appear very scanty and doubtful, while it is certain
+that one of the few actors who after the Restoration
+still played female parts maintained a high reputation
+and won great applause. Again, if these parts
+in Shakespeare&rsquo;s day were very inadequately performed,
+would not the effect of that fact be distinctly
+visible in the plays themselves? The rôles
+in question would be less important in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+dramas, for example, than in dramas of later times:
+but I do not see that they are. Besides, in the
+Shakespearean play itself the female parts would be
+much less important than the male: but on the
+whole they are not. In the tragedies and histories,
+it is true, the impelling forces of the action usually
+belong in larger measure to men than to women.
+But that is because the action in such plays is laid
+in the sphere of public life; and in cases where, in
+spite of this, the heroine is as prominent as the
+hero, her part&mdash;the part of Juliet, Cleopatra, Lady
+Macbeth&mdash;certainly requires as good acting as his.
+As to the comedies, if we ask ourselves who are the
+central or the most interesting figures in them, we
+shall find that we pronounce a woman&rsquo;s name at
+least as often as a man&rsquo;s. I understate the case.
+Of Shakespeare&rsquo;s mature comedies the <i>Merchant of
+Venice</i>, I believe, is the only one where this name
+would unquestionably be a man&rsquo;s, and in three of the
+last five it would almost certainly be a woman&rsquo;s&mdash;Isabella&rsquo;s,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page375" id="page375"></a>375</span>
+Imogen&rsquo;s, Hermione&rsquo;s. How shall we
+reconcile with these facts the idea that in his day
+the female parts were, on the whole, much less
+adequately played than the male? And finally, if
+the dramatists themselves believed this, why do we
+not find frequent indications of the belief in their
+prologues, epilogues, prefaces, and plays?<a name="fa9k" id="fa9k" href="#ft9k"><span class="sp">9</span></a></p>
+
+<p>We must conclude, it would seem, that the
+absence of actresses from the Elizabethan theatre,
+though at first it may appear to us highly important,
+made no great difference to the dramas themselves.</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">3.</p>
+
+<p>That certainly cannot be said of the construction
+and arrangements of the stage. On this subject a
+great deal has been written of late years, and as
+regards many details there is still much difference
+of opinion.<a name="fa10k" id="fa10k" href="#ft10k"><span class="sp">10</span></a> But fortunately all that is of great
+moment for our present purpose is tolerably certain.
+In trying to bring it out, I will begin by reminding
+you of our present stage. For it is the stage, and
+not the rest of the theatre, that is of special interest
+here; and no serious harm will be done if, for the
+rest, we imagine Shakespeare&rsquo;s theatre with boxes,
+circles, and galleries like our own, though in the
+shape of a more elongated horse-shoe than ours.
+We must imagine, of course, an area too; but there,
+as we shall see, an important difference comes in.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page376" id="page376"></a>376</span></p>
+
+<p>Our present stage may be called a box with one
+of its sides knocked out. Through this opening,
+which has an ornamental frame, we look into the
+box. Its three upright sides (for we may ignore
+the bottom and the top) are composed of movable
+painted scenes, which are changed from time to
+time during the course of the play. Before the play
+and after it the opening is blocked by a curtain,
+dropped from the top of the frame; and this is also
+dropped at intervals during the performance, that
+the scenes may be changed.</p>
+
+<p>In all these respects the Elizabethan arrangement
+was quite different. The stage came forward to
+about the middle of the area; so that a line bisecting
+the house would have coincided with the line of
+footlights, if there had been such things. The stage
+was therefore a platform viewed from both sides
+and not only from the front; and along its sides, as
+well as in front of it, stood the people who paid
+least, the groundlings, sometimes punningly derided
+by dramatists as &lsquo;the men of understanding.&rsquo; Obviously,
+the sides of this platform were open; nor were
+there movable scenes even at the back of it; nor
+was there any front curtain. It was overshadowed
+by a projecting roof; but the area, or &lsquo;yard,&rsquo; where
+the groundlings stood, was open to the weather,
+and accordingly the theatre could not be darkened.
+It will be seen that, when the actors were on the
+forward part of the stage, they were (to exaggerate
+a little) in the middle of the audience, like the performers
+in a circus now. And on this forward naked
+part of the stage most of a Shakespearean drama
+was played. We may call it the main or front
+stage.<a name="fa11k" id="fa11k" href="#ft11k"><span class="sp">11</span></a></p>
+
+<p>If now we look towards the rear of this stage,
+what do we find? In the first place, while the back
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page377" id="page377"></a>377</span>
+of our present-day box consists of a movable scene,
+that of the Elizabethan stage was formed by the
+&lsquo;tiring-house,&rsquo; or dressing-room, of the actors. In
+its wall were two doors, by which entrances and
+exits were made. But it was not merely a tiring-house.
+In the play it might represent a room, a
+house, a castle, the wall of a town; and the doors
+played their parts accordingly. Again, when a
+person speaks &lsquo;from within,&rsquo; that doubtless means
+that he is in the tiring-house, opens one of the doors
+a little, and speaks through the chink. So apparently
+did the prompter.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, on the top of the tiring-house was the
+&lsquo;upper stage&rsquo; or &lsquo;balcony,&rsquo; which looked down on
+the platform stage. It is hardly possible to make
+brief statements about it that would be secure. For
+our purposes it may be imagined as a balcony
+jutting forward a little from the line of the tiring-house;
+and it will suffice to add that, though the
+whole or part of it was on some occasions, or in
+some theatres, occupied by spectators, the whole or
+part of it was sometimes used by the actors and was
+indispensably requisite to the performance of the
+play. &lsquo;Enter above&rsquo; or &lsquo;enter aloft&rsquo; means that
+the actor was to appear on this upper stage or
+balcony. Usually, no doubt, he reached it by a
+ladder or stair inside the tiring-house; but on
+occasions there were ascents or descents directly
+from, or to, the main stage, as we see from &lsquo;climbs
+the tree and is received above&rsquo; or &lsquo;the citizens leap
+from the walls.&rsquo; The reader of Shakespeare will at
+once remember many scenes where the balcony was
+used. On it, as the city wall, appeared the Governor
+and citizens of Harfleur, while King Henry and his
+train stood before the gates below. From it Arthur
+made his fatal leap. It was Cleopatra&rsquo;s monument,
+into which she and her women drew up the dying
+Antony. Juliet talked to Romeo from it; and from
+it Romeo (&lsquo;one kiss and I&rsquo;ll descend&rsquo;) &lsquo;goeth down&rsquo;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page378" id="page378"></a>378</span>
+to the main stage. Richard appeared there between
+the two bishops; and there the spectators imagined
+Duncan murdered in his sleep.<a name="fa12k" id="fa12k" href="#ft12k"><span class="sp">12</span></a> But they could not
+look into his chamber. The balcony could be concealed
+by curtains, running, like all Elizabethan
+stage curtains, on a rod.</p>
+
+<p>In the third place, there was, towards the back of
+the main stage, a part that could be curtained off,
+and so separated from the front part of that stage.
+Let us call it the back stage. It is the matter about
+which there is most difficulty and controversy; but
+the general description just given would be accepted
+by almost all scholars and will suffice for us. Here
+was the curtain (more strictly, the curtains) through
+which the actors peeped at the audience before the
+play began, and at which the groundlings hurled
+apples and other missiles to hasten their coming or
+signify disapproval of them. And this &lsquo;back stage&rsquo;
+was essential to many performances, and was used in
+a variety of ways. It was the room where Henry IV.
+lay dying; the cave of Timon or of Belarius; probably
+the tent in which Richmond slept before the
+battle of Bosworth; the cell of Prospero, who draws
+the curtains apart and shows Ferdinand and Miranda
+playing at chess within; and here, I imagine, and
+not on the balcony, Juliet, after drinking the potion,
+&lsquo;falls upon her bed within the curtains.&rsquo;<a name="fa13k" id="fa13k" href="#ft13k"><span class="sp">13</span></a> Finally, the
+back stage accounts for those passages where, at the
+close of a death-scene, there is no indication that
+the corpse was carried off the stage. If the death
+took place on the open stage, as it usually did, this
+of course was necessary, since there was no front
+curtain to drop; and so we usually find in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page379" id="page379"></a>379</span>
+dialogue words like &lsquo;Take up the bodies&rsquo; (<i>Hamlet</i>),
+or &lsquo;Bear them from hence&rsquo; (<i>King Lear</i>). But Desdemona
+was murdered in her bed on the back stage;
+and there died also Othello and Emilia; so that
+Lodovico orders the bodies to be &lsquo;hid,&rsquo; not carried
+off. The curtains were drawn together, and the
+dead actors withdrew into the tiring-house unseen,<a name="fa14k" id="fa14k" href="#ft14k"><span class="sp">14</span></a>
+while the living went off openly.</p>
+
+<p>This triple stage is the primary thing to remember
+about Shakespeare&rsquo;s theatre: a platform coming well
+forward into the yard, completely open in the larger
+front part, but having further back a part that could
+be curtained off, and overlooked by an upper stage
+or balcony above the tiring-house. Only a few
+further details need be mentioned. Though scenery
+was unknown, there were plenty of properties, as
+may be gathered from the dramas and, more quickly,
+from the accounts of Henslowe, the manager of the
+Rose. Chairs, benches, and tables are a matter of
+course. Kent sat in the stocks. The witches had
+a caldron. Imogen slept in a bed, and Iachimo
+crept out of his trunk in her room. Falstaff was
+carried off the stage in a clothes-basket. I have
+quoted the direction &lsquo;climb the tree.&rsquo; A &lsquo;banquet&rsquo;
+figures in Henslowe&rsquo;s list, and in the <i>Tempest</i>
+&lsquo;several strange shapes&rsquo; bring one in. He mentions
+a &lsquo;tomb,&rsquo; and it is possible, though not likely,
+that the tomb of the Capulets was a property; and
+he mentions a &lsquo;moss-bank,&rsquo; doubtless such as that
+where the wild thyme was blowing for Titania. Her
+lover, you remember, wore an ass&rsquo;s head, and the
+Falstaff of the <i>Merry Wives</i> a buck&rsquo;s. There were
+whole animals, too. &lsquo;A great horse with his legs&rsquo;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page380" id="page380"></a>380</span>
+is in Henslowe&rsquo;s list; and in a play not by Shakespeare
+Jonah is cast out of the whale&rsquo;s belly on to
+the stage. Besides these properties there was a
+contrivance with ropes and pulleys, by which a
+heavenly being could descend from the stage-roof
+(the &lsquo;heaven&rsquo;), as in <i>Cymbeline</i> Jupiter descends
+upon his eagle. When his speech is over we find
+the direction &lsquo;ascends.&rsquo; Soon after comes another
+direction: &lsquo;vanish.&rsquo; This is addressed not to Jupiter
+but to various ghosts who are present. For there
+was a hollow space under the stage, and a trap-door
+into it. Through this ghosts usually made their
+entrances and exits; and &lsquo;vanish&rsquo; seems commonly
+to mean an exit that way. Through it, too, arose
+and sank the witches&rsquo; caldron and the apparitions
+shown to Macbeth. A person could speak from
+under the stage, as the Ghost does when Hamlet
+calls him &lsquo;old mole&rsquo;; and the musicians could go
+and play there, as they do in the scene where
+Antony&rsquo;s soldiers hear strange music on the night
+before the battle; &lsquo;Musicke of the Hoboyes is under
+the Stage&rsquo; the direction runs (&lsquo;Hoboyes&rsquo; were used
+also in the witch-scene just mentioned).</p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">4.</p>
+
+<p>We have now to observe certain ways in which
+this stage with its arrangements influenced the
+dramas themselves; and we shall find that the
+majority of these influences are connected with
+the absence of scenery. In this, to begin with, lies
+the main, though not the whole, explanation of the
+shortness of the performance. In our Shakespeare
+revivals the drama is always considerably cut down;
+and yet, even where no excessive prominence is
+given to scenic display, the time occupied is seldom
+less than three hours, and often a good deal more.
+In Shakespeare&rsquo;s day, as we gather from various
+sources (<i>e.g.</i> from the Prologues to <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page381" id="page381"></a>381</span>
+and <i>Henry VIII.</i>), the customary time taken by the
+un-shortened play was about two hours. And the
+chief reason of this great difference obviously is
+that the time which we spend in setting and changing
+scenes his company spent in acting the piece.
+At a given signal certain characters appeared.
+Unless a placard announced the place where they
+were supposed to be,<a name="fa15k" id="fa15k" href="#ft15k"><span class="sp">15</span></a> the audience gathered this
+from their conversation, or in the absence of such
+indications asked no questions on the subject.
+They talked for a time and went away; and at
+once another set appeared. The intervals between
+the acts (if intervals there were, and however they
+were occupied) had no purpose connected with
+scene-changing, and must have been short; and
+the introduction and removal of a few properties
+would take next to no time from the performance.<a name="fa16k" id="fa16k" href="#ft16k"><span class="sp">16</span></a>
+We may safely assume that not less than a hundred
+of the hundred and twenty minutes were given to
+the play itself.</p>
+
+<p>The absence of scenery, however, will not wholly
+account for the difference in question. If you take
+a Shakespearean play of average length and read it
+at about the pace usual in our revivals, you will find,
+I think, that you have occupied considerably more
+than a hundred or a hundred and twenty minutes.<a name="fa17k" id="fa17k" href="#ft17k"><span class="sp">17</span></a>
+The Elizabethan actor can hardly have spoken so
+slowly. Probably the position of the stage, and
+especially of the front part of it where most of the
+action took place, was of advantage to him in this
+respect. Standing almost in the middle of his
+audience, and at no great distance from any section
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page382" id="page382"></a>382</span>
+of it, he could with safety deliver his lines much
+faster than an actor can now. He could speak even
+a &lsquo;passionate&rsquo; speech &lsquo;trippingly on the tongue.&rsquo;
+Hamlet bids him do so, warns him not to mouth,
+and, when the time for his speech comes, calls impatiently
+to him to leave his damnable faces and
+begin; and this is not the only passage in Elizabethan
+literature which suggests that good judges
+objected to a slow and over-emphatic delivery.
+We have some actors not inferior in elocution, we
+must presume, to Burbage or Taylor, but even Mr.
+Vezin or Mr. Forbes Robertson may find it difficult
+to deliver blank verse intelligibly, musically, and
+rapidly out of our stage-box.<a name="fa18k" id="fa18k" href="#ft18k"><span class="sp">18</span></a></p>
+
+<p>I return to the absence of scenery, which even in
+this matter must be more important than the position
+of the stage or the preference for rapid speech. It
+explains, secondly, the great difference between
+Elizabethan and more modern plays in the number
+of the scenes.<a name="fa19k" id="fa19k" href="#ft19k"><span class="sp">19</span></a> This number, with Shakespeare,
+averages somewhere about twenty: it reaches forty-two
+in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, and sinks to nine
+in <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, the <i>Midsummer-Night&rsquo;s
+Dream</i>, and the <i>Tempest</i>. In the fourth act of the
+first of these plays there are thirteen scenes, no one
+of them in the same place as the next. The average
+number in Schiller&rsquo;s plays seems to be about eight.
+In plays written now it corresponds not unfrequently
+with the number of acts.<a name="fa20k" id="fa20k" href="#ft20k"><span class="sp">20</span></a> The primary cause of
+this difference, though not the only one, is, I presume,
+that we expect to see appropriate surroundings,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page383" id="page383"></a>383</span>
+at the least, for every part of the story. Such
+surroundings mean more or less elaborate scenery,
+which, besides being expensive, takes a long time to
+set and change. For a dramatist accordingly who
+is a dramatist and wishes to hold his audience by
+the play itself, it is an advantage to have as few
+scenes as may be. And so the absence of scenery
+in Shakespeare&rsquo;s day, and its presence in ours,
+result in two totally different systems, not merely
+of theatrical effect, but of dramatic construction.</p>
+
+<p>In certain ways it was clearly an advantage to a
+playwright to be able to produce a large number of
+scenes, varying in length according to his pleasure,
+and separated by almost inappreciable intervals. Nor
+could there be any disadvantage in this freedom, if
+he had a strong feeling for dramatic construction,
+and a gift for it, and a determination to construct
+as well as he could. But, as a matter of fact, many,
+perhaps the majority, of the pre-Shakespearean
+dramas are put together very loosely; scene follows
+scene in the manner of a casual narrative rather
+than a play; and a good deal is admitted for the
+sake of its immediate attraction and not because it
+is essential to the plot. The freedom which we are
+considering, though it could not necessitate these
+defects, gave the widest scope for them; the majority
+of the audience probably was, and continued to
+be, well-nigh indifferent to them; and a large proportion
+of the plays of Shakespeare&rsquo;s time exhibits
+them in some degree. The average drama of that
+day has great merits of a strictly dramatic kind,
+but it is not well-built, it is not what we mean by
+&lsquo;a good play&rsquo;; and if we look at it from the
+restricted point of view implied by that phrase we
+shall be inclined, I think, to believe that it would
+have been a better play if its author had been
+compelled by the stage-arrangements to halve the
+number of the scenes. These remarks will hold of
+Shakespeare himself. Some of his most delightful
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page384" id="page384"></a>384</span>
+dramas, indeed,&mdash;for instance, the two Parts of
+<i>Henry IV.</i>&mdash;make little or no pretence to be well-constructed
+wholes; and even in those which fully
+deserve that title a certain amount of matter not
+indispensable to the plot is usually to be found. In
+point of construction <i>Othello</i> is the best of his
+tragedies, <i>Julius Cćsar</i> better than <i>King Lear</i>, and
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> perhaps the faultiest. To
+say that this depends solely on the number of scenes
+would be ridiculous, but still it is probably significant
+that the numbers are, respectively, fifteen, eighteen,
+twenty-one, and forty-two.</p>
+
+<p>The average Elizabethan play could not, of
+course, have been converted into a well-built fabric
+by a <i>mere</i> reduction of the number of its scenes;
+and in some cases no amount of rearrangement
+of the whole material employed could have produced
+this result. This means, however, on the other
+hand, that the Elizabethans, partly from the very
+simplicity of their theatrical conditions, were able to
+handle with decided, though usually imperfect,
+dramatic effect subjects which would present difficulties
+still greater, if not insuperable, to a playwright
+now. And in Shakespeare we can trace, in this
+respect and in others, the advantages connected
+with the absence of scenery. He could carry his
+audience freely from one country, town, house or
+room, to another, or from this part of a battle-field
+to that, because the audience imagined each place
+and saw none. I take an extreme example. The
+Third Act of <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, according to
+modern editions, contains thirteen scenes, and these
+are the localities assigned to them: (1) a plain in
+Syria, (2) Rome, an ante-chamber in Cćsar&rsquo;s house,
+(3) Alexandria, Cleopatra&rsquo;s palace, (4) Athens, a
+room in Antony&rsquo;s house, (5) the same, another room,
+(6) Rome, Cćsar&rsquo;s house, (7) near Actium, Antony&rsquo;s
+camp, (8) a plain near Actium, (9) another part of
+the plain, (10) another part of the plain, (11)
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page385" id="page385"></a>385</span>
+Alexandria, Cleopatra&rsquo;s palace, (12) Egypt, Cćsar&rsquo;s
+camp, (13) Alexandria, Cleopatra&rsquo;s palace. I wonder
+how long this Act would take on our stage, where
+each locality must be represented. Three hours
+perhaps, of which the performance might occupy
+one-eighth. But in Shakespeare&rsquo;s day there was no
+occasion for any stage-direction as to locality
+throughout the Act.</p>
+
+<p>Again, Shakespeare&rsquo;s method of working a double
+plot depends largely on his ability to bring the
+persons belonging to the two plots on to the stage
+in alternate scenes of no great length until the
+threads are combined. This is easily seen in <i>King
+Lear</i>; and there we can observe, further, how he
+varies the pitch of feeling and provides relief by
+interposing short quiet scenes between longer exciting
+ones. By this means, as I have pointed out
+elsewhere, the Storm-scene on the heath, which if
+undivided would be intolerable, is broken into three,
+separated by very short duologues spoken within the
+Castle and in prose. Again, since scene follows
+scene without a pause, he could make one tell on
+another in the way either of intensification or of
+contrast. We catch the effect in reading, but in our
+theatres it is usually destroyed by the interval.
+Finally, however many scenes an Act may contain,
+Shakespeare can keep attention glued to the play
+throughout the Act, because there are no intervals.
+So can our playwrights, because they have but one
+or two scenes in the Act. But in our reproductions
+of Shakespeare, though the number of scenes is
+reduced, it can scarcely ever be reduced to that
+extent; so that several times during an Act, and
+many times during the play, we are withdrawn
+perforce from the dramatic atmosphere into
+that of everyday life, solitary impatience or ennui,
+distracting conversation, third-rate music, or, occasionally,
+good music half-drowned in a babble of
+voices.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page386" id="page386"></a>386</span></p>
+
+<p>If we consider the characteristics on which I have
+been dwelling, and bear in mind also the rapidity of
+speech which we have found to be probable, we
+shall realise that a performance in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+day, though more of the play was performed, must
+have been something much more variegated and
+changeful, and much lighter in movement, than a
+revival now. And this difference will have been
+observed by those who have seen Shakespeare
+acted by the Elizabethan Stage Society, under the
+direction of Mr. Poel, who not only played scene
+after scene without intervals, but secured in a considerable
+degree that rapidity of speech.</p>
+
+<p>A minor point remains. The Elizabethan stage,
+we have seen, had no front curtain. The front
+curtain and the use of scenery naturally came in
+together, for the second, so far as the front stage
+was concerned, was dependent on the first; and as
+we have already glanced at some effects of the
+absence of the second, that of the first will require
+but a few additional words. It was clearly in some
+ways a great disadvantage; for every situation at
+the front of the stage had to be begun and ended
+before the eyes of the audience. In our dramas the
+curtain may rise on a position which the actors then
+had to produce by movements not really belonging
+to the play; and, what is more important, the scene
+may advance to a striking climax, the effect of which
+would be greatly diminished and sometimes destroyed
+if the actors had to leave the stage instead of being
+suddenly hidden. In Elizabethan plays, accordingly,
+we seldom meet with this kind of effect, though it is
+not difficult to discover places where it would have
+been appropriate. But we shall not find them, I
+venture to think, in tragedies. This effect, in other
+words, appears properly to belong to comedy and to
+melodrama (if that species of play is to be considered
+here at all); and the Elizabethans lost nothing by
+their inability to misuse it in tragedy, and especially
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page387" id="page387"></a>387</span>
+at the close of a tragedy. Whether it can be artistic
+to end any serious scene whatever at the point of
+greatest tension seems doubtful, but surely it is little
+short of barbarous to drop the curtain on the last
+dying words, or, it may be, the last convulsion, of a
+tragic hero. In tragedy the Elizabethan practice,
+like the Greek, was to lower the pitch of emotion
+from this point by a few quiet words, followed perhaps
+by sounds which, in intention at least, were
+majestic or solemn, and so to restore the audience
+to common life &lsquo;in calm of mind, all passion spent.&rsquo;
+Thus Shakespeare&rsquo;s tragedies always close; and the
+end of Marlowe&rsquo;s <i>Doctor Faustus</i> is not <i>Exeunt
+Devils with Faustus</i>, but the speech beginning</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+<p>Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,</p>
+<p>And burned is Apollo&rsquo;s laurel-bough,</p>
+<p>That sometime grew within this learned man.</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">In this particular case Marlowe, if he had not been a
+poet, might have dispensed with the final descent,
+or ascent, from the violent emotions attending the
+catastrophe; but in the immense majority of their
+tragedies the Elizabethans, even if they had wished
+to do as we too often do, were saved from the
+temptation by the absence of a front curtain.<a name="fa21k" id="fa21k" href="#ft21k"><span class="sp">21</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page388" id="page388"></a>388</span></p>
+
+<p class="pt2 center">5.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto we have not considered a Shakespearean
+performance on the side, I will not say of its spectacular,
+but of its pictorial effect. This must be our
+last subject. We have to bear in mind here three
+things: the fact that the stage was viewed from
+three sides, its illumination by daylight throughout
+the play, and the absence of scenery. It is obvious
+that the last two deprived the audience of many
+attractive or impressive pictures; while, as to the
+first, it seems unlikely that actors who were watched
+from the sides as well as the front would study to
+group themselves as parts of a composition addressed
+to the eye. Indeed one may doubt whether, except
+in regard to costume, they seriously attended to the
+pictorial effect of a drama at all; their tiny crowds
+and armies, for example, cannot have provided much
+of a show. And in any case it is clear that the
+audience had to dispense with many more or less
+beautiful sights that we may now enjoy. But the
+question whether their loss was, on the whole, a
+disadvantage is not so easy to answer; for here again
+it freed them from a temptation&mdash;that of sacrificing
+dramatic to pictorial effect; and we cannot tell
+whether, or how far, they would have been proof
+against its influence. Let us try, however, to see
+the position clearly.</p>
+
+<p>The essence of drama&mdash;and certainly of Shakespearean
+drama&mdash;lies in actions and words expressive
+of inward movements of human nature. Pictorial
+effects (if for convenience&rsquo; sake the various matters
+under consideration may be signified by that phrase)
+are in themselves no more dramatic than songs,
+dances, military music, or the jests of a &lsquo;fool.&rsquo; Like
+these other things, they may be made dramatic.
+They may be used and apprehended, that is to say,
+as elements fused with the essential elements of
+dramatic effect. And, so far as this is the case and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page389" id="page389"></a>389</span>
+they thus contribute to that effect, they are, it seems
+clear, an unmixed advantage. But a distinct and
+separate attention to them is another matter; for,
+the moment it sets in, attention begins to be withdrawn
+from the actions and words, and therefore
+from the inward movements that these express. And
+experience shows that, as soon as pictorial attractions
+exceed a certain limit, impossible to specify in
+general terms, they at once influence the average
+play-goer in this mischievous way. It is, further,
+well-nigh inevitable that this should happen. However
+interesting the actions, words, and inward
+movements may be, they call for some effort of
+imagination and of other mental activities,<a name="fa22k" id="fa22k" href="#ft22k"><span class="sp">22</span></a> while
+stage-pictures demand very little; and accordingly,
+at the present time at any rate, the bulk of an
+audience to which the latter are abundantly presented
+will begin to enjoy them for their own sakes,
+or as parts of a panorama and not of a drama. No
+one, I think, can honestly doubt this who watches
+and listens to the people sitting near him at what
+the newspapers too truly call &lsquo;an amazing Shakespearean
+spectacle.&rsquo; If we are offered a pretty
+picture of the changing colours of the sky at dawn,
+or of a forest glade with deer miraculously moving
+across its sunny grass, most of us cease for the time
+to be an audience and become mere spectators; and
+let Romeo and Juliet, or Rosalind and Orlando, talk
+as like angels as they will, they will talk but half-heeded.
+Our dramatists know this well enough.
+Mr. Barrie and Mr. Pinero and Mr. Shaw, who
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page390" id="page390"></a>390</span>
+want the audience to listen and understand, take
+good care not to divert its attention and deaden its
+imagination by scenic displays. And yet, with the
+heartiest admiration for their best work, one may
+say that Shakespeare&rsquo;s requires more attention and
+imagination than theirs.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the Elizabethan companies, if they had
+had the power to use the attractions of scenery,
+would have abused it, and whether in that case the
+audience would have been as readily debauched as
+ours, it is useless to dispute. The audience was
+not composed mainly of groundlings; and even the
+groundlings in that age had drama in their blood.
+But I venture to disbelieve that the main fault in
+these matters lies, in any age, with the audience. It
+is like the populace in Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays, easy to
+lead wrong but just as easy to lead right. If you
+give people in the East End, or even in the Albert
+Hall, nothing but third-rate music, most of them
+will be content with it, and possibly may come to
+disrelish what is better. But if you have a little
+faith in great art and in human nature, and offer
+them, I do not say the Diabelli variations, but such
+music as the symphonies of Beethoven or even of
+Brahms, they will justify your faith. This is not
+theory, but fact; and I cannot think that it is otherwise
+with drama, or at least with the dramas of
+Shakespeare. Did they ever &lsquo;spell ruin to managers&rsquo;
+if they were, through the whole cast, satisfactorily
+acted? What spells real ruin to managers and
+actors alike is what spells degradation to audiences.<a name="fa23k" id="fa23k" href="#ft23k"><span class="sp">23</span></a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page391" id="page391"></a>391</span></p>
+
+<p>But whether or no Shakespeare&rsquo;s audience could
+have been easily degraded by scenic pleasure, it had
+not the chance; and I will not raise the further
+question how far its disabilities were the cause of
+its virtues, but will end with a few words on two of
+the virtues themselves. It possessed, first, a vivid
+imagination. Shakespeare could address to it not
+in vain the injunction, &lsquo;Work, work your thoughts!&rsquo;
+Probably in three scenes out of five the place and
+surroundings of the action were absolutely invisible
+to its eyes. In a fourth it took the barest symbol
+for reality. A couple of wretched trees made the
+Forest of Arden for it, five men with ragged foils
+the army that conquered at Agincourt: are we
+stronger than it, or weaker? It heard Romeo say</p>
+
+<table class="reg f90" summary="poem"><tr><td> <div class="poemr">
+    <p class="i2">Look, love, what envious streaks</p>
+<p>Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;</p>
+</div> </td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="noind">and to its mind&rsquo;s eye they were there. It looked at
+a shabby old balcony, but as it listened it saw the
+swallows flitting round the sun-lit battlements of
+Macbeth&rsquo;s castle, and our pitiful sense of grotesque
+incongruity never troubled it.<a name="fa24k" id="fa24k" href="#ft24k"><span class="sp">24</span></a> The simplest convention
+sufficed to set its imagination at work. If
+Prospero entered wearing a particular robe, it knew
+that no one on the stage could see his solid shape;<a name="fa25k" id="fa25k" href="#ft25k"><span class="sp">25</span></a>
+and if Banquo, rising through the trap-door, had his
+bloody face dusted over with meal, it recognised
+him for a ghost and thrilled with horror; and we,
+Heaven help us, should laugh. Though the stage
+stood in broad daylight, again, Banquo, for it, was
+being murdered on a dark wet night, for he carried
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page392" id="page392"></a>392</span>
+a torch and spoke of rain; and the chaste stars were
+shining for it outside Desdemona&rsquo;s chamber as the
+awful figure entered and extinguished the lamp.
+Consider how extraordinary is the fact I am about
+to mention, and what a testimony it bears to the
+imagination of the audience. In <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>,
+and <i>Macbeth</i>, not one scene here and there but
+actually the majority of the most impressive scenes
+take place at night, and, to a reader, depend not
+a little on the darkness for their effect. Yet the
+Ghost-scenes, the play-scene, the sparing of the king
+at prayer, that conversation of Hamlet with his
+mother which is opened by the killing of Polonius
+and interrupted by the appearance of the Ghost;
+the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the
+Banquet-scene, the Sleep-walking scene; the whole
+of the first Act of <i>Othello</i>, the scene of Cassio&rsquo;s
+drunken revel and fight, and the whole of the terrible
+last Act,&mdash;all of this was played in a theatre open to
+the afternoon sun, and was written by a man who
+knew that it was so to be played. But he knew his
+audience too.<a name="fa26k" id="fa26k" href="#ft26k"><span class="sp">26</span></a></p>
+
+<p>That audience had not only imagination, and the
+power to sink its soul in the essence of drama. It
+had something else of scarcely less import for
+Shakespeare, the love of poetry. Ignorant, noisy,
+malodorous, too fond of dances and songs and dirty
+jokes, of soldiers and trumpets and cannon, the
+groundling might be: but he liked poetry. If he
+had not liked it, he, with his brutal manners, would
+have silenced it, and the Elizabethan drama could
+never have been the thing it was. The plays of
+Shakespeare swarm with long speeches, almost all
+of which are cut down or cut clean away for our
+theatres. They are never, of course, irrelevant;
+sometimes they are indispensable to the full appreciation
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page393" id="page393"></a>393</span>
+of a character; but it is manifest that they
+were not written solely for a dramatic purpose, but
+also because the author and his audience loved
+poetry. A sign of this is the fact that they especially
+abound where, from the nature of the story, the
+dramatic structure is imperfect.<a name="fa27k" id="fa27k" href="#ft27k"><span class="sp">27</span></a> They abound in
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i> and <i>Henry V.</i> more than in
+<i>Othello</i> or <i>Much Ado</i>. Remember, for a standard
+of size, that &lsquo;To be or not to be&rsquo; is thirty-three
+lines in length, and then consider the following fact.
+<i>Henry V.</i> contains seventeen speeches longer than
+that soliloquy. Five of them are between forty and
+fifty lines long, two between fifty and sixty, and two
+exceed sixty. Yet if any play entirely by Shakespeare
+were open to the charge of being a &lsquo;drum
+and trumpet history&rsquo; written to please the populace,
+it would be <i>Henry V.</i> Not only then the cultured
+section of the audience loved poetry; the whole
+audience loved it. How long would they have continued
+to relish this &lsquo;perpetual feast of nectared
+sweets&rsquo; if their eyes had been feasted too? Or
+is it likely that, once habituated to spectacular
+stimulants, they would have welcomed &lsquo;the crystal
+clearness of the Muses&rsquo; spring&rsquo;?</p>
+
+<p class="f80">1902.</p>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1k" id="ft1k" href="#fa1k"><span class="fn">1</span></a> This, one may suspect, was also the position of Webster, who praises
+Shakespeare, but groups him with Dekker and Heywood, and mentions
+him after Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher (Preface to
+the <i>White Devil</i>).</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft2k" id="ft2k" href="#fa2k"><span class="fn">2</span></a> I am obliged to speak summarily. Some of these things declined
+in popularity as time went on.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft3k" id="ft3k" href="#fa3k"><span class="fn">3</span></a> The examples just cited show his method at its best, and it would
+be easy to mention others far less satisfactory. Nor do I doubt that
+his plays would be much more free from blemishes of various kinds if
+his audience had added to their virtues greater cultivation. On the
+other hand the question whether, or how far, he knowingly &lsquo;wrote
+down to&rsquo; his audience, in the sense of giving it what he despised,
+seems to me very difficult, if not impossible, to answer: and I may
+mention some causes of this difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>(1) There is no general presumption against interpolations in an
+Elizabethan drama published piratically or after the author&rsquo;s death.
+We have, further, positive grounds of the strongest kind for believing
+that &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays&rsquo; contain a good deal that Shakespeare never
+wrote. We cannot therefore simply take it for granted that he wrote
+every silly or offensive thing that we find in the volume; and least of
+all should we do this when the passage is more or less irrelevant and
+particularly easy to excise. I do not say that these considerations
+have great importance here, but they have some; and readers of
+Shakespeare, and even some scholars, constantly tend to forget them,
+and to regard the texts as if they had been published by himself, or
+by scrupulously careful men of letters immediately after his death.</p>
+
+<p>(2) We must never take for granted that what seems to us feeble or
+bad seemed so to Shakespeare. Evidently he was amused by puns
+and quips and verbal ingenuities in which most of us find little
+entertainment. Gross jokes, scarcely redeemed in our eyes by their
+humour, may have diverted him. He sometimes writes, and clearly
+in good faith, what seems to us bombastic or &lsquo;conceited.&rsquo; So far as
+this was the case he was not writing down to his audience. He
+shared its tastes, or the tastes of some section of it. So it may have
+been, again, with such a blot as the blinding of Gloucester on the open
+stage.</p>
+
+<p>(3) Jonson defied his audience, yet he wrote a good deal that we
+think bad. In the same way certain of Shakespeare&rsquo;s faults <i>cannot</i> be
+due to condescension to his audience: <i>e.g.</i> the obscurities and distortions
+of language not infrequent in his later plays. And this may be
+so with some faults which have the appearance of arising from that condescension.</p>
+
+<p>(4) Other defects again he might have deliberately defended; <i>e.g.</i>
+the highly improbable conclusions and the distressing mis-marriages of
+some of the comedies. &lsquo;It is of the essence of romantic comedy,&rsquo; he
+might have said, &lsquo;to treat such things with indifference. There is a
+convention that you should take the characters with some degree of
+seriousness while they are in difficulties, and should cease to do so
+when they are to be delivered from them.&rsquo; Do not we ourselves adopt
+this point of view to some extent when we go to the theatre now?</p>
+
+<p>I added this note after reading Mr. Bridges&rsquo;s very interesting and
+original contribution to the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare
+(vol x.). I disagree with some of Mr. Bridges&rsquo;s remarks, and am not
+always repelled by things that he dislikes. But this brief note is not,
+of course, meant for an answer to his paper; it merely suggests
+reasons for at least diminishing the proportion of defect attributable
+to a conscious sacrifice of art to the tastes of the audience.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft4k" id="ft4k" href="#fa4k"><span class="fn">4</span></a> To us their first appearance is of interest chiefly because it introduces
+the soliloquy &lsquo;How all occasions.&rsquo; But, it is amusing to notice,
+the Folio, which probably represents the acting version in 1623, omits
+the soliloquy but retains the marching soldiers.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft5k" id="ft5k" href="#fa5k"><span class="fn">5</span></a> I do not refer to the Globe.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft6k" id="ft6k" href="#fa6k"><span class="fn">6</span></a> The latter, no doubt, accompanied by the band, except when the
+clown played the tabor while he danced alone.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft7k" id="ft7k" href="#fa7k"><span class="fn">7</span></a> This may possibly be one of the signs that <i>Macbeth</i> was altered
+after Shakespeare&rsquo;s retirement or death.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft8k" id="ft8k" href="#fa8k"><span class="fn">8</span></a> Surely every company that plays Shakespeare should include a
+boy. There would then be no excuse for giving to a woman such
+parts as Ariel and Brutus&rsquo;s boy Lucius.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft9k" id="ft9k" href="#fa9k"><span class="fn">9</span></a> This question will not be answered by the citation of one famous
+speech of Cleopatra&rsquo;s&mdash;a speech, too, which is strictly in character.
+But, as to this matter and the other considerations put forward above,
+I must add that, while my impression is that what has been said of
+Shakespeare holds of most of the contemporary dramatists, I have not
+verified it by a research. A student looking for a subject for his thesis
+might well undertake such a research.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft10k" id="ft10k" href="#fa10k"><span class="fn">10</span></a> When the lecture was given (in 1902) I went more fully into details,
+having arrived at certain conclusions mainly by an examination of
+Elizabethan dramas. I suppress them here because I have been
+unable to study all that has since been written on the Elizabethan
+stage. The reader who is interested in the subject should refer in the
+first instance to an excellent article by Mr. Archer in the <i>Quarterly
+Review</i> for April, 1908.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft11k" id="ft11k" href="#fa11k"><span class="fn">11</span></a> This is a description of a public theatre. A private one, it will be
+remembered, had seats in the area (there called the pit), was completely
+roofed, and could be darkened.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft12k" id="ft12k" href="#fa12k"><span class="fn">12</span></a> &lsquo;The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their
+charge with snores,&rsquo; says Lady Macbeth on the stage below; and no
+doubt the tiring-house doors <i>were</i> open.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft13k" id="ft13k" href="#fa13k"><span class="fn">13</span></a> This view, into the grounds of which I cannot go, implies that
+Juliet&rsquo;s bedroom was, in one scene, the upper stage, and, in another,
+the back stage; but the Elizabethans, I believe, would make no difficulty
+about that.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft14k" id="ft14k" href="#fa14k"><span class="fn">14</span></a> Perhaps. It seems necessary to suppose that the sides of the backstage,
+as well as its front, could be open; otherwise many of the
+spectators could not have seen what took place there. But it is not
+<i>necessary</i>, so far as I remember, to suppose that the sides could be
+closed by curtains. The Elizabethans probably would not have been
+troubled by seeing dead bodies get up and go into the tiring-house
+when a play or even a scene was over.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft15k" id="ft15k" href="#fa15k"><span class="fn">15</span></a> Where this contrivance was used at all it probably only announced
+the general place of the action throughout the play: <i>e.g.</i> <i>Denmark</i>, or,
+a little more fully, <i>Verona</i>, <i>Mantua</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft16k" id="ft16k" href="#fa16k"><span class="fn">16</span></a> It is possibly significant that <i>Macbeth</i> and the <i>Tempest</i>, plays
+containing more &lsquo;shews&rsquo; than most, are exceptionally short.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft17k" id="ft17k" href="#fa17k"><span class="fn">17</span></a> It suffices for this rough experiment to read a column in an edition
+like the Globe, and then to multiply the time taken by the number of
+columns in the play.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft18k" id="ft18k" href="#fa18k"><span class="fn">18</span></a> I do not know whether the average size of our theatres differs much
+from that of the Elizabethan. The diameter of the area at the <i>Fortune</i>
+and the <i>Globe</i> seems to have been fifty feet.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft19k" id="ft19k" href="#fa19k"><span class="fn">19</span></a> I mean by a scene a section of a play before and after which the
+stage is unoccupied. Most editions of Shakespeare are faulty in the
+division of scenes (see <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i>, p. 451).</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft20k" id="ft20k" href="#fa20k"><span class="fn">20</span></a> So it very nearly does in some Restoration comedies. In the <i>Way
+of the World</i> the scenery is changed only twice in the five acts, though
+there are more than five scenes.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft21k" id="ft21k" href="#fa21k"><span class="fn">21</span></a> The &lsquo;back&rsquo; stage, which had curtains, must, I suppose, have been
+too small to accommodate the number of persons commonly present,
+alive or dead, at the close of a tragedy. I do not know if any recent
+writer has raised and discussed the questions how often the back stage
+is used in the last scene of an Elizabethan play, and, again, whether it
+is often employed at all in order to produce, by the closing of the
+curtains, the kind of effect referred to in the paragraph above. Perhaps
+the fact that the curtains had to be closed by an actor, within them or
+without, made this effect impossible. Or perhaps it was not desired.
+In Shakespeare&rsquo;s tragedies, if my memory serves me, the only sudden
+or startling appeals of an outward kind (apart, of course, from actions)
+are those produced by supernatural appearances and disappearances,
+as in <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>. These, we have seen, were usually
+managed by means of the trap-door, which, it would seem from some
+passages, must have been rather large. These matters deserve investigation
+if they have not already received it.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft22k" id="ft22k" href="#fa22k"><span class="fn">22</span></a> I do not refer to such deliberate and sustained effort as a reader
+may sometimes make. It is not commonly realised that continuous
+attention to any imaginative or intellectual matter, however enjoyable,
+involves considerable strain. If at a lecture or sermon a careless
+person makes himself observable in arriving late or leaving early, the
+eyes of half the audience will turn to him and follow him. And the
+reason is not always that the speaker bores them; it is that involuntarily
+they seek relief from this strain. The same thing may be seen
+in the concert-room or theatre, but very much less at a panorama,
+because the mere use of the eyes, even when continuous, is comparatively
+easy.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft23k" id="ft23k" href="#fa23k"><span class="fn">23</span></a> I am not referring here, or elsewhere, to such a moderate use of
+scenery in Shakespearean performances as most of our actor-managers
+(<i>e.g.</i> Mr. Benson) now adopt. I regret it in so far as it involves a
+curtailing of the play; but I do not think it withdraws from the play
+any attention that is of value, and for some of the audience it probably
+heightens the dramatic effect. Still, in my belief, it would be desirable
+to decrease it, because the less there is of it, the more is good acting
+necessary, and the more of the play itself can be acted. Some use of
+scenery, with its consequences to the play, must unquestionably be
+accepted as the rule, but I would add that it ought always to be
+possible for us to see performances, such as we owed to Mr. Poel,
+nearer to those of Shakespeare&rsquo;s time.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft24k" id="ft24k" href="#fa24k"><span class="fn">24</span></a> When, in the time of Malone and Steevens, the question was
+debated whether Shakespeare&rsquo;s stage had scenery, it was argued that
+it must have had it, because otherwise the contrast between the words
+and the visible stage in the passage referred to would have been hopelessly
+ludicrous.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft25k" id="ft25k" href="#fa25k"><span class="fn">25</span></a> &lsquo;Enter invisible&rsquo; (a common stage-direction) means &lsquo;Enter in the
+dress which means to the audience that you are invisible.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft26k" id="ft26k" href="#fa26k"><span class="fn">26</span></a> Probably he never needed to think of the audience, but wrote what
+pleased his own imagination, which, like theirs, was not only dramatic
+but, in the best sense, theatrical.</p>
+
+<p><a name="ft27k" id="ft27k" href="#fa27k"><span class="fn">27</span></a> Their abundance in <i>Hamlet</i> results partly from the character of
+the hero. They helped, however, to make that play too long; and
+the omission of &lsquo;How all occasions&rsquo; from the Folio doubtless means
+that the company cut this soliloquy (whether they did so in the
+author&rsquo;s life-time we cannot tell). It may be noticed that, where a
+play shows clear signs of revision by Shakespeare himself, we rarely
+find a disposition to shorten long poetical speeches.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="art" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page394" id="page394"></a>394</span></p>
+
+<p>In some of these lectures<a name="fa1l" id="fa1l" href="#ft1l"><span class="sp">1</span></a>&mdash;for the duties and
+pleasures that have fallen to me as Professor of
+Poetry are now to end&mdash;I may have betrayed a
+certain propensity to philosophise. But I should
+ask pardon for this only if I believed it to intrude
+where it has no place, in the imaginative perception
+of poetry. Philosophy has long been at home in
+this University; in the remarkable development of
+English philosophical thought during the last five-and-thirty
+years Oxford has played a leading part;
+and I hope the time will never come when a son of
+hers will need to apologise to his brethren for talking
+philosophy. Besides, though I owe her gratitude
+for many gifts, and most for the friendships she gave
+me, her best intellectual gift was the conviction
+that what imagination loved as poetry reason might
+love as philosophy, and that in the end these are
+two ways of saying the same thing. And, finally, I
+hoped, by dwelling in these lectures (for instance,
+with reference to the poets of Wordsworth&rsquo;s time)
+on the connection of poetry with the wider life around
+it, to correct an impression which my opening lecture
+seems here and there to have left. Not that I can
+withdraw or even modify the view put forward then.
+So far as any single function of spiritual life can be
+said to have an intrinsic value, poetry, it seems to
+me, possesses it just as other functions do, and it is
+in each case irreplaceable. And further, it seems to
+me, poetry attains its own aim, and in doing so
+makes its contribution to the whole, most surely and
+fully when it seeks its own end without attempting
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page395" id="page395"></a>395</span>
+to reach those of co-ordinate functions, such as the
+attainment of philosophic truth or the furtherance of
+moral progress. But then I believe this because I
+also believe that the unity of human nature in its
+diverse activities is so intimate and pervasive that
+no influence can affect any one of them alone, and
+that no one of them can operate or change without
+transmitting its influence to the rest. If I may use
+the language of paradox I would say that the pursuit
+of poetry for its own sake is the pursuit both of
+truth and of goodness. Devotion to it is devotion
+to &lsquo;the good cause of the world&rsquo;; and wherever the
+imagination is satisfied, there, if we had a knowledge
+we have not, we should discover no idle fancy but
+the image of a truth.</p>
+
+<hr class="foot" /> <div class="note">
+
+<p><a name="ft1l" id="ft1l" href="#fa1l"><span class="fn">1</span></a> As the order of the lectures has been changed for the purposes of
+publication, I have been obliged to move these concluding sentences
+from their original place at the end of the lecture on <i>The Long Poem
+in the Age of Wordsworth</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="art" />
+<p class="center f80">PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY<br />
+MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., LONDON AND EDINBURGH</p>
+
+<hr class="art" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Oxford Lectures on Poetry, by Andrew Cecil Bradley
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+Project Gutenberg's Oxford Lectures on Poetry, by Andrew Cecil Bradley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Oxford Lectures on Poetry
+
+Author: Andrew Cecil Bradley
+
+Release Date: July 17, 2011 [EBook #36773]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD LECTURES ON POETRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marius Masi, Suzanne Shell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  _BY A. C. BRADLEY, LL.D., LITT.D._
+
+  SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
+
+  LECTURES ON
+  HAMLET, OTHELLO, KING LEAR, MACBETH
+
+  MACMILLAN & CO LTD.
+
+
+
+
+  OXFORD LECTURES
+  ON POETRY
+
+  BY
+
+  A. C. BRADLEY
+  LL.D., LITT.D.
+
+  FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
+  AND FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE
+
+
+  MACMILLAN
+
+  London . Melbourne . Toronto
+
+  ST MARTIN'S PRESS
+  New York
+  1965
+
+
+_This book is copyright in all countries which are signatories of the
+Berne Convention_
+
+First Edition, May 1909. Second Edition, November 1909 Reprinted 1911,
+1914, 1917, 1919, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1934, 1941, 1950, 1955, 1959, 1962,
+1963, 1965
+
+
+  MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED
+  _St Martin's Street London WC2
+  also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne_
+
+  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
+  _70 Bond Street Toronto 2_
+
+  ST MARTIN'S PRESS INC
+  _175 Fifth Avenue New York 10010 NY_
+
+
+  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+
+
+
+  TO
+  MY OXFORD FRIENDS
+  1869-1909
+
+_'They have seemed to be together, though absent, shook hands, as over a
+vast; and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds.'_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This volume consists of lectures delivered during my tenure of the Chair
+of Poetry at Oxford and not included in _Shakespearean Tragedy_. Most of
+them have been enlarged, and all have been revised. As they were given
+at intervals, and the majority before the publication of that book, they
+contained repetitions which I have not found it possible wholly to
+remove. Readers of a lecture published by the University of Manchester
+on _English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth_ will
+pardon also the restatement of some ideas expressed in it.
+
+The several lectures are dated, as I have been unable to take account of
+most of the literature on their subjects published since they were
+delivered.
+
+They are arranged in the order that seems best to me, but it is of
+importance only in the case of the four which deal with the poets of
+Wordsworth's time.
+
+I am indebted to the Delegates of the University Press, and to the
+proprietors and editors of the _Hibbert Journal_ and the _Albany_,
+_Fortnightly_, and _Quarterly Reviews_, respectively, for permission to
+republish the first, third, fifth, eighth, and ninth lectures. A like
+acknowledgment is due for leave to use some sentences of an article on
+Keats contributed to _Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature_
+(1903).
+
+In the revision of the proof-sheets I owed much help to a sister who has
+shared many of my Oxford friendships.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION
+
+
+This edition is substantially identical with the first; but it and its
+later impressions contain a few improvements in points of detail, and,
+thanks to criticisms by my brother, F. H. Bradley, I hope to have made
+my meaning clearer in some pages of the second lecture.
+
+There was an oversight in the first edition which I regret. In adding
+the note on p. 247 I forgot that I had not referred to Professor Dowden
+in the lecture on "Shakespeare the Man." In everything that I have
+written on Shakespeare I am indebted to Professor Dowden, and certainly
+not least in that lecture.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                         PAGE
+  POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE                  3
+
+  THE SUBLIME                              37
+
+  HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY                69
+
+  WORDSWORTH                               99
+
+  SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY                151
+
+  THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH  177
+
+  THE LETTERS OF KEATS                    209
+
+  THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF               247
+
+  SHAKESPEARE'S 'ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA'    279
+
+  SHAKESPEARE THE MAN                     311
+
+  SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE      361
+
+
+
+
+POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE
+
+
+POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE[1]
+
+(INAUGURAL LECTURE)
+
+
+One who, after twenty years, is restored to the University where he was
+taught and first tried to teach, and who has received at the hands of
+his Alma Mater an honour of which he never dreamed, is tempted to speak
+both of himself and of her. But I remember that you have come to listen
+to my thoughts about a great subject, and not to my feelings about
+myself; and of Oxford who that holds this Professorship could dare to
+speak, when he recalls the exquisite verse in which one of his
+predecessors described her beauty, and the prose in which he gently
+touched on her illusions and protested that they were as nothing when
+set against her age-long warfare with the Philistine? How, again,
+remembering him and others, should I venture to praise my predecessors?
+It would be pleasant to do so, and even pleasanter to me and you if,
+instead of lecturing, I quoted to you some of their best passages. But I
+could not do this for five years. Sooner or later, my own words would
+have to come, and the inevitable contrast. Not to sharpen it now, I
+will be silent concerning them also; and will only assure you that I do
+not forget them, or the greatness of the honour of succeeding them, or
+the responsibility which it entails.
+
+The words 'Poetry for poetry's sake' recall the famous phrase 'Art for
+Art.' It is far from my purpose to examine the possible meanings of that
+phrase, or all the questions it involves. I propose to state briefly
+what I understand by 'Poetry for poetry's sake,' and then, after
+guarding against one or two misapprehensions of the formula, to consider
+more fully a single problem connected with it. And I must premise,
+without attempting to justify them, certain explanations. We are to
+consider poetry in its essence, and apart from the flaws which in most
+poems accompany their poetry. We are to include in the idea of poetry
+the metrical form, and not to regard this as a mere accident or a mere
+vehicle. And, finally, poetry being poems, we are to think of a poem as
+it actually exists; and, without aiming here at accuracy, we may say
+that an actual poem is the succession of experiences--sounds, images,
+thoughts, emotions--through which we pass when we are reading as
+poetically as we can.[2] Of course this imaginative experience--if I may
+use the phrase for brevity--differs with every reader and every time of
+reading: a poem exists in innumerable degrees. But that insurmountable
+fact lies in the nature of things and does not concern us now.
+
+What then does the formula 'Poetry for poetry's sake' tell us about this
+experience? It says, as I understand it, these things. First, this
+experience is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, has
+an intrinsic value. Next, its _poetic_ value is this intrinsic worth
+alone. Poetry may have also an ulterior value as a means to culture or
+religion; because it conveys instruction, or softens the passions, or
+furthers a good cause; because it brings the poet fame or money or a
+quiet conscience. So much the better: let it be valued for these reasons
+too. But its ulterior worth neither is nor can directly determine its
+poetic worth as a satisfying imaginative experience; and this is to be
+judged entirely from within. And to these two positions the formula
+would add, though not of necessity, a third. The consideration of
+ulterior ends, whether by the poet in the act of composing or by the
+reader in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic value. It does
+so because it tends to change the nature of poetry by taking it out of
+its own atmosphere. For its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a copy,
+of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase), but to be a
+world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous; and to possess it
+fully you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore for the
+time the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in
+the other world of reality.
+
+Of the more serious misapprehensions to which these statements may give
+rise I will glance only at one or two. The offensive consequences often
+drawn from the formula 'Art for Art' will be found to attach not to the
+doctrine that Art is an end in itself, but to the doctrine that Art is
+the whole or supreme end of human life. And as this latter doctrine,
+which seems to me absurd, is in any case quite different from the
+former, its consequences fall outside my subject. The formula 'Poetry is
+an end in itself' has nothing to say on the various questions of moral
+judgment which arise from the fact that poetry has its place in a
+many-sided life. For anything it says, the intrinsic value of poetry
+might be so small, and its ulterior effects so mischievous, that it had
+better not exist. The formula only tells us that we must not place in
+antithesis poetry and human good, for poetry is one kind of human good;
+and that we must not determine the intrinsic value of this kind of good
+by direct reference to another. If we do, we shall find ourselves
+maintaining what we did not expect. If poetic value lies in the
+stimulation of religious feelings, _Lead, kindly Light_ is no better a
+poem than many a tasteless version of a Psalm: if in the excitement of
+patriotism, why is _Scots, wha hae_ superior to _We don't want to
+fight?_ if in the mitigation of the passions, the Odes of Sappho will
+win but little praise: if in instruction, Armstrong's _Art of preserving
+Health_ should win much.
+
+Again, our formula may be accused of cutting poetry away from its
+connection with life. And this accusation raises so huge a problem that
+I must ask leave to be dogmatic as well as brief. There is plenty of
+connection between life and poetry, but it is, so to say, a connection
+underground. The two may be called different forms of the same thing:
+one of them having (in the usual sense) reality, but seldom fully
+satisfying imagination; while the other offers something which satisfies
+imagination but has not full 'reality.' They are parallel developments
+which nowhere meet, or, if I may use loosely a word which will be
+serviceable later, they are analogues. Hence we understand one by help
+of the other, and even, in a sense, care for one because of the other;
+but hence also, poetry neither is life, nor, strictly speaking, a copy
+of it. They differ not only because one has more mass and the other a
+more perfect shape, but because they have different _kinds_ of
+existence. The one touches us as beings occupying a given position in
+space and time, and having feelings, desires, and purposes due to that
+position: it appeals to imagination, but appeals to much besides. What
+meets us in poetry has not a position in the same series of time and
+space, or, if it has or had such a position, it is taken apart from much
+that belonged to it there;[3] and therefore it makes no direct appeal
+to those feelings, desires, and purposes, but speaks only to
+contemplative imagination--imagination the reverse of empty or
+emotionless, imagination saturated with the results of 'real'
+experience, but still contemplative. Thus, no doubt, one main reason why
+poetry has poetic value for us is that it presents to us in its own way
+something which we meet in another form in nature or life; and yet the
+test of its poetic value for us lies simply in the question whether it
+satisfies our imagination; the rest of us, our knowledge or conscience,
+for example, judging it only so far as they appear transmuted in our
+imagination. So also Shakespeare's knowledge or his moral insight,
+Milton's greatness of soul, Shelley's 'hate of hate' and 'love of love,'
+and that desire to help men or make them happier which may have
+influenced a poet in hours of meditation--all these have, as such, no
+poetical worth: they have that worth only when, passing through the
+unity of the poet's being, they reappear as qualities of imagination,
+and then are indeed mighty powers in the world of poetry.
+
+I come to a third misapprehension, and so to my main subject. This
+formula, it is said, empties poetry of its meaning: it is really a
+doctrine of form for form's sake. 'It is of no consequence what a poet
+says, so long as he says the thing well. The _what_ is poetically
+indifferent: it is the _how_ that counts. Matter, subject, content,
+substance, determines nothing; there is no subject with which poetry may
+not deal: the form, the treatment, is everything. Nay, more: not only is
+the matter indifferent, but it is the secret of Art to "eradicate the
+matter by means of the form,"'--phrases and statements like these meet
+us everywhere in current criticism of literature and the other arts.
+They are the stock-in-trade of writers who understand of them little
+more than the fact that somehow or other they are not 'bourgeois.' But
+we find them also seriously used by writers whom we must respect,
+whether they are anonymous or not; something like one or another of them
+might be quoted, for example, from Professor Saintsbury, the late R. A.
+M. Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe himself; and they are the watchwords of a
+school in the one country where Aesthetics has flourished. They come, as
+a rule, from men who either practise one of the arts, or, from study of
+it, are interested in its methods. The general reader--a being so
+general that I may say what I will of him--is outraged by them. He feels
+that he is being robbed of almost all that he cares for in a work of
+art. 'You are asking me,' he says, 'to look at the Dresden Madonna as if
+it were a Persian rug. You are telling me that the poetic value of
+_Hamlet_ lies solely in its style and versification, and that my
+interest in the man and his fate is only an intellectual or moral
+interest. You allege that, if I want to enjoy the poetry of _Crossing
+the Bar_, I must not mind what Tennyson says there, but must consider
+solely his way of saying it. But in that case I can care no more for a
+poem than I do for a set of nonsense verses; and I do not believe that
+the authors of _Hamlet_ and _Crossing the Bar_ regarded their poems
+thus.'
+
+These antitheses of subject, matter, substance on the one side, form,
+treatment, handling on the other, are the field through which I
+especially want, in this lecture, to indicate a way. It is a field of
+battle; and the battle is waged for no trivial cause; but the cries of
+the combatants are terribly ambiguous. Those phrases of the so-called
+formalist may each mean five or six different things. Taken in one sense
+they seem to me chiefly true; taken as the general reader not
+unnaturally takes them, they seem to me false and mischievous. It would
+be absurd to pretend that I can end in a few minutes a controversy
+which concerns the ultimate nature of Art, and leads perhaps to problems
+not yet soluble; but we can at least draw some plain distinctions which,
+in this controversy, are too often confused.
+
+In the first place, then, let us take 'subject' in one particular sense;
+let us understand by it that which we have in view when, looking at the
+title of an un-read poem, we say that the poet has chosen this or that
+for his subject. The subject, in this sense, so far as I can discover,
+is generally something, real or imaginary, as it exists in the minds of
+fairly cultivated people. The subject of _Paradise Lost_ would be the
+story of the Fall as that story exists in the general imagination of a
+Bible-reading people. The subject of Shelley's stanzas _To a Skylark_
+would be the ideas which arise in the mind of an educated person when,
+without knowing the poem, he hears the word 'skylark'. If the title of a
+poem conveys little or nothing to us, the 'subject' appears to be either
+what we should gather by investigating the title in a dictionary or
+other book of the kind, or else such a brief suggestion as might be
+offered by a person who had read the poem, and who said, for example,
+that the subject of _The Ancient Mariner_ was a sailor who killed an
+albatross and suffered for his deed.
+
+Now the subject, in this sense (and I intend to use the word in no
+other), is not, as such, inside the poem, but outside it. The contents
+of the stanzas _To a Skylark_ are not the ideas suggested by the work
+'skylark' to the average man; they belong to Shelley just as much as the
+language does. The subject, therefore, is not the matter _of_ the poem
+at all; and its opposite is not the _form_ of the poem, but the whole
+poem. The subject is one thing; the poem, matter and form alike, another
+thing. This being so, it is surely obvious that the poetic value cannot
+lie in the subject, but lies entirely in its opposite, the poem. How
+can the subject determine the value when on one and the same subject
+poems may be written of all degrees of merit and demerit; or when a
+perfect poem may be composed on a subject so slight as a pet sparrow,
+and, if Macaulay may be trusted, a nearly worthless poem on a subject so
+stupendous as the omnipresence of the Deity? The 'formalist' is here
+perfectly right. Nor is he insisting on something unimportant. He is
+fighting against our tendency to take the work of art as a mere copy or
+reminder of something already in our heads, or at the best as a
+suggestion of some idea as little removed as possible from the familiar.
+The sightseer who promenades a picture-gallery, remarking that this
+portrait is so like his cousin, or that landscape the very image of his
+birthplace, or who, after satisfying himself that one picture is about
+Elijah, passes on rejoicing to discover the subject, and nothing but the
+subject, of the next--what is he but an extreme example of this
+tendency? Well, but the very same tendency vitiates much of our
+criticism, much criticism of Shakespeare, for example, which, with all
+its cleverness and partial truth, still shows that the critic never
+passed from his own mind into Shakespeare's; and it may be traced even
+in so fine a critic as Coleridge, as when he dwarfs the sublime struggle
+of Hamlet into the image of his own unhappy weakness. Hazlitt by no
+means escaped its influence. Only the third of that great trio, Lamb,
+appears almost always to have rendered the conception of the composer.
+
+Again, it is surely true that we cannot determine beforehand what
+subjects are fit for Art, or name any subject on which a good poem might
+not possibly be written. To divide subjects into two groups, the
+beautiful or elevating, and the ugly or vicious, and to judge poems
+according as their subjects belong to one of these groups or the other,
+is to fall into the same pit, to confuse with our pre-conceptions the
+meaning of the poet. What the thing is in the poem he is to be judged
+by, not by the thing as it was before he touched it; and how can we
+venture to say beforehand that he cannot make a true poem out of
+something which to us was merely alluring or dull or revolting? The
+question whether, having done so, he ought to publish his poem; whether
+the thing in the poet's work will not be still confused by the
+incompetent Puritan or the incompetent sensualist with the thing in
+_his_ mind, does not touch this point: it is a further question, one of
+ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders of 'Art for art's sake' will
+generally be in favour of the courageous course, of refusing to
+sacrifice the better or stronger part of the public to the weaker or
+worse; but their maxim in no way binds them to this view. Rossetti
+suppressed one of the best of his sonnets, a sonnet chosen for
+admiration by Tennyson, himself extremely sensitive about the moral
+effect of poetry; suppressed it, I believe, because it was called
+fleshly. One may regret Rossetti's judgment and at the same time respect
+his scrupulousness; but in any case he judged in his capacity of
+citizen, not in his capacity of artist.
+
+So far then the 'formalist' appears to be right. But he goes too far, I
+think, if he maintains that the subject is indifferent and that all
+subjects are the same to poetry. And he does not prove his point by
+observing that a good poem might be written on a pin's head, and a bad
+one on the Fall of Man. That truth shows that the subject _settles_
+nothing, but not that it counts for nothing. The Fall of Man is really a
+more favourable subject than a pin's head. The Fall of Man, that is to
+say, offers opportunities of poetic effects wider in range and more
+penetrating in appeal. And the fact is that such a subject, as it exists
+in the general imagination, has some aesthetic value before the poet
+touches it. It is, as you may choose to call it, an inchoate poem or
+the debris of a poem. It is not an abstract idea or a bare isolated
+fact, but an assemblage of figures, scenes, actions, and events, which
+already appeal to emotional imagination; and it is already in some
+degree organized and formed. In spite of this a bad poet would make a
+bad poem on it; but then we should say he was unworthy of the subject.
+And we should not say this if he wrote a bad poem on a pin's head.
+Conversely, a good poem on a pin's head would almost certainly transform
+its subject far more than a good poem on the Fall of Man. It might
+revolutionize its subject so completely that we should say, 'The subject
+may be a pin's head, but the substance of the poem has very little to do
+with it.'
+
+This brings us to another and a different antithesis. Those figures,
+scenes, events, that form part of the subject called the Fall of Man,
+are not the substance of _Paradise Lost_; but in _Paradise Lost_ there
+are figures, scenes, and events resembling them in some degree. These,
+with much more of the same kind, may be described as its substance, and
+may then be contrasted with the measured language of the poem, which
+will be called its form. Subject is the opposite not of form but of the
+whole poem. Substance is within the poem, and its opposite, form, is
+also within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis at present,
+but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically
+the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama,
+and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example,
+in examining _Paradise Lost_ considers in order the fable, the
+characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he
+considers the language, that is, the style and numbers; this will be the
+form. In like manner, the substance or meaning of a lyric may be
+distinguished from the form.
+
+Now I believe it will be found that a large part of the controversy we
+are dealing with arises from a confusion between these two distinctions
+of substance and form, and of subject and poem. The extreme formalist
+lays his whole weight on the form because he thinks its opposite is the
+mere subject. The general reader is angry, but makes the same mistake,
+and gives to the subject praises that rightly belong to the
+substance[4]. I will read an example of what I mean. I can only explain
+the following words of a good critic by supposing that for the moment he
+has fallen into this confusion: 'The mere matter of all poetry--to wit,
+the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men--being
+unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will
+depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme,
+cadence, and what not, to this invariable material.' What has become
+here of the substance of _Paradise Lost_--the story, scenery,
+characters, sentiments, as they are in the poem? They have vanished
+clean away. Nothing is left but the form on one side, and on the other
+not even the subject, but a supposed invariable material, the
+appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men. Is it
+surprising that the whole value should then be found in the form?
+
+So far we have assumed that this antithesis of substance and form is
+valid, and that it always has one meaning. In reality it has several,
+but we will leave it in its present shape, and pass to the question of
+its validity. And this question we are compelled to raise, because we
+have to deal with the two contentions that the poetic value lies wholly
+or mainly in the substance, and that it lies wholly or mainly in the
+form. Now these contentions, whether false or true, may seem at least to
+be clear; but we shall find, I think, that they are both of them false,
+or both of them nonsense: false if they concern anything outside the
+poem, nonsense if they apply to something in it. For what do they
+evidently imply? They imply that there are in a poem two parts, factors,
+or components, a substance and a form; and that you can conceive them
+distinctly and separately, so that when you are speaking of the one you
+are not speaking of the other. Otherwise how can you ask the question,
+In which of them does the value lie? But really in a poem, apart from
+defects, there are no such factors or components; and therefore it is
+strictly nonsense to ask in which of them the value lies. And on the
+other hand, if the substance and the form referred to are not in the
+poem, then both the contentions are false, for its poetic value lies in
+itself.
+
+What I mean is neither new nor mysterious; and it will be clear, I
+believe, to any one who reads poetry poetically and who closely examines
+his experience. When you are reading a poem, I would ask--not analysing
+it, and much less criticizing it, but allowing it, as it proceeds, to
+make its full impression on you through the exertion of your recreating
+imagination--do you then apprehend and enjoy as one thing a certain
+meaning or substance, and as another thing certain articulate sounds,
+and do you somehow compound these two? Surely you do not, any more than
+you apprehend apart, when you see some one smile, those lines in the
+face which express a feeling, and the feeling that the lines express.
+Just as there the lines and their meaning are to you one thing, not two,
+so in poetry the meaning and the sounds are one: there is, if I may put
+it so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance. If you read the line,
+'The sun is warm, the sky is clear,' you do not experience separately
+the image of a warm sun and clear sky, on the one side, and certain
+unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the other; nor yet do you experience
+them together, side by side; but you experience the one _in_ the other.
+And in like manner, when you are really reading _Hamlet_, the action and
+the characters are not something which you conceive apart from the
+words; you apprehend them from point to point _in_ the words, and the
+words as expressions of them. Afterwards, no doubt, when you are out of
+the poetic experience but remember it, you may by analysis decompose
+this unity, and attend to a substance more or less isolated, and a form
+more or less isolated. But these are things in your analytic head, not
+in the poem, which is _poetic_ experience. And if you want to have the
+poem again, you cannot find it by adding together these two products of
+decomposition; you can only find it by passing back into poetic
+experience. And then what you recover is no aggregate of factors, it is
+a unity in which you can no more separate a substance and a form than
+you can separate living blood and the life in the blood. This unity has,
+if you like, various 'aspects' or 'sides,' but they are not factors or
+parts; if you try to examine one, you find it is also the other. Call
+them substance and form if you please, but these are not the
+reciprocally exclusive substance and form to which the two contentions
+_must_ refer. They do not 'agree,' for they are not apart: they are one
+thing from different points of view, and in that sense identical. And
+this identity of content and form, you will say, is no accident; it is
+of the essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry, and of all art in so
+far as it is art. Just as there is in music not sound on one side and a
+meaning on the other, but expressive sound, and if you ask what is the
+meaning you can only answer by pointing to the sounds; just as in
+painting there is not a meaning _plus_ paint, but a meaning _in_ paint,
+or significant paint, and no man can really express the meaning in any
+other way than in paint and in _this_ paint; so in a poem the true
+content and the true form neither exist nor can be imagined apart. When
+then you are asked whether the value of a poem lies in a substance got
+by decomposing the poem, and present, as such, only in reflective
+analysis, or whether the value lies in a form arrived at and existing in
+the same way, you will answer, 'It lies neither in one, nor in the
+other, nor in any addition of them, but in the poem, where they are
+not.'
+
+We have then, first, an antithesis of subject and poem. This is clear
+and valid; and the question in which of them does the value lie is
+intelligible; and its answer is, In the poem. We have next a distinction
+of substance and form. If the substance means ideas, images, and the
+like taken alone, and the form means the measured language taken by
+itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of
+things not in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them. If
+substance and form mean anything _in_ the poem, then each is involved in
+the other, and the question in which of them the value lies has no
+sense. No doubt you may say, speaking loosely, that in this poet or poem
+the aspect of substance is the more noticeable, and in that the aspect
+of form; and you may pursue interesting discussions on this basis,
+though no principle or ultimate question of value is touched by them.
+And apart from that question, of course, I am not denying the usefulness
+and necessity of the distinction. We cannot dispense with it. To
+consider separately the action or the characters of a play, and
+separately its style or versification, is both legitimate and valuable,
+so long as we remember what we are doing. But the true critic in
+speaking of these apart does not really think of them apart; the whole,
+the poetic experience, of which they are but aspects, is always in his
+mind; and he is always aiming at a richer, truer, more intense
+repetition of that experience. On the other hand, when the question of
+principle, of poetic value, is raised, these aspects _must_ fall apart
+into components, separately conceivable; and then there arise two
+heresies, equally false, that the value lies in one of two things, both
+of which are outside the poem, and therefore where its value cannot lie.
+
+On the heresy of the separable substance a few additional words will
+suffice. This heresy is seldom formulated, but perhaps some unconscious
+holder of it may object: 'Surely the action and the characters of
+_Hamlet_ are in the play; and surely I can retain these, though I have
+forgotten all the words. I admit that I do not possess the whole poem,
+but I possess a part, and the most important part.' And I would answer:
+'If we are not concerned with any question of principle, I accept all
+that you say except the last words, which do raise such a question.
+Speaking loosely, I agree that the action and characters, as you perhaps
+conceive them, together with a great deal more, are in the poem. Even
+then, however, you must not claim to possess all of this kind that is in
+the poem; for in forgetting the words you must have lost innumerable
+details of the action and the characters. And, when the question of
+value is raised, I must insist that the action and characters, as you
+conceive them, are not in _Hamlet_ at all. If they are, point them out.
+You cannot do it. What you find at any moment of that succession of
+experiences called _Hamlet_ is words. In these words, to speak loosely
+again, the action and characters (more of them than you can conceive
+apart) are focussed; but your experience is not a combination of them,
+as ideas, on the one side, with certain sounds on the other; it is an
+experience of something in which the two are indissolubly fused. If you
+deny this, to be sure I can make no answer, or can only answer that I
+have reason to believe that you cannot read poetically, or else are
+misinterpreting your experience. But if you do not deny this, then you
+will admit that the action and characters of the poem, as you separately
+imagine them, are no part of it, but a product of it in your reflective
+imagination, a faint analogue of one aspect of it taken in detachment
+from the whole. Well, I do not dispute, I would even insist, that, in
+the case of so long a poem as _Hamlet_, it may be necessary from time to
+time to interrupt the poetic experience, in order to enrich it by
+forming such a product and dwelling on it. Nor, in a wide sense of
+"poetic," do I question the poetic value of this product, as you think
+of it apart from the poem. It resembles our recollections of the heroes
+of history or legend, who move about in our imaginations, "forms more
+real than living man," and are worth much to us though we do not
+remember anything they said. Our ideas and images of the "substance" of
+a poem have this poetic value, and more, if they are at all adequate.
+But they cannot determine the poetic value of the poem, for (not to
+speak of the competing claims of the "form") nothing that is outside the
+poem can do that, and they, as such, are outside it.'[5]
+
+Let us turn to the so-called form--style and versification. There is no
+such thing as mere form in poetry. All form is expression. Style may
+have indeed a certain aesthetic worth in partial abstraction from the
+particular matter it conveys, as in a well-built sentence you may take
+pleasure in the build almost apart from the meaning. Even so, style is
+expressive--presents to sense, for example, the order, ease, and
+rapidity with which ideas move in the writer's mind--but it is not
+expressive of the meaning of that particular sentence. And it is
+possible, interrupting poetic experience, to decompose it and abstract
+for comparatively separate consideration this nearly formal element of
+style. But the aesthetic value of style so taken is not considerable;[6]
+you could not read with pleasure for an hour a composition which had no
+other merit. And in poetic experience you never apprehend this value by
+itself; the style is here expressive also of a particular meaning, or
+rather is one aspect of that unity whose other aspect is meaning. So
+that what you apprehend may be called indifferently an expressed meaning
+or a significant form. Perhaps on this point I may in Oxford appeal to
+authority, that of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, the latter at any
+rate an authority whom the formalist will not despise. What is the gist
+of Pater's teaching about style, if it is not that in the end the one
+virtue of style is truth or adequacy; that the word, phrase, sentence,
+should express perfectly the writer's perception, feeling, image, or
+thought; so that, as we read a descriptive phrase of Keats's, we
+exclaim, 'That is the thing itself'; so that, to quote Arnold, the words
+are 'symbols equivalent with the thing symbolized,' or, in our technical
+language, a form identical with its content? Hence in true poetry it is,
+in strictness, impossible to express the meaning in any but its own
+words, or to change the words without changing the meaning. A
+translation of such poetry is not really the old meaning in a fresh
+dress; it is a new product, something like the poem, though, if one
+chooses to say so, more like it in the aspect of meaning than in the
+aspect of form.
+
+No one who understands poetry, it seems to me, would dispute this, were
+it not that, falling away from his experience, or misled by theory, he
+takes the word 'meaning' in a sense almost ludicrously inapplicable to
+poetry. People say, for instance, 'steed' and 'horse' have the same
+meaning; and in bad poetry they have, but not in poetry that _is_
+poetry.
+
+  'Bring forth the horse!' The horse was brought:
+  In truth he was a noble steed!
+
+says Byron in _Mazeppa_. If the two words mean the same here, transpose
+them:
+
+  'Bring forth the steed!' The steed was brought:
+  In truth he was a noble horse!
+
+and ask again if they mean the same. Or let me take a line certainly
+very free from 'poetic diction':
+
+  To be or not to be, that is the question.
+
+You may say that this means the same as 'What is just now occupying my
+attention is the comparative disadvantages of continuing to live or
+putting an end to myself.' And for practical purposes--the purpose, for
+example, of a coroner--it does. But as the second version altogether
+misrepresents the speaker at that moment of his existence, while the
+first does represent him, how can they for any but a practical or
+logical purpose be said to have the same sense? Hamlet was well able to
+'unpack his heart with words,' but he will not unpack it with our
+paraphrases.
+
+These considerations apply equally to versification. If I take the
+famous line which describes how the souls of the dead stood waiting by
+the river, imploring a passage from Charon:
+
+  Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore;
+
+and if I translate it, 'and were stretching forth their hands in longing
+for the further bank,' the charm of the original has fled. Why has it
+fled? Partly (but we have dealt with that) because I have substituted
+for five words, and those the words of Virgil, twelve words, and those
+my own. In some measure because I have turned into rhythmless prose a
+line of verse which, as mere sound, has unusual beauty. But much more
+because in doing so I have also changed the _meaning_ of Virgil's line.
+What that meaning is _I_ cannot say: Virgil has said it. But I can see
+this much, that the translation conveys a far less vivid picture of the
+outstretched hands and of their remaining outstretched, and a far less
+poignant sense of the distance of the shore and the longing of the
+souls. And it does so partly because this picture and this sense are
+conveyed not only by the obvious meaning of the words, but through the
+long-drawn sound of 'tendebantque,' through the time occupied by the
+five syllables and therefore by the idea of 'ulterioris,' and through
+the identity of the long sound 'or' in the penultimate syllables of
+'ulterioris amore'--all this, and much more, apprehended not in this
+analytical fashion, nor as _added_ to the beauty of mere sound and to
+the obvious meaning, but in unity with them and so as expressive of the
+poetic meaning of the whole.
+
+It is always so in fine poetry. The value of versification, when it is
+indissolubly fused with meaning, can hardly be exaggerated. The gift for
+feeling it, even more perhaps than the gift for feeling the value of
+style, is the _specific_ gift for poetry, as distinguished from other
+arts. But versification, taken, as far as possible, all by itself, has a
+very different worth. Some aesthetic worth it has; how much, you may
+experience by reading poetry in a language of which you do not
+understand a syllable.[7] The pleasure is quite appreciable, but it is
+not great; nor in actual poetic experience do you meet with it, as such,
+at all. For, I repeat, it is not _added_ to the pleasure of the meaning
+when you read poetry that you do understand: by some mystery the music
+is then the music _of_ the meaning, and the two are one. However fond
+of versification you might be, you would tire very soon of reading
+verses in Chinese; and before long of reading Virgil and Dante if you
+were ignorant of their languages. But take the music as it is _in_ the
+poem, and there is a marvellous change. Now
+
+  It gives a very echo to the seat
+  Where love is throned;
+
+or 'carries far into your heart,' almost like music itself, the sound
+
+  Of old, unhappy, far-off things
+      And battles long ago.
+
+What then is to be said of the following sentence of the critic quoted
+before: 'But when any one who knows what poetry is reads--
+
+  Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+  Of the eternal silence,
+
+he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, ... there is one note
+added to the articulate music of the world--a note that never will leave
+off resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it' must think that
+the writer is deceiving himself. For I could quite understand his
+enthusiasm, if it were an enthusiasm for the music of the meaning; but
+as for the music, 'quite independently of the meaning,' so far as I can
+hear it thus (and I doubt if any one who knows English can quite do so),
+I find it gives some pleasure, but only a trifling pleasure. And indeed
+I venture to doubt whether, considered as mere sound, the words are at
+all exceptionally beautiful, as Virgil's line certainly is.
+
+When poetry answers to its idea and is purely or almost purely poetic,
+we find the identity of form and content; and the degree of purity
+attained may be tested by the degree in which we feel it hopeless to
+convey the effect of a poem or passage in any form but its own. Where
+the notion of doing so is simply ludicrous, you have quintessential
+poetry. But a great part even of good poetry, especially in long works,
+is of a mixed nature; and so we find in it no more than a partial
+agreement of a form and substance which remain to some extent distinct.
+This is so in many passages of Shakespeare (the greatest of poets when
+he chose, but not always a conscientious poet); passages where something
+was wanted for the sake of the plot, but he did not care about it or was
+hurried. The conception of the passage is then distinct from the
+execution, and neither is inspired. This is so also, I think, wherever
+we can truly speak of merely decorative effect. We seem to perceive that
+the poet had a truth or fact--philosophical, agricultural,
+social--distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in
+metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative, didactic, or satiric
+poems are partly of this kind; and in imaginative poems anything which
+is really a mere 'conceit' is mere decoration. We often deceive
+ourselves in this matter, for what we call decoration has often a new
+and genuinely poetic content of its own; but wherever there is mere
+decoration, we judge the poetry to be not wholly poetic. And so when
+Wordsworth inveighed against poetic diction, though he hurled his darts
+rather wildly, what he was rightly aiming at was a phraseology, not the
+living body of a new content, but the mere worn-out body of an old
+one.[8]
+
+In pure poetry it is otherwise. Pure poetry is not the decoration of a
+preconceived and clearly defined matter: it springs from the creative
+impulse of a vague imaginative mass pressing for development and
+definition. If the poet already knew exactly what he meant to say, why
+should he write the poem? The poem would in fact already be written. For
+only its completion can reveal, even to him, exactly what he wanted.
+When he began and while he was at work, he did not possess his meaning;
+it possessed him. It was not a fully formed soul asking for a body: it
+was an inchoate soul in the inchoate body of perhaps two or three vague
+ideas and a few scattered phrases. The growing of this body into its
+full stature and perfect shape was the same thing as the gradual
+self-definition of the meaning.[9] And this is the reason why such poems
+strike us as creations, not manufactures, and have the magical effect
+which mere decoration cannot produce. This is also the reason why, if we
+insist on asking for the meaning of such a poem, we can only be answered
+'It means itself.'
+
+And so at last I may explain why I have troubled myself and you with
+what may seem an arid controversy about mere words. It is not so. These
+heresies which would make poetry a compound of two factors--a matter
+common to it with the merest prose, _plus_ a poetic form, as the one
+heresy says: a poetical substance _plus_ a negligible form, as the other
+says--are not only untrue, they are injurious to the dignity of poetry.
+In an age already inclined to shrink from those higher realms where
+poetry touches religion and philosophy, the formalist heresy encourages
+men to taste poetry as they would a fine wine, which has indeed an
+aesthetic value, but a small one. And then the natural man, finding an
+empty form, hurls into it the matter of cheap pathos, rancid sentiment,
+vulgar humour, bare lust, ravenous vanity--everything which, in
+Schiller's phrase,[10] the form should extirpate, but which no mere form
+can extirpate. And the other heresy--which is indeed rather a practice
+than a creed--encourages us in the habit so dear to us of putting our
+own thoughts or fancies into the place of the poet's creation. What he
+meant by _Hamlet_, or the _Ode to a Nightingale_, or _Abt Vogler_, we
+say, is this or that which we knew already; and so we lose what he had
+to tell us. But he meant what he said, and said what he meant.
+
+Poetry in this matter is not, as good critics of painting and music
+often affirm, different from the other arts; in all of them the content
+is one thing with the form. What Beethoven meant by his symphony, or
+Turner by his picture, was not something which you can name, but the
+picture and the symphony. Meaning they have, but _what_ meaning can be
+said in no language but their own: and we know this, though some strange
+delusion makes us think the meaning has less worth because we cannot put
+it into words. Well, it is just the same with poetry. But because poetry
+is words, we vainly fancy that some other words than its own will
+express its meaning. And they will do so no more--or, if you like to
+speak loosely, only a trifle more--than words will express the meaning
+of the Dresden Madonna.[11] Something a little like it they may indeed
+express. And we may find analogues of the meaning of poetry outside it,
+which may help us to appropriate it. The other arts, the best ideas of
+philosophy or religion, much that nature and life offer us or force upon
+us, are akin to it. But they are only akin. Nor is it the expression of
+them. Poetry does not present to imagination our highest knowledge or
+belief, and much less our dreams and opinions; but it, content and form
+in unity, embodies in its own irreplaceable way something which embodies
+itself also in other irreplaceable ways, such as philosophy or religion.
+And just as each of these gives a satisfaction which the other cannot
+possibly give, so we find in poetry, which cannot satisfy the needs they
+meet, that which by their natures they cannot afford us. But we shall
+not find it fully if we look for something else.
+
+And now, when all is said, the question will still recur, though now in
+quite another sense, What does poetry mean?[12] This unique expression,
+which cannot be replaced by any other, still seems to be trying to
+express something beyond itself. And this, we feel, is also what the
+other arts, and religion, and philosophy are trying to express: and that
+is what impels us to seek in vain to translate the one into the other.
+About the best poetry, and not only the best, there floats an atmosphere
+of infinite suggestion. The poet speaks to us of one thing, but in this
+one thing there seems to lurk the secret of all. He said what he meant,
+but his meaning seems to beckon away beyond itself, or rather to expand
+into something boundless which is only focussed in it; something also
+which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination, but the whole of
+us; that something within us, and without, which everywhere
+
+                  makes us seem
+  To patch up fragments of a dream,
+  Part of which comes true, and part
+  Beats and trembles in the heart.
+
+Those who are susceptible to this effect of poetry find it not only,
+perhaps not most, in the ideals which she has sometimes described, but
+in a child's song by Christina Rossetti about a mere crown of
+wind-flowers, and in tragedies like _Lear_, where the sun seems to have
+set for ever. They hear this spirit murmuring its undertone through the
+_Aeneid_, and catch its voice in the song of Keats's nightingale, and
+its light upon the figures on the Urn, and it pierces them no less in
+Shelley's hopeless lament, _O world, O life, O time_, than in the
+rapturous ecstasy of his _Life of Life_. This all-embracing perfection
+cannot be expressed in poetic words or words of any kind, nor yet in
+music or in colour, but the suggestion of it is in much poetry, if not
+all, and poetry has in this suggestion, this 'meaning,' a great part of
+its value. We do it wrong, and we defeat our own purposes, when we try
+to bend it to them:
+
+  We do it wrong, being so majestical,
+  To offer it the show of violence;
+  For it is as the air invulnerable,
+  And our vain blows malicious mockery.
+
+It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our
+bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our
+master.
+
+1901
+
+
+  NOTE A
+
+The purpose of this sentence was not, as has been supposed, to give a
+definition of poetry. To define poetry as something that goes on in us
+when we read poetically would be absurd indeed. My object was to suggest
+to my hearers in passing that it is futile to ask questions about the
+end, or substance, or form of poetry, if we forget that a poem is
+neither a mere number of black marks on a white page, nor such
+experience as is evoked in us when we read these marks as we read, let
+us say, a newspaper article; and I suppose my hearers to know,
+sufficiently for the purpose of the lecture, how that sort of reading
+differs from poetical reading.
+
+The truths thus suggested are so obvious, when stated, that I thought a
+bare reminder of them would be enough. But in fact the mistakes we make
+about 'subject,' 'substance,' 'form,' and the like, are due not solely
+to misapprehension of our poetic experience, but to our examining what
+is not this experience. The whole lecture may be called an expansion of
+this statement.
+
+The passage to which the present note refers raises difficult questions
+which any attempt at a 'Poetics' ought to discuss. I will mention three.
+(1) If the experience called a poem varies 'with every reader and every
+time of reading' and 'exists in innumerable degrees,' what is the poem
+itself, if there is such a thing? (2) How does a series of successive
+experiences form _one_ poem? (3) If the object in the case of poetry and
+music ('arts of hearing') is a succession somehow and to some extent
+unified, how does it differ in this respect from the object in 'arts of
+sight'--a building, a statue, a picture?
+
+
+  NOTE B
+
+A lyric, for example, may arise from 'real' emotions due to transitory
+conditions peculiar to the poet. But these emotions and conditions,
+however interesting biographically, are poetically irrelevant. The poem,
+what the poet _says_, is universal, and is appropriated by people who
+live centuries after him and perhaps know nothing of him and his life;
+and if it arose from mere imagination it is none the worse (or the
+better) for that. So far as it cannot be appropriated without a
+knowledge of the circumstances in which it arose, it is probably, so
+far, faulty (probably, because the difficulty _may_ come from our
+distance from the whole mental world of the poet's time and country).
+
+What is said in the text applies equally to all the arts. It applies
+also to such aesthetic apprehension as does not issue in a work of art.
+And it applies to this apprehension whether the object belongs to
+'Nature' or to 'Man.' A beautiful landscape is not a 'real' landscape.
+Much that belongs to the 'real' landscape is ignored when it is
+apprehended aesthetically; and the painter only carries this unconscious
+idealisation further when he deliberately alters the 'real' landscape in
+further ways.
+
+All this does not in the least imply that the 'real' thing, where there
+is one (personal emotion, landscape, historical event, etc.), is of
+small importance to the aesthetic apprehension or the work of art. But
+it is relevant only as it appears _in_ that apprehension or work.
+
+If an artist alters a reality (_e.g._ a well-known scene or historical
+character) so much that his product clashes violently with our familiar
+ideas, he may be making a mistake: not because his product is untrue to
+the reality (this by itself is perfectly irrelevant), but because the
+'untruth' may make it difficult or impossible for others to appropriate
+his product, or because this product may be aesthetically inferior to
+the reality even as it exists in the general imagination.
+
+
+  NOTE C
+
+For the purpose of the experiment you must, of course, know the sounds
+denoted by the letters, and you must be able to make out the rhythmical
+scheme. But the experiment will be vitiated if you get some one who
+understands the language to read or recite to you poems written in it,
+for he will certainly so read or recite as to convey to you something of
+the meaning through the sound (I do not refer of course to the logical
+meaning).
+
+Hence it is clear that, if by 'versification taken by itself' one means
+the versification of a _poem_, it is impossible under the requisite
+conditions to get at this versification by itself. The versification of
+a poem is always, to speak loosely, influenced by the sense. The bare
+metrical scheme, to go no further, is practically never followed by the
+poet. Suppose yourself to know no English, and to perceive merely that
+in its general scheme
+
+  It gives a very echo to the seat
+
+is an iambic line of five feet; and then read the line as you would have
+to read it; and then ask if _that_ noise is the sound of the line _in
+the poem_.
+
+In the text, therefore, more is admitted than in strictness should be
+admitted. For I have assumed for the moment that you can hear the sound
+of poetry if you read poetry which you do not in the least understand,
+whereas in fact that sound cannot be produced at all except by a person
+who knows something of the meaning.
+
+
+  NOTE D
+
+This paragraph has not, to my knowledge, been adversely criticised, but
+it now appears to me seriously misleading. It refers to certain kinds of
+poetry, and again to certain passages in poems, which we feel to be less
+poetical than some other kinds or passages. But this difference of
+degree in poeticalness (if I may use the word) is put as a difference
+between 'mixed' and 'pure' poetry; and that distinction is, I think,
+unreal and mischievous. Further, it is implied that in less poetical
+poetry there necessarily is only a partial unity of content and form.
+This (unless I am now mistaken) is a mistake, and a mistake due to
+failure to hold fast the main idea of the lecture. Naturally it would be
+most agreeable to me to re-write the paragraph, but if I reprint it and
+expose my errors the reader will perhaps be helped to a firmer grasp of
+that idea.
+
+It is true that where poetry is most poetic we feel most decidedly how
+impossible it is to separate content and form. But where poetry is less
+poetic and does not make us feel this unity so decidedly, it does not
+follow that the unity is imperfect. Failure or partial failure in this
+unity is always (as in the case of Shakespeare referred to) a failure on
+the part of the _poet_ (though it is not always due to the same causes).
+It does not lie of necessity in the nature of a particular kind of
+poetry (_e.g._ satire) or in the nature of a particular passage. All
+poetry cannot be equally poetic, but _all_ poetry ought to maintain the
+unity of content and form, and, in that sense, to be 'pure.' Only in
+certain kinds, and in certain passages, it is more difficult for the
+poet to maintain it than in others.
+
+Let us take first the 'passages' and suppose them to occur in one of the
+more poetic kinds of poetry. In certain parts of any epic or tragedy
+matter has to be treated which, though necessary to the whole, is not in
+itself favourable to poetry, or would not in itself be a good 'subject.'
+But it is the business of the poet to do his best to make this matter
+poetry, and pure poetry. And, if he succeeds, the passage, though it
+will probably be less poetic than the bulk of the poem, will exhibit the
+complete unity of content and form. It will not strike us as a mere
+bridge between other passages; it will be enjoyable for itself; and it
+will not occur to us to think that the poet was dealing with an
+un-poetic 'matter' and found his task difficult or irksome. Shakespeare
+frequently does not trouble himself to face this problem and leaves an
+imperfect unity. The conscientious artists, like Virgil, Milton,
+Tennyson, habitually face, it and frequently solve it.[13] And when they
+wholly or partially fail, the fault is still _theirs_. It is, in one
+sense, due to the 'matter,' which set a hard problem; but they would be
+the first to declare that _nothing_ in the poem ought to be only mixedly
+poetic.
+
+In the same way, satire is not in its nature a highly poetic kind of
+poetry, but it ought, in its own kind, to be poetry throughout, and
+therefore ought not to show a merely partial unity of content and form.
+If the satirist makes us exclaim 'This is sheer prose wonderfully well
+disguised,' that is a fault, and _his_ fault (unless it happens to be
+ours). The idea that a tragedy or lyric could really be reproduced in a
+form not its own strikes us as ridiculous; the idea that a satire could
+so be reproduced seems much less ridiculous; but if it were true the
+satire would not be poetry at all.
+
+The reader will now see where, in my judgment, the paragraph is wrong.
+Elsewhere it is, I think, right, though it deals with a subject far too
+large for a paragraph. This is also true of the next paragraph, which
+uses the false distinction of 'pure' and 'mixed,' and which will hold in
+various degrees of poetry in various degrees poetical.
+
+It is of course possible to use a distinction of 'pure' and 'mixed' in
+another sense. Poetry, whatever its kind, would be pure as far as it
+preserved the unity of content and form; mixed, so far as it failed to
+do so--in other words, failed to be poetry and was partly prosaic.
+
+
+  NOTE E
+
+It is possible therefore that the poem, as it existed at certain stages
+in its growth, may correspond roughly with the poem as it exists in the
+memories of various readers. A reader who is fond of the poem and often
+thinks of it, but remembers only half the words and perhaps fills up the
+gaps with his own words, may possess something like the poem as it was
+when half-made. There are readers again who retain only what they would
+call the 'idea' of the poem; and the poem _may_ have begun from such an
+idea. Others will forget all the words, and will not profess to remember
+even the 'meaning,' but believe that they possess the 'spirit' of the
+poem. And what they possess may have, I think, an immense value. The
+poem, of course, it is not; but it may answer to the state of
+imaginative feeling or emotional imagination which was the germ of the
+poem. This is, in one sense, quite definite: it would not be the germ of
+a decidedly different poem: but in another sense it is indefinite,
+comparatively structureless, more a 'stimmung' than an idea.
+
+Such correspondences, naturally, must be very rough, if only because the
+readers have been at one time in contact with the fully grown poem.
+
+
+  NOTE F
+
+I should be sorry if what is said here and elsewhere were taken to imply
+depreciation of all attempts at the interpretation of works of art. As
+regards poetry, such attempts, though they cannot possibly express the
+whole meaning of a poem, may do much to facilitate the poetic
+apprehension of that meaning. And, although the attempt is still more
+hazardous in the case of music and painting, I believe it may have a
+similar value. That its results _may_ be absurd or disgusting goes
+without saying, and whether they are ever of use to musicians or the
+musically educated I do not know. But I see no reason why an exceedingly
+competent person should not try to indicate the emotional tone of a
+composition, movement, or passage, or the changes of feeling within it,
+or even, very roughly, the 'idea' he may suppose it to embody (though he
+need not imply that the composer had any of this before his mind). And I
+believe that such indications, however inadequate they must be, may
+greatly help the uneducated lover of music to hear more truly the music
+itself.
+
+
+  NOTE G
+
+This new question has 'quite another sense' than that of the question,
+What is the meaning or content expressed by the form of a poem? The new
+question asks, What is it that the _poem_, the unity of this content and
+form, is trying to express? This 'beyond' is beyond the content as well
+as the form.
+
+Of course, I should add, it is not _merely_ beyond them or outside of
+them. If it were, they (the poem) could not 'suggest' it. They are a
+partial manifestation of it, and point beyond themselves to it, both
+because they _are_ a manifestation and because this is partial.
+
+The same thing is true, not only (as is remarked in the text) of the
+other arts and of religion and philosophy, but also of what is commonly
+called reality. This reality is a manifestation of a different order
+from poetry, and in certain important respects a much more imperfect
+manifestation. Hence, as was pointed out (pp. 6, 7, note B), poetry is
+not a copy of it, but in dealing with it idealises it, and in doing so
+produces in certain respects a fuller manifestation. On the other hand,
+that imperfect 'reality' has for us a character in which poetry is
+deficient,--the character in virtue of which we call it 'reality.' It
+is, we feel, thrust upon us, not made by us or by any other man. And in
+this respect it seems more akin than poetry to that 'beyond,' or
+absolute, or perfection, which we want, which partially expresses itself
+in both, and which could not be perfection and could not satisfy us if
+it were not real (though it cannot be real in the same sense as that
+imperfect 'reality'). This seems the ultimate ground of the requirement
+that poetry, though no copy of 'reality,' should not be mere 'fancy,'
+but should refer to, and interpret, that 'reality.' For that reality,
+however imperfectly it reveals perfection, is at least no mere fancy.
+(Not that the merest fancy can fail to reveal something of perfection.)
+
+The lines quoted on p. 26 are from a fragment of Shelley's beginning 'Is
+it that in some brighter sphere.'
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The lecture, as printed in 1901, was preceded by the following
+    note: "This Lecture is printed almost as it was delivered. I am aware
+    that, especially in the earlier pages, difficult subjects are treated
+    in a manner far too summary, but they require an exposition so full
+    that it would destroy the original form of the Lecture, while a
+    slight expansion would do little to provide against
+    misunderstandings." A few verbal changes have now been made, some
+    notes have been added, and some of the introductory remarks omitted.
+
+  [2] Note A.
+
+  [3] Note B.
+
+  [4] What is here called 'substance' is what people generally mean
+    when they use the word 'subject' and insist on the value of the
+    subject. I am not arguing against this usage, or in favour of the
+    usage which I have adopted for the sake of clearness. It does not
+    matter which we employ, so long as we and others know what we mean.
+    (I use 'substance' and 'content' indifferently.)
+
+  [5] These remarks will hold good, _mutatis mutandis_, if by
+    'substance' is understood the 'moral' or the 'idea' of a poem,
+    although perhaps in one instance out of five thousand this may be
+    found in so many words in the poem.
+
+  [6] On the other hand, the absence, or worse than absence, of style,
+    in this sense, is a serious matter.
+
+  [7] Note C.
+
+  [8] This paragraph is criticized in Note D.
+
+  [9]: Note E.
+
+  [10] Not that to Schiller 'form' meant mere style and versification.
+
+  [11] Note F.
+
+  [12] Note G.
+
+  [13] In Schiller's phrase, they have extirpated the mere 'matter.' We
+    often say that they do this by dint of style. This is roughly true,
+    but in strictness it means, as we have seen, not that they decorate
+    the mere 'matter' with a mere 'form,' but that they produce a new
+    content-form.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUBLIME
+
+
+THE SUBLIME[1]
+
+
+Coleridge used to tell a story about his visit to the Falls of Clyde;
+but he told it with such variations that the details are uncertain, and
+without regard to truth I shall change it to the shape that suits my
+purpose best. After gazing at the Falls for some time, he began to
+consider what adjective would answer most precisely to the impression he
+had received; and he came to the conclusion that the proper word was
+'sublime.' Two other tourists arrived, and, standing by him, looked in
+silence at the spectacle. Then, to Coleridge's high satisfaction, the
+gentleman exclaimed, 'It is sublime.' To which the lady responded, 'Yes,
+it is the prettiest thing I ever saw.'
+
+This poor lady's incapacity (for I assume that Coleridge and her husband
+were in the right) is ludicrous, but it is also a little painful.
+Sublimity and prettiness are qualities separated by so great a distance
+that our sudden attempt to unite them has a comically incongruous
+effect. At the same time the first of these qualities is so exalted that
+the exhibition of entire inability to perceive it is distressing.
+Astonishment, rapture, awe, even self-abasement, are among the emotions
+evoked by sublimity. Many would be inclined to pronounce it the very
+highest of all the forms assumed by beauty, whether in nature or in
+works of imagination.
+
+I propose to make some remarks on this quality, and even to attempt some
+sort of answer to the question what sublimity is. I say 'some sort of
+answer,' because the question is large and difficult, and I can deal
+with it only in outline and by drawing artificial limits round it and
+refusing to discuss certain presuppositions on which the answer rests.
+What I mean by these last words will be evident if I begin by referring
+to a term which will often recur in this lecture--the term 'beauty.'
+
+When we call sublimity a form of beauty, as I did just now, the word
+'beauty' is obviously being used in the widest sense. It is the sense
+which the word bears when we distinguish beauty from goodness and from
+truth, or when 'beautiful' is taken to signify anything and everything
+that gives aesthetic satisfaction, or when 'Aesthetics' and 'Philosophy
+of the Beautiful' are used as equivalent expressions. Of beauty, thus
+understood, sublimity is one particular kind among a number of others,
+for instance prettiness. But 'beauty' and 'beautiful' have also another
+meaning, narrower and more specific, as when we say that a thing is
+pretty but not beautiful, or that it is beautiful but not sublime. The
+beauty we have in view here is evidently not the same as beauty in the
+wider sense; it is only, like sublimity or prettiness, a particular kind
+or mode of that beauty. This ambiguity of the words 'beauty' and
+'beautiful' is a great inconvenience, and especially so in a lecture,
+where it forces us to add some qualification to the words whenever they
+occur: but it cannot be helped. (Now that the lecture is printed I am
+able to avoid these qualifications by printing the words in inverted
+commas where they bear the narrower sense.)[2]
+
+Now, obviously, all the particular kinds or modes of beauty must have,
+up to a certain point, the same nature. They must all possess that
+character in virtue of which they are called beautiful rather than good
+or true. And so a philosopher, investigating one of these kinds, would
+first have to determine this common nature or character; and then he
+would go on to ascertain what it is that distinguishes the particular
+kind from its companions. But here we cannot follow such a method. The
+nature of beauty in general is so much disputed and so variously defined
+that to discuss it here by way of preface would be absurd; and on the
+other hand it would be both presumptuous and useless to assume the truth
+of any one account of it. Our only plan, therefore, must be to leave it
+entirely alone, and to consider merely the distinctive character of
+sublimity. Let beauty in general be what it may, what is it that marks
+off _this_ kind of beauty from others, and what is there peculiar in our
+state of mind when we are moved to apply to anything the specific
+epithet 'sublime'?--such is our question. And this plan is not merely
+the only possible one, but it is, I believe, quite justifiable, since,
+so far as I can see, the answer to our particular question, unless it is
+pushed further than I propose to go, is unaffected by the differences
+among theories of repute concerning beauty in general. At the same time,
+it is essential to realise and always to bear in mind one consequence of
+this plan; which is that our account of what is peculiar to sublimity
+will not be an account of sublimity in its full nature. For sublimity is
+not those peculiar characteristics alone, it is that _beauty_ which is
+distinguished by them, and a large part of its effect is due to that
+general nature of beauty which it shares with other kinds, and which we
+leave unexamined.
+
+In considering the question thus defined I propose to start from our
+common aesthetic experience and to attempt to arrive at an answer by
+degrees. It will be understood, therefore, that our first results may
+have to be modified as we proceed. And I will venture to ask my hearers,
+further, to ignore for the time any doubts they may feel whether I am
+right in saying, by way of illustration, that this or that thing is
+sublime. Such differences of opinion scarcely affect our question, which
+is not whether in a given case the epithet is rightly applied, but what
+the epithet signifies. And it has to be borne in mind that, while no two
+kinds of beauty can be quite the same, a _thing_ may very well possess
+beauty of two different kinds.
+
+Let us begin by placing side by side five terms which represent five of
+the many modes of beauty--sublime, grand, 'beautiful,' graceful, pretty.
+'Beautiful' is here placed in the middle. Before it come two terms,
+sublime and grand; and beyond it lie two others, graceful and pretty.
+Now is it not the case that the first two, though not identical, still
+seem to be allied in some respect; that the last two also seem to be
+allied in some respect; that in this respect, whatever it may be, these
+two pairs seem to stand apart from one another, and even to stand in
+contrast; that 'beauty,' in this respect, seems to hold a neutral
+position, though perhaps inclining rather to grace than to grandeur; and
+that the extreme terms, sublime and pretty, seem in this respect to be
+the most widely removed; so that this series of five constitutes, in a
+sense, a descending series,--descending not necessarily in value, but in
+some particular respect not yet assigned? If, for example, in the lady's
+answer, 'Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw,' you substitute for
+'prettiest' first 'most graceful,' and then 'most beautiful,' and then
+'grandest,' you will find that your astonishment at her diminishes at
+each step, and that at the last, when she identifies sublimity and
+grandeur, she is guilty no longer of an absurdity, but only of a slight
+anti-climax. If, I may add, she had said 'majestic,' the anti-climax
+would have been slighter still, and, in fact, in one version of the
+story Coleridge says that 'majestic' was the word he himself chose.
+
+What then is the 'respect' in question here,--the something or other in
+regard to which sublimity and grandeur seemed to be allied with one
+another, and to differ decidedly from grace and prettiness? It appears
+to be greatness. Thousands of things are 'beautiful,' graceful, or
+pretty, and yet make no impression of greatness, nay, this impression in
+many cases appears to collide with, and even to destroy, that of grace
+or prettiness, so that if a pretty thing produced it you would cease to
+call it pretty. But whatever strikes us as sublime produces an
+impression of greatness, and more--of exceeding or even overwhelming
+greatness. And this greatness, further, is apparently no mere
+accompaniment of sublimity, but essential to it: remove the greatness in
+imagination, and the sublimity vanishes. Grandeur, too, seems always to
+possess greatness, though not in this superlative degree; while 'beauty'
+neither invariably possesses it nor tends, like prettiness and grace, to
+exclude it. I will try, not to defend these statements by argument, but
+to develop their meaning by help of illustrations, dismissing from view
+the minor differences between these modes of beauty, and, for the most
+part, leaving grandeur out of account.
+
+We need not ask here what is the exact meaning of that 'greatness' of
+which I have spoken: but we must observe at once that the greatness in
+question is of more than one kind. Let us understand by the term, to
+begin with, greatness of extent,--of size, number, or duration; and let
+us ask whether sublime things are, in this sense, exceedingly great.
+Some certainly are. The vault of heaven, one expanse of blue, or dark
+and studded with countless and prodigiously distant stars; the sea that
+stretches to the horizon and beyond it, a surface smooth as glass or
+breaking into innumerable waves; time, to which we can imagine no
+beginning and no end,--these furnish favourite examples of sublimity;
+and to call them great seems almost mockery, for they are images of
+immeasurable magnitude. When we turn from them to living beings, of
+course our standard of greatness changes;[3] but, using the standard
+appropriate to the sphere, we find again that the sublime things have,
+for the most part, great magnitude. A graceful tree need not be a large
+one; a pretty tree is almost always small; but a sublime tree is almost
+always large. If you were asked to mention sublime animals, you would
+perhaps suggest, among birds, the eagle; among fishes, if any, the
+whale; among beasts, the lion or the tiger, the python or the elephant.
+But you would find it hard to name a sublime insect; and indeed it is
+not easy, perhaps not possible, to feel sublimity in any animal smaller
+than oneself, unless one goes beyond the special kind of greatness at
+present under review. Consider again such facts as these: that a human
+being of average, or even of less than average, stature and build may be
+graceful and even 'beautiful,' but can hardly, in respect of stature and
+build, be grand or sublime; that we most commonly think of flowers as
+little things, and also most commonly think of them as 'beautiful,'
+graceful, pretty, but rarely as grand, and still more rarely as
+sublime, and that in these latter cases we do not think of them as
+small; that a mighty river may well be sublime, but hardly a stream; a
+towering or far-stretching mountain, but hardly a low hill; a vast
+bridge, but hardly one of moderate span; a great cathedral, but hardly a
+village church; that a model of a sublime building is not sublime,
+unless in imagination you expand it to the dimensions of its original;
+that a plain, though flat, may be sublime if its extent is immense; that
+while we constantly say 'a pretty little thing,' or even 'a beautiful
+little thing,' nobody ever says 'a sublime little thing.' Examples like
+these seem to show clearly--not that bigness is sublimity, for bigness
+need have no beauty, while sublimity is a mode of beauty--but that this
+particular mode of beauty is frequently connected with, and dependent
+on, exceeding greatness of extent.
+
+Let us now take a further step. Can there be sublimity when such
+greatness is absent? And, if there can, is greatness of some other sort
+always present in such cases, and essential to the sublime effect? The
+answer to the first of these questions is beyond doubt. Children have no
+great extension, and what Wordsworth calls 'a six-years' darling of a
+pigmy size' is (if a darling) generally called pretty but not sublime;
+for it _is_ 'of a pigmy size.' Yet it certainly _may_ be sublime, and it
+is so to the poet who addresses it thus:
+
+  Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie
+    Thy soul's immensity....
+  Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
+  On whom those truths do rest
+  Which we are toiling all our lives to find.
+
+A baby is still smaller, but a baby too may be sublime. The starry sky
+is not more sublime than the babe on the arm of the Madonna di San
+Sisto. A sparrow is more diminutive still; but that it is possible for a
+sparrow to be sublime is not difficult to show. This is a translation
+of a prose poem by Tourgenieff:
+
+  I was on my way home from hunting, and was walking up the garden
+  avenue. My dog was running on in front of me.
+
+  Suddenly he slackened his pace, and began to steal forward as though
+  he scented game ahead.
+
+  I looked along the avenue; and I saw on the ground a young sparrow,
+  its beak edged with yellow, and its head covered with soft down. It
+  had fallen from the nest (a strong wind was blowing, and shaking the
+  birches of the avenue); and there it sat and never stirred, except to
+  stretch out its little half-grown wings in a helpless flutter.
+
+  My dog was slowly approaching it, when suddenly, darting from the tree
+  overhead, an old black-throated sparrow dropt like a stone right
+  before his nose, and, all rumpled and flustered, with a plaintive
+  desperate cry flung itself, once, twice, at his open jaws with their
+  great teeth.
+
+  It would save its young one; it screened it with its own body; the
+  tiny frame quivered with terror; the little cries grew wild and
+  hoarse; it sank and died. It had sacrificed itself.
+
+  What a huge monster the dog must have seemed to it! And yet it could
+  not stay up there on its safe bough. A power stronger than its own
+  will tore it away.
+
+  My dog stood still, and then slunk back disconcerted. Plainly he too
+  had to recognise that power. I called him to me; and a feeling of
+  reverence came over me as I passed on.
+
+  Yes, do not laugh. It was really reverence I felt before that little
+  heroic bird and the passionate outburst of its love.
+
+  Love, I thought, is verily stronger than death and the terror of
+  death. By love, only by love, is life sustained and moved.
+
+This sparrow, it will be agreed, is sublime. What, then, makes it so?
+Not largeness of size, assuredly, but, we answer, its love and courage.
+Yes; but what do we mean by '_its_ love and courage'? We often meet with
+love and courage, and always admire and approve them; but we do not
+always find them sublime. Why, then, are they sublime in the sparrow?
+From their extraordinary greatness. It is not in the quality alone, but
+in the quantity of the quality, that the sublimity lies. And this may be
+readily seen if we imagine the quantity to be considerably reduced,--if
+we imagine the parent bird, after its first brave effort, flinching and
+flying away, or if we suppose the bird that sacrifices itself to be no
+sparrow but a turkey. In either case love and courage would remain, but
+sublimity would recede or vanish, simply because the love and courage
+would no longer possess the required immensity.[4]
+
+The sublimity of the sparrow, then, no less than that of the sky or sea,
+depends on exceeding or overwhelming greatness--a greatness, however,
+not of extension but rather of strength or power, and in this case of
+spiritual power. 'Love is _stronger_ than death,' quotes the poet; 'a
+power _stronger_ than its own tore it away.' So it is with the dog of
+whom Scott and Wordsworth sang, whose master had perished among the
+crags of Helvellyn, and who was found three months after by his master's
+body,
+
+  How nourished here through such long time
+  He knows who gave that love sublime,
+  And gave that strength of feeling, great
+  Above all human estimate.[5]
+
+And if we look further we shall find that these cases of sublimity are,
+in this respect, far from being exceptions: 'thy soul's _immensity_,'
+says Wordsworth to the child; '_mighty_ prophet' he calls it. We shall
+find, in fact, that in the sublime, when there is not greatness of
+extent, there is another greatness, which (without saying that the
+phrase is invariably the most appropriate) we may call greatness of
+power and which in these cases is essential.
+
+We must develop this statement a little. Naturally the power, and
+therefore the sublimity, will differ in its character in different
+instances, and therefore will affect us variously. It may be--to
+classify very roughly--physical, or vital, or (in the old wide sense of
+the word) moral, like that of the sparrow and the dog. And physical
+force will appeal to the imagination in one way, and vital in another,
+and moral or spiritual in another. But it is still power of some kind
+that makes a thing sublime rather than graceful, and immensity of power
+that makes it sublime rather than merely grand. For example, the lines
+of the water in a thin cascade may be exquisitely graceful, but such a
+cascade has not power enough to be sublime. Flickering fire in a grate
+is often 'beautiful,' but it is not sublime; the fire of a big bonfire
+is on the way to be so; a 'great fire' frequently is so, because it
+gives the impression of tremendous power. The ocean, in those stanzas of
+_Childe Harold_ which no amount of familiarity or of defect can deprive
+of their sublimity, is the untameable monster which engulfs men as
+lightly as rain-drops and shatters fleets like toys. The sublimity of
+Behemoth and Leviathan in the _Book of Job_ lies in the contrast of
+their enormous might with the puny power of man; that of the horse in
+the fiery energy of his courage and strength. Think of sublime figures
+or ideas in the world of fiction or of history, and you find that,
+whether they are radiant or gloomy, violent or peaceful, terrible or
+adorable, they all impress the imagination by their immense or even
+irresistible might. It is so with Achilles, standing alone beyond the
+wall, with the light of the divine flame soaring from his head, while he
+sends across the trench that shout at whose far-off sound the hearts of
+the Trojans die within them; or with Odysseus, when the moment of his
+vengeance has come, and he casts off his rags, and leaps onto the
+threshold with his bow, and pours his arrows down at his feet, and looks
+down the long hall at the doomed faces of his feasting enemies. Milton's
+Satan is sublime when he refuses to accept defeat from an omnipotent
+foe; he ceases to be so in tempting Eve, because here he shows not power
+but cunning, and we feel not the strength of his cunning but the
+weakness of his victim. In the bust of Zeus in the Vatican, in some of
+the figures of the Medici Chapel, in 'The horse and his rider,' we feel
+again sublimity, because we feel gigantic power, put forth or held in
+reserve. Fate or Death, imagined as a lurking assassin, is not sublime,
+but may become so when imagined as inevitable, irresistible,
+_ineluctabile fatum_. The eternal laws to which Antigone appeals, like
+that Duty which preserves the strength and freshness of the most ancient
+heavens, are sublime. Prometheus, the saviour of mankind, opposing a
+boundless power of enduring pain to a boundless power of inflicting it;
+Regulus returning unmoved to his doom; Socrates, serene and even joyous
+in the presence of injury and death and the lamentations of his friends,
+are sublime. The words 'I have overcome the world' are among the most
+sublime on record, and they are also the expression of the absolute
+power of the spirit.[6]
+
+It seems clear, then, that sublimity very often arises from an
+overwhelming greatness of power. So abundant, indeed, are the instances
+that one begins to wonder whether it ever arises from any other kind of
+greatness, and whether we were right in supposing that mere magnitude of
+extension can produce it. Would such magnitude, however prodigious, seem
+to us sublime unless we insensibly construed it as the sign of power? In
+the case of living things, at any rate, this doubt seems to be well
+founded. A tree is sublime not because it occupies a large extent of
+empty space or time, but from the power in it which raises aloft and
+spreads abroad a thousand branches and a million leaves, or which has
+battled for centuries with buffeting storms and has seen summers and
+winters arise and pass like the hours of our day. It is not the mere
+bulk of the lion or the eagle that wins them their title as king of
+beasts or of birds, but the power exhibited in the gigantic head and arm
+or the stretch of wing and the piercing eye. And even when we pass from
+the realm of life our doubt remains. Would a mountain, a river, or a
+building be sublime to us if we did not read their masses and lines as
+symbols of force? Would even the illimitable extent of sea or sky, the
+endlessness of time, or the countlessness of stars or sands or waves,
+bring us anything but fatigue or depression if we did not apprehend
+them, in some way and however vaguely, as expressions of immeasurable
+power--power that created them, or lives in them, or _can_ count them;
+so that what impresses us is not the mere absence of limits, but the
+presence of something that overpowers any imaginable limit? If these
+doubts are justified (as in my opinion they are), the conclusion will
+follow that the exceeding greatness required for sublimity is _always_
+greatness of some kind of power, though in one class of cases the
+impression of this greatness can only be conveyed through immensity of
+extent.
+
+However this question may be decided, our result so far seems to be that
+the peculiarity of the sublime lies in some exceeding and overwhelming
+greatness. But before this result can be considered safe, two obstacles
+must be removed. In the first place, are there no negative instances? Is
+it impossible to find anything sublime which does _not_ show this
+greatness? Naturally I can say no more than that I have conscientiously
+searched for exceptions to the rule and have searched in vain. I can
+find only apparent exceptions which in reality confirm the rule; and I
+will mention only those which look the most formidable. They are cases
+where at first sight there seems to be not merely an inconsiderable
+amount of power or other greatness, but actually the negation of it. For
+example, the silence of night, or the sudden pause in a storm or in
+stormy music, or again the silence and movelessness of death, may
+undoubtedly be sublime; and how, it may be asked, can a mere absence of
+sound and motion be an exhibition of immense greatness? It cannot, I
+answer; but neither can it be sublime. If you apprehend the silence in
+these cases as a mere absence, no feeling of sublimity will arise in
+your mind; and if you do apprehend the silence as sublime, it is to you
+the sign of immense power, put forth or held in reserve. The 'dead pause
+abrupt of mighty winds' is the pause _of_ mighty winds and not of gentle
+breezes; and it is not the absence of mighty winds, but their _pause_
+before they burst into renewed fury; or if their silence is not their
+will, it is a silence imposed on them by something mightier even than
+they. In either case there may be sublimity, but then there is the
+impression of immense power. In the same way the silence of night, when
+it seems sublime, is apprehended not as the absence but as the subdual
+of sound,--the stillness wrought by a power so mighty that at its touch
+all the restless noises of the day fall dumb,--or the brooding of an
+omnipotent peace over the world. And such a peace it is, an unassailable
+peace, that may make the face of death sublime, a stillness which is not
+moveless but immovable.[7]
+
+At present, then, our result seems to stand firm. But another danger
+remains. Granted that in the sublime there is always some exceeding and
+overwhelming greatness, is that _all_ there is? Is there not in every
+case some further characteristic? This question, premising that the
+phrase 'overwhelming greatness' contains important implications which
+have yet to be considered, I can only answer like the last. I do not
+find any other peculiarity that is _always_ present. Several have been
+alleged, and one or two of these will be mentioned later, but none of
+them appears to show itself indubitably wherever sublimity is found. It
+is easy to give a much fuller account of the sublime if you include in
+it everything that impresses you in a sublime baby while you omit to
+consider Behemoth, or if you build upon Socrates and ignore Satan, or if
+you confine yourself to the sublime thunderstorm and forget the sublime
+rainbow or sunrise. But then your account will not answer to the
+instances you have ignored; and when you take them in you will have to
+pare it down until perhaps you end in a result like ours. At any rate we
+had better be content with it for the present, and turn to another
+aspect of the matter.[8]
+
+So far, on the whole, we have been regarding the sublime object as if
+its sublimity were independent of our state of mind in feeling and
+apprehending it. Yet the adjective in the phrase 'overwhelming
+greatness' should at once suggest the truth that this state of mind is
+essential to sublimity. Let us now therefore look inward, and ask how
+this state differs from our state in perceiving or imagining what is
+graceful or 'beautiful.' Since Kant dealt with the subject, most writers
+who have thought about it have agreed that there is a decided
+difference, which I will try to describe broadly, and without pledging
+myself to the entire accuracy of the description.
+
+When, on seeing or hearing something, we exclaim, How graceful! or How
+lovely! or How 'beautiful'! there is in us an immediate outflow of
+pleasure, an unchecked expansion, a delightful sense of harmony between
+the thing and ourselves.
+
+                            The air
+  Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
+  Unto our gentle senses.... The heaven's breath
+  Smells wooingly here.
+
+The thing wins us and draws us towards itself without resistance.
+Something in us hastens to meet it in sympathy or love. Our feeling, we
+may say, is entirely affirmative. For though it is not always untouched
+by pain (for the thing may have sadness in it),[9] this touch of pain or
+sadness does not mean any disharmony between the thing and us, or
+involve any check in our acceptance of it.
+
+In the case of sublimity, on the other hand, this acceptance does not
+seem to be so simple or immediate. There seem, in fact, to be two
+'aspects' or stages in it.[10] First--if only for a fraction of a
+second--there is a sense of being checked, or baffled, or even
+stupefied, or possibly even repelled or menaced, as though something
+were affecting us which we could not receive, or grasp, or stand up to.
+In certain cases we appear to shrink away from it, as though it thrust
+upon us a sense of our own feebleness or insignificance. This we may
+call by the convenient but too strong name of the negative stage. It is
+essential to sublimity; and nothing seems to correspond to it in our
+perception of loveliness or grace except sometimes a sense of surprise
+or wonder, which is wholly pleasant, and which does not necessarily
+qualify the lovely or graceful thing.
+
+But this first stage or aspect clearly does not by itself suffice for
+sublimity. To it there succeeds, it may be instantaneously or more
+gradually, another: a powerful reaction, a rush of self-expansion, or an
+uplifting, or a sense of being borne out of the self that was checked,
+or even of being carried away beyond all checks and limits. These
+feelings, even when the sublime thing might be called forbidding,
+menacing, or terrible, are always positive,--feelings of union with it;
+and, when its nature permits of this, they may amount to rapture or
+adoration. But the mark of the negation from which they have issued, the
+'smell of the fire,' usually remains on them. The union, we may say
+perhaps, has required a self-surrender, and the rapture or adoration is
+often strongly tinged with awe.
+
+Now, this peculiar doubleness in our apprehension of sublimity, this
+presence of two equally necessary stages or phases, a negative and a
+positive, seems to correspond with the peculiarity which we found in the
+sublime object when we were provisionally regarding it by itself. It is
+its overwhelming greatness which for a moment checks, baffles, subdues,
+even repels us or makes us feel our littleness, and which then, forcing
+its way into the imagination and emotions, distends or uplifts them to
+its own dimensions. We burst our own limits, go out to the sublime thing,
+identify ourselves ideally with it, and share its immense greatness. But
+if, and in so far as, we remain conscious of our difference from it, we
+still feel the insignificance of our actual selves, and our glory is
+mingled with awe or even with self-abasement.[11]
+
+In writing thus I was endeavouring simply and without any _arriere
+pensee_ to describe a mode of aesthetic experience. But it must have
+occurred to some of my hearers that the description recalls other kinds
+of experience. And if they find it accurate in the main, they will
+appreciate, even if they do not accept, the exalted claim which
+philosophers, in various forms, have made for the sublime. It awakes in
+us, they say, through the check or shock which it gives to our finitude,
+the consciousness of an infinite or absolute; and this is the reason of
+the kinship we feel between this particular mode of aesthetic experience
+on the one side, and, on the other, morality or religion. For there, by
+the denial of our merely finite or individual selves, we rise into union
+with the law which imposes on us an unconditional demand, or with the
+infinite source and end of our spiritual life.
+
+These are ideas much too large to be considered now, and even later I
+can but touch on them. But the mere mention of them may carry us to the
+last enquiries with which we can deal. For it suggests this question:
+Supposing that high claim to be justified at all, can it really be made
+for _all_ sublimity, or must it not be confined to the very highest
+forms? A similar question must be raised as to various other statements
+regarding the sublime; and I go on to speak of some of these.
+
+(1) Burke asserted that the sublime is always founded on fear; indeed he
+considered this to be its distinguishing characteristic. Setting aside,
+then, the connection of this statement with Burke's general doctrine (a
+doctrine impossible to accept), we may ask, Is it true that the 'check'
+administered by the sublime object is always one of fear? We must
+answer, first, that if this check is part of an aesthetic experience and
+not a mere preliminary to it, it can _never_ be fear in the common
+meaning of that word, or what may be called practical or real fear. So
+far as we are _practically_ afraid of a storm or a mountain, afraid, for
+instance, for ourselves as bodily beings in this particular spatial and
+temporal position, the storm or mountain is not sublime to us, it is
+simply terrible. _That_ fear must be absent, or must not engage
+attention, or must be changed in character, if the object is to be for
+us _sublimely_ terrible, something with which we identify ourselves in
+imaginative sympathy, and which so causes a great self-expansion. But,
+secondly, even if 'fear' is understood rightly as indicating a feature
+in an aesthetic and not a practical experience, our question must
+obviously be answered in the negative. There is fear in the apprehension
+of some sublimity, but by no means in that of all. If there is a
+momentary check, for example, in the case of a rainbow, a glorious
+sunrise, the starry night, Socrates, or Tourgenieff's sparrow, 'fear,'
+unless the meaning of the word is unnaturally extended, is surely not
+the name for this check.
+
+Burke's mistake, however, implies a recognition of the 'negative aspect'
+in sublimity, and it may remind us of a truth. Instances of the sublime
+differ greatly in regard to the prominence and tone of this aspect. It
+is less marked, for example, and less obvious, in the case of a sublime
+rainbow or sunrise than in that of a sublime and 'terrible'
+thunderstorm. And in general we may say that the _distinctive_ nature of
+sublimity appears most clearly where this aspect is most prominent,--so
+prominent, perhaps, that we have a more or less explicit sense of the
+littleness and powerlessness of ourselves, and indeed of the whole
+world of our usual experience. It is here that the object is most
+decidedly more than 'glorious,' or even 'majestic,' and that sublimity
+appears in antithesis to grace. Only we must not give an account of the
+sublime which fully applies to these cases _alone_, or suppose that the
+negative aspect is absent in other cases. If a rainbow or sunrise is
+really sublime, it is overwhelming as well as uplifting. Nor must we
+assume that the most distinctively sublime must also be the most
+sublime. The sunrise witnessed from an immense snowfield in the high
+Alps may be as sublime as an Alpine thunderstorm, though its sublimity
+is different.
+
+(2) Grace and 'beauty,' it has been said, though not of course merely
+sensuous, are yet friendly to sense. It is their essence, in fact, to be
+a harmonious unity of sense and spirit, and so to reconcile powers which
+in much of our experience are conflicting and dissonant. But sublimity
+is harsh and hostile to sense. It makes us feel in ourselves and in the
+world the presence of something irresistibly superior to sense. And this
+is the reason why it does not soothe or delight, but uplifts us.
+
+This statement recalls some of the ideas we have been considering, but
+it may easily mislead. For one thing, it is impossible for any sublimity
+whatever to be _merely_ hostile to 'sense,' since everything aesthetic
+must appeal to sense or sensuous imagination, so that the sublime must
+at least express its hostility to sense by means of sense. And if we
+take the phrase in another meaning, the statement may mislead still, for
+it attributes to sublimity in general what is a characteristic only of
+certain forms of the sublime. Scores of examples could easily be quoted
+which show no hostility to sense: _e.g._ a sublime lion, or bull, or
+tree. And if we think of our old examples of the rainbow and the
+sunrise, or, better still, of a thunderstorm, or 'The horse and his
+rider,' or the 'Sanctus' in Bach's Mass, we find the sublime thing
+actually making a powerful appeal to sense and depending for its
+sublimity on the vehemence or volume of this appeal. Diminish at all
+markedly in these cases the amount of light, colour, or sound, and the
+sublimity would vanish. Of course the appeal here is not merely to
+sense, but it _is_ to sense.
+
+But undoubtedly there is another kind of sublimity; and it is
+particularly interesting. Here, it is true, a sort of despite is done to
+the senses and what speaks to them. As we have seen, the greatness of
+soul in the sparrow is enhanced by contrast with the smallness and
+feebleness of its body, and pours contempt on the visible magnitude of
+the hound; and the stillness of night or death is sublime from its
+active negation of sound and motion. Again, there is a famous passage
+which depends for its effect on this, that, first, sublime things are
+introduced which appeal powerfully to sense, and then something else,
+which does not so appeal, is made to appear even more sublime and to put
+them to shame: first a great and strong wind, an earthquake, a fire; and
+after the fire a still small voice. Sometimes, again, as Burke observed,
+sublimity depends on, or is increased by, darkness, obscurity,
+vagueness,--refusal of satisfaction to the sense of sight. Often in
+these cases the sublime object is terrible, and its terror is increased
+by inability to see or distinguish it. Examples are the image of 'the
+pestilence that walketh in darkness,' or Milton's description of Death,
+or the lines in the _Book of Job_:
+
+  In thoughts from the visions of the night
+  When deep sleep falleth on men,
+  Fear came upon me and trembling,
+  Which made all my bones to shake.
+  Then a spirit passed before my face;
+  The hair of my flesh stood up.
+  It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.
+  An image was before mine eyes.
+  There was silence, and I heard a voice.
+
+It has been observed that attempts to illustrate such passages as these
+dissipate their sublimity by diminishing the obscurity of the object.
+Blake's illustrations of the lines in Milton and in _Job_[12] show this,
+while his design of the morning-stars singing together is worthy even of
+the words.
+
+We may trace this severity towards sense, again, in examples already
+mentioned, the ideas of Fate, of the eternal laws to which Antigone
+appeals, of Duty in Wordsworth's ode. We imagine these powers as removed
+from sight, and indeed wholly immaterial, and yet as exercising
+sovereign dominion over the visible and material world. And their
+sublimity would be endangered if we tried to bring them nearer to sense
+by picturing the means by which they exercise their control.
+
+I will take a last example. It has probably been mentioned in almost
+every account of the sublime since Longinus quoted it in his work on
+Elevation of Style. And it is of special interest here because it
+illustrates at one and the same time the two kinds of sublimity which we
+are engaged in distinguishing. 'God said, Let there be light, and there
+was light.' The idea of the first and instantaneous appearance of light,
+and that the whole light of the whole world, is already sublime; and its
+primary appeal is to sense. The further idea that this transcendently
+glorious apparition is due to mere words, to a breath--our symbol of
+tenuity, evanescence, impotence to influence material bulk--heightens
+enormously the impression of absolutely immeasurable power.
+
+To sum up, then, on this matter. It is not safe to distinguish the
+sublime from the 'beautiful' by its hostility to sense. The sublime may
+impress its overwhelming greatness in either of two ways, by an appeal
+to sense, or by a kind of despite done to it. Nor can we assert, if we
+think of the sunrise, the thunderstorm, or of sublime music, that the
+second of these ways is more distinctive of the sublime than the first.
+But perhaps we may say this. In 'beauty' that which appears in a
+sensuous form seems to rest in it, to be perfectly embodied in it, and
+to have no tendency to pass beyond it. In the sublime, even where no
+such tendency is felt and sublimity is nearest to 'beauty,' we still
+feel the presence of a power held in reserve, which could with ease
+exceed its present expression. In _some_ forms of sublimity, again, the
+sensuous embodiment seems threatening to break in its effort to express
+what appears in it. And in others we definitely feel that the power
+which for a moment intimates its presence to sense is infinite and
+utterly uncontainable by any or all vehicles of its manifestation. Here
+we are furthest (in a way) from sense, and furthest also from 'beauty.'
+
+(3) I come finally and, as it will at first seem, needlessly to an idea
+which has already been touched on. The words 'boundless,' 'illimitable,'
+'infinite,' constantly recur in discussions of sublimity, and it cannot
+be denied that our experience constantly provokes them. The sublime has
+been said to awake in us the consciousness of our own infinity. It has
+been said, again, to represent in all cases the inadequacy of all finite
+forms to express the infinite. And so we may be told that, even if we do
+not adopt some such formula, but continue to speak of 'greatness,' we
+ought at least to go beyond the adjective 'exceeding' or 'overwhelming,'
+and to substitute 'immeasurable' or 'incomparable' or 'infinite.'
+
+Now, at the point we have reached, it would seem we might at once answer
+that a claim is here being made for the sublime in general which really
+holds good only of one kind of sublimity. Sometimes the sublime object
+_is_ apprehended as the Infinite, or again as an expression of it. This
+is, for example, a point of view frequent in Hebrew poetry. Sometimes,
+again, the object (_e.g._ time or the heavens) is apprehended, not
+indeed as _the_ Infinite, but still as infinite or immeasurable. But how
+are we to say that a sublime lion or mountain, or Satan or Lady Macbeth,
+is apprehended as the Infinite, or as infinite, or (usually) as even an
+expression of the Infinite? And how are we to say that the greatness of
+most sublime objects is apprehended as incomparable or immeasurable? It
+is only failure to observe these distinctions that leads to errors like
+one recorded in Coleridge's Table-talk (July 25, 1832): 'Could you ever
+discover anything sublime, in our sense of the word, in the classic
+Greek literature? I never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.'
+
+This reply, however, though sound so far as it goes, does not settle the
+question raised. It may still be maintained that sublimity in all cases,
+and even when we have no idea of infinity before us, does represent the
+inadequacy of all finite forms to express the infinite. And it is
+unfortunately impossible for us to deal fully with this contention. It
+would carry us into the region of metaphysics; and, while believing that
+no theory of the sublime can be complete which stops short of that
+region, I am aiming in this lecture at no such theory, but only at a
+result which may hold good without regard to further developments. All
+that I can do is to add a few words on the question whether, going
+beyond the adjective 'exceeding' or 'overwhelming,' we can say that the
+sublime is the beautiful which has immeasurable, incomparable, or
+infinite greatness. And the answer which I suggest and will go on to
+explain may be put thus: the greatness is only sometimes immeasurable,
+but it is _always_ unmeasured.
+
+We cannot apprehend an object as sublime while we apprehend it as
+comparably, measurably, or finitely great. Let the thing be what it
+may--physical, vital, or spiritual--the moment we say to ourselves, 'It
+is very great, but I know _how_ great,' or 'It is very great, but
+something else is as great or greater,' at that moment it has ceased to
+be sublime. Outside the consciousness of its sublimity we may be
+perfectly well aware that a thing is limited, measurable, equal or
+inferior to something else. But then we are _not_ finding it sublime.
+And when we _are_ so finding it, we are absorbed in _its_ greatness, and
+have no thought either of the limits of that or of its equality or
+inferiority to anything else. The lion of whom we are thinking, 'An
+elephant could kill him,' is no sublime lion. The Falls of Schaffhausen
+are sublime when you are lost in astonishment at them, but not when you
+are saying to yourself 'What must Niagara be!' This seems indubitable,
+and hence we may say that, in one sense, all sublimity has unmeasured
+greatness, and that no greatness is sublime which we apprehend as
+finite.
+
+But the absence of a consciousness of measure or finitude is one thing;
+the presence of a consciousness of immeasurableness or infinity is
+another. The first belongs to all sublimity, the second only to one kind
+of it,--to that where we _attempt_ to measure, or find limits to, the
+greatness of the thing. _If_ we make this attempt, as when we try in
+imagination to number the stars or to find an end to time, then it is
+essential to sublimity that we should fail, and so fail that the idea of
+immeasurability or endlessness emerges. In like manner, _if_ we compare
+things, nothing will appear sublime whose greatness is surpassed or even
+equalled by that of something else; and, if this process of comparison
+is pursued, in the end nothing will be found sublime except the absolute
+totality (however it may be imagined). And this kind of sublimity,
+which arises from attempts to measure or compare, is often exceedingly
+striking. But it is only one kind. For it is an entire delusion--though
+a very common one in theories of the sublime--to suppose that we _must_
+attempt to measure or compare. On the contrary, in the majority of cases
+our impression of overwhelming greatness is accompanied neither by any
+idea that this greatness has a measure, nor by the idea that it is
+immeasurable or infinite.[13]
+
+It will not do, then, to lay it down that the sublime is the beautiful
+which has immeasurable, incomparable, or infinite greatness. But I
+suggest that, after the explanations given, we may conveniently use the
+adjective 'unmeasured,' so long as we remember that this means one thing
+where we do not measure at all, and another thing where we try to
+measure and fail. And, this being so, it seems that we may say that
+_all_ sublimity, and not only that in which the idea of infinite
+greatness or of the Infinite emerges, is an image of infinity; for in
+all, through a certain check or limitation and the overcoming of it, we
+reach the perception or the imaginative idea of something which, on the
+one hand, has a positive nature, and, on the other, is either _not_
+determined as finite or _is_ determined as infinite. But we must not add
+that this makes the sublime superior to the 'beautiful.' For the
+'beautiful' too, though in a different way, is an image of infinity. In
+'beauty,' as we said, that which appears in a sensuous form seems to
+rest in that form, to be wholly embodied in it; it shows no tendency to
+pass beyond it, and intimates no reserve of force that might strain or
+break it. So that the 'beautiful' thing is a whole complete in itself,
+and in moments when beauty fills our souls we know what Wordsworth meant
+when he said 'the least of things seemed infinite,' though each thing,
+being but one of many, must from another point of view, here suppressed,
+be finite. 'Beauty,' then, we may perhaps say, is the image of the total
+presence of the Infinite within any limits it may choose to assume;
+sublimity the image of its boundlessness, and of its rejection of any
+pretension to independence or absoluteness on the part of its finite
+forms; the one the image of its immanence, the other of its
+transcendence.
+
+Within an hour I could attempt no more than an outline of our subject.
+That is inevitable; and so is another defect, which I regret more. In
+analysing any kind of aesthetic experience we have to begin by
+disentangling the threads that meet in it; and when we can only make a
+beginning, no time is left for the further task of showing how they are
+interwoven. We distinguish, for example, one kind of sublimity from
+another, and we must do so; but in the actual experience, the single
+instance, these kinds often melt together. I take one case of this.
+Trying to overlook the field in which sublimity appears, we say that
+there is a sublimity of inorganic things, and of things vital, and of
+things spiritual, and that these kinds differ. And this is true; and
+perhaps it is also true that sometimes we experience one of these kinds,
+so to say, quite pure and unmixed with others. But it is not always,
+perhaps not usually so. More frequently kind mingles with kind, and we
+mutilate the experience when we name it after one of them. In life the
+imagination, touched at one point, tingles all over and responds at all
+points. It is offered an impression of physical or vital greatness, but
+at once it brings from the other end of its world reminiscences of
+quite another order, and fuses the impression with them. Or an appeal is
+made to the sense of spiritual greatness, but there rises before the
+imagination a vision with the outlines and hues of material Nature.
+Offer it a sunset--a mere collection of coloured lines and spots--and
+they become to it regrets and hopes and longings too deep for tears.
+Tell it of souls made perfect in bliss, and it sees an immeasurable
+rose, or city-walls that flash with the light of all the gems on earth.
+The truth that a sparrow and a mountain are different, and that Socrates
+is not Satan, interests it but little. What it cares for is the truth
+that, when they are sublime, they are all the same; for each becomes
+infinite, and it feels in each its own infinity.
+
+1903.
+
+
+  NOTES[14]
+
+I add here a few remarks on some points which it was not convenient to
+discuss in the lecture.
+
+1. We have seen that in the apprehension of sublimity we do not always
+employ comparison or attempt to measure. To feel a thing overwhelmingly
+great it is not necessary to have before the mind either the idea of
+something less great, or any standard of greatness. To argue that this
+must be necessary because 'great' means nothing except as opposed to
+'small,' is like arguing that I cannot have a perception of pride
+without thinking of humility.
+
+This point seems to me quite clear. But a question remains. If we go
+below consciousness, what is it that happens in us? The apprehension of
+sublimity implies that we have received an exceedingly strong
+impression. This as a matter of fact must mean an impression very much
+stronger than something else; and this something else must be, so to
+say, a standard with which the impression is unconsciously compared.
+What then is it?
+
+Stated in the most general terms, it must apparently be the usual or
+average strength of impressions.
+
+But this unconscious standard takes particular concrete forms in various
+classes of cases. Not seldom it seems to be our sense of our own power
+or of average human power. This is especially so where the thing felt to
+be sublime is, in the relevant respect, _in eodem genere_ with
+ourselves. A sublime lion, for example, is immensely superior to us, or
+to the average man, in muscular force and so in dangerousness,
+Tourgenieff's sparrow in courage and love, a god in all sorts of ways.
+And the use of this unconscious standard is probably the reason of the
+fact, noted in the lecture, that it is difficult to feel sublimity, as
+regards vital force, in a creature smaller than ourselves.
+
+But this is not the only standard. A sublime lion is not only immensely
+stronger than we are, but is generally also exceptional among lions; and
+so with a sublime tree or bridge or thunderstorm. So that we seem also
+to use as unconscious standard the idea of the average of the kind to
+which the thing belongs. An average thunderstorm hardly seems sublime,
+and yet it is overwhelmingly superior to us in power.[15]
+
+What, again, is the psychical machinery employed when we attempt to
+measure the shoreless sea, or time, and find them immeasurable? Is there
+any standard of the 'usual' here? I will leave this question to more
+skilled psychologists than myself.
+
+2. Since the impression produced by sublimity is one of very exceptional
+strength, we are not able to feel it continuously for long, though we
+can repeat it after a pause. In this the sublime differs from the
+'beautiful,' on which we like to _dwell_ after our first surprise is
+over. A tragedy or symphony that was sublime from beginning to end could
+not be so experienced. Living among mountains, we feel their beauty more
+or less constantly, their sublimity only by flashes.
+
+3. If our account of the impression produced by sublimity is true, why
+should not any sensation whatever produce this impression merely by
+gaining extraordinary strength? It seems to me it would, supposing at
+its normal strength it conformed to the general requirements of
+aesthetic experience, and supposing the requisite accession of strength
+did not remove this conformity. But this, in one respect at least, it
+would do. It would make the light, sound, smell, physiologically
+painful, and we should feel it as painful or even dangerous. We find
+this in the case of lightning. If it is to be felt as aesthetic it must
+not pass a certain degree of brightness; or, as we sometimes say, it
+must not be too 'near.'
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] I have learned something from many discussions of this subject.
+    In its outline the view I have taken is perhaps nearer to Hartmann's
+    than to any other.
+
+  [2] Popular usage coincides roughly with this sense. Indeed, it can
+    hardly be said to recognise the wider one at all. 'Beauty' and
+    'beautiful,' in that wider sense, are technical terms of Aesthetics.
+    It is a misfortune that the language of Aesthetics should thus differ
+    from the ordinary language of speech and literature; but the
+    misfortune seems to be unavoidable, for there is no word in the
+    ordinary language which means 'whatever gives aesthetic
+    satisfaction,' and yet that idea _must_ have a name in Aesthetics.
+
+  [3] I do not mean to imply that in aesthetic apprehension itself we
+    always, or generally, make conscious use of a standard or, indeed,
+    think of greatness. But here we are _reflecting_ on this
+    apprehension.
+
+  [4] Thus, it may be noticed, the sparrow's size, which is the reverse
+    of sublime, is yet indirectly essential to the sublimity of the
+    sparrow.
+
+  [5] The poet's language here has done our analysis for us.
+
+  [6] A word may be added here on a disputed point as to 'spiritual'
+    sublimity. It has been held that intellect cannot be sublime; but
+    surely in the teeth of facts. Not to speak of intellect as it appears
+    in the sphere of practice, how can it be denied that the intellect of
+    Aristotle or Shakespeare or Newton may produce the impression of
+    sublimity? All that is true is, first, that the intellect must be
+    apprehended imaginatively and not thought abstractly (otherwise it
+    can produce _no_ aesthetic impression), and, secondly, that it
+    appears sublime in virtue not of its quality alone but of the
+    quantity, or force, of that quality.
+
+  [7] The same principle applies to other cases. If, for example, the
+    desolation of a landscape is felt to be sublime, it is so not as the
+    mere negation of life, verdure, etc., but as their _active_ negation.
+
+  [8] The reader will remember that in one sense of the question, Is
+    there no more in the sublime than overwhelming greatness? this
+    question must of course be answered in the affirmative. Sublimity is
+    a mode of beauty: the sublime is not the overwhelmingly great, it is
+    the beautiful which has overwhelming greatness; and it affects us
+    through its whole nature, not by mere greatness.
+
+  [9] I am warning the reader against a mistake which may arise from
+    the complexity of aesthetic experience. We may make a broad
+    distinction between 'glad' and 'sad' modes of beauty; but that does
+    not coincide with the distinction of modes with which we are
+    concerned in this lecture. What is lovely or 'beautiful' may be glad
+    or sad, and so may what is grand or sublime.
+
+  [10] In what follows I have spoken as if the two were always
+    successive stages, and as if these always came in the same order. It
+    is easier to make the matter quickly clear by taking this view, which
+    also seemed to answer to my own experience. But I do not wish to
+    commit myself to an opinion on the point, which is of minor
+    importance. What is essential is to recognise the presence of the two
+    'aspects' or 'stages,' and to see that both are requisite to
+    sublimity.
+
+  [11] 'Ich fuehlte mich so klein, so gross,' says Faust, remembering
+    the vision of the Erdgeist, whom he addresses as 'Erhabener Geist.'
+    He was at once overwhelmed and uplifted.
+
+  [12] At least if the 'Vision' is sublime its sublimity is not that of
+    the original. We can 'discern the form thereof' distinctly enough.
+
+  [13] To avoid complication I have passed by the case where we compare
+    the sublime thing with another thing and find it much greater without
+    finding it immeasurably great. Here the greatness, it appears to me,
+    is still unmeasured. That is to say, we do not attempt to determine
+    its amount, and if we did we should lose the impression of sublimity.
+    We may _say_, perhaps, that it is ten, fifty, or a million times, as
+    great; but these words no more represent mathematical calculations
+    than Hamlet's 'forty thousand brothers.'
+
+  [14] I am far from being satisfied with the ideas imperfectly
+    expressed in the first and third of these Notes, but they require
+    more consideration than I can give to them during the printing of the
+    Second Edition. The reader is requested to take them as mere
+    suggestions.
+
+  [15] Hence a creature much less powerful than ourselves _may_, I
+    suppose, be sublime, even from the mere point of view of vital
+    energy. But I doubt if this is so in my own case. I have seen
+    'magnificent' or 'glorious' cocks and cats, but if I called them
+    'sublime' I should say rather more than I feel. I mention cocks,
+    because Ruskin somewhere mentions a sublime cock; but I cannot find
+    the passage, and this cock may have been sublime (if it really was so
+    to Ruskin) from some other than 'vital' greatness.
+
+
+
+
+HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY
+
+
+HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY[1]
+
+
+Since Aristotle dealt with tragedy, and, as usual, drew the main
+features of his subject with those sure and simple strokes which no
+later hand has rivalled, the only philosopher who has treated it in a
+manner both original and searching is Hegel. I propose here to give a
+sketch of Hegel's theory, and to add some remarks upon it. But I cannot
+possibly do justice in a sketch to a theory which fills many pages of
+the _Aesthetik_; which I must tear from its connections with the
+author's general view of poetry, and with the rest of his philosophy[2];
+and which I must try to exhibit as far as possible in the language of
+ordinary literature. To estimate this theory, therefore, from my sketch
+would be neither safe nor just--all the more because, in the interest of
+immediate clearness, I have not scrupled to insert without warning
+various remarks and illustrations for which Hegel is not responsible.
+
+On certain characteristics of tragedy the briefest reminder will
+suffice. A large part of the nature of this form of drama is common to
+the drama in all its forms; and of this nothing need be said. It will be
+agreed, further, that in all tragedy there is some sort of collision or
+conflict--conflict of feelings, modes of thought, desires, wills,
+purposes; conflict of persons with one another, or with circumstances,
+or with themselves; one, several, or all of these kinds of conflict, as
+the case may be. Again, it may be taken for granted that a tragedy is a
+story of unhappiness or suffering, and excites such feelings as pity and
+fear. To this, if we followed the present usage of the term, we should
+add that the story of unhappiness must have an unhappy end; by which we
+mean in effect that the conflict must close with the death of one or
+more of the principal characters. But this usage of the word 'tragedy'
+is comparatively recent; it leaves us without a name for many plays, in
+many languages, which deal with unhappiness without ending unhappily;
+and Hegel takes the word in its older and wider sense.
+
+Passing on from these admitted characteristics of tragedy, we may best
+approach Hegel's peculiar view by observing that he lays particular
+stress on one of them. That a tragedy is a story of suffering is
+probably to many people the most obvious fact about it. Hegel says very
+little of this; partly, perhaps, because it is obvious, but more because
+the essential point to him is not the suffering but its cause, namely,
+the action or conflict. Mere suffering, he would say, is not tragic, but
+only the suffering that comes of a special kind of action. Pity for mere
+misfortune, like fear of it, is not tragic pity or fear. These are due
+to the spectacle of the conflict and its attendant suffering, which do
+not appeal simply to our sensibilities or our instinct of
+self-preservation, but also to our deeper mind or spirit (_Geist_, a
+word which, with its adjective, I shall translate 'spirit,' 'spiritual,'
+because our words 'mind' and 'mental' suggest something merely
+intellectual).
+
+The reason why the tragic conflict thus appeals to the spirit is that it
+is itself a conflict of the spirit. It is a conflict, that is to say,
+between powers that rule the world of man's will and action--his
+'ethical substance.' The family and the state, the bond of parent and
+child, of brother and sister, of husband and wife, of citizen and ruler,
+or citizen and citizen, with the obligations and feelings appropriate to
+these bonds; and again the powers of personal love and honour, or of
+devotion to a great cause or an ideal interest like religion or science
+or some kind of social welfare--such are the forces exhibited in tragic
+action; not indeed alone, not without others less affirmative and
+perhaps even evil, but still in preponderating mass. And as they form
+the substance of man, are common to all civilised men, and are
+acknowledged as powers rightfully claiming human allegiance, their
+exhibition in tragedy has that interest, at once deep and universal,
+which is essential to a great work of art.
+
+In many a work of art, in many a statue, picture, tale, or song, such
+powers are shown in solitary peace or harmonious co-operation. Tragedy
+shows them in collision. Their nature is divine, and in religion they
+appear as gods; but, as seen in the world of tragic action, they have
+left the repose of Olympus, have entered into human wills, and now meet
+as foes. And this spectacle, if sublime, is also terrible. The
+essentially tragic fact is the self-division and intestinal warfare of
+the ethical substance, not so much the war of good with evil as the war
+of good with good. Two of these isolated powers face each other, making
+incompatible demands. The family claims what the state refuses, love
+requires what honour forbids. The competing forces are both in
+themselves rightful, and so far the claim of each is equally justified;
+but the right of each is pushed into a wrong, because it ignores the
+right of the other, and demands that absolute sway which belongs to
+neither alone, but to the whole of which each is but a part.
+
+And one reason why this happens lies in the nature of the characters
+through whom these claims are made. It is the nature of the tragic hero,
+at once his greatness and his doom, that he knows no shrinking or
+half-heartedness, but identifies himself wholly with the power that
+moves him, and will admit the justification of no other power. However
+varied and rich his inner life and character may be, in the conflict it
+is all concentrated in one point. Antigone _is_ the determination to do
+her duty to her dead brother; Romeo is not a son or a citizen as well as
+a lover, he is lover pure and simple, and his love is the whole of him.
+
+The end of the tragic conflict is the denial of both the exclusive
+claims. It is not the work of chance or blank fate; it is the act of the
+ethical substance itself, asserting its absoluteness against the
+excessive pretensions of its particular powers. In that sense, as
+proceeding from an absolute right which cancels claims based on right
+but pushed into wrong, it may be called the act of 'eternal justice.'
+Sometimes it can end the conflict peacefully, and the tragedy closes
+with a solution. Appearing as a divine being, the spiritual unity
+reconciles by some adjustment the claims of the contending powers
+(_Eumenides_); or at its bidding one of them softens its demand
+(_Philoctetes_); or again, as in the more beautiful solution of the
+_Oedipus Coloneus_, the hero by his own self-condemnation and inward
+purification reconciles himself with the supreme justice, and is
+accepted by it. But sometimes the quarrel is pressed to extremes; the
+denial of the one-sided claims involves the death of one or more of the
+persons concerned; and we have a catastrophe. The ultimate power thus
+appears as a destructive force. Yet even here, as Hegel insists, the end
+is not without an aspect of reconciliation. For that which is denied is
+not the rightful powers with which the combatants have identified
+themselves. On the contrary, those powers, and with them the only thing
+for which the combatants cared, are affirmed. What is denied is the
+exclusive and therefore wrongful assertion of their right.
+
+Such in outline is Hegel's main view. It may be illustrated more fully
+by two examples, favourites of his, taken from Aeschylus and Sophocles.
+Clytemnestra has murdered Agamemnon, her husband and king. Orestes,
+their son, is impelled by filial piety to avenge his father, and is
+ordered by Apollo to do so. But to kill a mother is to sin against
+filial piety. The spiritual substance is divided against itself. The
+sacred bond of father and son demands what the equally sacred bond of
+son and mother forbids. When, therefore, Orestes has done the deed, the
+Furies of his murdered mother claim him for their prey. He appeals to
+Apollo, who resists their claim. A solution is arrived at without a
+catastrophe. The cause is referred to Athene, who institutes at Athens a
+court of sworn judges. The votes of this court being equally divided,
+Athene gives her casting-vote for Orestes; while the Furies are at last
+appeased by a promise of everlasting honour at Athens.
+
+In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, to Hegel the 'perfect exemplar of
+tragedy,' the solution is negative. The brother of Antigone has brought
+against his native city an army of foreigners bent on destroying it. He
+has been killed in the battle, and Creon, the ruler of the city, has
+issued an edict forbidding anyone on pain of death to bury the corpse.
+In so doing he not only dishonours the dead man, but violates the rights
+of the gods of the dead. Antigone without hesitation disobeys the
+edict, and Creon, despite the remonstrance of his son, who is affianced
+to her, persists in exacting the penalty. Warned by the prophet
+Teiresias, he gives way, but too late. Antigone, immured in a rocky
+chamber to starve, has anticipated her death. Her lover follows her
+example, and his mother refuses to survive him. Thus Antigone has lost
+her life through her absolute assertion of the family against the state;
+Creon has violated the sanctity of the family, and in return sees his
+own home laid in ruins. But in this catastrophe neither the right of the
+family nor that of the state is denied; what is denied is the
+absoluteness of the claim of each.
+
+The danger of illustrations like these is that they divert attention
+from the principle illustrated to questions about the interpretation of
+particular works. So it will be here. I cannot stay to discuss these
+questions, which do not affect Hegel's principle; but it will be well,
+before going further, to remove a misunderstanding of it which is
+generally to be found in criticisms of his treatment of the _Eumenides_
+and the _Antigone_. The main objection may be put thus: 'Hegel talks of
+equally justified powers or claims. But Aeschylus never meant that
+Orestes and the Furies were equally justified; for Orestes was
+acquitted. Nor did Sophocles mean that Antigone and Creon were equally
+right. And how can it have been equally the duty of Orestes to kill his
+mother and not to kill her?' But, in the first place, it is most
+important to observe that Hegel is not discussing at all what we should
+generally call the moral quality of the acts and persons concerned, or,
+in the ordinary sense, what it was their duty to do. And, in the second
+place, when he speaks of 'equally justified' powers, what he means, and,
+indeed, sometimes says, is that these powers are _in themselves_ equally
+justified. The family and the state, the bond of father and son, the
+bond of mother and son, the bond of citizenship, these are each and all,
+one as much as another, powers rightfully claiming human allegiance. It
+is tragic that observance of one should involve the violation of
+another. These are Hegel's propositions, and surely they are true. Their
+truth is quite unaffected by the fact (assuming it is one) that in the
+circumstances the act combining this observance of one and violation of
+another was morally right, or by the fact (if so it is) that one such
+act (say Antigone's) was morally right, and another (say Creon's) was
+morally wrong. It is sufficient for Hegel's principle that the violation
+should take place, and that we should feel its weight. We do feel it. We
+may approve the act of Antigone or Orestes, but in approving it we still
+feel that it is no light matter to disobey the law or to murder a
+mother, that (as we might say) there is much justice in the pleas of the
+Furies and of Creon, and that the _tragic_ effect depends upon these
+facts. If, again, it is objected that the underlying conflict in the
+_Antigone_ is not between the family and the state, but between divine
+and human law, that objection, if sound, might touch Hegel's
+interpretation,[3] but it would not affect his principle, except for
+those who recognise no obligation in human law; and it will scarcely be
+contended that Sophocles is to be numbered among them. On the other
+hand, it is, I think, a matter for regret that Hegel employed such words
+as 'right,' 'justified,' and 'justice.' They do not mislead readers
+familiar with his writings, but to others they suggest associations with
+criminal law, or our everyday moral judgments, or perhaps the theory of
+'poetic justice'; and these are all out of place in a discussion on
+tragedy.
+
+Having determined in outline the idea or principle of tragedy, Hegel
+proceeds to give an account of some differences between ancient and
+modern works. In the limited time at our disposal we shall do best to
+confine ourselves to a selection from his remarks on the latter. For in
+speaking of ancient tragedy Hegel, who finds something modern in
+Euripides, makes accordingly but little use of him for purposes of
+contrast, while his main point of view as to Aeschylus and Sophocles has
+already appeared in the illustrations we have given of the general
+principle. I will only add, by way of preface, that the pages about to
+be summarised leave on one, rightly or wrongly, the impression that to
+his mind the principle is more adequately realised in the best classical
+tragedies than in modern works. But the question whether this really was
+his deliberate opinion would detain us too long from weightier
+matters.[4]
+
+Hegel considers first the cases where modern tragedy resembles ancient
+in dealing with conflicts arising from the pursuit of ends which may be
+called substantial or objective and not merely personal. And he points
+out that modern tragedy here shows a much greater variety. Subjects are
+taken, for example, from the quarrels of dynasties, of rivals for the
+throne, of kings and nobles, of state and church. Calderon shows the
+conflict of love and honour regarded as powers imposing obligations.
+Schiller in his early works makes his characters defend the rights of
+nature against convention, or of freedom of thought against
+prescription--rights in their essence universal. Wallenstein aims at the
+unity and peace of Germany; Karl Moor attacks the whole arrangement of
+society; Faust seeks to attain in thought and action union with the
+Absolute. In such cases the end is more than personal; it represents a
+power claiming the allegiance of the individual; but, on the other
+hand, it does not always or generally represent a great _ethical_
+institution or bond like the family or the state. We have passed into a
+wider world.
+
+But, secondly, he observes, in regard to modern tragedy, that in a
+larger number of instances such public or universal interests either do
+not appear at all, or, if they appear, are scarcely more than a
+background for the real subject. The real subject, the impelling end or
+passion, and the ensuing conflict, is personal,--these particular
+characters with their struggle and their fate. The importance given to
+subjectivity--this is the distinctive mark of modern sentiment, and so
+of modern art; and such tragedies bear its impress. A part at least of
+Hegel's meaning may be illustrated thus. We are interested in the
+personality of Orestes or Antigone, but chiefly as it shows itself in
+one aspect, as identifying itself with a certain ethical relation; and
+our interest in the personality is inseparable and indistinguishable
+from our interest in the power it represents. This is not so with
+Hamlet, whose position so closely resembles that of Orestes. What
+engrosses our attention is the whole personality of Hamlet in his
+conflict, not with an opposing spiritual power, but with circumstances
+and, still more, with difficulties in his own nature. No one could think
+of describing Othello as the representative of an ethical family
+relation. His passion, however much nobility he may show in it, is
+personal. So is Romeo's love. It is not pursued, like Posa's freedom of
+thought, as something universal, a right of man. Its right, if it could
+occur to us to use the term at all, is Romeo's right.
+
+On this main characteristic of modern tragedy others depend. For
+instance, that variety of subject to which reference has just been made
+depends on it. For when so much weight is attached to personality,
+almost any fatal collision in which a sufficiently striking character is
+involved may yield material for tragedy. Naturally, again,
+characterisation has become fuller and more subtle, except in dramas
+which are more or less an imitation of the antique. The characters in
+Greek tragedy are far from being types or personified abstractions, as
+those of classical French tragedy tend to be: they are genuine
+individuals. But still they are comparatively simple and easy to
+understand, and have not the intricacy of the characters in Shakespeare.
+These, for the most part, represent simply themselves; and the loss of
+that interest which attached to the Greek characters from their
+identification with an ethical power, is compensated by an extraordinary
+subtlety in their portrayal, and also by their possession of some
+peculiar charm or some commanding superiority. Finally, the interest in
+personality explains the freedom with which characters more or less
+definitely evil are introduced in modern tragedy. Mephistopheles is as
+essentially modern as Faust. The passion of Richard or Macbeth is not
+only personal, like that of Othello; it is egoistic and anarchic, and
+leads to crimes done with a full knowledge of their wickedness; but to
+the modern mind the greatness of the personality justifies its
+appearance in the position of hero. Such beings as Iago and Goneril,
+almost portents of evil, are not indeed made the heroes of tragedies;
+but, according to Hegel, they would not have been admitted in Greek
+tragedy at all. If Clytemnestra had been cited in objection as a
+parallel to Lady Macbeth, he would have replied that Lady Macbeth had
+not the faintest ground of complaint against Duncan, while in reading
+the _Agamemnon_ we are frequently reminded that Clytemnestra's husband
+was the sacrificer of their child. He might have added that Clytemnestra
+is herself an example of the necessity, where one of the principal
+characters inspires hatred or horror, of increasing the subtlety of the
+drawing or adding grandeur to the evil will.
+
+It remains to compare ancient and modern tragedy in regard to the issue
+of the conflict. We have seen that Hegel attributes this issue in the
+former to the ethical substance or eternal justice, and so accounts for
+such reconciliation as we feel to be present even where the end is a
+catastrophe. Now, in the catastrophe of modern tragedy, he says, a
+certain justice is sometimes felt to be present; but even then it
+differs from the antique justice. It is in some cases more 'abstract':
+the end pursued by the hero, though it is not egoistic, is still
+presented rather as his particular end than as something rightful though
+partial; and hence the catastrophe appears as the reaction, not of an
+undivided ethical totality, but merely of the universal turning against
+a too assertive particular.[5] In cases, again, where the hero (Richard
+or Macbeth) openly attacks an ethical power and plunges into evil, we
+feel that he meets with justice, and only gets what he deserves; but
+then this justice is colder and more 'criminalistic' than that of
+ancient tragedy. Thus even when the modern work seems to resemble the
+ancient in its issue, the sense of reconciliation is imperfect. And
+partly for this reason, partly from the concentration of our interest on
+individuality as such, we desire to see in the individual himself some
+sort of reconciliation with his fate. What shape this will take depends,
+of course, on the story and the character of the hero. It may appear in
+a religious form, as his feeling that he is exchanging his earthly being
+for an indestructible happiness; or again, in his recognition of the
+justice of his fall; or at least he may show us that, in face of the
+forces that crush him to death, he maintains untouched the freedom and
+strength of his own will.
+
+But there remain, says Hegel, many modern tragedies where we have to
+attribute the catastrophe not to any kind of justice, but to unhappy
+circumstances and outward accidents. And then we can only feel that the
+individual whose merely personal ends are thwarted by mere particular
+circumstances and chances, pays the penalty that awaits existence in a
+scene of contingency and finitude. Such a feeling cannot rise above
+sadness, and, if the hero is a noble soul, it may become the impression
+of a dreadful external necessity. This impression can be avoided only
+when circumstance and accident are so depicted that they are felt to
+coincide with something in the hero himself, so that he is not simply
+destroyed by an outward force. So it is with Hamlet. 'This bank and
+shoal of time' is too narrow for his soul, and the death that seems to
+fall on him by chance is also within him. And so in _Romeo and Juliet_
+we feel that the rose of a love so beautiful is too tender to bloom in
+the storm-swept valley of its birth. But such a feeling of
+reconciliation is still one of pain, an unhappy blessedness.[6] And if
+the situation displayed in a drama is of such a kind that we feel the
+issue to depend _simply_ on the turn the dramatist may choose to give to
+the course of events, we are fully justified in our preference for a
+happy ending.
+
+In this last remark (or rather in the pages misrepresented by it) Hegel,
+of course, is not criticising Shakespeare. He is objecting to the
+destiny-dramas of his own time, and to the fashionable indulgence in
+sentimental melancholy. Strongly as he asserted the essential function
+of negation throughout the universe, the affirmative power of the
+spirit, even in its profoundest divisions, was for him the deepest truth
+and the most inspiring theme. And one may see this even in his
+references to Shakespeare. He appreciated Shakespeare's representation
+of extreme forms of evil, but, even if he was fully satisfied of its
+justification, his personal preference lay in another direction, and
+while I do not doubt that he thought _Hamlet_ a greater work than
+_Iphigenie_, I suspect he loved Goethe's play the best.
+
+Most of those who have thought about this subject will agree that the
+ideas I have tried to sketch are interesting and valuable; but they
+suggest scores of questions. Alike in the account of tragedy in general,
+and in that of the differences between ancient and modern tragedy,
+everyone will find statements to doubt and omissions to regret; and
+scarcely one of Hegel's interpretations of particular plays will escape
+objection. It is impossible for me to touch on more than a few points;
+and to the main ideas I owe so much that I am more inclined to dwell on
+their truth than to criticise what seem to be defects. But perhaps after
+all an attempt to supplement and amend may be the best way of throwing
+some part of Hegel's meaning more into relief. And I will begin with the
+attempt to supplement.
+
+He seems to be right in laying emphasis on the action and conflict in
+tragedy rather than on the suffering and misfortune. No mere suffering
+or misfortune, no suffering that does not spring in great part from
+human agency, and in some degree from the agency of the sufferer, is
+tragic, however pitiful or dreadful it may be. But, sufficient
+connection with these agencies being present, misfortune, the fall from
+prosperity to adversity, with the suffering attending it, at once
+becomes tragic; and in many tragedies it forms a large ingredient, as
+does the pity for it in the tragic feeling. Hegel, I think, certainly
+takes too little notice of it; and by this omission he also withdraws
+attention from something the importance of which he would have admitted
+at once; I mean the way in which suffering is borne. Physical pain, to
+take an extreme instance, is one thing: Philoctetes, bearing it, is
+another. And the noble endurance of pain that rends the heart is the
+source of much that is best worth having in tragedy.
+
+Again, there is one particular kind of misfortune _not_ obviously due to
+human agency, which undoubtedly may affect us in a tragic way. I mean
+that kind which suggests the idea of fate. Tragedies which represent man
+as the mere plaything of chance or a blank fate or a malicious fate, are
+never really deep: it is satisfactory to see that Maeterlinck, a man of
+true genius, has now risen above these ideas. But, where those factors
+of tragedy are present which Hegel emphasises, the impression of
+something fateful in what we call accident, the impression that the hero
+not only invites misfortune by his exceptional stature and exceptional
+daring, but is also, if I may so put it, strangely and terribly unlucky,
+is in many plays a genuine ingredient in tragic effect. It is so, for
+example, in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_. It is so even in dramas like
+Shakespeare's, which exemplify the saying that character is destiny.
+Hegel's own reference to the prominence of accident in the plot of
+_Hamlet_ proves it. Othello would not have become Iago's victim if his
+own character had been different; but still, as we say, it is an
+extraordinary fatality which makes him the companion of the one man in
+the world who is at once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough to
+ensnare him. In the _Antigone_ itself, and in the very catastrophe of
+it, accident plays its part: we can hardly say that it depends solely on
+the characters of Creon and Antigone that the one yields just too late
+to save the life of the other. Now, it may be said with truth that
+Hegel's whole account of the ultimate power in tragedy is a
+rationalisation of the idea of fate, but his remarks on this particular
+aspect of fate are neither sufficient nor satisfactory.
+
+His insistence on the need for some element of reconciliation in a
+tragic catastrophe, and his remarks on the various forms it assumes,
+have the greatest value; but one result of the omissions just noticed is
+that he sometimes exaggerates it, and at other times rates it too low.
+When he is speaking of the kind of tragedy he most approves, his
+language almost suggests that our feeling at the close of the conflict
+is, or should be, one of complete reconciliation. This it surely neither
+is nor can be. Not to mention the suffering and death we have witnessed,
+the very existence of the conflict, even if a supreme ethical power is
+felt to be asserted in its close, remains a painful fact, and, in large
+measure, a fact not understood. For, though we may be said to see, in
+one sense, how the opposition of spiritual powers arises, something in
+us, and that the best, still cries out against it. And even the
+perception or belief that it must needs be that offences come would not
+abolish our feeling that the necessity is terrible, or our pain in the
+woe of the guilty and the innocent. Nay, one may conjecture, the feeling
+and the pain would not vanish if we fully understood that the conflict
+and catastrophe were by a rational necessity involved in the divine and
+eternally accomplished purpose of the world. But this exaggeration in
+Hegel's language, if partly due to his enthusiasm for the affirmative,
+may be mainly, like some other defects, an accident of lecturing. In the
+_Philosophy of Religion_, I may add, he plainly states that in the
+solution even of tragedies like the _Antigone_ something remains
+unresolved (ii. 135).
+
+On the other hand, his treatment of the aspect of reconciliation in
+modern tragedy is in several respects insufficient. I will mention only
+one. He does not notice that in the conclusion of not a few tragedies
+pain is mingled not merely with acquiescence, but with something like
+exultation. Is there not such a feeling at the close of _Hamlet_,
+_Othello_, and _King Lear_; and that although the end in the last two
+cases touches the limit of legitimate pathos? This exultation appears to
+be connected with our sense that the hero has never shown himself so
+great or noble as in the death which seals his failure. A rush of
+passionate admiration, and a glory in the greatness of the soul, mingle
+with our grief; and the coming of death, so far from destroying these
+feelings, appears to leave them untouched, or even to be entirely in
+harmony with them. If in such dramas we may be said to feel that the
+ultimate power is no mere fate, but a spiritual power, then we also feel
+that the hero was never so near to this power as in the moment when it
+required his life.
+
+The last omission I would notice in Hegel's theory is that he underrates
+the action in tragedy of what may be called by a rough distinction moral
+evil rather than defect. Certainly the part played by evil differs
+greatly in different cases, but it is never absent, not even from
+tragedies of Hegel's favourite type. If it does not appear in the main
+conflict, it appears in its occasion. You may say that, while Iago and
+Macbeth have evil purposes, neither the act of Orestes nor the vengeance
+of the Furies, neither Antigone's breach of the edict nor even Creon's
+insistence on her punishment, springs from evil in them; but the
+situation with which Orestes or Antigone has to deal, and so in a sense
+the whole tragedy, arises from evil, the murder of Agamemnon, and the
+attempt of Polyneices to bring ruin on his native city. In fact, if we
+confine the title 'tragedy' to plays ending with a catastrophe, it will
+be found difficult to name great tragedies, ancient or modern, in which
+evil has not directly or indirectly a prominent part. And its presence
+has an important bearing on the effect produced by the catastrophe. On
+the one hand, it deepens the sense of painful awe. The question why
+affirmative spiritual forces should collide is hard enough; but the
+question why, together with them, there should be generated violent evil
+and extreme depravity is harder and more painful still. But, on the
+other hand, the element of reconciliation in the catastrophe is
+strengthened by recognition of the part played by evil in bringing it
+about; because our sense that the ultimate power cannot endure the
+presence of such evil is implicitly the sense that this power is at
+least more closely allied with good. If it rejects the exaggerated
+claims of its own isolated powers, that which provokes from it a much
+more vehement reaction must be still more alien to its nature. This
+feeling is forcibly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies, and in many Greek
+dramas it is directly appealed to by repeated reminders that what is at
+work in the disasters is the unsleeping Ate which follows an ancestral
+sin. If Aristotle did not in some lost part of the _Poetics_ discuss
+ideas like this, he failed to give a complete rationale of Greek
+tragedy.
+
+I come lastly to the matter I have most at heart. What I take to be the
+central idea in Hegel's theory seems to me to touch the essence of
+tragedy. And I will not assert that his own statement of it fails to
+cover the whole field of instances. For he does not teach, as he is
+often said to do, that tragedy portrays only the conflict of such
+ethical powers as the family and the state. He adds to these, as we have
+seen, others, such as love and honour, together with various universal
+ends; and it may even be maintained that he has provided in his general
+statement for those numerous cases where, according to himself, no
+substantial or universal ends collide, but the interest is centred on
+'personalities.' Nevertheless, when these cases come to be considered
+more fully--and, in Hegel's view, they are the most characteristically
+modern cases--we are not satisfied. They naturally tend to appear as
+declensions from the more ideal ancient form; for how can a personality
+which represents only itself claim the interest of one which represents
+something universal? And further, they are sometimes described in a
+manner which strikes the reader, let us say, of Shakespeare, as both
+insufficient and misleading. Without raising, then, unprofitable
+questions about the comparative merits of ancient and modern tragedy, I
+should like to propose a restatement of Hegel's general principle which
+would make it more obviously apply to both.
+
+If we omit all reference to ethical or substantial powers and interests,
+what have we left? We have the more general idea--to use again a formula
+not Hegel's own--that tragedy portrays a self-division and self-waste of
+spirit, or a division of spirit involving conflict and waste. It is
+implied in this that on _both_ sides in the conflict there is a
+spiritual value. The same idea may be expressed (again, I think, not in
+Hegel's own words) by saying that the tragic conflict is one not merely
+of good with evil, but also, and more essentially, of good with good.
+Only, in saying this, we must be careful to observe that 'good' here
+means anything that has spiritual value, not moral goodness alone,[7]
+and that 'evil' has a similarly wide sense.
+
+Now this idea of a division of spirit involving conflict and waste
+covers the tragedies of ethical and other universal powers, and it
+covers much besides. According to it the collision of such powers would
+be one kind of tragic collision, but only one. _Why_ are we tragically
+moved by the conflict of family and state? Because we set a high value
+on family and state. Why then should not the conflict of anything else
+that has sufficient value affect us tragically? It does. The value must
+be sufficient--a moderate value will not serve; and other
+characteristics must be present which need not be considered here. But,
+granted these conditions, _any_ spiritual conflict involving spiritual
+waste is tragic. And it is just one greatness of modern art that it has
+shown the tragic fact in situations of so many and such diverse kinds.
+These situations have not the peculiar effectiveness of the conflicts
+preferred by Hegel, but they may have an equal effectiveness peculiar to
+themselves.
+
+Let me attempt to test these ideas by choosing a most unfavourable
+instance--unfavourable because the play seems at first to represent a
+conflict simply of good and evil, and so, according both to Hegel's
+statement and the proposed restatement, to be no tragedy at all: I mean
+_Macbeth_. What is the conflict here? It will be agreed that it does not
+lie between two ethical powers or universal ends, and that, as Hegel
+says, the main interest is in personalities. Let us take it first, then,
+to lie between Macbeth and the persons opposing him, and let us ask
+whether there is not spiritual value or good on both sides--not an equal
+amount of good (that is not necessary), but enough good on each to give
+the impression of spiritual waste. Is there not such good in Macbeth? It
+is not a question merely of moral goodness, but of good. It is not a
+question of the use made of good, but of its presence. And such bravery
+and skill in war as win the enthusiasm of everyone about him; such an
+imagination as few but poets possess; a conscience so vivid that his
+deed is to him beforehand a thing of terror, and, once done, condemns
+him to that torture of the mind on which he lies in restless ecstasy; a
+determination so tremendous and a courage so appalling that, for all
+this torment, he never dreams of turning back, but, even when he has
+found that life is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,
+will tell it out to the end though earth and heaven and hell are leagued
+against him; are not these things, in themselves, good, and gloriously
+good? Do they not make you, for all your horror, admire Macbeth,
+sympathise with his agony, pity him, and see in him the waste of forces
+on which you place a spiritual value? It is simply on this account that
+he is for you, not the abstraction called a criminal who merely 'gets
+what he deserves' (art, like religion, knows no such thing), but a
+tragic hero, and that his war with other forces of indubitable spiritual
+worth is a tragic war.[8]
+
+It is required by the restatement of Hegel's principle to show that in
+the external conflict of persons there is good on both sides. It is not
+required that this should be true, secondly, of both sides in the
+conflict within the hero's soul; for the hero is only a part of the
+tragedy. Nevertheless in almost all cases, if not in all, it is true. It
+is obviously so where, as in the hero and also the heroine of the _Cid_,
+the contending powers in this internal struggle are love and honour.
+Even when love is of a quality less pure and has a destructive force, as
+in Shakespeare's Antony, it is clearly true. And it remains true even
+where, as in Hamlet and Macbeth, the contest seems to lie, and for most
+purposes might conveniently be said to lie, between forces simply good
+and simply the reverse. This is not really so, and the tragic effect
+depends upon the fact. It depends on our feeling that the elements in
+the man's nature are so inextricably blended that the good in him, that
+which we admire, instead of simply opposing the evil, reinforces it.
+Macbeth's imagination deters him from murder, but it also makes the
+vision of a crown irresistibly bright. If he had been less determined,
+nay, if his conscience had been less maddening in its insistence that he
+had thrown the precious jewel of his soul irretrievably away, he might
+have paused after his first deed, might even have repented. Yet his
+imagination, his determination, and his conscience were things good.
+Hamlet's desire to do his duty is a good thing, but what opposes this
+desire is by no means simply evil. It is something to which a
+substantial contribution is made by the qualities we most admire in him.
+Thus the nature of tragedy, as seen in the external conflict, repeats
+itself on each side of this conflict, and everywhere there is a
+spiritual value in both the contending forces.
+
+In showing that _Macbeth_, a tragedy as far removed as possible from the
+_Antigone_ as understood by Hegel, is still of one nature with it, and
+equally answers to the account of tragedy proposed, it has been
+necessary to ignore the great difference between the two plays. But when
+once the common essence of all tragedies has been determined, their
+differences become the interesting subject. They could be distinguished
+according to the character of the collisions on which they are built, or
+of the main forces which move the principal agents. And it may well be
+that, other things being equal (as they never are), the tragedy in which
+the hero is, as we say, a good man, is more tragic than that in which he
+is, as we say, a bad one. The more spiritual value, the more tragedy in
+conflict and waste. The death of Hamlet or Othello is, so far, more
+tragic than that of Macbeth, that of Macbeth than that of Richard. Below
+Richard stands Iago, a figure still tragic, but unfit for the hero's
+part; below him persons like Regan or, in the very depth, Oswald,
+characters no longer (at least in the dramatic sense) tragic at all.
+Moral evil, that is to say, so greatly diminishes the spiritual value we
+ascribe to the personality that a very large amount of good of some kind
+is required to bring this personality up to the tragic level, the
+destruction of evil as such being in no degree tragic. And again, it may
+well be that, other things being equal, the more nearly the contending
+forces approach each other in goodness, the more tragic is the conflict;
+that the collision is, so far, more tragic in the _Antigone_ than in
+_Macbeth_, and Hamlet's internal conflict than his struggle with outward
+enemies and obstacles. But it is dangerous to describe tragedy in terms
+that even appear to exclude _Macbeth_, or to describe _Macbeth_, even
+casually or by implication, in terms which imply that it portrays a
+conflict of mere evil with mere good.
+
+The restatement of Hegel's main principle as to the conflict would
+involve a similar restatement as to the catastrophe (for we need not
+consider here those 'tragedies' which end with a solution). As before,
+we must avoid any reference to ethical or universal ends, or to the work
+of 'justice' in the catastrophe. We might then simply say that, as the
+tragic action portrays a self-division or intestinal conflict of spirit,
+so the catastrophe displays the violent annulling of this division or
+conflict. But this statement, which might be pretty generally accepted,
+would represent only half of Hegel's idea, and perhaps nothing of what
+is most characteristic and valuable in it. For the catastrophe (if I may
+put his idea in my own way) has two aspects, a negative and an
+affirmative, and we have ignored the latter. On the one hand it is the
+act of a power immeasurably superior to that of the conflicting agents,
+a power which is irresistible and unescapable, and which overbears and
+negates whatever is incompatible with it. So far, it may be called, in
+relation to the conflicting agents,[9] necessity or fate; and unless a
+catastrophe affects us in ways corresponding with this aspect it is not
+truly tragic. But then if this were all and this necessity were merely
+infinite, characterless, external force, the catastrophe would not only
+terrify (as it should), it would also horrify, depress, or at best
+provoke indignation or rebellion; and these are not tragic feelings. The
+catastrophe, then, must have a second and affirmative aspect, which is
+the source of our feelings of reconciliation, whatever form they may
+assume. And this will be taken into account if we describe the
+catastrophe as the violent self-restitution of the divided spiritual
+unity. The necessity which acts and negates in it, that is to say, is
+yet of one substance with both the agents. _It_ is divided against
+itself in them; they are _its_ conflicting forces; and in restoring its
+unity through negation it affirms them, so far as they are compatible
+with that unity. The qualification is essential, since the hero, for all
+his affinity with that power, is, as the living man we see before us,
+not so compatible. He must die, and his union with 'eternal justice'
+(which is more than 'justice') must itself be 'eternal' or ideal. But
+the qualification does not abolish what it qualifies. This is no
+occasion to ask how in particular, and in what various ways in various
+works, we feel the effect of this affirmative aspect in the catastrophe.
+But it corresponds at least with that strange double impression which is
+produced by the hero's death. He dies, and our hearts die with him; and
+yet his death matters nothing to us, or we even exult. He is dead; and
+he has no more to do with death than the power which killed him and with
+which he is one.
+
+I leave it to students of Hegel to ask whether he would have accepted
+the criticisms and modifications I have suggested. Naturally I think he
+would, as I believe they rest on truth, and am sure he had a habit of
+arriving at truth. But in any case their importance is trifling,
+compared with that of the theory which they attempt to strengthen and to
+which they owe their existence.
+
+1901.
+
+
+  NOTE
+
+Why did Hegel, in his lectures on Aesthetics, so treat of tragedy as to
+suggest the idea that the kind of tragedy which he personally preferred
+(let us for the sake of brevity call it 'ancient') is also the most
+adequate embodiment of the idea of tragedy? This question can be
+answered, I think, only conjecturally, but some remarks on it may have
+an interest for readers of Hegel (they are too brief to be of use to
+others).
+
+One answer might be this. Hegel did not really hold that idea. But he
+was lecturing, not writing a book. He thought the principle of tragedy
+was more clearly and readily visible in ancient works than in modern;
+and so, for purposes of exposition, he emphasised the ancient form. And
+this fact, with his personal enthusiasm for certain Greek plays, leads
+the reader of the _Aesthetik_ to misconstrue him.
+
+Again, we must remember the facts of Hegel's life. He seems first to
+have reflected on tragedy at a time when his enthusiasm for the Greeks
+and their 'substantial' ethics was combined, not only with a
+contemptuous dislike for much modern 'subjectivity' (this he never
+ceased to feel), but with a certain hostility to the individualism and
+the un-political character of Christian morality. His first view of
+tragedy was thus, in effect, a theory of Aeschylean and Sophoclean
+tragedy; and it appears in the early essay on _Naturrecht_ and more
+fully in the _Phaenomenologie_. Perhaps, then, when he came to deal with
+the subject more generally, he insensibly regarded the ancient form as
+the typical form, and tended to treat the modern rather as a
+modification of this type than as an alternative embodiment of the
+general idea of tragedy. The note in the _Rechtsphilosophie_ (p. 196)
+perhaps favours this idea.
+
+But, whether it is correct or no, I believe that the impression produced
+by the _Aesthetik_ is a true one, and that Hegel did deliberately
+consider the ancient form the more satisfactory. It would not follow, of
+course, from that opinion that he thought the advantage was all on one
+side, or considered this or that ancient poet greater than this or that
+modern, or wished that modern poets had tried to write tragedies of the
+Greek type. Tragedy would, in his view, be in somewhat the same position
+as Sculpture. Renaissance sculpture, he might say, has qualities in
+which it is superior to Greek, and Michael Angelo may have been as great
+an artist as Pheidias; but all the same for certain reasons Greek
+sculpture is, and probably will remain, sculpture _par excellence_. So,
+though not to the same extent, with tragedy.
+
+And such a view would cohere with his general view of Art. For he taught
+that, in a sense, Classical Art is Art _par excellence_, and that in
+Greece beauty held a position such as it never held before and will not
+hold again. To explain in a brief note how this position bears upon his
+treatment of modern tragedy would be impossible: but if the student of
+Hegel will remember in what sense and on what grounds he held it; that
+he describes Beauty as the '_sinnliches_ Scheinen der Idee'; that for
+him the new idea that distinguished Christianity and Romantic Art from
+Greek religion and Classical Art is that '_unendliche_ Subjektivitaet'
+which implies a negative, though not merely negative, relation to sense;
+and that in Romantic Art this idea is not only exhibited in the
+religious sphere, but appears in the position given to personal honour,
+love, and loyalty, and indirectly in what Hegel calls 'die formelle
+Selbststaendigkeit der individuellen Besonderheiten,' and in the fuller
+admission of common and un-beautiful reality into the realm of
+Beauty,--he will see how all this is connected with those
+characteristics of modern tragedy which Hegel regards as necessary and
+yet as, in part, drawbacks. This connection, which Hegel has no occasion
+to work out, will be apparent even from consideration of the
+introductory chapter on 'die romantische Kunstform,' _Aesthetik_, ii.
+120-135.
+
+There is one marked difference, I may add, between ancient and modern
+tragedy, which should be considered with reference to this subject, and
+which Hegel, I think, does not explicitly point out. Speaking roughly,
+we may say that the former includes, while the latter tends to ignore,
+the accepted religious ideas of the time. The ultimate reason of this
+difference, on Hegel's view, would be that the Olympian gods are
+themselves the '_sinnliches_ Scheinen der Idee,' and so are in the same
+element as Art, while this is, on the whole, not so with modern
+religious ideas. One result would be that Greek tragedy represents the
+total Greek mind more fully than modern tragedy can the total modern
+mind.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] See, primarily, _Aesthetik_, iii. 479-581, and especially
+    525-581. There is much in _Aesthetik_, i. 219-306, and a good deal in
+    ii. 1-243, that bears on the subject. See also the section on Greek
+    religion in _Religionsphilosophie_, ii. 96-156, especially 131-6,
+    152-6; and the references to the death of Socrates in _Geschichte der
+    Philosophie_, ii. 81 ff., especially 102-5. The works so far cited
+    all consist of posthumous redactions of lecture-notes. Among works
+    published by Hegel himself, the early essay on 'Naturrecht' (_Werke_,
+    i. 386 ff.), and _Phaenomenologie d. Geistes_, 320-348, 527-542, deal
+    with or bear on _Greek_ tragedy. See also _Rechtsphilosophie_, 196,
+    note. There is a note on _Wallenstein_ in _Werke_, xvii. 411-4. These
+    references are to the second edition of the works cited, where there
+    are two editions.
+
+  [2] His theory of tragedy is connected with his view of the function
+    of negation in the universe. No statement therefore which ignores his
+    metaphysics and his philosophy of religion can be more than a
+    fragmentary account of that theory.
+
+  [3] I say 'might,' because Hegel himself in the _Phaenomenologie_
+    uses those very terms 'divine' and 'human law' in reference to the
+    _Antigone_.
+
+  [4] See Note at end of lecture.
+
+  [5] This interpretation of Hegel's 'abstract' is more or less
+    conjectural and doubtful.
+
+  [6] Hegel's meaning does not fully appear in the sentences here
+    condensed. The 'blessedness' comes from the sense of greatness or
+    beauty in the characters.
+
+  [7] Hegel himself expressly guards against this misconception.
+
+  [8] The same point may be put thus, in view of that dangerous word
+    'personality.' Our interest in Macbeth may be called interest in a
+    personality; but it is not an interest in some bare form of
+    self-consciousness, nor yet in a person in the legal sense, but in a
+    personality full of matter. This matter is not an ethical or
+    universal end, but it must in a sense be universal--human nature in a
+    particular form--or it would not excite the horror, sympathy, and
+    admiration it does excite. Nor, again, could it excite these feelings
+    if it were not composed largely of qualities on which we set a high
+    value.
+
+  [9] In relation to _both_ sides in the conflict (though it may not
+    need to negate life in both). For the ultimate agent in the
+    catastrophe is emphatically not the finite power of one side. It is
+    beyond both, and, at any rate in relation to them, boundless.
+
+
+
+
+WORDSWORTH
+
+
+WORDSWORTH[1]
+
+
+'Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that
+every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or
+original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished;
+he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.... My ears are
+stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to
+these petty stings.' These sentences, from a letter written by
+Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common
+attitude of his reviewers in the dozen years when most of his best
+poetry was produced. A century has gone by, and there is now no English
+poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of
+criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say more
+reverential. Some of this later criticism might have satisfied even that
+sense of wonder, awe, and solemn responsibility with which the poet
+himself regarded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and
+if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really
+astonishing number of excellent guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold,
+Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,--how easy to add to
+this list of them! Only the other day there came another, Mr. Walter
+Raleigh. And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for
+some years should be a study of Wordsworth is just what might have been
+expected. The whirligig of time has brought him a full revenge.
+
+I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures another study, or
+even an estimate, of Wordsworth. My purpose is much more limited. I
+think that in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the notions
+of his poetry prevalent among general readers, a disproportionate
+emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And
+I should like to offer some words of warning as to this tendency, and
+also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached. I
+will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last moment to
+omit it, and simply to refer you to Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book
+has practised what I am about to preach.
+
+
+  1.
+
+There have been greater poets than Wordsworth, but none more original.
+He saw new things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally, this would
+have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if
+his new perception had been superficial. But that was not so. If it had
+been, Wordsworth might have won acceptance more quickly, but he would
+not have gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it is, those in
+whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to
+love him (and in each generation they are not a few), never let him go.
+Their love for him is of the kind that he himself celebrated, a settled
+passion, perhaps 'slow to begin,' but 'never ending,' and twined around
+the roots of their being. And the reason is that they find his way of
+seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his
+'criticism of life,' to be something deep, and therefore something that
+will hold. It continues to bring them joy, peace, strength, exaltation.
+It does not thin out or break beneath them as they grow older and wiser;
+nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their
+sorest need. And yet--to return to our starting-point--it continues to
+strike them as original, and something more. It is not like
+Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both,
+peculiar. They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a
+cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood what
+made him write this poem or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling,
+though now familiar and beloved, still brings them not only peace,
+strength, exaltation, but a 'shock of mild surprise'; and his paradoxes,
+long known by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.
+
+If this is so, the road into Wordsworth's mind must be through his
+strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them. I do not mean that
+they are everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak of
+occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult;
+and some of this may be as valuable as that which is audacious or
+strange. But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth's
+centre; and, if we have not a most unusual affinity to him, we cannot
+get hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt
+the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for example, two or three of his
+statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a
+philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or
+symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth. He said that the
+meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too
+deep for tears. He said, in a poem not less solemn, that Nature was the
+soul of all his moral being; and also that she can so influence us that
+nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is
+full of blessings. After making his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale
+of Margaret, he makes him say that the beauty and tranquillity of her
+ruined cottage had once so affected him
+
+  That what we feel of sorrow and despair
+  From ruin and from change, and all the grief
+  The passing shows of Being leave behind,
+  Appeared an idle dream, that could not live
+  Where meditation was.
+
+He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the
+clouds unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him
+breathed immortality. He said to 'Almighty God,'
+
+  But thy most dreaded instrument
+  For working out a pure intent
+  Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter;
+  Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.
+
+This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit
+more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we assume that we
+are familiar with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we
+translate 'the soul of all my moral being' into 'somehow concordant with
+my moral feelings,' or convert 'all that we behold' into 'a good deal
+that we behold,' or transform the Wanderer's reading of the silent faces
+of the clouds into an argument from 'design.' But this is the road round
+Wordsworth's mind, not into it.[2]
+
+Again, with all Wordsworth's best poems, it is essential not to miss the
+unique tone of his experience. This doubtless holds good of any true
+poet, but not in the same way. With many poems there is little risk of
+our failing either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to
+appropriate what he says. What is characteristic, for example, in
+Byron's lines, _On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year_, or in
+Shelley's _Stanzas written in dejection near Naples_, cannot escape
+discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood
+expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is
+constantly present in some degree. Take, for instance, one of the most
+popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake. It is
+popular partly because it remains a pretty thing even to those who
+convert it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth. And it is
+comparatively easy, too, to perceive and to reproduce in imagination a
+good deal that _is_ distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the
+sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the breeze in their glee, and
+the Wordsworthian 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' expressed in the
+lines (written by his wife),
+
+  They flash upon that inward eye
+  Which is the bliss of solitude.
+
+But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:
+
+  I wandered lonely as a Cloud
+  That floats on high o'er vales and hills.
+
+It is thrust into the reader's face, for these are the opening lines.
+But with many readers it passes unheeded, because it is strange and
+outside their own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential to the
+effect of the poem.
+
+This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised, would remain,
+as I said, a pretty thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our
+point is best illustrated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most
+earned ridicule, the ballad poems. They arose almost always from some
+incident which, for him, had a novel and arresting character and came on
+his mind with a certain shock; and if we do not get back to this through
+the poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course, get back to this and
+yet consider the poem to be more or less a failure. There is here
+therefore room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr. Swinburne
+sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of _The Idiot
+Boy_ and _The Thorn_, yet he calls them 'doleful examples of
+eccentricity in dullness,' while Coleridge's judgment, though he
+criticised both poems, was very different. I believe (if I may venture
+into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote _Goody
+Blake and Harry Gill_ and the _Anecdote for Fathers_, and yet I doubt if
+he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected
+the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in
+a selection from which he excluded _The Sailor's Mother_.[3] Indeed, of
+all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has
+not been praised by some excellent judge. But they were ridiculed by
+men who judged them without attempting first to get inside them. And
+this is fatal.
+
+I may bring out the point by referring more fully to one of them. _Alice
+Fell_ was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles
+Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that it was excluded 'in
+policy' from edition after edition of Wordsworth's Poems; many still who
+admire _Lucy Gray_ see nothing to admire in _Alice Fell_; and you may
+still hear the question asked, What could be made of a child crying for
+the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of a man poking
+his stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking
+questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject
+of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me illustrate
+this individuality methodically. A child crying for the loss of her
+cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an imagination, and
+who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling in the wheel-spokes
+of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesome roads through
+a night of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was alone, and,
+having to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise,
+and her cloak was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and
+motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called _Alice Fell, or
+Poverty_) is so extreme that for the loss of her weather-beaten rag she
+does not 'cry'; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent
+heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side
+and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob
+after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself
+for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost
+her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart. It was
+_this_ poverty and _this_ grief that Wordsworth described with his
+reiterated hammering blows. Is it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was
+more. To him grief like this is sublime. It is the agony of a soul from
+which something is torn away that was made one with its very being. What
+does it matter whether the thing is a woman, or a kingdom, or a tattered
+cloak? It is the passion that counts. Othello must not agonise for a
+cloak, but 'the little orphan Alice Fell' has nothing else to agonise
+for. Is all this insignificant? And then--for this poem about a child is
+right to the last line--next day the storm and the tragedy have
+vanished, and the new cloak is bought, of duffil grey, as warm a cloak
+as man can sell; and the child is as pleased as Punch.[4]
+
+
+  2.
+
+I pass on from this subject to another, allied to it, but wider. In
+spite of all the excellent criticism of Wordsworth, there has gradually
+been formed, I think, in the mind of the general reader a partial and
+misleading idea of the poet and his work. This partiality is due to
+several causes: for instance, to the fact that personal recollections of
+Wordsworth have inevitably been, for the most part, recollections of his
+later years; to forgetfulness of his position in the history of
+literature, and of the restricted purpose of his first important poems;
+and to the insistence of some of his most influential critics, notably
+Arnold, on one particular source of his power--an insistence perfectly
+just, but accompanied now and then by a lack of sympathy with other
+aspects of his poetry. The result is an idea of him which is mainly true
+and really characteristic, but yet incomplete, and so, in a sense,
+untrue; a picture, I might say, somewhat like Millais' first portrait of
+Gladstone, which renders the inspiration, the beauty, the light, but
+not the sternness or imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire.
+Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless to say, I do not
+attribute, in the shape here given to it, to anyone in particular.
+
+It was not Wordsworth's function to sing, like most great poets, of war,
+or love, or tragic passions, or the actions of supernatural beings. His
+peculiar function was 'to open out the soul of little and familiar
+things,' alike in nature and in human life. His 'poetry is great because
+of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in
+nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and
+duties.' His field was therefore narrow; and, besides, he was deficient
+in romance, his moral sympathies were somewhat limited, and he tended
+also to ignore the darker aspects of the world. But in this very
+optimism lay his strength. The gulf which for Byron and Shelley yawned
+between the real and the ideal, had no existence for him. For him the
+ideal was realised, and Utopia a country which he saw every day, and
+which, he thought, every man might see who did not strive, nor cry, nor
+rebel, but opened his heart in love and thankfulness to sweet influences
+as universal and perpetual as the air. The spirit of his poetry was also
+that of his life--a life full of strong but peaceful affections; of a
+communion with nature in keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect
+devotion to the mission with which he held himself charged; and of a
+natural piety gradually assuming a more distinctively religious tone.
+Some verses of his own best describe him, and some verses of Matthew
+Arnold his influence on his readers. These are his own words (from _A
+Poet's Epitaph_):
+
+  But who is he, with modest looks,
+  And clad in homely russet brown?
+  He murmurs near the running brooks
+  A music sweeter than their own.
+
+
+  He is retired as noontide dew,
+  Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
+  And you must love him, ere to you
+  He will seem worthy of your love.
+
+  The outward shows of sky and earth,
+  Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
+  And impulses of deeper birth
+  Have come to him in solitude.
+
+  In common things that round us lie
+  Some random truths he can impart,
+  --The harvest of a quiet eye
+  That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
+
+  But he is weak; both man and boy,
+  Hath been an idler in the land:
+  Contented if he might enjoy
+  The things which others understand.
+
+And these are the words from Arnold's _Memorial Verses_:
+
+  He too upon a wintry clime
+  Had fallen--on this iron time
+  Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears
+  He found us when the age had bound
+  Our souls in its benumbing round--
+  He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
+  He laid us as we lay at birth
+  On the cool flowery lap of earth;
+  Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
+  The hills were round us, and the breeze
+  Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
+  Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
+  Our youth returned: for there was shed
+  On spirits that had long been dead,
+  Spirits dried up and closely furled,
+  The freshness of the early world.
+
+  Ah, since dark days still bring to light
+  Man's prudence and man's fiery might,
+  Time may restore us in his course
+  Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
+  But where will Europe's latter hour
+  Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
+  Others will teach us how to dare,
+  And against fear our breast to steel;
+  Others will strengthen us to bear--
+  But who, ah who, will make us feel?
+  The cloud of mortal destiny,
+  Others will front it fearlessly--
+  But who, like him, will put it by?
+
+  Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
+  O Rotha! with thy living wave.
+  Sing him thy best! for few or none
+  Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.
+
+Those last words are enough to disarm dissent. No, that voice will never
+again be heard quite right now Wordsworth is gone. Nor is it, for the
+most part, dissent that I wish to express. The picture we have been
+looking at, though we may question the accuracy of this line or that,
+seems to me, I repeat, substantially true. But is there nothing missing?
+Consider this picture, and refuse to go beyond it, and then ask if it
+accounts for all that is most characteristic in Wordsworth. How did the
+man in the picture ever come to write the Immortality _Ode_, or
+_Yew-trees_, or why should he say,
+
+  For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
+  Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
+  To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil?
+
+How, again, could he say that Carnage is God's daughter, or write the
+_Sonnets dedicated to National Liberty and Independence_, or the tract
+on the Convention of Cintra? Can it be true of him that many of his
+best-known poems of human life--perhaps the majority--deal with painful
+subjects, and not a few with extreme suffering? Should we expect him to
+make an 'idol' of Milton, or to show a 'strong predilection for such
+geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo'? He might easily be 'reserved,'
+but is it not surprising to find him described as haughty, prouder than
+Lucifer, inhumanly arrogant? Why should his forehead have been marked by
+the 'severe worn pressure of thought,' or his eyes have looked so
+'supernatural ... like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a
+sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two
+caverns'? In all this there need be nothing inconsistent with the
+picture we have been looking at; but that picture fails to suggest it.
+In that way the likeness it presents is only partial, and I propose to
+emphasise some of the traits which it omits or marks too faintly.[5]
+
+And first as to the restriction of Wordsworth's field. Certainly his
+field, as compared with that of some poets, is narrow; but to describe
+it as confined to external nature and peasant life, or to little and
+familiar things, would be absurdly untrue, as a mere glance at his Table
+of Contents suffices to show. And its actual restriction was not due to
+any false theory, nor mainly to any narrowness of outlook. It was due,
+apart from limitation of endowment, on the one hand to that diminution
+of poetic energy which in Wordsworth began comparatively soon, and on
+the other, especially in his best days, to deliberate choice; and we
+must not assume without question that he was inherently incapable of
+doing either what he would not do, or what, in his last five and thirty
+years, he could no longer do.
+
+There is no reason to suppose that Wordsworth undervalued or objected to
+the subjects of such poets as Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Spenser,
+Shakespeare and Milton. And when, after writing his part of the _Lyrical
+Ballads_, he returned from Germany and settled in the Lake Country, the
+subjects he himself revolved for a great poem were not concerned with
+rural life or humble persons. Some old 'romantic' British theme, left
+unsung by Milton; some tale of Chivalry, dire enchantments, war-like
+feats; vanquished Mithridates passing north and becoming Odin; the
+fortunes of the followers of Sertorius; de Gourgues' journey of
+vengeance to Florida; Gustavus; Wallace and his exploits in the war for
+his country's independence,--these are the subjects he names first. And,
+though his 'last and favourite aspiration' was towards
+
+               Some philosophic song
+  Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,
+
+--that song which was never completed--yet, some ten years later, he
+still hoped, when it should be finished, to write an epic. Whether at
+any time he was fitted for the task or no, he wished to undertake it;
+and his addiction, by no means entire even in his earlier days, to
+little and familiar things was due, not at all to an opinion that they
+are the only right subjects or the best, nor merely to a natural
+predilection for them, but to the belief that a particular kind of
+poetry was wanted at that time to counteract its special evils. There
+prevailed, he thought, a 'degrading thirst after outrageous
+stimulation.' The violent excitement of public events, and 'the
+increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
+occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
+rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies,' had induced a
+torpor of mind which only yielded to gross and sensational effects--such
+effects as were produced by 'frantic novels,' of the Radcliffe or Monk
+Lewis type, full of mysterious criminals, gloomy castles and terrifying
+spectres. He wanted to oppose to this tendency one as far removed from
+it as possible; to write a poetry even _more_ alien to it than
+Shakespeare's tragedies or Spenser's stories of knights and dragons; to
+show men that wonder and beauty can be felt, and the heart be moved,
+even when the rate of the pulse is perfectly normal. In the same way, he
+grieved Coleridge by refusing to interest himself in the Somersetshire
+fairies, and declared that he desired for his scene no planet but the
+earth, and no region of the earth stranger than England and the lowliest
+ways in England. And, being by no means merely a gentle shepherd, but a
+born fighter who was easily provoked and could swing his crook with
+uncommon force, he asserted his convictions defiantly and carried them
+out to extremes. And so in later days, after he had somewhat narrowed,
+when in the Seventh Book of the _Excursion_ he made the Pastor protest
+that poetry was not wanted to multiply and aggravate the din of war, or
+to propagate the pangs and turbulence of passionate love, he did this
+perhaps because the world which would not listen to him[6] was
+enraptured by _Marmion_ and the earlier poems of Byron.
+
+How great Wordsworth's success might have been in fields which he
+deliberately avoided, it is perhaps idle to conjecture. I do not suppose
+it would have been very great, but I see no reason to believe that he
+would have failed. With regard, for instance, to love, one cannot read
+without a smile his reported statement that, had he been a writer of
+love-poetry, it would have been natural to him to write it with a degree
+of warmth which could hardly have been approved by his principles, and
+which might have been undesirable for the reader. But one may smile at
+his naivete without disbelieving his statement. And, in fact, Wordsworth
+neither wholly avoided the subject nor failed when he touched it. The
+poems about Lucy are not poems of passion, in the usual sense, but they
+surely are love-poems. The verses _'Tis said that some have died for
+love_, excluded from Arnold's selection but praised by Ruskin, are
+poignant enough. And the following lines from _Vaudracour and Julia_
+make one wonder how this could be to Arnold the only poem of
+Wordsworth's that he could not read with pleasure:
+
+  Arabian fiction never filled the world
+  With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
+  Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring;
+  Life turned the meanest of her implements,
+  Before his eyes, to price above all gold;
+  The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine;
+  Her chamber-window did surpass in glory
+  The portals of the dawn; all paradise
+  Could, by the simple opening of a door,
+  Let itself in upon him:--pathways, walks,
+  Swarmed with enchantment, till his spirit sank,
+  Surcharged, within him, overblest to move
+  Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world
+  To its dull round of ordinary cares;
+  A man too happy for mortality!
+
+As a whole, _Vaudracour and Julia_ is a failure, but these lines haunt
+my memory, and I cannot think them a poor description of that which they
+profess to describe. This is not precisely 'passion,' and, I admit, they
+do not prove Wordsworth's capacity to deal with passion. The main reason
+for doubting whether, if he had made the attempt, he would have reached
+his highest level, is that, so far as we can see, he did not strongly
+feel--perhaps hardly felt at all--that the _passion_ of love is a way
+into the Infinite; and a thing must be no less than this to Wordsworth
+if it is to rouse all his power. Byron, it seemed to him, had
+
+                                     dared to take
+  Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake;[7]
+
+and he utterly repudiated that. 'The immortal mind craves objects that
+endure.'
+
+Then there is that 'romance' which Wordsworth abjured. In using the word
+I am employing the familiar distinction between two tendencies of the
+Romantic Revival, one called naturalistic and one called, in a more
+special sense, romantic, and signalised, among other ways, by a love of
+the marvellous, the supernatural, the exotic, the worlds of mythology.
+It is a just and necessary distinction: the _Ancient Mariner_ and
+_Michael_ are very dissimilar. But, like most distinctions of the kind,
+it becomes misleading when it is roughly handled or pushed into an
+antithesis; and it would be easy to show that these two tendencies
+exclude one another only in their inferior examples, and that the better
+the example of either, the more it shows its community with the other.
+There is not a great deal of truth to nature in _Lalla Rookh_, but there
+is plenty in the _Ancient Mariner_: in certain poems of Crabbe there is
+little romance, but there is no want of it in _Sir Eustace Grey_ or in
+_Peter Grimes_. Taking the distinction, however, as we find it, and
+assuming, as I do, that it lay beyond Wordsworth's power to write an
+_Ancient Mariner_, or to tell us of
+
+         magic casements opening on the foam
+  Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,
+
+we are not therefore to conclude that he was by nature deficient in
+romance and incapable of writing well what he refused to write. The
+indications are quite contrary. Not to speak here of his own peculiar
+dealings with the supernatural, his vehement defence (in the _Prelude_)
+of fairy-tales as food for the young is only one of many passages which
+show that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted only by the
+supernatural powers of nature. He delighted in 'Arabian fiction.' The
+'Arabian sands' (_Solitary Reaper_) had the same glamour for him as for
+others. His dream of the Arab and the two books (_Prelude_, v.) has a
+very curious romantic effect, though it is not romance _in excelsis_,
+like _Kubla Khan_. His love of Spenser; his very description of him,
+
+  Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
+  With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace;
+
+the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual attitude, in which he
+praises the Osmunda fern as
+
+       lovelier, in its own retired abode
+  On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side
+  Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere
+  Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,[8]
+
+--these, and a score of other passages, all point the same way. He would
+not carry his readers to the East, like Southey and Moore and Byron,
+nor, like Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it suited his
+purpose, as in _Ruth_, he could write well enough of un-English scenery:
+
+  He told of the magnolia, spread
+  High as a cloud, high overhead,
+  The cypress and her spire;
+  Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam
+  Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
+  To set the hills on fire.
+
+He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for a subject, for he was
+determined to speak of what Englishmen may see every day; but what he
+wrote of Greek religion in the _Excursion_ is full of imagination and
+brought inspiration to Keats, and the most famous expression in English
+of that longing for the perished glory of Greek myth which appears in
+much Romantic poetry came from Wordsworth's pen:
+
+             Great God! I'd rather be
+  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
+  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
+  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
+  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
+  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
+
+As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor at all approved, that
+elementary love of fighting which, together with much nobler things, is
+gratified by some great poetry. And assuredly he could not, even if he
+would, have rivalled the last canto of _Marmion_, nor even the best
+passages in the _Siege of Corinth_. But he is not to be judged by his
+intentional failures. The martial parts of the _White Doe of Rylstone_
+are, with few exceptions, uninteresting, if not painfully tame. The
+former at least they were meant to be. The _Lay of the Last Minstrel_
+was on every tongue. The modest poet was as stiff-necked a person as
+ever walked the earth; and he was determined that no reader of his poem
+who missed its spiritual interest should be interested in anything else.
+Probably he overshot his mark. For readers who could understand him the
+effect he aimed at would not have been weakened by contrast with an
+outward action narrated with more spirit and sympathy. But, however that
+may be, he did what he meant to do. In the _Song at the Feast of
+Brougham Castle_, again, the war-like close of the Song was not written
+for its own sake. It was designed with a view to the transition to the
+longer metre, the thought of peace in communion with nature, and the
+wonderful stanza 'Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.' But,
+for the effect of this transition, it was necessary for Wordsworth to
+put his heart into the martial close of the Song; and surely it has
+plenty of animation and glory. Its author need not have shrunk from the
+subject of war if he had wished to handle it _con amore_.
+
+The poet whose portrait we drew when we began might have been the author
+of the _White Doe_, and perhaps of _Brougham Castle_, and possibly of
+the _Happy Warrior_. He could no more have composed the _Poems dedicated
+to National Independence and Liberty_ than the political sonnets of
+Milton. And yet Wordsworth wrote nothing more characteristic than these
+Poems, which I am not going to praise, since Mr. Swinburne's praise of
+them is, to my mind, not less just than eloquent. They are
+characteristic in many ways. The later are, on the whole, decidedly
+inferior to the earlier. Even in this little series, which occupies the
+first fifteen years of the century, the decline of Wordsworth's poetic
+power and the increasing use of theological ideas are clearly visible.
+The Odes, again, are much inferior to the majority of the Sonnets. And
+this too is characteristic. The entire success of the _Ode to Duty_ is
+exceptional, and it is connected with the fact that the poem is written
+in regular stanzas of a simple metrical scheme. The irregular Odes are
+never thus successful. Wordsworth could not command the tone of
+sustained rapture, and where his metrical form is irregular his ear is
+uncertain. The Immortality Ode, like _King Lear_, is its author's
+greatest product, but not his best piece of work. The Odes among the
+_Poems_ which we are now considering are declamatory, even violent, and
+yet they stir comparatively little emotion, and they do not sing. The
+sense of massive passion, concentrated, and repressing the utterance it
+permits itself, is that which most moves us in his political verse. And
+the Sonnet suited this.
+
+The patriotism of these _Poems_ is equally characteristic. It
+illustrates Wordsworth's total rejection of the Godwinian ideas in which
+he had once in vain sought refuge, and his belief in the necessity and
+sanctity of forms of association arising from natural kinship. It is
+composed, we may say, of two elements. The first is the simple love of
+country raised to a high pitch, the love of 'a lover or a child'; the
+love that makes it for some men a miserable doom to be forced to live in
+a foreign land, and that makes them feel their country's virtues and
+faults, and joys and sorrows, like those of the persons dearest to them.
+We talk as if this love were common. It is very far from common; but
+Wordsworth felt it.[9] The other element in his patriotism I must call
+by the dreaded name of 'moral,' a name which Wordsworth did not dread,
+because it meant for him nothing stereotyped or narrow. His country is
+to him the representative of freedom, left, as he writes in 1803,
+
+                     the only light
+  Of Liberty that yet remains on earth.
+
+This Liberty is, first, national independence; and that requires
+military power, the maintenance of which is a primary moral duty.[10]
+But neither military power nor even national independence is of value in
+itself; and neither could be long maintained without that which gives
+value to both. This is the freedom of the soul, plain living and high
+thinking, indifference to the externals of mere rank or wealth or power,
+domestic affections not crippled (as they may be) by poverty. Wordsworth
+fears for his country only when he doubts whether this inward freedom is
+not failing;[11] but he seldom fears for long. England, in the war
+against Napoleon, is to him almost what the England of the Long
+Parliament and the Commonwealth was to Milton,--an elect people, the
+chosen agent of God's purpose on the earth. His ideal of life, unlike
+Milton's in the stress he lays on the domestic affections and the
+influence of nature, is otherwise of the same Stoical cast. His country
+is to him, as to Milton,
+
+  An old and haughty nation, proud in arms.[12]
+
+And his own pride in it is, like Milton's, in the highest degree
+haughty. It would be calumnious to say that it recalls the description
+of the English given by the Irishman Goldsmith,
+
+  Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
+  I see the lords of human kind pass by;
+
+for Wordsworth had not the faintest wish to see his countrymen the lords
+of human kind, nor is there anything vulgar in his patriotism; but there
+_is_ pride in his port and defiance in his eye. And, lastly, the
+character of his ideal and of this national pride, with him as with
+Milton, is connected with personal traits,--impatience of constraint,
+severity, a certain austere passion, an inclination of imagination to
+the sublime.
+
+
+  3.
+
+These personal traits, though quite compatible with the portrait on
+which I am commenting, are not visible in it. Nor are others, which
+belong especially, but not exclusively, to the younger Wordsworth. He
+had a spirit so vehement and affections so violent (it is his sister's
+word) as to inspire alarm for him. If he had been acquainted with that
+excuse for impotent idleness and selfishness, 'the artistic
+temperament,' he might have made out a good claim to it. He was from the
+beginning self-willed, and for a long time he appeared aimless. He would
+not work at the studies of his university: he preferred to imagine a
+university in which he _would_ work. He had a passion for wandering
+which was restrained only by want of means, and which opened his heart
+to every pedlar or tramp whom he met. After leaving Cambridge he would
+not fix on a profession. He remained, to the displeasure of his
+relatives, an idler in the land or out of it; and as soon as he had L900
+of capital left to him he determined _not_ to have a profession.
+Sometimes he worked hard at his poetry, even heroically hard; but he did
+not work methodically, and often he wrote nothing for weeks, but loafed
+and walked and enjoyed himself. He was not blind like Milton, but the
+act of writing was physically disagreeable to him, and he made his
+woman-kind write to his dictation. He would not conform to rules, or
+attend to the dinner-bell, or go to church (he made up for this neglect
+later). 'He wrote his _Ode to Duty_,' said one of his friends, 'and then
+he had done with that matter.' He never 'tired' of his 'unchartered
+freedom.' In age, if he wanted to go out, whatever the hour and whatever
+the weather, he must have his way. 'In vain one reminded him that a
+letter needed an answer or that the storm would soon be over. It was
+very necessary for him to do what he liked.' If the poetic fit was on
+him he could attend to nothing else. He was passionately fond of his
+children, but, when the serious illness of one of them coincided with an
+onset of inspiration, it was impossible to rouse him to a sense of
+danger. At such times he was as completely possessed as any wild poet
+who ruins the happiness of everyone dependent on him. But he has himself
+described the tyranny of inspiration, and the reaction after it, in his
+_Stanzas written in Thomson's Castle of Indolence_. It is almost beyond
+doubt, I think, that the first portrait there is that of himself; and
+though it is idealised it is probably quite as accurate as the portrait
+in _A Poet's Epitaph_. In the _Prelude_ he tells us that, though he
+rarely at Cambridge betrayed by gestures or looks his feelings about
+nature, yet, when he did so, some of his companions said he was mad.
+Hazlitt, describing his manner of reading his own poetry in much later
+years, says, 'It is clear that he is either mad or inspired.'
+
+Wordsworth's lawlessness was of the innocuous kind, but it is a
+superstition to suppose that he was a disgustingly well-regulated
+person. It is scarcely less unjust to describe his poetic sympathies as
+narrow and his poetic morality as puritanical. The former, of course,
+had nothing like the range of minds like Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or
+Browning, or the great novelists. Wordsworth's want of humour would by
+itself have made that impossible; and, in addition, though by no means
+wanting in psychological curiosity, he was not much interested in
+complex natures. Simple souls, and especially simple souls that are also
+deep, were the natures that attracted him: and in the same way the
+passions he loved to depict are not those that storm themselves out or
+rush to a catastrophe, but those that hold the soul in a vice for long
+years. But, these limitations admitted, it will not be found by anyone
+who reviews the characters in the smaller poems and the _Excursion_
+(especially Book vii.), that Wordsworth's poetic sympathies are narrow.
+They are wider than those of any imaginative writer of his time and
+country except Scott and perhaps Crabbe.
+
+Nor is his morality narrow. It is serious, but it is human and kindly
+and not in the least ascetic. 'It is the privilege of poetic genius,' he
+says in his defence of Burns, 'to catch a spirit of pleasure wherever it
+can be found--in the walks of nature and in the business of men. The
+poet, trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of
+love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes the fairer aspects
+of war: nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love
+though immoderate--from convivial pleasure though intemperate--nor from
+the presence of war though savage and recognised as the handmaid of
+desolation. Who but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in
+works of art ever read without delight the picture which Burns has drawn
+of the convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o' Shanter?'
+There is no want of sympathy in Wordsworth's own picture of the
+'convivial exaltation' of his Waggoner. It is true that he himself never
+describes a scene in which, to quote his astonishing phrase, 'conjugal
+fidelity archly bends to the service of general benevolence,' and that
+his treatment of sexual passion is always grave and, in a true sense,
+moral; but it is plain and manly and perfectly free from timidity or
+monkishness. It would really be easier to make out against Wordsworth a
+charge of excessive tolerance than a charge of excessive rigidity. A
+beggar is the sort of person he likes. It is all very well for him to
+say that he likes the Old Cumberland Beggar because, by making people
+give, he keeps love alive in their hearts. It may be so--he says so, and
+I always believe him. But that was not his only reason; and it is clear
+to me that, when he met the tall gipsy-beggar, he gave her money because
+she was beautiful and queenly, and that he delighted in her two lying
+boys because of their gaiety and joy in life. Neither has he the least
+objection to a thief. The grandfather and grandson who go pilfering
+together, two infants separated by ninety years, meet with nothing but
+smiles from him. The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale, after thirty years of
+careless hospitality, found himself ruined. He borrowed money, spent
+some of it in paying a few of his other debts, and absconded to London.
+
+  But this he did all in the _ease_ of his heart.
+
+And for this reason, and because in London he keeps the ease of his
+heart and continues to love the country, Wordsworth dismisses him with a
+blessing. What he cannot bear is torpor. He passes a knot of gipsies in
+the morning; and, passing them again after his twelve hours of joyful
+rambling, he finds them just as they were, sunk in sloth; and he breaks
+out,
+
+           Oh, better wrong and strife,
+  Better vain deeds and evil than such life.
+
+He changed this shocking exclamation later, but it represents his
+original feeling, and he might have trusted that only an 'impenetrable
+dunce or narrow-minded puritan' would misunderstand him.[13]
+
+Wordsworth's morality is of one piece with his optimism and with his
+determination to seize and exhibit in everything the element of good.
+But this is a subject far too large for treatment here, and I can refer
+to it only in the most summary way. What Arnold precisely meant when he
+said that Wordsworth 'put by' the cloud of human destiny I am not sure.
+That Wordsworth saw this cloud and looked at it steadily is beyond all
+question. I am not building on such famous lines as
+
+  The still sad music of humanity,
+
+or
+
+          the fierce confederate storm
+  Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore
+  Within the walls of cities;
+
+or
+
+  Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills,
+  The generations are prepared; the pangs,
+  The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife
+  Of poor humanity's afflicted will
+  Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny;
+
+for, although such quotations could be multiplied, isolated expressions,
+even when not dramatic,[14] would prove little. But I repeat the remark
+already made, that if we review the subjects of many of Wordsworth's
+famous poems on human life,--the subjects, for example, of _The Thorn_,
+_The Sailor's Mother_, _Ruth_, _The Brothers_, _Michael_, _The
+Affliction of Margaret_, _The White Doe of Rylstone_, the story of
+Margaret in _Excursion_, i., half the stories told in _Excursion_, vi.
+and vii.--we find ourselves in the presence of poverty, crime, insanity,
+ruined innocence, torturing hopes doomed to extinction, solitary
+anguish, even despair. Ignore the manner in which Wordsworth treated
+his subjects, and you will have to say that his world, so far as
+humanity is concerned, is a dark world,--at least as dark as that of
+Byron. Unquestionably then he saw the cloud of human destiny, and he did
+not avert his eyes from it. Nor did he pretend to understand its
+darkness. The world was to him in the end 'this unintelligible world,'
+and the only 'adequate support for the calamities of mortal life' was
+faith.[15] But he was profoundly impressed, through the experience of
+his own years of crisis, alike by the dangers of despondency, and by the
+superficiality of the views which it engenders. It was for him (and
+here, as in other points, he shows his natural affinity to Spinoza) a
+condition in which the soul, concentrated on its own suffering, for that
+very reason loses hold both of its own being and of the reality of which
+it forms a part. His experience also made it impossible for him to doubt
+that what he grasped
+
+  At times when most existence with herself
+  Is satisfied,
+
+--and these are the times when existence is most united in love with
+other existence--was, in a special sense or degree, the truth, and
+therefore that the evils which we suffer, deplore, or condemn, cannot
+really be what they seem to us when we merely suffer, deplore, or
+condemn them. He set himself to _see_ this, as far as he could, and to
+show it. He sang of pleasure, joy, glee, blitheness, love, wherever in
+nature or humanity they assert their indisputable power; and turning to
+pain and wrong, and gazing at them steadfastly, and setting himself to
+present the facts with a quiet but unsparing truthfulness, he yet
+endeavoured to show what he had seen, that sometimes pain and wrong are
+the conditions of a happiness and good which without them could not
+have been, that no limit can be set to the power of the soul to
+transmute them into its own substance, and that, in suffering and even
+in misery, there may still be such a strength as fills us with awe or
+with glory. He did not pretend, I repeat, that what he saw sufficed to
+solve the riddle of the painful earth. 'Our being rests' on 'dark
+foundations,' and 'our haughty life is crowned with darkness.' But still
+what he showed was what he _saw_, and he saw it in the cloud of human
+destiny. We are not here concerned with his faith in the sun behind that
+cloud; my purpose is only to insist that he 'fronted' it 'fearlessly.'
+
+
+  4.
+
+After quoting the lines from _A Poet's Epitaph_, and Arnold's lines on
+Wordsworth, I asked how the man described in them ever came to write the
+_Ode_ on Immortality, or _Yew-trees_, or why he should say,
+
+  For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
+  Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
+  To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
+
+The aspect of Wordsworth's poetry which answers this question forms my
+last subject.
+
+We may recall this aspect in more than one way. First, not a little of
+Wordsworth's poetry either approaches or actually enters the province of
+the sublime. His strongest natural inclination tended there. He himself
+speaks of his temperament as 'stern,' and tells us that
+
+          to the very going out of youth
+  [He] too exclusively esteemed _that_ love,
+  And sought _that_ beauty, which, as Milton says,
+  Hath terror in it.
+
+This disposition is easily traced in the imaginative impressions of his
+childhood as he describes them in the _Prelude_. His fixed habit of
+looking
+
+       with feelings of fraternal love
+  Upon the unassuming things that hold
+  A silent station in this beauteous world,
+
+was only formed, it would seem, under his sister's influence, after his
+recovery from the crisis that followed the ruin of his towering hopes in
+the French Revolution. It was a part of his endeavour to find something
+of the distant ideal in life's familiar face. And though this attitude
+of sympathy and humility did become habitual, the first bent towards
+grandeur, austerity, sublimity, retained its force. It is evident in the
+political poems, and in all those pictures of life which depict the
+unconquerable power of affection, passion, resolution, patience, or
+faith. It inspires much of his greatest poetry of Nature. It emerges
+occasionally with a strange and thrilling effect in the serene,
+gracious, but sometimes stagnant atmosphere of the later poems,--for the
+last time, perhaps, in that magnificent stanza of the _Extempore
+Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg_ (1835),
+
+  Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
+    Or waves that own no curbing hand,
+  How fast has brother followed brother
+    From sunshine to the sunless land!
+
+Wordsworth is indisputably the most sublime of our poets since Milton.
+
+We may put the matter, secondly, thus. However much Wordsworth was the
+poet of small and humble things, and the poet who saw his ideal
+realised, not in Utopia, but here and now before his eyes, he was, quite
+as much, what some would call a mystic. He saw everything in the light
+of 'the visionary power.' He was, for himself,
+
+  The transitory being that beheld
+  This Vision.
+
+He apprehended all things, natural or human, as the expression of
+something which, while manifested in them, immeasurably transcends them.
+And nothing can be more intensely Wordsworthian than the poems and
+passages most marked by this visionary power and most directly issuing
+from this apprehension. The bearing of these statements on Wordsworth's
+inclination to sublimity will be obvious at a glance.
+
+Now we may prefer the Wordsworth of the daffodils to the Wordsworth of
+the yew-trees, and we may even believe the poet's mysticism to be
+moonshine; but it is certain that to neglect or throw into the shade
+this aspect of his poetry is neither to take Wordsworth as he really was
+nor to judge his poetry truly, since this aspect appears in much of it
+that we cannot deny to be first-rate. Yet there is, I think, and has
+been for some time, a tendency to this mistake. It is exemplified in
+Arnold's Introduction and has been increased by it, and it is visible in
+some degree even in Pater's essay. Arnold wished to make Wordsworth more
+popular; and so he was tempted to represent Wordsworth's poetry as much
+more simple and unambitious than it really was, and as much more easily
+apprehended than it ever can be. He was also annoyed by attempts to
+formulate a systematic Wordsworthian philosophy; partly, doubtless,
+because he knew that, however great the philosophical value of a poet's
+ideas may be, it cannot by itself determine the value of his poetry; but
+partly also because, having himself but little turn for philosophy, he
+was disposed to regard it as illusory; and further because, even in the
+poetic sphere, he was somewhat deficient in that kind of imagination
+which is allied to metaphysical thought. This is one reason of his
+curious failure to appreciate Shelley, and of the evident irritation
+which Shelley produced in him. And it is also one reason why, both in
+his _Memorial Verses_ and in the introduction to his selection from
+Wordsworth, he either ignores or depreciates that aspect of the poetry
+with which we are just now concerned. It is not true, we must bluntly
+say, that the cause of the greatness of this poetry 'is simple and may
+be told quite simply.' It is true, and it is admirably said, that this
+poetry 'is great because of the extraordinary power with which
+Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us
+in the simple primary affections and duties.' But this is only half the
+truth.
+
+Pater's essay is not thus one-sided. It is, to my mind, an extremely
+fine piece of criticism. Yet the tendency to which I am objecting does
+appear in it. Pater says, for example, that Wordsworth is the poet of
+nature, 'and of nature, after all, in her modesty. The English Lake
+country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of
+Wordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of
+apparently little and familiar things, would have found its true test
+had he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.'
+This last sentence is, in one sense, doubtless true. The 'function'
+referred to could have been exercised in Surrey, and was exercised in
+Dorset and Somerset, as well as in the Lake country. And this function
+was a 'peculiar function of Wordsworth's genius.' But that it was _the_
+peculiar function of his genius, or more peculiar than that other
+function which forms our present subject, I venture to deny; and for the
+full exercise of this latter function, it is hardly hazardous to assert,
+Wordsworth's childhood in a mountain district, and his subsequent
+residence there, were indispensable. This will be doubted for a moment,
+I believe, only by those readers (and they are not a few) who ignore the
+_Prelude_ and the _Excursion_. But the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_,
+though there are dull pages in both, contain much of Wordsworth's best
+and most characteristic poetry. And even in a selection like Arnold's,
+which, perhaps wisely, makes hardly any use of them, many famous poems
+will be found which deal with nature but not with nature 'in her
+modesty.'
+
+My main object was to insist that the 'mystic,' 'visionary,' 'sublime,'
+aspect of Wordsworth's poetry must not be slighted. I wish to add a few
+remarks on it, but to consider it fully would carry us far beyond our
+bounds; and, even if I attempted the task, I should not formulate its
+results in a body of doctrines. Such a formulation is useful, and I see
+no objection to it in principle, as one method of exploring Wordsworth's
+mind with a view to the better apprehension of his poetry. But the
+method has its dangers, and it is another matter to put forward the
+results as philosophically adequate, or to take the position that
+'Wordsworth was first and foremost a philosophical thinker, a man whose
+intention and purpose it was to think out for himself, faithfully and
+seriously, the questions concerning man and nature and human life' (Dean
+Church). If this were true, he should have given himself to philosophy
+and not to poetry; and there is no reason to think that he would have
+been eminently successful. Nobody ever was so who was not forced by a
+special natural power and an imperious impulsion into the business of
+'thinking out,' and who did not develope this power by years of arduous
+discipline. Wordsworth does not show it in any marked degree; and,
+though he reflected deeply and acutely, he was without philosophical
+training. His poetry is immensely interesting as an imaginative
+expression of the same mind which, in his day, produced in Germany great
+philosophies. His poetic experience, his intuitions, his single
+thoughts, even his large views, correspond in a striking way, sometimes
+in a startling way, with ideas methodically developed by Kant,
+Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer. They remain admirable material for
+philosophy; and a philosophy which found itself driven to treat them as
+moonshine would probably be a very poor affair. But they are like the
+experience and the utterances of men of religious genius: great truths
+are enshrined in them, but generally the shrine would have to be broken
+to liberate these truths in a form which would satisfy the desire to
+understand. To claim for them the power to satisfy that desire is an
+error, and it tempts those in whom that desire is predominant to treat
+them as mere beautiful illusions.
+
+Setting aside, then, any questions as to the ultimate import of the
+'mystic' strain in Wordsworth's poetry, I intend only to call attention
+to certain traits in the kind of poetic experience which exhibits it
+most plainly. And we may observe at once that in this there is always
+traceable a certain hostility to 'sense.' I do not mean that hostility
+which is present in _all_ poetic experience, and of which Wordsworth was
+very distinctly aware. The regular action of the senses on their
+customary material produces, in his view, a 'tyranny' over the soul. It
+helps to construct that every-day picture of the world, of sensible
+objects and events 'in disconnection dead and spiritless,' which we take
+for reality. In relation to this reality we become passive slaves;[16]
+it lies on us with a weight 'heavy as frost and deep almost as life.' It
+is the origin alike of our torpor and our superficiality. _All_ poetic
+experience frees us from it to some extent, or breaks into it, and so
+may be called hostile to sense. But this experience is, broadly
+speaking, of two different kinds. The perception of the daffodils as
+dancing in glee, and in sympathy with other gleeful beings, shows us a
+living, joyous, loving world, and so a 'spiritual' world, not a merely
+'sensible' one. But the hostility to sense is here no more than a
+hostility to _mere_ sense: this 'spiritual' world is itself the sensible
+world more fully apprehended: the daffodils do not change or lose their
+colour in disclosing their glee. On the other hand, in the kind of
+experience which forms our present subject, there is always some feeling
+of definite contrast with the limited sensible world. The arresting
+feature or object is felt in some way _against_ this background, or even
+as in some way a denial of it. Sometimes it is a visionary unearthly
+light resting on a scene or on some strange figure. Sometimes it is the
+feeling that the scene or figure belongs to the world of dream.
+Sometimes it is an intimation of boundlessness, contradicting or
+abolishing the fixed limits of our habitual view. Sometimes it is the
+obscure sense of 'unknown modes of being,' unlike the familiar modes.
+This kind of experience, further, comes often with a distinct shock,
+which may bewilder, confuse or trouble the mind. And, lastly, it is
+especially, though not invariably, associated with mountains, and again
+with solitude. Some of these bald statements I will go on to illustrate,
+only remarking that the boundary between these modes of imagination is,
+naturally, less marked and more wavering in Wordsworth's poetry than in
+my brief analysis.
+
+We may begin with a poem standing near this boundary, the famous verses
+_To the Cuckoo_, 'O blithe new-comer.' It stands near the boundary
+because, like the poem on the Daffodils, it is entirely happy. But it
+stands unmistakably on the further side of the boundary, and is, in
+truth, more nearly allied to the _Ode_ on Immortality than to the poem
+on the Daffodils. The sense of sight is baffled, and its tyranny broken.
+Only a cry is heard, which makes the listener look a thousand ways, so
+shifting is the direction from which it reaches him. It seems to come
+from a mere 'voice,' 'an invisible thing,' 'a mystery.' It brings him
+'a tale of visionary hours,'--hours of childhood, when he sought this
+invisible thing in vain, and the earth appeared to his bewildered but
+liberated fancy 'an unsubstantial fairy place.' And still, when he hears
+it, the great globe itself, we may say, fades like an unsubstantial
+pageant; or, to quote from the Immortality _Ode_, the 'shades of the
+prison house' melt into air. These words are much more solemn than the
+Cuckoo poem; but the experience is of the same type, and 'the visionary
+gleam' of the ode, like the 'wandering voice' of the poem, is the
+expression through sense of something beyond sense.
+
+Take another passage referring to childhood. It is from the _Prelude_,
+ii. Here there is something more than perplexity. There is apprehension,
+and we are approaching the sublime:
+
+    One summer evening (led by her[17]) I found
+  A little boat tied to a willow tree
+  Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
+  Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
+  Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
+  And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
+  Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
+  Leaving behind her still, on either side,
+  Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
+  Until they melted all into one track
+  Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
+  Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
+  With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
+  Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
+  The horizon's utmost boundary; far above
+  Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
+  She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
+  I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
+  And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
+  Went heaving through the water like a swan;
+  When, from behind that craggy steep till then
+  The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
+  As if with voluntary power instinct,
+  Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
+  And growing still in stature the grim shape
+  Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
+  For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
+  And measured motion like a living thing,
+  Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
+  And through the silent water stole my way
+  Back to the covert of the willow tree;
+  There in her mooring-place I left my bark,--
+  And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
+  And serious mood; but after I had seen
+  That spectacle, for many days, my brain
+  Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
+  Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
+  There hung a darkness, call it solitude
+  Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
+  Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
+  Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
+  But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
+  Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
+  By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
+
+The best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in the poet's
+other works. And those last dozen lines furnish the best commentary on
+that famous passage in the _Ode_, where the poet, looking back to his
+childhood, gives thanks for it,--not however for its careless delight
+and liberty,
+
+      But for those obstinate questionings
+      Of sense and outward things,
+      Fallings from us, vanishings;
+      Blank misgivings of a Creature
+  Moving about in worlds not realised,
+  High instincts before which our mortal Nature
+  Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
+
+Whether, or how, these experiences afford 'intimations of immortality'
+is not in question here; but it will never do to dismiss them so airily
+as Arnold did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.
+
+The most striking recollections of his childhood have not in all cases
+this manifest affinity to the _Ode_, but wherever the visionary feeling
+appears in them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still
+traceable. There is, for instance, in _Prelude_, xii., the description
+of the crag, from which, on a wild dark day, the boy watched eagerly
+the two highways below for the ponies that were coming to take him home
+for the holidays. It is too long to quote, but every reader of it will
+remember
+
+           the wind and sleety rain,
+  And all the business of the elements,
+  The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
+  And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
+  The noise of wood and water, and the mist
+  That on the line of each of those two roads
+  Advanced in such indisputable shapes.
+
+Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen
+to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory.
+In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he
+recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow
+world of common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and the vast unseen
+world which encloses it in beneficent yet dark and inexorable arms. The
+visionary feeling has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or
+covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or
+breaking into the customary 'reality.' Its character varies; and so
+sometimes at its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity,
+melts in rapture into that infinite being; while at other times the
+'mortal nature' stands dumb, incapable of thought, or shrinking from
+some presence
+
+  Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks
+  That threaten the profane.
+
+This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth's most characteristic
+poems that it may almost be called their soul; and failure to understand
+them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It appears in a mild and
+tender form, but quite openly, in the lines _To a Highland Girl_, where
+the child, and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her home, seem
+to the poet
+
+  Like something fashioned in a dream.
+
+It gives to _The Solitary Reaper_ its note of remoteness and wonder; and
+even the slight shock of bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening
+line of the most famous stanza:
+
+  Will no one tell me what she sings?
+
+Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the White Doe, and sounds
+faintly to us from far away through all the tale of failure and anguish.
+Without it such shorter narratives as _Hartleap Well_ and _Resolution
+and Independence_ would lose the imaginative atmosphere which adds
+mystery and grandeur to the apparently simple 'moral.'
+
+In _Hartleap Well_ it is conveyed at first by slight touches of
+contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit of the Hart, has mounted his
+third horse.
+
+  Joy sparkled in the prancing courser's eyes;
+  The horse and horseman are a happy pair;
+  But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,
+  There is a doleful silence in the air.
+
+  A rout this morning left Sir Walter's hall,
+  That as they galloped made the echoes roar;
+  But horse and man are vanished, one and all;
+  Such race, I think, was never seen before.
+
+At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one by one among the
+mountain fern.
+
+  Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?
+  The bugles that so joyfully were blown?
+  --This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;
+  Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.
+
+Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the old shepherd's description
+of the utter desolation of the spot where the waters of the little
+spring had trembled with the last deep groan of the dying stag, and
+where the Knight, to commemorate his exploit, had built a basin for the
+spring, three pillars to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a
+pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing plants, for the summer
+joy of himself and his paramour. But now 'the pleasure-house is dust,'
+and the trees are grey, 'with neither arms nor head':
+
+  Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;
+  The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
+  So will it be, as I have often said,
+  Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.
+
+It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable Powers,
+behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride, that
+justifies the solemnity of the stanza:
+
+  The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
+  That is in the green leaves among the groves,
+  Maintains a deep and reverential care
+  For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
+
+_Hartleap Well_ is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely
+successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There can be no sort of doubt as to
+_Resolution and Independence_, probably, if we must choose, the most
+Wordsworthian of Wordsworth's poems, and the best test of ability to
+understand him. The story, if given in a brief argument, would sound far
+from promising. We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat
+like that of _Simon Lee_. When we read it, we find instead lines of
+extraordinary grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines more pedestrian
+than could be found in an impressive poem from any other hand,--for
+instance,
+
+  And, drawing to his side, to him did say,
+  'This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.'
+
+or,
+
+  'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'
+
+We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless
+reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered),
+which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a
+writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured.
+Yet with all this, and by dint of all this, we read with bated breath,
+almost as if we were in the presence of that 'majestical' Spirit in
+_Hamlet_, come to 'admonish' from another world, though not this time by
+terror. And one source of this effect is the confusion, the almost
+hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind, that falls on the
+poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer, and hears, without
+understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the
+prosaic 'occupation' he 'pursues':
+
+  The old man still stood talking by my side;
+  But now his voice to me was like a stream
+  Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
+  And the whole body of the man did seem
+  Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
+  Or like a man from some far region sent,
+  To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
+
+The same question was asked again, and the answer was repeated. But
+
+  While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
+  The old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me.
+
+'Trouble' is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the
+confusion caused by some visionary experience. Here are, again, the
+fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of the
+soul's infinity.
+
+Out of many illustrations I will choose three more. There is in the
+_Prelude_, iv., the passage (so strongly resembling _Resolution and
+Independence_ that I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an
+old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone on the moon-lit
+road, all alone:
+
+  No living thing appeared in earth or air;
+  And, save the flowing water's peaceful voice,
+  Sound there was none ...
+                            ... still his form
+  Kept the same awful steadiness--at his feet
+  His shadow lay, and moved not.
+
+His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghost was never ghostlier than
+he. And by him we may place the London beggar of _Prelude_, vii.:
+
+  How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
+  Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
+  Unto myself, 'The face of every one
+  That passes by me is a mystery!'
+  Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
+  By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,
+  Until the shapes before my eyes became
+  A second-sight procession, such as glides
+  Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;
+  And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
+  The reach of common indication, lost
+  Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
+  Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
+  Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
+  Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
+  Wearing a written paper, to explain
+  His story, whence he came, and who he was.
+  Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
+  As with the might of waters; an apt type
+  This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
+  Both of ourselves and of the universe;
+  And, on the shape of that unmoving man,
+  His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
+  As if admonished from another world.
+
+Still more curious psychologically is the passage, in the preceding book
+of the _Prelude_, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the
+description of its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the
+passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones ('Jones, as from Calais
+southward you and I') set out to walk over the Simplon, then traversed
+only by a rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way, and, meeting a
+peasant, discovered from his answers to their questions that, without
+knowing it, they '_had crossed the Alps_.' This may not sound important,
+and the italics are Wordsworth's, not mine. But the next words are
+these:
+
+    Imagination--here the Power so called
+  Through sad incompetence of human speech,
+  That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
+  Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
+  At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
+  Halted without an effort to break through;
+  But to my conscious soul I now can say--
+  'I recognise thy glory': in such strength
+  Of usurpation, when the light of sense
+  Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
+  The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
+  There harbours; whether we be young or old,
+  Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
+  Is with infinitude, and only there;
+  With hope it is, hope that can never die,
+  Effort, and expectation, and desire,
+  And something evermore about to be.
+
+And what was the result of this shock? The poet may answer for himself
+in some of the greatest lines in English poetry. The travellers
+proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.
+
+                   Downwards we hurried fast,
+  And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
+  Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
+  Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
+  And with them did we journey several hours
+  At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
+  Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
+  The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
+  And in the narrow rent at every turn
+  Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
+  The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
+  The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
+  Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
+  As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
+  And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
+  The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
+  Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light--
+  Were all like workings of one mind, the features
+  Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
+  Characters of the great Apocalypse,
+  The types and symbols of Eternity,
+  Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.[18]
+
+I hardly think that 'the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its
+life' could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have
+lately referred, and all the passages I have quoted, there are but two
+or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or
+the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish.
+The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the
+more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo in _O blithe new-comer_, though
+visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is
+
+  Like--but oh, how different![19]
+
+It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer,
+_felt_ his faith. It was there that all things
+
+  Breathed immortality, revolving life,
+  And greatness still revolving; infinite.
+  There littleness was not; the least of things
+  Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
+  Her prospects, nor did he believe,--he _saw_.
+
+And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words,
+as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.
+
+  Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
+  One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.
+
+And of the second of these we may say that 'few or none hears it right'
+now he is gone.
+
+Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more
+pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain
+voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom
+Wordsworth's greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered
+him than to do what he has probably never done in his life--to be on a
+mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only, but all
+solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.
+
+  The outward shows of sky and earth,
+  Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
+  And impulses _of deeper birth_
+  Have come to him in solitude.
+
+The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is essential to nearly
+all the poems and passages we have been considering, and to some of
+quite a different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas. And it is not
+merely that the poet is alone; what he sees is so too. If the
+leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been
+solitary figures, they would not have awaked 'the visionary power'; and
+it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the boy who was watching for his
+father's ponies had had beside him any more than
+
+  The _single_ sheep and the _one_ blasted tree,
+
+the mist would not have advanced along the roads 'in such indisputable
+shapes.' With Wordsworth that power seems to have sprung into life at
+once on the perception of loneliness. What is lonely is a spirit. To
+call a thing lonely or solitary is, with him, to say that it opens a
+bright or solemn vista into infinity. He himself 'wanders lonely as a
+cloud': he seeks the 'souls of lonely places': he listens in awe to
+
+  One voice, the solitary raven ...
+  An iron knell, with echoes from afar:
+
+against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,
+
+  A solitary object and sublime,
+  Above all height! like an aerial cross
+  Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
+  Of the Chartreuse, for worship.
+
+But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I will refer only to two
+poems more. The editor of the _Golden Treasury_, a book never to be
+thought of without gratitude, changed the title _The Solitary_ _Reaper_
+into _The Highland Reaper_. He may have had his reasons. Perhaps he had
+met some one who thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still the
+change was a mistake: the 'solitary' in Wordsworth's title gave the
+keynote. The other poem is _Lucy Gray_. 'When I was little,' a lover of
+Wordsworth once said, 'I could hardly bear to read _Lucy Gray_, it made
+me feel so lonely.' Wordsworth called it _Lucy Gray, or Solitude_, and
+this young reader understood him. But there is too much, reason to fear
+that for half his readers his 'solitary child' is generalised into a
+mere 'little girl,' and that they never receive the main impression he
+wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines,
+and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which give even to
+this ballad the visionary touch which distinguishes it from _Alice
+Fell_:
+
+  Yet some maintain that to this day
+  She is a living child;
+  That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
+  Upon the lonesome wild.
+
+  O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
+  And never looks behind;
+  And sings a solitary song
+  That whistles in the wind.
+
+The solitariness which exerted so potent a spell on Wordsworth had in it
+nothing 'Byronic.' He preached in the _Excursion_ against the solitude
+of 'self-indulging spleen.' He was even aware that he himself, though
+free from that weakness, had felt
+
+                   perhaps too much
+  The self-sufficing power of Solitude.[20]
+
+No poet is more emphatically the poet of community. A great part of his
+verse--a part as characteristic and as precious as the part on which I
+have been dwelling--is dedicated to the affections of home and
+neighbourhood and country, and to that soul of joy and love which links
+together all Nature's children, and 'steals from earth to man, from man
+to earth.' And this soul is for him as truly the presence of 'the Being
+that is in the clouds and air' and in the mind of man as are the power,
+the darkness, the silence, the strange gleams and mysterious visitations
+which startle and confuse with intimations of infinity. But solitude and
+solitariness were to him, in the main, one of these intimations. They
+had not for him merely the 'eeriness' which they have at times for
+everyone, though that was essential to some of the poems we have
+reviewed. They were the symbol of power to stand alone, to be
+'self-sufficing,' to dispense with custom and surroundings and aid and
+sympathy--a self-dependence at once the image and the communication of
+'the soul of all the worlds.' Even when they were full of 'sounds and
+sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,' the solitude of the Reaper
+or of Lucy, they so appealed to him. But they appealed also to that
+austerer strain which led him to love 'bare trees and mountains bare,'
+and lonely places, and the bleak music of the old stone wall, and to
+dwell with awe, and yet with exultation, on the majesty of that
+'unconquerable mind' which through long years holds its solitary
+purpose, sustains its solitary passion, feeds upon its solitary anguish.
+For this mind, as for the blind beggar or the leech-gatherer, the 'light
+of sense' and the sweetness of life have faded or 'gone out'; but in it
+'greatness makes abode,' and it 'retains its station proud,' 'by form or
+image unprofaned.' Thus, in whatever guise it might present itself,
+solitariness 'carried far into his heart' the haunting sense of an
+'invisible world'; of some Life beyond this 'transitory being' and
+'unapproachable by death';
+
+  Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;
+  That hath been, is, and where it was and is
+  There shall endure,--existence unexposed
+  To the blind walk of mortal accident;
+  From diminution safe and weakening age;
+  While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;
+  And countless generations of mankind
+  Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.
+
+For me, I confess, all this is far from being 'mere poetry'--partly
+because I do not believe that any such thing as 'mere poetry' exists.
+But whatever kind or degree of truth we may find in all this, everything
+in Wordsworth that is sublime or approaches sublimity has, directly or
+more remotely, to do with it. And without this part of his poetry
+Wordsworth would be 'shorn of his strength,' and would no longer stand,
+as he does stand, nearer than any other poet of the Nineteenth Century
+to Milton.
+
+
+  NOTE.
+
+I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about _We are Seven_.
+Wordsworth's friend, James Tobin, who saw the _Lyrical Ballads_ while
+they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make
+him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I
+have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of
+the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever
+heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the
+'moral' of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the
+'moral' given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative
+impression from which the poem arose.
+
+The 'moral' is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated
+opening stanza:
+
+  --------A simple child,
+    That lightly draws its breath,
+  And feels its life in every limb,
+    What should it know of death?
+
+Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was
+all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed
+that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea
+better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza
+as we have it, except that the first line ran, 'A simple child, dear
+brother Jim,'--this Jim, who rhymes with 'limb,' being the James Tobin
+who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in the
+_Lyrical Ballads_ as Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the
+words 'dear brother Jim' as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for
+the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.
+
+Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has a felicity of
+style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have achieved in expressing
+the idea. And the idea was not only accepted by Wordsworth, but,
+according to his own account, he had mentioned in substance what he
+wished to be expressed. It must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a
+doubt whether the stanza truly represents the imaginative experience
+from which the poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this
+doubt does not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge's
+authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having read _We are
+Seven_ without feeling it or without saying to myself at the end, 'This
+means more than the first stanza says.' And, however improbable, it
+cannot be called impossible that even so introspective a poet as
+Wordsworth might misconstrue the impression that stirred him to write. I
+will take courage, therefore, to confess the belief that what stirred
+him was the coincidence of the child's feelings with some of those
+feelings of his own childhood which he described in the Immortality
+_Ode_, and once or twice in conversation, and which, in a less
+individual and peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs,
+to children in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer
+to one or two passages. 'At that time I could not believe that I should
+lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust'
+(remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth, _Prose Works_, ed. Grosart, iii.
+464). Is not this the condition of the child in _We are Seven_?
+'Nothing,' he says to Miss Fenwick, 'was more difficult for me in
+childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my
+own being' (_ib._ iii. 194). He then quotes the first stanza of _We are
+Seven_. It is true that thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own
+case from the child's, attributing the difficulty in her case to 'animal
+vivacity.' But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth's direct
+testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention to a
+passage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth begins by
+saying that the custom of raising monuments to the dead 'proceeded
+obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to guard the remains of the
+deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation, and,
+secondly, to preserve their memory.' But these desires, in his opinion,
+resolve themselves into one, and both proceed from the consciousness or
+fore-feeling of immortality, also described as 'an intimation or
+assurance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable.' And
+he goes on thus: 'If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall
+find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own
+individual Being, the mind was without this assurance.... Forlorn, and
+cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that
+man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the
+mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal
+spirits with which the lamb in the meadow or any other irrational
+creature is endowed; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of
+his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a
+notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been
+instilled into him!' Now Coleridge's stanza, and Wordsworth's own
+distinction between the child and himself, do come at least very near to
+attributing the child's inability to realise the fact of death to that
+very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient cause of it, is
+here indignantly repudiated. According to the present passage, this
+inability ought to have been traced to that 'sense' or 'consciousness'
+of immortality which is inherent in human nature. And (whether or no
+Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it was _this_, I suggest, that,
+unknown to himself, arrested him in the child's persistent ignoring of
+the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the Immortality _Ode_. The
+child is in possession of one of those 'truths that wake to perish
+never,' though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of
+custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the conversation took
+place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth
+had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he
+saw them later (_Tintern Abbey_, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to
+the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted
+from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even
+to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly
+significant that the child in _We are Seven_ is not described as showing
+any particular 'animal vivacity': she strikes one as rather a quiet,
+though determined, little person.
+
+These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who
+feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But
+many, I think, must feel them.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a
+    short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April,
+    1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of
+    English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other
+    lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the
+    course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult
+    Professor Herford's _The Age of Wordsworth_, a little book which is
+    familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the
+    more admired the more they use it?
+
+  [2] These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen
+    partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much
+    the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in
+    _The Tables Turned_, where occurs that outrageous stanza about 'one
+    impulse from a vernal wood' which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When
+    all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these
+    statements, and many like them, are 'poetic,' they ought to remain
+    startling. Two of them--that from the story of Margaret (_Excursion_,
+    I.), and that from the _Ode_, 1815--were made less so, to the injury
+    of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten
+    what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.
+
+  [3] _Goody Blake_, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of
+    impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge's _Three Graves_. The
+    question as to the _Anecdote for Fathers_ is not precisely whether it
+    makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in
+    such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is
+    in the lines,
+
+      And five times to the child I said,
+      Why, Edward, tell me why?
+
+    The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim,
+    is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed
+    with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the
+    effect so delightfully reproduced in _Through the Looking-glass_
+    ('I'll tell thee everything I can').
+
+  [4] Some remarks on _We are seven_ are added in a note at the end of
+    the lecture.
+
+  [5] The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from
+    Hazlitt and De Quincey.
+
+  [6] The publication of the _Excursion_ seems to have been postponed
+    for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the
+    world for thirteen years.
+
+  [7] _Evening Voluntaries_, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.
+
+  [8] _Poems on the Naming of Places_, iv. Keats need not have been
+    ashamed to write the last line.
+
+  [9] ''Tis past, that melancholy dream,'--so he describes his sojourn
+    in Germany.
+
+  [10] Wordsworth's Letter to Major-General Pasley (_Prose Works_, i.)
+    contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of
+    his hostility to mere militarism.
+
+  [11] I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost
+    courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased
+    to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.
+
+  [12] [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh
+    (_Comus_, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the
+    quotation.]
+
+  [13] In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of
+    course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude,
+    cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in
+    his poetry or in his life. 'I could kick such a man across England
+    with my naked foot,' the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base
+    action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was
+    not so very unlike Wordsworth's. And neither poet would have found it
+    difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or 'the
+    unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.'
+
+  [14] The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary
+    (_Excursion_, vi.).
+
+  [15] The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the
+    _Excursion_, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.
+
+  [16] This is just the opposite of the 'wise passiveness' of
+    imaginative but unreflective feeling.
+
+  [17] Nature.
+
+  [18] I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture,
+    but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth's mind who cares to
+    return to them.
+
+    The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth,
+    'the visionary power' arises from, and testifies to, the mind's
+    infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united
+    with, a feeling or idea of _the_ infinite or 'one mind,' and of union
+    with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague
+    alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet's
+    experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought
+    always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about
+    'immortality' or 'eternity.' His sense or consciousness of
+    'immortality,' that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in
+    some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness
+    that 'he' belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an 'active
+    principle' which is eternal, indivisible, and the 'soul of all the
+    worlds' (cf. opening of _Excursion_, ix.). Whatever we may make of
+    this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain
+    entirely outside Wordsworth's mind in passages like that just
+    referred to, and in passages where he talks of 'acts of immortality
+    in Nature's course,' or says that to the Wanderer 'all things among
+    the mountains breathed immortality,' or says that he has been
+    unfolding 'far-stretching views of immortality,' though he may not
+    appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and
+    Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth 'transitory,' but Nature always
+    and everywhere _reveals_ 'immortality,' and Man (in another sense) is
+    'immortal.' Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise
+    sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only
+    chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except
+    Wordsworth, may mean by 'man' and 'immortal,' and to try to get into
+    _his_ mind.
+
+    There is an illuminating passage on 'the visionary power' and the
+    mind's infinity or immortality, in _Prelude_, ii.:
+
+              and hence, from the same source,
+      Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,
+      Under the quiet stars, and at that time
+      Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
+      To breathe an elevated mood, by form
+      Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
+      If the night blackened with a coming storm,
+      Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
+      The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
+      Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
+      Thence did I drink the visionary power;
+      And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
+      Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
+      That they are kindred to our purer mind
+      And intellectual life; but that the soul,
+      Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
+      Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
+      Of possible sublimity, whereto
+      With growing faculties she doth aspire,
+      With faculties still growing, feeling still
+      That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
+      Have something to pursue.
+
+    An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of
+    this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with
+    Wordsworth's love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for
+    instance, _Prelude_, xiii., 'Who doth not love to follow with his eye
+    The windings of a public way?' And compare the enchantment of the
+    question, _What, are you stepping westward_?
+
+                         'twas a sound
+      Of something without place or bound.
+
+  [19] _Yes, it was the mountain echo_, placed in Arnold's selection,
+    with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem _To the Cuckoo_.
+
+  [20] This was Coleridge's opinion.
+
+
+
+
+SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY
+
+
+SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY
+
+
+The ideas of Wordsworth and of Coleridge about poetry have often been
+discussed and are familiar. Those of Shelley are much less so, and in
+his eloquent exposition of them there is a radiance which almost
+conceals them from many readers. I wish, at the cost of all the
+radiance, to try to see them and show them rather more distinctly. Even
+if they had little value for the theory of poetry, they would still have
+much as material for it, since they allow us to look into a poet's
+experience in conceiving and composing. And, in addition, they throw
+light on some of the chief characteristics of Shelley's own poetry.
+
+His poems in their turn form one of the sources from which his ideas on
+the subject may be gathered. We have also some remarks in his letters
+and in prose pieces dealing with other topics. We have the prefaces to
+those of his works which he himself published. And, lastly, there is the
+_Defence of Poetry_. This essay was written in reply to an attack made
+on contemporary verse by Shelley's friend Peacock,--not a favourable
+specimen of Peacock's writing. The _Defence_, we can see, was hurriedly
+composed, and it remains a fragment, being only the first of three
+projected parts. It contains a good deal of historical matter, highly
+interesting, but too extensive to be made use of here. Being polemical,
+it no doubt exaggerates such of Shelley's views as collided with those
+of his antagonist. But, besides being the only full expression of these
+views, it is the most mature, for it was written within eighteen months
+of his death. It appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth's
+Prefaces or to Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_; but there are a few
+reminiscences of Sidney's _Apology_, which Shelley had read just before
+he wrote his own _Defence_; and it shows, like much of his mature
+poetry, how deeply he was influenced by the more imaginative dialogues
+of Plato.
+
+
+  1.
+
+Any one familiar with the manner in which Shelley in his verse
+habitually represents the world could guess at his general view of
+poetry. The world to him is a melancholy place, a 'dim vast vale of
+tears,' illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but glorious
+power. Nor is this power, as that favourite metaphor would imply, wholly
+outside the world. It works within it as a soul contending with
+obstruction and striving to penetrate and transform the whole mass. And
+though the fulness of its glory is concealed, its nature is known in
+outline. It is the realised perfection of everything good and beautiful
+on earth; or, in other words, all such goodness and beauty is its
+partial manifestation. 'All,' I say: for the splendour of nature, the
+love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law,
+the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art, the truths deformed by
+superstitious religion,--all are equally operations or appearances of
+the hidden power. It is of the first importance for the understanding of
+Shelley to realise how strong in him is the sense and conviction of this
+unity in life: it is one of his Platonic traits. The intellectual Beauty
+of his _Hymn_ is absolutely the same thing as the Liberty of his _Ode_,
+the 'Great Spirit' of Love that he invokes to bring freedom to Naples,
+the One which in _Adonais_ he contrasts with the Many, the Spirit of
+Nature of _Queen Mab_, and the Vision of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_.
+The skylark of the famous stanzas is free from our sorrows, not because
+it is below them, but because, as an embodiment of that perfection, it
+knows the rapture of love without its satiety, and understands death as
+we cannot. The voice of the mountain, if a whole nation could hear it
+with the poet's ear, would 'repeal large codes of fraud and woe'; it is
+the same voice as the reformer's and the martyr's. And in the far-off
+day when the 'plastic stress' of this power has mastered the last
+resistance and is all in all, outward nature, which now suffers with
+man, will be redeemed with him, and man, in becoming politically free,
+will become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then, poetry, as the
+world now is, must be one of the voices of this power, or one tone of
+its voice. To use the language so dear to Shelley, it is the revelation
+of those eternal ideas which lie behind the many-coloured, ever-shifting
+veil that we call reality or life. Or rather, it is one such revelation
+among many.
+
+When we turn to the _Defence of Poetry_ we meet substantially the same
+view. There is indeed a certain change; for Shelley is now
+philosophising and writing prose, and he wishes not to sing from the
+mid-sky, but, for a while at least, to argue with his friend on the
+earth. Hence at first we hear nothing of that perfect power at the heart
+of things, and poetry is considered as a creation rather than a
+revelation. But for Shelley, we soon discover, this would be a false
+antithesis. The poet creates, but this creation is no mere fancy of his;
+it represents 'those forms which are common to universal nature and
+existence,' and 'a poem is the very image of life expressed in its
+eternal truth.' We notice, further, that the more voluntary and
+conscious work of invention and execution is regarded as quite
+subordinate in the creative process. In that process the mind, obedient
+to an influence which it does not understand and cannot control, is
+driven to produce images of perfection which rather form themselves in
+it than are formed by it. The greatest stress is laid on this influence
+or inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin of the whole
+process lies in certain exceptional moments when visitations of thought
+and feeling, elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but always
+arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, reach the soul; that these
+are, as it were, the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our
+own; and that the province of the poet is to arrest these apparitions,
+to veil them in language, to colour every other form he touches with
+their evanescent hues, and so to 'redeem from decay the visitations of
+the divinity in man.'
+
+Even more decided is the emphasis laid on the unity of all the forms in
+which the 'divinity' or ideal power thus attests its presence. Indeed,
+throughout a large part of the essay, that 'Poetry' which Shelley is
+defending is something very much wider than poetry in the usual sense.
+The enemy he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its influence
+steadily decline as civilisation advances, and that they are giving
+place, and ought to give place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility.
+His answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been, is, and
+always will be, the prime source of everything that has intrinsic value
+in life. Reasoning, he declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon
+the products of imagination. Further, he holds that the predominance of
+mere reasoning and mere utility has become in great part an evil; for
+while it has accumulated masses of material goods and moral truths, we
+distribute the goods iniquitously and fail to apply the truths, because,
+for want of imagination, we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not
+feel what we know. The 'Poetry' which he defends, therefore, is the
+whole creative imagination with all its products. And these include not
+merely literature in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied
+to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts; and, finally,
+all actions, inventions, institutions, and even ideas and moral
+dispositions, which imagination brings into being in its effort to
+satisfy the longing for perfection. Painters and musicians are poets.
+Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is
+much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented
+the arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed, as
+sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And
+every one, Shelley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined
+virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For
+all these things come from imagination.
+
+Shelley's exposition of this, which is probably the most original part
+of his theory, is not very clear; but, if I understand his meaning, that
+which he takes to happen in all these cases might be thus described. The
+imagination--that is to say, the soul imagining--has before it, or feels
+within it, something which, answering perfectly to its nature, fills it
+with delight and with a desire to realise what delights it. This
+something, for the sake of brevity, we may call an idea, so long as we
+remember that it need not be distinctly imagined and that it is always
+accompanied by emotion. The reason why such ideas delight the imagining
+soul is that they are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own
+perfection--of itself become perfect--in one aspect or another. These
+aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life
+and outward existence; and so the idea may be that of the perfect
+harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of the perfect union of soul
+with soul (love), or of the perfect order of certain social relations
+or forces (a law or institution), or of the perfect adjustment of
+intellectual elements (a truth); and so on. The formation and expression
+of any such idea is thus the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while
+at the same time (as we must add, to complete Shelley's thought) any
+such idea is a gleam or apparition of the perfect Intellectual Beauty.
+
+I choose this particular title of the hidden power or divinity in order
+to point out (what the reader is left to observe for himself) that the
+imaginative idea is always regarded by Shelley as beautiful. It is, for
+example, desirable for itself and not merely as a means to a further
+result; and it has the formal characters of beauty. For, as will have
+been noticed in the instances given, it is always the image of an order,
+or harmony, or unity in variety, of the elements concerned. Shelley
+sometimes even speaks of their 'rhythm.' For example, he uses this word
+in reference to an action; and I quote the passage because, though it
+occurs at some distance from the exposition of his main view, it
+illustrates it well. He is saying that the true poetry of Rome, unlike
+that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems. 'The true poetry
+of Rome lived in its institutions: for whatever of beautiful, true and
+majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which
+creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus; the death
+of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their god-like state, of
+the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with
+Hannibal after the battle of Cannae'--these he describes as 'a rhythm and
+order in the shows of life,' an order not arranged with a view to
+utility or outward result, but due to the imagination, which, 'beholding
+the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own
+idea.'
+
+
+  2.
+
+If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the
+poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls?
+Not essentially in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry,
+but in the kind of expression he gives to them. In so far as he is a
+poet, his medium of expression, of course, is not virtue, or action, or
+law; poetry is one of the acts. And, again, it differs from the rest,
+because its particular vehicle is language. We have now to see,
+therefore, what Shelley has to say of the form of poetry, and especially
+of poetic language.
+
+First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of
+artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also
+the most plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being
+simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination;
+whereas any more material medium has a nature of its own, and relations
+to other things in the material world, and this nature and these
+relations intervene between the artist's conception and his expression
+of it in the medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that
+Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as
+compared with other arts. He forgets (if I may interpose a word of
+criticism) that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain
+advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the
+inferiority which he notices. He would also have found it difficult to
+show that language, on its physical side, is any more a product of
+imagination than stone or pigments. And his idea that the medium in the
+other arts is an obstacle intervening between conception and expression
+is, to say the least, one-sided. A sculptor, painter, or musician, would
+probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium that enable
+him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the
+vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not from
+the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical. It is true, no
+doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is
+also true of language.
+
+But to resume. Language, Shelley goes on to say, receives in poetry a
+peculiar form. As it represents in its meaning a perfection which is
+always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound,
+_is_ an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not
+the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning.
+For Shelley, however, this measured language is not of necessity
+metrical. The order or measure may remain at the stage which it reaches
+in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose language,
+Shelley declares, is the most intense it is possible to conceive. It may
+again advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient,
+popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing much action.
+But he will not have any new great poet tied down to it. It is not
+essential, while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere accident of
+poetry that its language is measured, nor does a delight in this measure
+mean little. As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is
+always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of
+thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less
+indispensable than their meaning to the communication of the influence
+of poetry. 'Hence,' says Shelley, 'the vanity of translation: it were as
+wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal
+principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one
+language into another the creations of a poet.' Strong words to come
+from the translator of the _Hymn to Mercury_ and of Agathon's speech in
+the _Symposium_![1] And is not all that Shelley says of the difference
+between measured and unrhythmical language applicable, at least in some
+degree, to the difference between metrical and merely measured language?
+Could he really have supposed that metre is no more than a
+'convenience,' which contributes nothing of any account to the influence
+of poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather point out how
+surprising, at first sight, and how significant, is Shelley's insistence
+on the importance of measure or rhythm. No one could assert more
+absolutely than he the identity of the general substance of poetry with
+that of moral life and action, of the other arts, and of the higher
+kinds of philosophy. And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the
+emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it)
+is indispensable to the effect of poetry.
+
+Shelley, however, nowhere considers this element more at length. He has
+no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He
+never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover. We
+hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a
+passage of Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he ramped
+through the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower. When in his
+letters he refers to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions
+particular lines or expressions; and we have no evidence that, like
+Coleridge and Keats, he was a curious student of metrical effects or the
+relations of vowel-sounds. I doubt if all this is wholly accidental.
+Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of aspiration, love and
+worship, that we can imagine his feeling it almost an impiety to break
+up its unity even for purposes of study, and to give a separate
+attention to its means of utterance. And what he does say on the
+subject confirms this impression. In the first place, as we have seen,
+he lays great stress on inspiration; and his statements, if exaggerated
+and misleading, must still reflect in some degree his own experience. No
+poem, he asserts, however inspired it may be, is more than a feeble
+shadow of the original conception; for when composition begins,
+inspiration is already on the decline. And so in a letter he speaks of
+the detail of execution destroying all wild and beautiful visions.
+Still, inspiration, if diminished by composition, is not wholly
+dispelled; and he appeals to the greatest poets of his day whether it is
+not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced
+by labour and study. Such toil he would restrict to those parts which
+connect the inspired passages, and he speaks with contempt of the
+fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_.
+He seems to exaggerate on this matter because in the _Defence_ his foe
+is cold reason and calculation. Elsewhere he writes more truly of the
+original conception as being obscure as well as intense;[2] from which
+it would seem to follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least
+more distinct than the original. He forgets, too, what is certainly the
+fact, that the poet in reshaping and correcting is able to revive in
+some degree the fire of the first impulse. And we know from himself that
+his greatest works cost him a severe labour not confined to the
+execution, while his manuscripts show plenty of various readings, if
+never so many as fifty-six in one line.
+
+Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his own practice in
+composition. He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its way, without
+pausing to complete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not
+come; and the next day (if ever) he filled up the gaps and smoothed the
+ragged edges. And the result answers to his theory. Keats was right in
+telling him that he might be more of an artist. His language, indeed,
+unlike Wordsworth's or Byron's, is, in his mature work, always that of a
+poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently
+diffuse and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are
+sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the
+mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its
+way into all the little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly
+inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so
+inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. It has the rapture of
+the mystic, and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly said of the
+hymn _Life of Life_: 'He seems to go up into the air and burst.' It is
+true: and, if we are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not compare
+_Life of Life_ with a great set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that
+illumines the whole sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling
+sight than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and it bursts at a height no
+other fire can reach.
+
+In addition to his praise of inspiration Shelley has some scattered
+remarks on another point which show the same spirit. He could not bear
+in poetic language any approach to artifice, or any sign that the writer
+had a theory or system of style. He thought Keats's earlier poems faulty
+in this respect, and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth in the
+following sentence from the Preface to the _Revolt of Islam_: 'Nor have
+I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of
+the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to
+my own ingenuity in contriving,--to disgust him according to the rules
+of criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me
+the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar with
+nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can
+scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of
+language, produced by that familiarity.'[3] His own poetic style
+certainly corresponds with his intention. It cannot give the kind of
+pleasure afforded by what may be called without disparagement a learned
+and artful style, such as Virgil's or Milton's; but, like the best
+writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is, with all its individuality,
+almost entirely free from mannerism and the other vices of
+self-consciousness, and appears to flow so directly from the thought
+that one is ashamed to admire it for itself. This is equally so whether
+the appropriate style is impassioned and highly figurative, or simple
+and even plain. It is indeed in the latter case that Shelley wins his
+greatest, because most difficult, triumph. In the dialogue part of
+_Julian and Maddalo_ he has succeeded remarkably in keeping the style
+quite close to that of familiar though serious conversation, while
+making it nevertheless unmistakably poetic. And the _Cenci_ is an
+example of a success less complete only because the problem was even
+harder. The ideal of the style of tragic drama in the nineteenth or
+twentieth century should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications
+the style of Shakespeare, but to do what Shakespeare did--to idealise,
+without deserting, the language of contemporary speech. Shelley in the
+_Cenci_ seems to me to have come nearest to this ideal.
+
+
+  3.
+
+So much for general exposition. If now we consider more closely what
+Shelley says of the substance of poetry, a question at once arises. He
+may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of
+perfection in some form, and accordingly to imagine its effect as simply
+joy or delighted aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an
+expression; and we understand when we find him saying that Homer
+embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and
+unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses 'the truth and beauty of
+friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object.' But
+poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this
+kind. What is to be said, on Shelley's theory, of his own melancholy
+lyrics, those 'sweetest songs' that 'tell of saddest thought'? What of
+satire, of the epic of conflict and war, or of tragic exhibitions of
+violent and destructive passion? Does not his theory reflect the
+weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and
+abstract ideal instead of interpreting the concrete detail of nature and
+life; and ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would consider
+poetry simply as a representation of fact?
+
+To this last question I should answer No. Shelley's theory, rightly
+understood, will take in, I think, everything really poetic. And to a
+considerable extent he himself shows the way to meet these doubts. He
+did not mean that the _immediate_ subject of poetry must be perfection
+in some form. The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the ideal
+everything he touches. If so, he may write of absolutely anything so
+long as he _can_ so colour it, and nothing would be excluded from his
+province except those things (if any such exist) in which no positive
+relation to the ideal, however indirect, can be shown or intimated. Thus
+to take the instance of Shelley's melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament
+which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its
+visitations or the desolation of its absence, is indirectly an
+expression _of_ the ideal; and so on his theory is the simplest song of
+unhappy love or the simplest dirge. Further, he himself observes that,
+though the joy of poetry is often unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the
+'highest portions of our being is frequently connected with the pain of
+the inferior,' that 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the
+pleasure of pleasure itself,' and that not sorrow only, but 'terror,
+anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an
+approximation to the highest good.' That, then, which appeals poetically
+to such painful emotions will again be an indirect portrayal of the
+ideal; and it is clear, I think, that this was how Shelley in the
+_Defence_ regarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether narrative or
+dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect characters and its exhibition of
+conflict and wild passion. He had, it is true, another and an
+unsatisfactory way of explaining the presence of these things in poetry;
+and I will refer to this in a moment. But he tells us that the Athenian
+tragedies represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals) of
+passion and of power (not merely of virtue); and that in them we behold
+ourselves, 'under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but
+that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the
+internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become.' He
+writes of Milton's Satan in somewhat the same strain. The Shakespearean
+tragedy from which he most often quotes is one in which evil holds the
+stage, _Macbeth_; and he was inclined to think _King Lear_, which
+certainly is no direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama in the
+world. Lastly, in the Preface to his own _Cenci_ he truly says that,
+while the story is fearful and monstrous, 'the poetry which exists in
+these tempestuous sufferings and crimes,' if duly brought out,
+'mitigates the pain of the contemplation of moral deformity': so that he
+regards Count Cenci himself as a _poetic_ character, and therefore as in
+_some_ sense an expression of the ideal. He does not further explain his
+meaning. Perhaps it was that the perfection which poetry is to exhibit
+includes, together with those qualities which win our immediate and
+entire approval or sympathy, others which are capable of becoming the
+instruments of evil. For these, the energy, power and passion of the
+soul, though they may be perverted, are in themselves elements of
+perfection; and so, even in their perversion or their combination with
+moral deformity, they retain their value, they are not simply ugly or
+horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly painful to the same
+love of the ideal which is directly satisfied by pictures of goodness
+and beauty. Now to these various considerations we shall wish to add
+others; but if we bear these in mind, I believe we shall find Shelley's
+theory wide enough, and must hold that the substance of poetry is never
+mere fact, but is always ideal, though its method of representation is
+sometimes more direct, sometimes more indirect.
+
+Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his view quite clear to
+himself, or to hold to it consistently. We are left with the impression,
+not merely that he personally preferred the direct method (as he was, of
+course, entitled to do), but that his use of it shows a certain
+weakness, and also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to regard
+it as the primary and proper method, and to admit only by a reluctant
+after-thought the representation of imperfection. Let me point out some
+signs of this. He considered his own _Cenci_ as a poem inferior in kind
+to his other main works, even as a sort of accommodation to the public.
+With all his modesty he knew what to think of the neglected
+_Prometheus_ and _Adonais_, but there is no sign that he, any more than
+the world, was aware that the character of Cenci was a creation without
+a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth century. His enthusiasm
+for some second-rate and third-rate Italian paintings, and his failure
+to understand Michael Angelo, seem to show the same tendency. He could
+not enjoy comedy: it seemed to him simply cruel: he did not perceive
+that to show the absurdity of the imperfect is to glorify the perfect.
+And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers in his view of the
+representation of heroic and tragic imperfection. We find in the Preface
+to _Prometheus Unbound_ the strange notion that Prometheus is a more
+poetic character than Milton's Satan because he is free from Satan's
+imperfections, which are said to interfere with the interest. And in the
+_Defence_ a similar error appears. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, though
+they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits, imperfect. Why, then, did
+Homer make them so? Because, he seems to reply, Homer's contemporaries
+regarded their vices (_e.g._ revengefulness and deceitfulness) as
+virtues. Homer accordingly had to conceal in the costume of these vices
+the unspotted beauty that he himself imagined; and, like Homer, 'few
+poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
+conceptions in its naked truth and splendour.' Now, this idea, to say
+nothing of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer, and its
+probable baselessness in reference to most other poets, is quite
+inconsistent with that truer view of heroic and tragic character which
+was explained just now. It is an example of Shelley's tendency to
+abstract idealism or spurious Platonism. He is haunted by the fancy that
+if he could only get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete aloofness
+from the Many, from life with all its change, decay, struggle, sorrow
+and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry: as if the
+whole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion, the sheer opposite
+of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation. Life, he
+says--
+
+  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
+  Stains the white radiance of eternity;
+
+but the other side, the fact that the many colours _are_ the white light
+broken, he tends to forget, by no means always, but in one, and that not
+the least inspired, of his moods. This is the source of that thinness
+and shallowness of which his view of the world and of history is justly
+accused, a view in which all imperfect being is apt to figure as
+absolutely gratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure white or
+pitch black. Hence also his ideals of good, whether as a character or as
+a mode of life, resting as they do on abstraction from the mass of real
+existence, tend to lack body and individuality; and indeed, if the
+existence of the many is a mere calamity, clearly the next best thing to
+their disappearance is that they should all be exactly alike and have as
+little character as possible. But we must remember that Shelley's
+strength and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very
+abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of
+aspiration towards it in which his poetry is unequalled. We must not go
+for this to Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe; and if we go for it to
+Dante, we shall find, indeed, a mind far vaster than Shelley's, but also
+that dualism of which we complain in him, and the description of a
+heaven which, equally with Shelley's regenerated earth, is no place for
+mere mortality. In any case, as we have seen, the weakness in his
+poetical practice, though it occasionally appears also as a defect in
+his poetical theory, forms no necessary part of it.
+
+
+  4.
+
+I pass to his views on a last point. If the business of poetry is
+somehow to express ideal perfection, it may seem to follow that the
+poet should embody in his poems his beliefs about this perfection and
+the way to approach it, and should thus have a moral purpose and aim to
+be a teacher. And in regard to Shelley this conclusion seems the more
+natural because his own poetry allows us to see clearly some of his
+beliefs about morality and moral progress. Yet alike in his Prefaces and
+in the _Defence_ he takes up most decidedly the position that the poet
+ought neither to affect a moral aim nor to express his own conceptions
+of right and wrong. 'Didactic poetry,' he declares, 'is my abhorrence:
+nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and
+supererogatory in verse.'[4] 'There was little danger,' he tells us in
+the _Defence_, 'that Homer or any of the eternal poets' should make a
+mistake in this matter; but 'those in whom the poetical faculty, though
+great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have
+frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is
+diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to
+advert to this purpose.' These statements may appeal to us, but are they
+consistent with Shelley's main views of poetry? To answer this question
+we must observe what exactly it is that he means to condemn.
+
+Shelley was one of the few persons who can literally be said to _love_
+their kind. He held most strongly, too, that poetry does benefit men,
+and benefits them morally. The moral purpose, then, to which he objects
+cannot well be a poet's general purpose of doing moral as well as other
+good through his poetry--such a purpose, I mean, as he may cherish when
+he contemplates his life and his life's work. And, indeed, it seems
+obvious that nobody with any humanity or any sense can object to that,
+except through some intellectual confusion. Nor, secondly, does Shelley
+mean, I think, to condemn even the writing of a particular poem with a
+view to a particular moral or practical effect; certainly, at least, if
+this was his meaning he was condemning some of his own poetry. Nor,
+thirdly, can he be referring to the portrayal of moral ideals; for that
+he regarded as one of the main functions of poetry, and in the very
+place where he says that didactic poetry is his abhorrence he also says,
+by way of contrast, that he has tried to familiarise the minds of his
+readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence. It appears,
+therefore, that what he is really attacking is the attempt to give, in
+the strict sense, moral _instruction_, to communicate doctrines, to
+offer argumentative statements of opinion on right and wrong, and more
+especially, I think, on controversial questions of the day. An example
+would be Wordsworth's discourse on education at the end of the
+_Excursion_, a discourse of which Shelley, we know, had a very low
+opinion. In short, his enemy is not the purpose of producing a moral
+effect, it is the appeal made for this purpose to the reasoning
+intellect. He says to the poet: By all means aim at bettering men; you
+are a man, and are bound to do so; but you are also a poet, and
+therefore your proper way of doing so is not by reasoning and preaching.
+His idea is of a piece with his general championship of imagination, and
+it is quite consistent with his main view of poetry.[5]
+
+What, then, are the _grounds_ of this position? They are not clearly set
+out, but we can trace several, and they are all solid. Reasoning on
+moral subjects, moral philosophy, was by no means 'tedious' to Shelley;
+it seldom is to real poets. He loved it, and (outside his _Defence_) he
+rated its value very high.[6] But he thought it tedious and out of place
+in poetry, because it can be equally well expressed in 'unmeasured'
+language--much better expressed, one may venture to add. You invent an
+art in order to effect by it a particular purpose which nothing else can
+effect as well. How foolish, then, to use this art for a purpose better
+served by something else! I know no answer to this argument, and its
+application is far wider than that given to it by Shelley. Secondly,
+Shelley remarks that a poet's own conceptions on moral subjects are
+usually those of his place and time, while the matter of his poem ought
+to be eternal, or, as we say, of permanent and universal interest. This,
+again, seems true, and has a wide application; and it holds good even
+when the poet, like Shelley himself, is in rebellion against orthodox
+moral opinion; for his heterodox opinions will equally show the marks of
+his place and time, and constitute a perishable element in his work.
+Doubtless no poetry can be without a perishable element; but that poetry
+has least of it which interprets life least through the medium of
+systematic and doctrinal ideas. The veil which time and place have hung
+between Homer or Shakespeare and the general reader of to-day is almost
+transparent, while even a poetry so intense as that of Dante and Milton
+is impeded in its passage to him by systems which may be unfamiliar,
+and, if familiar, may be distasteful.
+
+Lastly--and this is Shelley's central argument--as poetry itself is
+directly due to imaginative inspiration and not to reasoning, so its
+true moral effect is produced through imagination and not through
+doctrine. Imagination is, for Shelley, 'the great instrument of moral
+good.' The 'secret of morals is love.' It is not 'for want of admirable
+doctrines that men hate and despise and censure and deceive and
+subjugate one another': it is for want of love. And love is 'a going out
+of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
+which exists in thought, action or person not our own.' 'A man,'
+therefore, 'to be greatly good must imagine intensely and
+comprehensively.' And poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by
+acting on its cause, imagination. It strengthens imagination as exercise
+strengthens a limb, and so it indirectly promotes morality. It also
+fills the imagination with beautiful impersonations of all that we
+should wish to be. But moral reasoning does not act upon the cause, it
+only analyses the effect; and the poet has no right to be content to
+analyse what he ought indirectly to create. Here, again, in his
+eagerness, Shelley cuts his antitheses too clean, but the defect is
+easily made good, and the main argument is sound.
+
+Limits of time will compel me to be guilty of the same fault in adding a
+consideration which is in the spirit of Shelley's. The chief moral
+effect claimed for poetry by Shelley is exerted, primarily, by
+imagination on the emotions; but there is another influence, exerted
+primarily through imagination on the understanding. Poetry is largely an
+interpretation of life; and, considering what life is, that must mean a
+moral interpretation. This, to have poetic value, must satisfy
+imagination; but we value it also because it gives us knowledge, a wider
+comprehension, a new insight into ourselves and the world.[7] Now, it
+may be held--and this view answers to a very general feeling among
+lovers of poetry now--that the most deep and original moral
+interpretation is not likely to be that which most shows a moral purpose
+or is most governed by reflective beliefs and opinions, and that as a
+rule we learn most from those who do not try to teach us, and whose
+opinions may even remain unknown to us: so that there is this weighty
+objection to the appearance of such purpose and opinions, that it tends
+to defeat its own intention. And the reason that I wish to suggest is
+this, that always we get most from the _genius_ in a man of genius and
+not from the rest of him. Now, although poets often have unusual powers
+of reflective thought, the specific genius of a poet does not lie there,
+but in imagination. Therefore his deepest and most original
+interpretation is likely to come by the way of imagination. And the
+specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held
+ideas; it is to produce half-consciously a matter from which, when
+produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry (I must
+exaggerate to be clear), psychologically considered, is not the
+_expression_ of ideas or of a view of life; it is their discovery or
+creation, or rather both discovery and creation in one. The
+interpretation contained in _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_ was not brought
+ready-made to the old stories. What was brought to them was the huge
+substance of Shakespeare's imagination, in which all his experience and
+thought was latent; and this, dwelling and working on the stories with
+nothing but a dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion,
+gradually discovered or created in them a meaning and a mass of truth
+about life, which was brought to birth by the process of composition,
+but never preceded it in the shape of ideas, and probably never, even
+after it, took that shape to the poet's mind. And _this_ is the
+interpretation which we find inexhaustibly instructive, because
+Shakespeare's _genius_ is in it. On the other hand, however much from
+curiosity and personal feeling towards him we may wish to know his
+opinions and beliefs about morals or religion or his own poems or Queen
+Elizabeth, we have not really any reason to suppose that their value
+would prove extraordinary. And so, to apply this generally, the
+opinions, reasonings and beliefs of poets are seldom of the same quality
+as their purely imaginative product. Occasionally, as with Goethe, they
+are not far off it; but sometimes they are intense without being
+profound, and more eccentric than original; and often they are very sane
+and sound, but not very different from those of wise men without genius.
+And therefore poetry is not the place for them. For we want in poetry a
+moral interpretation, but not the interpretation we have already. As a
+rule the genuine artist's quarrel with 'morality' in art is not really
+with morality, it is with a stereotyped or narrow morality; and when he
+refuses in his art to consider things from what he calls the moral point
+of view, his reasons are usually wrong, but his instinct is right.
+
+Poetry itself confirms on the whole this contention, though doubtless in
+these last centuries a great poet's work will usually reveal more of
+conscious reflection than once it did. Homer and Shakespeare show no
+moral aim and no system of opinion. Milton was far from justifying the
+ways of God to men by the argumentation he put into divine and angelic
+lips; his truer moral insight is in the creations of his genius; for
+instance, in the character of Satan or the picture of the glorious
+humanity of Adam and Eve. Goethe himself could never have told the world
+what he was going to express in the First Part of _Faust_: the poem told
+_him_, and it is one of the world's greatest. He knew too well what he
+was going to express in the Second Part, and with all its wisdom and
+beauty it is scarcely a great poem. Wordsworth's original message was
+delivered, not when he was a Godwinian semi-atheist, nor when he had
+subsided upon orthodoxy, but when his imagination, with a few hints from
+Coleridge, was creating a kind of natural religion; and this religion
+itself is more profoundly expressed in his descriptions of his
+experience than in his attempts to formulate it. The moral virtue of
+Tennyson is in poems like _Ulysses_ and parts of _In Memoriam_, where
+sorrow and the consciousness of a deathless affection or an unquenchable
+desire for experience forced an utterance; but when in the _Idylls_ he
+tried to found a great poem on explicit ideas about the soul and the
+ravages wrought in it by lawless passion, he succeeded but partially,
+because these ideas, however sound, were no product of his genius. And
+so the moral virtue of Shelley's poetry lay, not in his doctrines about
+the past and future of man, but in an intuition, which was the substance
+of his soul, of the unique value of love. In the end, for him, the
+truest name of that perfection called Intellectual Beauty, Liberty,
+Spirit of Nature, is Love. Whatever in the world has any worth is an
+expression of Love. Love sometimes talks. Love talking musically is
+Poetry.
+
+1904.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Statements equally emphatic on this subject may be found in a
+    passage quoted by Mrs. Shelley in a footnote to Shelley's letter to
+    John Gisborne, Nov. 16, 1819 (Letter XXX. in Mrs. Shelley's edition).
+    Cf. also Letter XXXIII. to Leigh Hunt, Nov. 1819.
+
+  [2] I cannot find the passage or passages to which I referred in
+    making this statement, and therefore I do not vouch for its accuracy.
+    Cf. from the fragment _Fiordispina_,
+
+      The ardours of a vision which obscure
+      The very idol of its portraiture.
+
+  [3] Cf. from the Preface to the _Cenci_: 'I entirely agree with those
+    modern critics who assert that, in order to move men to true
+    sympathy, we must use the familiar language of men.... But it must be
+    the real language of men in general, and not that of any particular
+    class to whose society the writer happens to belong.'
+
+  [4] Preface to _Prometheus Unbound_.
+
+  [5] I do not discuss the adequacy of Shelley's position, or assert
+    that he held it quite clearly or consistently. In support of my
+    interpretation, of it I may refer to the Preface to the _Cenci_.
+    There he repudiates the idea of making the dramatic exhibition of the
+    story 'subservient to what is vulgarly called a moral purpose,' and,
+    as the context shows, he identifies such a treatment of the story
+    with the 'enforcement' of a 'dogma.'
+
+    This passage has a further interest. The dogma which Shelley would
+    not enforce in his tragedy was that 'no person can truly be
+    dishonoured by the act of another, and the fit return to make to the
+    most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution
+    to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love'; and
+    accordingly he held that 'if Beatrice had thought in this manner, she
+    would have been wiser and better.' How inexcusable then is the not
+    uncommon criticism on the _Cenci_ that he represents Beatrice as a
+    perfect character and justifies her murder of 'the injurer.'
+
+    Shelley's position in the _Defence_, it may be added, is in total
+    disagreement with his youthful doctrine and practice. In 1811 he
+    wrote to Miss Hitchener, 'My opinion is that all poetical beauty
+    ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral,' and a large part of
+    _Queen Mab_ is frankly didactic. Even there, however, he reserved
+    most of the formal instruction for the Notes, perceiving that 'a poem
+    very didactic is ... very stupid.'
+
+  [6] 'I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political
+    science,' he says in a letter to Peacock, Jan. 1819.
+
+  [7] And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does it
+    imaginatively, the more does it satisfy imagination, and the greater
+    is its _poetic_ value.
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH
+
+
+THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH[1]
+
+
+The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the
+glories of our literature. It is surpassed, many would add, by the
+poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious
+flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly
+conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves
+with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is
+great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a
+wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal
+accomplishment?
+
+
+  1.
+
+Matthew Arnold, in his essay on _The Function of Criticism at the
+Present Time_, gave an answer to this question. 'It has long seemed to
+me,' he wrote, 'that the burst of creative activity in our literature,
+through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact,
+something premature.... And this prematureness comes from its having
+proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials
+to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of
+this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not
+know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
+Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and
+in variety.' The statement that this poetry 'did not know enough' means,
+of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of
+a kind, but that it lacked 'criticism.' And this means that it did not
+live and move freely in an atmosphere of the best available ideas, of
+ideas gained by a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology,
+philosophy, history, science, to see things as they are. In such an
+atmosphere Goethe lived. There was not indeed in Goethe's Germany, nor
+was there in the England of our poets, the 'national glow of life and
+thought' that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of
+Elizabeth. That happiest atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both
+countries. But there was for Goethe 'a sort of equivalent for it in the
+complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans,' a
+culture produced by a many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined
+critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.
+
+Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it may not have had all
+the importance he ascribes to it, but considerable importance it must
+have had. And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt. One of
+the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth's age is the very
+unusual superiority of the imaginative literature to the scientific. I
+mean by the 'scientific' literature that of philosophy, theology,
+history, politics, economics, not only that of the sciences of Nature,
+which for our present purpose are perhaps the least important. In this
+kind of literature Wordsworth's age has hardly an author to show who
+could for a moment be placed on a level with some five of the poets,
+with the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the poetic critics
+Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It has no writers to compare with Bacon,
+Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the time of Paley,
+Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford, Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher
+and theologian. These are names worthy of all respect, but they
+represent a literature quite definitely of the second rank. And this
+great disproportion between the two kinds of literature, we must
+observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the
+Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was
+doubtless superior to the other in Shakespeare's time, possibly even in
+Milton's; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and Clarendon and Hobbes are
+not separated from the best poets of their day by any startling
+difference of quality;[2] while in the later periods, right down to the
+age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say
+no more, with the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth's own
+time is there that gap between the two that we find in England. In
+respect of genius the philosophers, for example, though none of them was
+the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all inferior to the poets.
+The case of England in Wordsworth's age is anomalous.
+
+This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must have been influential.
+It confirms Arnold's view that the intellectual atmosphere of the time
+was not of the best. If we think of the periodical literature--of the
+_Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh_ and _Blackwood_--we shall be still more
+inclined to assent to that view. And when we turn to the poets
+themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and
+recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lamb,
+and of Coleridge, we cannot reject it. Assuredly we read with
+admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance--in
+greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany,
+if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the
+superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to
+ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe,
+Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four
+either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin?
+Could any of them have seen in the French Revolution no more
+significance than Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are the
+attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets towards
+the Christian religion! Could anything be more _borne_ than Coleridge's
+professed reason for not translating _Faust_?[3] Is it possible that a
+German poet with the genius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited
+a mental world so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened to us
+by the brilliant letters of the former, or could have sunk, like the
+latter, to suggesting that the cholera was a divine condemnation of
+Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill?
+
+But if we accept Arnold's statement as to the intellectual atmosphere of
+the poetry of Wordsworth's time, a question will remain. Was he right in
+regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even as the chief, cause of
+the fact (if it is one) that the poetry does not fully correspond in
+greatness with the genius of the poets? And before we come to this
+question we must put another. Is the fact really as it has just been
+stated? I do not think so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it
+seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems. Reviewing these in
+memory, and asking ourselves how many we can unreservedly call 'great,'
+we hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in some of them, fine
+poetry in many; but that does not make a great whole. Which of them is
+great as a whole? Not the _Prelude_ or the _Excursion_, still less
+_Endymion_ or _The Revolt of Islam_ or _Childe Harold_, which hardly
+pretends to unity. _Christabel_, the wonderful fragment, is a fragment;
+so is _Hyperion_; _Don Juan_, also unfinished, becomes more discursive
+the further it proceeds, and in spirit is nowhere great. All the
+principal poets wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and some
+readers think that in _Manfred_, and still more certainly in _Cain_, we
+have great poems, while others think this of _Prometheus Unbound_ and
+_The Cenci_. But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our
+judgment quite confident, and can we say that any of them _satisfy_ us,
+like some works of earlier times? We are thus satisfied, it seems to me,
+only when we come to poems of smaller dimensions, like _The Ancient
+Mariner_, or _The Eve of Saint Agnes_, or _Adonais_, or _The Vision of
+Judgment_, or when we read the lyrics. To save time I will confine
+myself to the latter.
+
+Within this sphere we have no longer that impression of genius which
+fails to reach full accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of
+course, of Wordsworth's age is the equal of Shakespeare or of Milton;
+and there are certain qualities, too, of lyrical verse in which the
+times of Shakespeare and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth.
+But if we take the better part of the lyrical poetry of these three
+periods in the mass, or again in a representative selection, it will not
+be the latest period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In the
+original edition of the _Golden Treasury_, Book I. (Wyatt to
+Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book II. (the rest of the seventeenth
+century) sixty-five; Book IV., which covers the very much shorter
+period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a hundred and forty. 'Book
+I.,' perhaps most of us would say, 'should be longer, and Book IV. a
+good deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in it, and
+Wordsworth is over-represented. And the Elizabethan poems are mostly
+quite short, while the Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the
+longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but
+admitted poems like Coleridge's _Love_ and Wordsworth's _Ruth_ (seven
+whole pages). And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.' No; but
+still quantity must count for something, and the _Golden Treasury_ is a
+volume excellent in selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think,
+leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth was our greatest period
+in lyrical poetry. And if Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book
+IV., this impression would not be materially altered; it might even be
+deepened. For the change would force into notice the comparative
+monotony of the themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely wider
+range of the thought and emotion that attain expression in the later. It
+might also convince us that, on the whole, this more varied material is
+treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is
+difficult to be sure, since we recognise what may be called the
+conventions of an earlier age, and are perhaps a little blind to those
+of a time near our own.
+
+Now the eminence of Wordsworth's age in lyrical poetry, even if it is
+not also a pre-eminence, is a significant fact. It may mean that the
+whole poetic spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this may
+indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment which mingles with
+our admiration of the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to
+two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of Campbell are already
+dead; he survives only in lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite
+of fine passages (and the battle in _Marmion_ is in certain qualities
+superior to anything else of the time) Scott's longer poems cannot be
+classed with the best contemporary poetry; but in some of his ballads
+and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again, much of the most famous
+narrative poetry is semi-lyrical in form, as a moment's thought of
+Scott, Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for instance, several
+of Byron's tales, or Wordsworth's _White Doe of Rylstone_) is strongly
+tinged with the lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It is
+an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than in scenes, events,
+actions, which express and re-act on emotions, thoughts, will. It would
+hardly be going too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative
+poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained.[4] (3) The
+same tendencies are visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron's
+regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived, are almost forgotten;
+but _Heaven and Earth_, which is still alive, is largely composed of
+lyrics, and the first two acts of _Manfred_ are full of them.
+_Prometheus Unbound_ is called 'a lyrical drama.' Though it has some
+very fine and some very beautiful blank verse passages (usually
+undramatic), its lyrics are its glory; and this is even more the case
+with _Hellas_. It would be untrue to say that the comparative failure of
+most of the dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical spirit,
+but many of them show it. (4) The strength of this spirit may be
+illustrated lastly by a curious fact. The ode is one of the longest and
+most ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most famous poems of
+Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are odes. But the greatest of the
+lyrists, who wrote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind,
+found the limits even of the ode too narrow for his 'flight of fire.' If
+_Lycidas_ and _L'Allegro_ and Spenser's _Epithalamion_ are lyrical
+poems, and if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing shall be
+called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, _Adonais_ will be a
+lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the _Lines written
+among the Euganean Hills_ and _Epipsychidion_ will be lyrics consisting
+respectively of 370 and 600 lines.
+
+It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical poem may be called
+short as compared with a narrative or drama. It is usual, further, to
+say that lyrical poetry is 'subjective,' since, instead of telling or
+representing a story of people, actions, and events, it expresses the
+thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous
+and in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to have a basis in
+fact. It may be suggested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical
+poetry of Wordsworth's time, and the imperfection of the long narratives
+and dramas, may have a common origin. Just as it was most natural to
+Homer or to Shakespeare to express the imaginative substance of his mind
+in the 'objective' shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly
+severed from his own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some reason
+or reasons, it was most natural to the best poets of this later time to
+express that substance in the shape of impassioned reflections,
+aspirations, prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of peace.
+The matter of these might, in another sense of the word, be 'objective'
+enough, a matter of general human interest, not personal in any
+exclusive way; but it appeared in the form of the poet's thought and
+feeling. Just because he most easily expressed it thus, he succeeded
+less completely when he attempted the more objective form of utterance;
+and for the same reason it was especially important that he should be
+surrounded and penetrated by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal
+'criticism.' For he not only lived among ideas; he expressed ideas, and
+expressed them _as_ ideas.
+
+These suggestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry.
+The 'subjective' spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer poems.
+This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron's case, that
+the poet's one hero is himself. It appears in another way when the poem,
+through its story or stories, displays the poet's favourite ideas and
+beliefs. The _Excursion_ does this; most of Shelley's longer poems do
+it. And the strength of this tendency may be seen in an apparent
+contradiction. One of the marks of the Romantic Revival is a disposition
+to substitute the more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and drama
+for the eighteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic
+reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their
+characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse;
+Coleridge, for example, in _Religious Musings_, Byron in the first two
+cantos of _Childe Harold_, Shelley in _Queen Mab_, and Keats in _Sleep
+and Poetry_. These are not, like the _Pleasures of Memory_ and
+_Pleasures of Hope_, continuations of the traditional style; they are
+thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective. Scott, indeed, goes
+straight to the objective forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was
+little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time. Those who were
+deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had their minds full of
+theoretic ideas. They were groping after, or were already inflamed by,
+some explicit view of life, and of life seen in relation to an ideal
+which it revealed or contradicted. And this view of life, at least at
+first, pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract shape, or
+became a sort of soul or second meaning within those appearances of
+nature, or actions of men, or figures and fantasies of youthful
+imagination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry.
+
+Considered in this light, the following facts become very significant.
+Wordsworth, now about thirty, and the author of many characteristic
+lyrics, on returning from Germany and settling at Grasmere, begins to
+meditate a long poem. He tells us in the _Prelude_ of the subjects he
+thought of. They are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories of
+action, not at all theoretical.[5] But it will not do: his mind 'turns
+recreant to her task.' He has another hope, a 'favourite aspiration'
+towards 'a philosophic song of Truth.' But even this will not do; it is
+premature; even Truth (I venture to suggest) is not inward enough. He
+must first tell the story of his own mind: the subject of his long poem
+must be Poetry itself. He tells this story, to our great gain, in the
+_Prelude_; and it is the story of the steps by which he came to see
+reality, Nature and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of an
+all-embracing and perfect spiritual life or Being. Not till this is done
+can he proceed to the _Excursion_, which, together with much reflection
+and even argumentation, contains pictures of particular men.
+
+'This for our greatest'; but it is not his history alone. The first
+longer poem of Shelley which can be called mature was _Alastor_. And
+what is its subject? The subject of the _Prelude_; the story of a Poet's
+soul, and of the effect on it of the revelation of its ideal. The first
+long poem of Keats was _Endymion_. The tendency to the concrete was
+strong in Keats; he has been called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of
+due time; and _Endymion_, like _Venus and Adonis_, is a mythological
+story. But it is by no means that alone. The infection of his time was
+in him. The further subject of _Endymion_ is again the subject of the
+_Prelude_, the story of a poet's soul smitten by love of its ideal, the
+Principle of Beauty, and striving for union with it, for the 'wedding'
+of the mind of man 'with this goodly universe in love and holy passion.'
+What, again, is the subject of _Epipsychidion_? The same.
+
+  There was a Being whom my spirit oft
+  Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft
+  In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn.
+
+The poem is all about the search of the poet's soul for this ideal
+Being. And the _Sensitive Plant_ is this soul, and the Lady of the
+Garden this Being, And _Prince Athanase_ is the same soul, and if the
+poem had been continued the Being would soon have appeared. Is it not an
+astonishing proof of Shelley's powers that the _Cenci_ was ever written?
+Shelley, when he died, had half escaped--Keats, some time before he
+died, had quite escaped--from that bewitching inward world of the poet's
+soul and its shadowy adventures. Could that well be the world of what we
+call emphatically a 'great poem'?
+
+
+  2.
+
+Let us review for a moment the course of our discussion. I have been
+suggesting that, if our pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth's
+age is tinged with disappointment, this does not extend to the lyrical
+poetry; that the lyrical spirit, or, more generally, an inward or
+subjective tendency, shows itself in many of the longer works; and that
+their imperfection is partly due to it. Now, let me suggest that the
+atmosphere of adequate 'criticism' which Arnold misses in the age and
+its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced favourably even the
+lyrics, and much more the larger works, could hardly have diminished the
+force of that tendency, and that the main difficulty lay _there_. But,
+before developing this idea further, I propose to leave for a time the
+English poetry of Wordsworth's age, to look beyond it, and to ask
+certain questions.
+
+First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of 'criticism' was more
+favourable in Germany than in England, how many long poems were produced
+in Germany that we can call without hesitation or qualification 'great'?
+Were _any_ produced except by Goethe? And, if we admit (as I gladly do)
+that he produced several, was not the _main_ reason simply that he was
+born with more poetic genius than any of his contemporaries, just as
+Dante and Shakespeare and Milton were? And again, with this native
+genius and his long laborious life, did he produce anything like as many
+great poems as might have been expected? And, if not, why not? I do not
+suggest that his general culture, so superior to that of his English
+contemporaries, did not help him; but are we sure that it did not also
+hinder him? And is it not also significant that, in spite of his love of
+new ideas, he felt an instinctive dread of the influence of philosophy,
+in the strict sense, as of something dangerous to the poetic modes of
+vision and creation?
+
+Secondly, if we look beyond the first quarter of the century to the
+second and third, do we find in Europe a large number of those
+emphatically great poems, solid coherent structures of concrete
+imagination? It seems more than doubtful. To confine ourselves to
+English examples, is it not the case that Tennyson is primarily a
+lyrical poet, that the best of his longer poems, _Maud_ and _In
+Memoriam_, are lyrical, and that the most ambitious, the narrative
+_Idylls of the King_, is, as a whole, not great? Is the _Ring and the
+Book_, however fine in parts, a great whole, or comparable as a whole
+with _Andrea del Sarto_ or _Rabbi ben Ezra_? And is any one of
+Browning's dramas a great play? What these questions suggest is that,
+while the difficulty about the long poem affects in an extreme degree
+the age of Wordsworth, it affects in some degree the time that follows.
+Its beginnings, too, are traceable before the nineteenth century. In
+fact it is connected with essential characteristics of modern poetry and
+art; and these characteristics are connected with the nature of modern
+life, and the position of the artist within that life. I wish to touch
+on this huge subject before returning to the age of Wordsworth.
+
+Art, we may say, has become free, and, in a sense, universal. The poet
+is no longer the minstrel of king or nobles, nor even of a city or
+country. Literature, as Goethe foretold, becomes increasingly European,
+and more than European; and the poet, however national, is a citizen of
+the Republic of Letters. No class of subject, again, has any prerogative
+claim on him. Whatever, in any time or place, is human, whatever has
+been conceived as divine, whatever belongs even to external nature, he
+may choose, as it suits his bent or offers a promising material. The
+world is all before him; and it is a world which the increase of
+knowledge has made immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has
+asserted its independence. Its public exhibition must conform to the
+law; but otherwise it neither asks the approval nor submits to the
+control of any outward authority; and it is the handmaid of nothing. It
+claims a value for itself, as an expression of mind co-ordinate with
+other expressions, theoretic and practical; satisfying a need and
+serving a purpose that none of them can fulfil; subject only, as they
+too are subject, to the unity of human nature and human good. Finally,
+in respect of the methods of his art the poet claims and enjoys the same
+freedom. The practice of the past, the 'rules' of the past (if they
+existed or exist), are without authority for him. It is improbable
+beforehand that a violent breach with them will lead him to a real
+advance, just as it is improbable that such a breach with the morals or
+the science of his day will do so. But there is no certainty beforehand;
+and if he fails, he expects blame not because he innovates, but because
+he has failed by innovating.
+
+The freedom of modern art, and the universality of its field, are great
+things, and the value of the second is easily seen in the extraordinary
+variety of subject-matter in the longer poems of the nineteenth century.
+But in candid minds most recitals of our modern advantages are followed
+by a melancholy sense of our feebleness in using them. And so in some
+degree it is here. The unrivalled opportunities fail to produce
+unrivalled works. And we can see that the deepest cause of this is not a
+want of native genius or of acquired skill or even of conscientious
+labour, but the fact that the opportunities themselves bring danger and
+difficulty. The poet who knows everything and may write about anything
+has, after all, a hard task. Things must have been easier, it seems to
+us, for an artist whose choice, if his aim was high, was restricted to a
+cycle of ideas and stories, mythological, legendary, or historical, or
+all together, concerning beings divine, daemonic, angelic, or heroic.
+His matter, as it existed in the general imagination, was already highly
+poetical. If not created by imagination, it was shaped or coloured by
+it; a world not of bodiless thoughts and emotions, but of scenes,
+figures, actions, and events. For the most part he lived in unity with
+it; it appealed to his own religious and moral feelings and beliefs,
+sometimes to his patriotic feelings; and he wrote, painted, or carved,
+for people who shared with him both his material and his attitude
+towards it. It belonged usually to the past, but he did not view it over
+a great gulf of time with the eye of a scientific historian. If he
+wished to robe it in the vesture of the life around him, he was checked
+by no scruples as to truth; and the life around him can seldom, we
+think, have appeared to him repulsively prosaic. Broad statements like
+these require much qualification; but, when it is supplied, they may
+still describe periods in which perhaps most of the greatest
+architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry has come into being.
+
+How different the position of the artist has now become we see at a
+glance, and I confine myself to some points which specially concern the
+difficulty of the long poem. If a poem is to be anything like great it
+must, in one sense, be concerned with the present. Whatever its
+'subject' may be, it must express something living in the mind from
+which it comes and the minds to which it goes. Wherever its body is, its
+soul must be here and now. What subject, then, in the measureless field
+of choice, is the poet to select and fashion into a body? The outward
+life around him, as he and his critics so often lament, appears uniform,
+ugly, and rationally regulated, a world of trousers, machinery and
+policemen. Law--the rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable
+will--is a vast achievement and priceless possession; but it is not
+favourable to striking events or individual actions on the grand scale.
+Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there is doubtless an
+infinity of poetic matter; but this is inward, or it fails to appear in
+impressive forms; and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the
+monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel, but hardly the long
+poem or high tragedy. Even war, for reasons not hard to find, is no
+longer the subject that it was.
+
+But when the poet turns to a subject distant in place or time or both,
+new troubles await him. If he aims at complete truth to time and place
+the soul of the present will hardly come into his work. Yet he lives in
+an age of history and science, and these hamper as well as help him. The
+difficulty is not that he is bound to historical or scientific truth,
+for in principle, I venture to say, he is free. If he _can_ satisfy
+imagination by violating them he is justified. It is no function of his
+to attain or propagate them; and a critic who objected, say, to the
+First Part of _Faust_ on the ground that it puts a modern spirit into
+the legend, would rightly be laughed at. It is its triumph to do so and
+yet to succeed. But then success is exceedingly difficult. For the poet
+lives in a time when the violation of truth is _prima facie_ felt to be
+a fault, something that does require justification by the result.
+Further, he has himself to start from a clear consciousness of
+difference between the present and the past, the spirit and the story,
+and has to produce on this basis a harmony of spirit and story. And
+again, living in an age of analytical thought, he is likely--all the
+more likely, if he has much greatness of mind--to be keenly interested
+in ideas; and so he is exposed to the temptation of using as the spirit
+of the old story some highly reflective idea--an idea not only
+historically alien to his material, but perhaps not very poetical, or
+again not very deep, because it belongs to him rather as philosopher
+than poet, while his genius is that of a poet.
+
+The influence of some of these difficulties might readily be shown in
+the Second Part of _Faust_ or in _Prometheus Unbound_, especially where
+we perceive in a figure or action some symbolical meaning, but find this
+meaning deficient in interest or poetic truth, or are vexed by the doubt
+how far it ought to be pursued.[6] But the matter is more easily
+illustrated by the partial failure of the _Idylls of the King_. We have
+no right to condemn beforehand an attempt to modernise the Arthurian
+legends. Tennyson's treatment of them, even his outrage on the story of
+Tristram, might conceivably have been justified by the result. And,
+indeed, in the _Holy Grail_ and the _Passing of Arthur_ his treatment,
+to my mind, was more than justified. But, in spite of countless
+beauties, the total result of the _Idylls_ was disappointing, not merely
+from the defects of this or that poem, but because the old unity of
+spirit and story was broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old
+nor complete in itself. For the main semi-allegorical idea, having
+already the disadvantage of not being poetic in its origin, was, as a
+reflective idea, by no means profound, and it led to such inconsistency
+in the very centre of the story as the imagination refuses to accept.
+Tennyson's Lancelot might have wronged the Arthur who is merely a
+blameless king and represents Conscience; but Tennyson's Lancelot would
+much rather have killed himself than be systematically treacherous to
+the friend and lover-husband who appears in _Guinevere_.[7]
+
+These difficulties belong in some measure to the whole modern time--the
+whole time that begins with the Renaissance; but they become so much
+clearer and so much more serious with the advance of knowledge and
+criticism, that in speaking of them I have been referring specially to
+the last century. There are other difficulties not so closely connected
+with that advance, and I will venture some very tentative remarks on
+one of these, which also has increased with time. It has to do with the
+kind of life commonly lived by our poets. Is there not some significance
+in the fact that the most famous of our narrative poets were all three,
+in their various ways and degrees, public men, or in contact with great
+affairs; and that poets in earlier times no less must usually have seen
+something at first hand of adventure, political struggles, or war;
+whereas poets now, for the most part, live wholly private lives, and,
+like the majority of their readers, are acquainted only by report with
+anything of the kind? If Chaucer had never been at Court, or seen
+service in the French war, or gone on embassies abroad; if Spenser had
+not known Sidney and Raleigh and been secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland;
+if Milton had spent his whole life at Horton; would it have made no
+difference to their poetry? Again, if we turn to the drama and ask why
+the numerous tragedies of the nineteenth century poets so rarely
+satisfy, what is the answer? There are many reasons, and among them the
+poet's ignorance of the stage will doubtless count for much; but must we
+not also consider that he scarcely ever saw anything resembling the
+things he tried to portray? When we study the history of the time in
+which the Elizabethan dramas were composed, when we examine the
+portraits of the famous men, or read such a book as the autobiography of
+Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we realise that the violent actions and
+passions which the dramatist depicted were like the things he saw.
+Whatever Shakespeare's own disposition was, he lived among these men,
+jested with the fellow-actor who had borne arms abroad and killed his
+man in a duel at home, conversed with nobles whose heads perhaps were no
+great way from the block. But the poet who strolls about the lanes or
+plods the London streets with an umbrella for a sword, and who has
+probably never seen a violent deed in his life, or for a moment really
+longed to kill so much as a critic, how is he to paint the vengeance of
+Hamlet or the frenzy of Macbeth, and not merely to thrill you with the
+emotions of his actors but to make them _do_ things that take your
+imagination by the throat?
+
+
+  3.
+
+Assuming, now, that (even if this last idea is doubtful or unimportant)
+there is some truth in the suggestion that the difficulties of the long
+poem arise largely from the conditions described, and especially from
+the nature of the intellectual atmosphere which the modern poet
+breathes, let us return to Wordsworth's age in particular. In that age
+these difficulties were aggravated in a quite exceptional way by special
+causes, causes responsible also in part for the unusual originality and
+intensity of the poetry. In it we find conditions removed to the
+extremest distance from those of the poet who wrote, in the midst of a
+generally accepted social order, for an audience with which he shared
+traditional ideas and beliefs and a more or less traditional imaginative
+material. It was, in a word, a revolutionary age, in the electric
+atmosphere of which the most potent intellectual influences were those
+of Rousseau and (for the English poets) of Godwin. Milton's time was not
+in the same sense revolutionary, much less Shakespeare's. The forces of
+the great movement of mind in Shakespeare's day _we_ may formulate as
+'ideas,' but they were not the abstractly conceived ideas of
+Wordsworth's day. Such theoretical ideas were potent in Milton's time,
+but they were not ideas that made a total breach with the past,
+rejecting as worthless, or worse, the institutions, beliefs, and modes
+of life in which human nature had endeavoured to realise itself, and
+drawing airy pictures of a different human nature on a new earth. Nor
+was the poetic mind of those ages enraptured or dejected by the haunting
+many-featured contrast of real and ideal. But the poetic mind in
+Wordsworth's age breathed this atmosphere of revolution, though it was
+not always sensitive to the influence. Nor is it a question of the
+acceptance or rejection of the 'ideas of the Revolution.' That influence
+is clearly traceable in all the greater writers except Scott and Jane
+Austen. It is equally obvious in Wordsworth, who hungered for realities,
+recovered from his theoretic malady, sought for good in life's familiar
+face, yet remained a preacher; in Byron, who was too shrewd, sceptical,
+and selfish to contract that particular malady, but who suffered from
+the sickness from which Goethe freed himself by writing _Werther_,[8]
+and who punctuates his story in _Don Juan_ with bursts of laughter and
+tears; and in Shelley, whose 'rapid spirit' was quickened, and then
+clogged, by the abstractions of revolutionary theory.
+
+But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical example of this
+influence and of its effects. From the world of his imagination the
+shapes of the old world had disappeared, and their place was taken by a
+stream of radiant vapours, incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving
+in the 'clear golden dawn,' and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to
+the music of the stars and the 'singing rain,' the sublime ridiculous
+formulas of Godwin. In his heart were emotions that responded to the
+vision,--an aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like those of
+spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over its ruin. And he wrote, not,
+like Shakespeare or Pope, for Londoners sitting in a theatre or a
+coffee-house, intelligences vivid enough but definitely embodied in a
+definite society; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to
+other spirit-sparks of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark
+earth, to spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or
+Freedom or Love, his one place of rest and the one source of his vision,
+ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang _to_ this, and he sang _of_ it, and of the
+emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest with such shapes of
+darkness as Faith and Custom. And he made immortal music; now in
+melodies as exquisite and varied as the songs of Schubert, and now in
+symphonies where the crudest of Philosophies of History melted into
+golden harmony. But the songs were more perfect than the symphonies; and
+they could hardly fail to be so. For a single thought and mood,
+expressive of one aspect of things, suffices, with its melody, for a
+lyric, but not for a long poem. That requires a substance which
+implicitly contains a whole 'criticism' or interpretation of life. And
+although there was something always working in Shelley's mind, and
+issuing in those radiant vapours, that was far deeper and truer than his
+philosophic creed, its expression and even its development were
+constantly checked or distorted by the hard and narrow framework of that
+creed. And it was one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of the human
+nature that has formed the material of the world's great poems.[9]
+
+The second and third quarters of the century were not in the same degree
+as the first a revolutionary time, and we feel this change in the
+poetry. The fever-heat is gone, the rapture and the dejection moderate,
+the culture is wider, the thought more staid and considerate, the
+fascination of abstractions less potent, and the formative or plastic
+impulse, if not stronger, less impeded. Late in the period, with Morris,
+the born teller of tales re-appears. If, as we saw, the lyrical spirit
+continues to prevail, no one would deny to Browning the full and robust
+sympathy of the dramatist with all the variety of character and passion.
+Yet these changes and others are far from obliterating those features of
+the earlier generation on which we have dwelt. To describe the
+atmosphere of 'criticism' as that of a common faith or view of the world
+would be laughable. If not revolutionary, it was agitated, restless, and
+distressed by the conflict of theoretic ideas. To Arnold's mind it was
+indeed a most unhappy time for poetry, though the poetic impulse
+remained as yet, and even later, powerful. The past was dead, but he
+could share neither the soaring hope nor the passionate melancholy of
+the opening century. He was
+
+  Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
+    The other powerless to be born,
+  With nowhere yet to rest his head.
+
+And the two greatest poets, as well as he, still offer not only, as
+poets always must, an interpretation, but a definite theory of life,
+and, more insistently than ever before, of death. Confidence in the
+detail, at least, of such theories has diminished, and with the rapid
+advance of the critical sciences the poets may prophesy less than their
+predecessors; but they probe, and weigh, and deliberate more. And the
+strength of the 'inward' tendency, obvious in Tennyson and Arnold, may
+be clearly seen even in Browning, and not alone in such works as
+_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_ or _La Saisiaz_.
+
+Objective and dramatic as Browning is called and by comparison is, he is
+surely most at home, and succeeds most completely, in lyrics, and in
+monologues divested of action and merely suggestive of a story or
+suggested by one. He too must begin, in _Pauline_, with the picture of a
+youthful poet's soul. Dramatic the drama of _Paracelsus_ neither is nor
+tries to be: it consists of scenes in the history of souls. Of the
+narrative _Sordello_ its author wrote: 'The historical decoration was
+purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my
+stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is
+worth study.' Even if that is so, great narrative poems are not written
+thus. And what Browning says here applies more or less fully to most of
+his works. In the end, if we set aside the short lyrics, his best poems
+are all 'studies' of souls. 'Well,' it may be answered, 'so are
+Shakespeare's tragedies and tragi-comedies.' But the difference is
+great. Shakespeare, doubtless, is little concerned with the accuracy of
+the historical background,--much less concerned than Browning. But his
+subject is not a soul, nor even souls: it is the actions of souls, or
+souls coming into action. It is more. It is that clash of souls which
+exhibits not them alone, but a whole of spiritual forces, appearing in
+them, but spreading beyond them into the visible society to which they
+essentially belong, and into invisible regions which enclose it. The
+thing shown, therefore, is huge, multiform, ponderous, yet quivering
+with an inward agitation which explodes into violent bodily expression
+and speaks to the _eye_ of imagination. What specially interests
+Browning is not this. It is the soul moving in itself, often in its most
+secret windings and recesses; before action or after it, where there is
+action at all; and this soul not essentially as in its society (that is
+'background' or 'decoration'), but alone, or in relation to another
+soul, or to God. He exhibits it best, therefore, in monologue, musing,
+explaining, debating, pleading, overflowing into the expression of
+feeling or passion, but not acting. The 'men and women' that haunt the
+reader's imagination are not so much men of action as lovers, artists,
+men of religion. And when they act (as for example in _The Ring and the
+Book_, or the dramas) what rivets attention, and is first recalled to
+memory by their names, is not the action, but its reflection in the soul
+of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my experience; and in the
+end a critic can only offer to others his considered experience. But
+with Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise. Even with Dante
+it is otherwise. I see not souls alone, but souls in visible attitudes,
+in outward movement, often in action. I see Paolo and Francesca drifting
+on the wind: I see them sitting and reading: I see them kiss: I _see_
+Dante's pity:
+
+  E caddi come corpo morto cade.
+
+
+  4.
+
+I spoke of Tennyson and Browning in order to point out that, although in
+their day the intellectual atmosphere was no longer 'revolutionary,' it
+remained an atmosphere of highly reflective ideas representing no common
+'faith' or way of envisaging the world, and that the inward tendency
+still asserts itself in their poetry. We cannot pursue the history
+further, but it does not appear that in the last forty years culture has
+advanced much, or at all, towards such a faith or way, or shows the
+working of new semi-conscious creative ideas beneath the surface of
+warring theories and opinions. Only the younger among us can hope to see
+what Arnold descried in the distance,
+
+  One mighty wave of thought and joy
+    Lifting mankind again.
+
+And even when, for them or their descendants, that hope is realised, and
+with it the hope of a new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly
+still be one of 'criticism,' and Arnold's insistence on the necessity of
+the best criticism will still be as urgently required. It must indeed be
+more and more needed as the power of half-educated journalism grows. How
+poetry then will overcome the obstacles which, therefore, must in some
+measure still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable not
+by the reflections of critics, but by the creative deeds of poets
+themselves. Accordingly, while one may safely prophesy that their long
+poems will differ from those of any past age, I have no idea of
+predicting the nature of this difference, and will refer in conclusion
+only to certain views which seem to me delusive.
+
+It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern
+difficulties by any attempt to withdraw himself from the atmosphere of
+free and scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity of view and
+concreteness of imagination, to live in a past century or a sanctuary of
+esoteric art, whether secular or religious. Whatever of value such an
+attempt may yield--and that it may yield much I do not deny--it will
+never yield poems at once long and great.
+
+Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will sometimes deal with
+much of the common and painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that
+sense more 'democratic' or universal than any poetry of the past. But it
+is vain to imagine that this can be done by a refusal to 'interpret' and
+an endeavour to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going prose
+'realism' there is selection; and, to go no further, selection itself is
+interpretation. And, as for poetry, the mirror which the least
+theoretical of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And that,
+whether he likes it or not, is an activity which divides, and sifts,
+and recombines into a unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the
+crude material which experience thrusts upon it. This must be so; the
+only question is of the choice of matter and the method of treatment.
+Nor can the end to be achieved be anything but beauty, though the
+meaning of that word may be extended and deepened. And beauty in its
+essence is something that gives satisfaction, however much of pain,
+repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and overcome.
+
+'But, even so,' it may be said, 'why should the poet trouble himself
+about figures, events, and actions? That inward tendency in which you
+see danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply and solely what on
+one side you admit it to be, the sign of our advance. What we really
+need is to make our long poems _entirely_ interior. We only want to know
+how Dante felt; we do not _wish_ to see his pity felling him to the
+ground; and much less do we wish to hear Othello say "and smote him
+thus," or even to imagine the blow. We are not children or savages.' We
+do not want, I agree, attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But
+those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how many kinds of poem this
+inward tendency can display its power without any injury or drawback.
+They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a _long_ poem so entirely
+'interior' can possibly have the clearness, variety, and solidity of
+effect that the best long poems have possessed; whether it can produce
+the same impression of a massive, building, organising, 'architectonic'
+power of imagination; and whether all this and much else is of little
+value. They can hardly have realised, one must suspect, how much of life
+they wish to leave unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that
+perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at once to satisfy and
+to purify, the primitive instincts from which it arises; and that, in
+the case of poetic art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures,
+scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts, and one that in
+the immense majority of men shows no sign of decay. And finally, if they
+suppose that the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is a
+symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of semi-barbarism, I am sure
+they are woefully mistaken. There is more virtue than their philosophy
+dreams of in deeds, in 'the motion of a muscle this way or that.'
+Doubtless it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains
+interior is not the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny can
+show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds, good and evil, will
+undeceive me.
+
+A last delusion remains. 'There is,' we may be told, 'a simple, final,
+and comfortable answer to all these doubts and fears. The long poem is
+not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and should be
+publicly buried, and there is not the least occasion to mourn it. It has
+become impossible not because we cannot write it, but because we see
+that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was written. The thing called
+a long poem was really, as any long poem must be, a number of short
+ones, linked together by passages of prose. And these passages _could_
+be nothing except prose; for poetry is the language of a state of
+crisis, and a crisis is brief. The long poem is an offence to art.' I
+believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was, unless I mistake, the
+invention of Poe, and it is about as true as I conceive his story of the
+composition of _The Raven_ to be. It became a gospel with some
+representatives of the Symbolist movement in France; and in fact it
+would condemn not only the long poem, but the middle-sized one, and
+indeed all sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to imply no
+want of gratitude for the lyrics of some of its adherents; but the
+theory itself seems strangely thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not
+quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic
+intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as
+a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying
+that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the
+rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation
+of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more
+beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were
+equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one
+movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem
+could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to
+speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an
+eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow
+in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as
+we have seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one;
+and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects
+of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes.
+That the long poem is doomed is a possible, however groundless, belief;
+but it is futile to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable
+worth will perish.[10]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The material of these pages belongs in part to the course
+    mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905.
+    They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible
+    to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a
+    single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the
+    prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which
+    doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the
+    long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the
+    false impression that the writer's admiration for those poems is
+    lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the
+    Romantic Revival of Wordsworth's time.
+
+  [2] This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is
+    the point.
+
+  [3] _Table-talk_, Feb. 16, 1833.
+
+  [4] The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they
+    come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this
+    balance. Such, for instance, are _The Eve of St. Agnes_, _Lamia_,
+    _Michael_, _The Vision of Judgment_, some of Crabbe's tales. It does
+    not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest
+    poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day
+    in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the
+    time.
+
+  [5] See p. 110.
+
+  [6] Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.
+
+  [7] This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with
+    which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur's speech in that
+    Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies
+    in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far
+    as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of
+    Conscience, the attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is
+    appropriate, and, again, Lancelot's treachery to him is intelligible
+    and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience
+    could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or
+    shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the
+    other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along
+    Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold
+    and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not
+    merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of the _Idylls_
+    could not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson's design requires
+    Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this
+    is not imaginable.
+
+    Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I
+    think the depreciation of Tennyson's genius now somewhat prevalent a
+    mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard
+    him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.
+
+  [8] It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English
+    poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge,
+    and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.
+
+  [9] The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an
+    exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the
+    poetry of the time, and of Shelley's poetry in particular, and must
+    supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him
+    to observe that Godwin's formulas are called sublime as well as
+    ridiculous. _Political Justice_ would never have fascinated such
+    young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a great truth
+    had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be
+    felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its
+    misapprehension.
+
+  [10] The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a
+    misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is
+    fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that
+    this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it is _not_ so in
+    a narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we
+    may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than
+    of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole
+    poetic content of the _Divine Comedy_ in a form not its own than you
+    can the content of a song.
+
+    The theory is connected in some minds with the view that 'music is
+    the true type or measure of perfected art.' That view again rests on
+    the idea that 'it is the art of music which most completely realises
+    [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and
+    matter,' and that accordingly 'the arts may be represented as
+    continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a
+    condition which music alone completely realises' (Pater, _The
+    Renaissance_, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent
+    from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what
+    follows is that poetry should endeavour _in its own way_ to achieve
+    that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that
+    it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible
+    to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply
+    it. But others have.
+
+
+
+
+THE LETTERS OF KEATS
+
+
+THE LETTERS OF KEATS
+
+
+There is no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been
+discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations;
+by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr.
+Bridges. Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_ and Mr. Colvin's biography
+both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no
+further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de Selincourt in a volume
+invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its
+author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he
+has contributed so much. My principal object is to consider Keats's
+attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas
+set forth in previous lectures on Shelley's views and on the age of
+Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to
+prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the
+poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge
+from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am
+sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to
+listen to quotations from them.[1]
+
+
+The best of Keats's poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without
+extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost
+necessary to the understanding of _Endymion_ and of some of the earlier
+or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind
+and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the
+fictions once current of a puny Keats who was 'snuffed out by an
+article,' a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and 'slippery
+blisses,' and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and
+his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died
+at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his
+faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the
+whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of
+that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic
+genius.
+
+Of Keats's character, as the letters manifest it, Arnold has written.
+While speaking plainly and decidedly of the weakness visible in those to
+Miss Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which proves that
+Keats 'had flint and iron in him,' 'had virtue in the true and large
+sense of the word.' And he selected passages, too, which illustrate the
+'admirable wisdom and temper' and the 'strength and clearness of
+judgment' shown by Keats, alike in matters of friendship and in his
+criticisms of his own productions, of the public, and of the literary
+circles,--the 'jabberers about pictures and books,' as Keats in a bitter
+mood once called them. We may notice, in addition, two characteristics.
+In spite of occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at the
+magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably plain from these
+letters, had a clear and habitual consciousness of his genius. He never
+dreamed of being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet; sometimes he
+hoped to be a great one. I remember no sign that he felt himself the
+inferior of any living poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of Byron,
+whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious. When Shelley wrote, hinting
+a criticism, but referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius, he
+returned the criticism without the compliment. His few references to
+Coleridge are critical, and his amusing description of Coleridge's talk
+is not more reverential than Carlyle's. Something, indeed, of the native
+pugnacity which his friends ascribe to him seems to show itself in his
+allusions to contemporaries, including even Wordsworth. Yet with all
+this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame, no letters extant
+breathe a more simple and natural modesty than these; and from end to
+end they exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the irritable
+vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime egotism of Milton and
+Wordsworth. He was of Shakespeare's tribe.
+
+The other trait that I wish to refer to appears in a particular series
+of letters--sometimes mere notes--scattered through the collection. They
+are addressed to Keats's school-girl sister Fanny, who was eight years
+younger than he, and who died in the same year as Browning.[2] Keats, as
+we see him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr. Colvin's
+collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm and ambition which his sister
+was too young to understand. During his last two years he was, besides,
+passionately and miserably in love, and, latterly, ill and threatened
+with death. His soul was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself,
+avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate friends. Yet, until he
+left England, he never ceased to visit his sister when he could; and,
+when he could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of amusing
+nonsense, full of brotherly care for her, and of excellent advice
+offered as by an equal who happened to be her senior; letters quite free
+from thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and the resentment
+against fate which in parts of his later correspondence with others
+betray his suffering. These letters to his sister are, in one sense, the
+least remarkable in the collection, yet it would lose much by their
+omission. They tell us next to nothing of his genius, but as we come
+upon them the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a moment
+hard or troubled, becomes once more soft and bright.
+
+To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from the character to the
+mind of Keats, if the reader has formed a notion of him as a youth with
+a genius for poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise
+not intellectually remarkable, this error will soon be dispelled by the
+letters. With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were
+passions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his
+contemporaries at the same time of life.[3] The letters remind us also
+that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual
+training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the
+University wits. They show, too--the earlier far more than the later--in
+certain literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence of Leigh Hunt and
+his circle. But everywhere we feel in them the presence of an
+intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open,
+daring, rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic, yet
+observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense without narrowness,
+and quite as various both in its interests and its capacities as the
+mind of Wordsworth or of Shelley. Fundamentally, and in spite of
+abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense, the mind of Keats was very
+serious and thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative than an
+original mind should be in youth; an intelligence which now startles by
+flashes of sudden beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and deep
+thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty aid from theories, out of
+personal experience. In quality--and I speak of nothing else--the mind
+of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have been very different.
+
+Short extracts can give but little idea of all this; but they may at
+least illustrate the variety of Keats's mind, and the passages I am
+about to read have been chosen mainly with this intention, and not
+because the majority are among the most striking that might be found.
+The earliest belong to the September of 1817, and I take them partly for
+their local interest. Keats spent most of that month here in Oxford,
+staying in the Magdalen Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man
+whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly admired. 'We lead,'
+he writes to his sister, 'very industrious lives--he in general studies,
+and I in proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem which I hope you
+will see early in the next year.' It was _Endymion_: he wrote, it seems,
+the whole of the Third Book in Bailey's rooms. Unluckily the hero in
+that Book is wandering at the bottom of the sea; but even in those
+regions, as Keats imagined them, a diligent student may perhaps find
+some traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers and quadrangles,
+cloisters and groves; of the deer in Magdalen Park; and how
+
+      The mouldering arch,
+      Shaded o'er by a larch,
+  Lives next door to Wilson the hosier
+
+(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear
+streams--'more clear streams than ever I saw together.' 'I take a walk
+by the side of one of them every evening.' 'For these last five or six
+days,' he writes to Reynolds, 'we have had regularly a boat on the Isis,
+and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your
+eyelashes. We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become
+naturalised river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we
+have christened "Reynolds's Cove," in which we have read Wordsworth and
+talked as may be.' Of those talks over Wordsworth with the grave
+religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the
+best-known of all the letters (it is too well known to quote), thoughts
+which take their origin from the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_.[4]
+
+About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a
+walking-tour to the Highlands; and I will quote two passages from the
+letters written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast they
+exhibit between the two strains in Keats's mind. The first is the later.
+The letter is dated 'Cairn-something July 17th':
+
+  Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides, take a little
+  from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I. The banks of
+  the Clyde are extremely beautiful--the north end of Loch Lomond grand
+  in excess--the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part is
+  precious good--the evening was beautiful--nothing could surpass our
+  fortune in the weather. Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet
+  of chivalry Barges with trumpets and banners, just to die away before
+  me into that blue place among the mountains.[5]
+
+Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was written a fortnight
+earlier from Carlisle:
+
+  After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in
+  Cumberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school
+  holden at the Tun. It was indeed 'no new cotillion fresh from
+  France.' No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and
+  whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go'd it, and twirl'd it and
+  whirl'd it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like
+  mad. The difference between our country dances and these Scottish
+  figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o' tea and
+  beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely gratified to think that,
+  if I had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which
+  I could not possibly enter. I hope I shall not return without having
+  got the Highland fling. There was as fine a row of boys and girls as
+  you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never
+  felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means
+  a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.[6]
+
+There is little enough here of the young poet who believes himself to
+care for nothing but 'Art'; and as little of the theoretic
+cosmopolitanism of some of Keats's friends.
+
+Some three months later we find Keats writing from London to his brother
+and his sister-in-law in America; and he tells them of a young lady from
+India whom he has just met:
+
+  She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich
+  Eastern look. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the
+  same as the beauty of a leopardess.... You will by this time think I
+  am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am
+  not--she kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
+  speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can
+  feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very
+  'yes' and 'no' of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though,
+  she has faults--the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet
+  she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there are two
+  distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly,
+  theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and
+  ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian,
+  hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop
+  Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the
+  conquering feelings.[7]
+
+I do not read this passage merely for its biographical interest, but a
+word may be ventured on that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less
+than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he immediately became her
+slave. When we observe the fact, and consider how very unlike the words
+I have quoted are to anything in Keats's previous letters, we can hardly
+help suspecting that he was at this time in a peculiar condition and
+ripe for his fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned from his
+Scotch tour, which was broken off because the Inverness doctor used the
+most menacing language about the state of his throat; and further, that
+he was now, in the late autumn, nursing his brother Tom, who died of
+consumption before the year was out. And an idea suggests itself which,
+if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some comfort in it. How often have
+readers of Keats's life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss
+Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does it not seem at least as
+probable that, if Miss Brawne had never existed, what happened would
+still have happened, and even that the fever of passion which helped to
+destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?
+
+I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a passage on politics.
+The friends of Keats were, for the most part, advanced liberals. His own
+sympathies went that way. A number of lines in the poems of his boyhood
+show this, and so do many remarks in the letters. And his sympathies
+were not mere sentiments. 'I hope sincerely,' he wrote in September,
+1819, 'I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the
+question before I die'; and a few days later, when he tells Brown of his
+wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work for his livelihood,
+composing deliberate poems only when he can afford to, he says that he
+will write as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he makes it a
+condition that he is to write 'on the liberal side of the question.' It
+is a mistake to suppose that he had no political interests. But he
+cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and Tory; a 'Radical' was
+for him the type of an 'obstinate and heady' man; and the perfectibility
+theories of friends like Shelley and Dilke slipped from his mind like
+water from a duck's back. We have seen the concrete shape his patriotism
+took. He always saw ideas embodied, and was 'convinced that small causes
+make great alterations.' I could easily find passages more
+characteristic than the following; but it is short, it shows that Keats
+thought for himself, and it has a curious interest just now (1905):[8]
+
+  Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of
+  Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of
+  Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the divine right
+  gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good. No, they have taken a
+  lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done,
+  without any of the good. The worst thing he has done is that he has
+  taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. The Emperor
+  Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian,
+  creating two Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch
+  of the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years keep
+  peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to
+  China. I think it a very likely thing that China itself may fall;
+  Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its
+  horns against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France.
+
+Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is in these letters, I
+may take next one or two passages which have an interest also from their
+bearing on Keats's poems. Here we have, for example, the unmistakable
+origin of the _Ode on Indolence_:
+
+  This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless.
+  I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_. My
+  passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven
+  and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation,
+  about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl
+  and the breath of lilies, I should call it languor, but as I am* I
+  must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the
+  brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a
+  happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement, and pain no
+  unbearable power.[9] Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any
+  alertness of countenance as they pass by me. They seem rather like
+  figures on a Greek vase--a man and two women whom no one but myself
+  could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness,
+  and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the
+  mind.[10]
+
+    * Especially as I have a black eye.
+
+'This is the only happiness'--the sentence will surprise no one who has
+even dipped into Keats's letters. It expresses a settled conviction.
+Happiness, he feels, belongs only to childhood and early youth. A young
+man thinks he can keep it, but a little experience shows him he must do
+without it. The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is fatal to
+it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because it is to realise the
+sorrow of the world and to feel the burden of the mystery. 'Health and
+spirits,' he says, 'can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man.'[11]
+Shelley might be speaking. 'To see an entirely disinterested girl quite
+happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It
+depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary.
+Women must want Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and so may
+we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of
+crime.'[12] These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his
+qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply
+a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect
+with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such
+'dreaming' poets as himself) to men of action.
+
+In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several
+recently written poems, and among them the ballad _La Belle Dame Sans
+Merci_. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say,
+'Here is the record of my love and my despair,' for on this one subject
+he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the
+copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):
+
+  She took me to her elfin grot,
+    And there she wept and sighed full sore,
+  And there I shut her wild wild eyes
+    With kisses four.
+
+'Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the
+headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said "score"
+without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the
+Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that
+both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece
+quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three
+and a half apiece--a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my
+side.' This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best
+poems, but I dare say the author of _Hamlet_ made such jests about it.
+Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were
+probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not
+published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.
+
+I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in different ways
+Keats's insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more
+decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe
+that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success
+in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of 'nonsense,'
+rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and
+worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing 'three
+witty people, all distinct in their excellence'; and he goes on:
+
+  I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his
+  excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a
+  negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see
+  him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear
+  the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel,
+  the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.
+
+C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and
+still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered
+the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much
+out of the tune of Falstaff: 'C, they say, is not his mother's true
+child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to
+sell.'[13]
+
+In the second passage Keats is describing one of his friends:
+
+  Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he
+  has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening
+  one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the
+  mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus
+  is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of
+  the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not
+  pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you
+  turn the point, still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a
+  truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a
+  Godwin Methodist.[14]
+
+These lines illustrate the instinctive feeling of Keats that it is
+essential to the growth of the poetic mind to preserve its natural
+receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it.
+They illustrate also his dislike of the fixed theories held and preached
+by some members of his circle. We shall have to consider later the
+meaning of his occasional outbreaks against 'thought,' 'knowledge,'
+'philosophy.' It is important not to be misled by them, and not to
+forget the frequent expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and
+must strive to gain is this very 'knowledge' and 'philosophy.' Here I
+will only observe that his polemics against them, though coloured by his
+temperament, coincide to a large extent with Wordsworth's dislike of 'a
+reasoning self-sufficing thing,' his depreciation of mere
+book-knowledge, and his praise of a wise passiveness. And, further, what
+he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is the 'Methodism,'
+the stubborn argument, and the habit of bringing to the argument and
+maintaining throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his own
+thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his
+brother--men willing to probe with him any serious idea--but not to
+Dilke. It is clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident
+assertions and negations of Shelley and his other Godwinian friends and
+acquaintances. Probably from his ignorance of theories he felt at a
+disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not dismiss their theories
+as something of no interest to a poet. He thought about them, convinced
+himself that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself philosophises
+in criticising them. The following passage, from a letter to George and
+Georgiana Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his writings to
+a theory of the world, a theology as he jestingly calls it; and although
+it is long, I make no apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he
+says, Robertson's _History of America_ and Voltaire's _Siecle de Louis
+XIV._, and he observes that, though the two civilisations described are
+so different, the case of the great body of the people is equally
+lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:
+
+  The whole appears to resolve into this--that man is originally a poor
+  forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the
+  forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other.
+  If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts, at
+  each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of
+  annoyances--he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars
+  above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us
+  is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom-appearing
+  Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness
+  carried to an extreme, but what must it end in? Death--and who could
+  in such a case bear with death? The whole troubles of life, which are
+  now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for
+  the last days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would
+  leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all
+  believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will
+  not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to
+  itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in
+  winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight
+  of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa--whirlpools
+  and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may
+  arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as
+  far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For
+  instance, suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful
+  morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It
+  cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native
+  to the world as itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the
+  worldly elements will prey upon his nature.
+
+  The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and
+  superstitious is 'a vale of tears,' from which we are to be redeemed
+  by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven. What
+  a little circumscribed straitened notion! Call the world if you please
+  'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world
+  (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it
+  to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of
+  showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say
+  '_Soul-making_'--Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence.[15] There
+  may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they
+  are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is
+  personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know
+  and they see and they are pure; in short they are God. How then are
+  souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have
+  identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each
+  one's individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like
+  this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a
+  grander system of salvation than the Christian religion--or rather it
+  is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand
+  materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These
+  three materials are the _Intelligence_, the _human heart_ (as
+  distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or elemental
+  space suited for the proper action of _Mind_ and _Heart_ on each other
+  for the purpose of forming the _Soul_ or _Intelligence destined to
+  possess the sense of Identity_. I can scarcely express what I but
+  dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the
+  more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will
+  call the _world_ a School instituted for the purpose of teaching
+  little children to read. I will call the _human heart_ the horn-book
+  read in that School. And I will call the _Child able to read_, the
+  _Soul_ made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how
+  necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence
+  and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a
+  thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the
+  Mind's Bible, it is the mind's experience, it is the text from which
+  the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives
+  of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does God make
+  individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own
+  essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation
+  which does not offend our reason and humanity.[16]
+
+Surely, when Keats's education is considered, this, with all its
+crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find
+anything written at the same age by another poet of the time which shows
+more openness of mind, more knowledge of human nature, or more original
+power of thought.
+
+About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description of A, B, and C, he
+received what he recognised at once for his death-warrant. He had yet
+fourteen months to endure, but at this point the development of his mind
+was arrested. During the three preceding years it had been very rapid,
+and is easy to trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in
+spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided difference between
+the Keats of the earlier letters and the Keats of the later. The tour in
+Scotland in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient accuracy as
+a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is the youth who had written the
+_Sonnet on first_ _looking into Chapman's Homer_, and _Sleep and
+Poetry_, and who was writing _Endymion_. He is thoughtful, often grave,
+sometimes despondent; but he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of
+the joy and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied the sense of
+poetic power. He is the poet who looked, we are told, as though he had
+been gazing on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose face
+worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields about Hampstead; who is
+described watching with rapture the billowing of the wind through the
+trees and over meadow-grasses and corn, and looking sometimes like a
+young eagle and sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the
+forest depths. This is the Keats who wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy
+for ever'; who found 'the Religion of Joy' in the monuments of the Greek
+spirit, in sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere handbooks
+of mythology; who never ceased, he said, to wonder at all that incarnate
+delight, and would point out to Severn how essentially modern, how
+imperishable, the Greek spirit is--a joy for ever.
+
+Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware, and we find him becoming
+more and more aware, that joy is not the only word. He had not read for
+nothing Wordsworth's great Ode, and _Tintern Abbey_, and the
+_Excursion_. We know it from _Endymion_, and the letter about the
+'burden of the mystery' was written before the tour in Scotland. But
+after this we feel a more decided change, doubtless hastened by outward
+events. The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews of _Endymion_
+appeared--reviews not less inexcusable because we understand their
+origin. Then came his brother's death. A few weeks later he met Miss
+Brawne. Henceforth his youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid
+feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are connected, I think,
+solely with his passion. His brother's death deepened his sympathies.
+The reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him nothing but
+good. He rated them at their true value, but they gave him a salutary
+shock. They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the
+weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt's verse and his own. Through them he
+saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into
+self-worship by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He
+kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He
+became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and
+rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns
+against his old self harshly. Some of his friends, he says, think he has
+lost his old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He speaks
+slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the human heart is something
+finer,--not its dreams, but its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as
+intent as ever,--more intent; but the glory he would see walks in a
+fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and learn. He is young, he
+says, writing at random, straining his eyes at particles of light in the
+midst of a great darkness. He knows at times the 'agony' of ignorance.
+In one year he writes six or seven of the best poems in the language,
+but he is little satisfied. 'Thus far,' he says, 'I have a consciousness
+of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase.' Two
+months later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, 'I am afraid I
+shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.' And so it was.
+
+It is important to remember this change in Keats in considering his
+ideas about poetry; but we have first to look at them in a more general
+way. Many of the most interesting occur in detached remarks or
+aphorisms, and these I must pass by. The others I intended at first to
+deal with in connection with Shelley's view of poetry; and, although
+that plan proved to be too large for a single lecture, I do not wish
+altogether to abandon it, because in the extracts which I have been
+reading the difference between the minds of the two poets has already
+appeared, and because it re-appears both in their poetic practice and in
+their opinions about their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it
+might be thought unlikely that these opinions would show also a marked
+resemblance. For Keats, it may be said, was of all the great poets then
+alive the one least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that
+'revolutionary' atmosphere of which I spoke in a previous lecture. He
+did not concern himself, we may be told, with the progress of humanity,
+or with Manchester Massacres or risings in Naples. He cared nothing for
+theories, abstractions, or ideals. He worshipped Beauty, not Liberty;
+and the beauty he worshipped was not 'intellectual,' but visible,
+audible, tangible. 'O for a life of sensations,' he cried, 'rather than
+of thoughts.' He was an artist, intent upon fashioning his material
+until the outward sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful.
+In all this he was at the opposite pole to Shelley; and he himself felt
+it. He refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might keep his own
+unfettered scope; and he never speaks of Shelley cordially. He told him,
+too, that he might be more of an artist and load every rift of his
+subject with ore; and that, while many people regard the purpose of a
+work as the God, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist must serve
+Mammon. And his practice, like his opinions, proves that, both in his
+strength and his limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.
+
+In such a plea there would certainly be much truth; and yet it is not
+_the_ truth, for it ignores other truths which must somehow be combined
+with it. There are great differences between the two poets, but then in
+Keats himself there are contending strains. Along with the differences,
+too, we find very close affinities. And these affinities with Shelley
+also show that Keats was deeply influenced by the spirit of his time.
+Let me illustrate these statements.
+
+The poet who cried, 'O for a life of sensations,' was consoled, as his
+life withered away, by the remembrance that he 'had loved the principle
+of beauty in all things.' And this is not a chance expression; it
+repeats, for instance, a phrase used two years before, 'the mighty
+abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things.' If Shelley had used this
+language, it would be taken to prove his love of abstractions. How does
+it differ from the language of the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_?[17]
+
+Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness between _Alastor_
+and _Endymion_, each the first poem of any length in which the writer's
+genius decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a young poet;
+of a dream in which his ideal appears in human form, and he knows the
+rapture of union with it; of the passion thus enkindled, and the search
+for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer to read _Endymion_ simply
+as we read _Isabella_; but the question here is not of our preferences.
+If we examine the poem without regard to them, we shall be unable to
+doubt that to some extent the story symbolises or allegorises this
+pursuit of the principle of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of
+the causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not in himself the
+experience required by parts of his design, and hence in them he had to
+write from mere imagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a flagrant
+degree the defect felt here and there in _Prometheus Unbound_. If we
+wish to read it as the author meant it, we must ask for the significance
+of the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear that not all of
+them are intended to have this further significance, and we are
+perplexed by the question where, and how far, we are to look for it.[18]
+
+Take, again, some of the most famous of the lyrical poems. Is it true
+that Keats was untroubled by that sense of contrast between ideal and
+real which haunted Shelley and was so characteristic of the time? So far
+is this from being the case that a critic might more plausibly object to
+his monotonous insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known
+lyrics of the two poets are the stanzas _To a Skylark_ and the _Ode to a
+Nightingale_. Well, if we summarise prosaically the subject of the one
+poem we have summarised that of the other. 'Our human life is all unrest
+and sorrow, an oscillation between longing and satiety, a looking before
+and after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot attain, and that
+leaves us dissatisfied by everything attainable. And we die, and do not
+understand death. But the bird is beyond this division and dissonance;
+it attains the ideal;
+
+  Das Unzulaengliche,
+  Hier wird's Ereigniss.'
+
+This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre, tone, atmosphere,
+they are far apart; the 'idea' is identical. And what else is the idea
+of the _Ode_ _on a Grecian Urn_, where a moment, arrested in its
+ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the change and decay of
+reality? And what else is the idea of the playful lines _To
+Fancy_,--Fancy who brings together the joys which in life are parted by
+distances of time and place, and who holds in sure possession what life
+wins only to lose? Even a poem so pictorial and narrative and free from
+symbolism as the _The Eve of St. Agnes_ rests on the same feeling. The
+contrast, so exquisitely imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the
+storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy enmity of the world
+outside Madeline's chamber, and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy
+bliss within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired the _Ode to a
+Nightingale_.
+
+It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would be easy, too, to show
+that Keats was far from indifferent to the 'progress of humanity.' He
+conceived it in his own way, but it is as much the theme of _Hyperion_
+as of _Prometheus Unbound_. We are concerned however here not with the
+interpretation of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and especially
+with certain real or apparent inconsistencies in it. For in the letters
+he now praises 'sensation' and decries thought or knowledge, and now
+cries out for 'knowledge' as his greatest need; in one place declares
+that an artist must have self-concentration, perhaps selfishness, and in
+others insists that what he desires is to be of use to his fellow-men.
+We shall gain light on these matters and on his relation to Shelley if I
+try to reduce his general view to a precise and prosaic form.
+
+That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is a 'principle'; it is One.
+All things beautiful manifest it, and so far therefore are one and the
+same. This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in many crucial
+passages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The goddess
+Cynthia in _Endymion_ is the Principle of Beauty. In this story she is
+also identified with the Moon. Accordingly the hero, gazing at the moon,
+declares that in all that he ever loved he loved _her_:
+
+                      thou wast the deep glen--
+  Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen--
+  The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun;
+  Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won;
+  Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed--
+  My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:--
+  Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
+  O what a wild and harmonised tune
+  My spirit struck from all the beautiful!
+
+When he says this he does not yet understand that the Moon and his
+strange visitant are one; he thinks they are rivals. So later, when he
+loves the Indian maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself
+therefore false to his goddess, he is in error; for she is only his
+goddess veiled, the shaded half of the moon.
+
+Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends differ. Indeed, the one
+Beauty is infinitely various. But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to
+fall into two main classes. On the one hand there is the kind of beauty
+that comes easily and is all sweetness and pleasure. In receiving it we
+seem to suppress nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely
+sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it speaks to sense and
+delights us. It is 'luxury.' But the other kind is won through thought,
+and also through pain. And this second and more difficult kind is also
+the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the Principle. That it is won
+through pain is doubly true. First, because the poet cannot reach it
+unless he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which disturb his
+enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter beauty, and may even seem to lead
+him away from beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain union with his
+goddess only by leaving the green hill-sides where he met her first, and
+by wandering unhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth and
+under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of other lovers, and to help
+them undertakes tasks which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia.
+Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a maiden devoted to sorrow,
+and gains his goddess just when he thinks he has resigned her. The
+highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet's pain; and, in the
+second place, it has pain in itself, or at least appears in objects that
+are painful. In his early poem _Sleep and Poetry_ Keats asks himself the
+question,
+
+  And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
+
+And he answers:
+
+  Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
+  Where I may find the agonies, the strife
+  Of human hearts.
+
+He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He never became equal to
+it, but the idea was realised to some extent in _Isabella_ and _Lamia_
+and _Hyperion_. The first two of these are tales of passion, 'agony,'
+and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a story of 'strife.'
+
+Such, in its bare outline, is Keats's habitual view of poetry. What,
+then, are the points where, in spite of its evident resemblance to
+Shelley's, we feel a marked difference? The most important seem to be
+two. In the first place Keats lays far the heavier stress on the idea
+that beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is
+to be found in Shelley, but (as we saw in another lecture) it is not
+congenial to him; it appears almost incidentally and is stated
+half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only
+manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested most fully, we find,
+I believe, no trace. And this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of
+Shelley's mind was to regard suffering and conflict with mere distress
+and horror as something senseless and purely evil, and to look on the
+world as naturally a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an
+inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this world of woe his
+Intellectual Beauty does not really belong; it appears there only in
+flashes; its true home is a place where no contradictions, not even
+reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of Keats is much more
+concrete. He has no belief either in this natural paradise or in
+'Godwinian perfectibility.' Pain and conflict have a meaning to him.
+Without them souls could not be made; and the business of the world, he
+conjectures, is the making of souls. They are not therefore simply
+obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this world it manifests
+itself most fully in and through them. For 'scenery is fine, but human
+nature is finer';[19] and the passions and actions of man are finer than
+his enjoyments and dreams. In the same way, the conflict in _Hyperion_
+is not one between light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as in
+_Prometheus Unbound_. The Titans must yield to the Olympians because, in
+a word, they are less beautiful, and
+
+                 'tis the eternal law
+  That first in beauty should be first in might.
+
+But the Titans, though less beautiful, _are_ beautiful; it is one and
+the same 'principle' that manifests itself in them and more fully in
+their victors. Their defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but
+the completion of their own being. This, it seems probable, the hero in
+_Hyperion_ would have come to recognise, so that the poem, at least so
+far as he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation born of
+strife.
+
+Man is 'finer,' Keats says, and the Titans must submit because they are
+less 'beautiful.' The second point of difference between him and
+Shelley lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with Shelley has many
+names, and one of them is beauty, but we hardly feel it to be the name
+nearest to his heart. The spirit of his worship is rather
+
+               that sustaining Love
+  Which, through the web of being blindly wove
+  By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
+  Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
+  The fire for which all thirst;
+
+and 'love' is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the term must be
+used, than 'beauty.' But the ideal for Keats is always and emphatically
+beauty or the 'principle of beauty.' When he sets the agonies and
+strifes of human hearts above a painless or luxurious loveliness, it is
+because they are the more beautiful. He would not have said that the
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_ is superior to _King Lear_ in beauty, but
+inferior to it in some other respect; it is inferior in _beauty_ to
+_King Lear_. Let art only be 'intense' enough, let the poet only look
+hard enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain in his object
+is seen truly as the vesture of great passion and action, and all
+'disagreeables' will 'evaporate,' and nothing will remain but
+beauty.[20] Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the
+great poet's power of vision, he is still content when he can feel that
+a poem of his has intensity, has (as he says of _Lamia_) 'that sort of
+fire in it that must take hold of people some way.'[21] And an earlier
+and inferior poem, _Isabella_, may show his mind. The mere subject is
+exceedingly painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the painful
+incidents and details; but the poem can hardly be called painful at all;
+for the final impression is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as
+the final impression left by the blissful story of _St. Agnes' Eve_. And
+this is most characteristic of Keats. If the word beauty is used in his
+sense, and not in the common contracted sense, we may truly say that he
+was, and must have remained, more than any other poet of his time, a
+worshipper of Beauty.
+
+When, then--to come to his apparent inconsistencies--he exalts sensation
+and decries thought or knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty.
+The word 'sensation,' as a comparison of passages would readily show,
+has not in his letters its usual meaning. It stands for _poetic_
+sensation, and, indeed, for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name
+for _all_ poetic or imaginative experience; and the contents of the
+speech of Oceanus are, in kind, just as much 'sensation' as the eating
+of nectarines (which may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I
+repeat, to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes in the earlier
+letters we find Keats false to his better mind. Knowing that the more
+difficult beauty is the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so
+entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that he rebels against
+everything that would disturb its magic or trouble his 'exquisite sense
+of the luxurious.' And then he is tempted to see in thought only that
+vexatious questioning that 'spoils the singing of the nightingale,' and
+to forget that it is necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of
+beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew that there was something
+wilful and weak about them; and they gradually disappear. On the whole,
+the gist of his attitude to 'thought' or 'philosophy' may be stated as
+follows.
+
+He was far from being indifferent to truth, or from considering it
+unimportant for poetry. In an early letter, when he criticises a poem of
+Wordsworth's, he ventures to say that 'if Wordsworth had thought a
+little deeper at that moment he would not have written it,' and that 'it
+is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after
+truth.'[22] He writes of a passage in _Endymion_: 'The whole thing
+must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a
+thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that, when I wrote it, it
+was the regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.'[23] And many
+passages show his conviction that for his progress towards this truth
+'thought,' 'knowledge,' 'philosophy,' are indispensable;[24] that he
+must submit to the toil and the solitude that they involve, just as he
+must undergo the pains of sympathy; that 'there is but one way for him,'
+and that this one 'road lies through application, study, and
+thought.'[25] On the other hand he had, in the first place, as we saw, a
+strong feeling that a man, and especially a poet, must not be in a hurry
+to arrive at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box of his
+supposed results, but must be content with half-knowledge, and capable
+of 'living in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
+reaching after fact and reason.' And, in the second place, a poet, he
+felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasonings which do not
+also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also beauty; and in
+so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are _mere_ thoughts
+and reasonings, they are no more than a means, though a necessary means,
+to an end, which end is beauty,--that beauty which is also truth. This
+alone is the poet's end, and therefore his law. 'With a great poet the
+sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather
+obliterates all consideration.'[26] Thought, knowledge, philosophy, if
+they fall short of this, are nothing but a 'road' to his goal. They
+bring matter for him to mould to his purpose of beauty; but he must not
+allow them to impose _their_ purpose on him, or to ask that it shall
+appear in his product. These statements formulate Keats's position more
+than he formulates it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He
+was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or because, while
+his mind had much general power, he was, more than Wordsworth or
+Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.[27]
+
+We can now deal more briefly with another apparent inconsistency. Keats
+says again and again that the poet must not live for himself, but must
+feel for others and try to help them; that 'there is no worthy pursuit
+but the idea of doing some good for the world'; that he is ambitious to
+do some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes to Shelley about the
+_Cenci_: 'There is only one part of it I am judge of--the poetry and
+dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon.
+A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An
+artist must serve Mammon; he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness,
+perhaps.'[28] These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember
+the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to
+Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic
+purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than
+any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious too to criticise the
+irritability of a man condemned to death; and in any case these sentences
+are perfectly consistent with Keats's expressed desire to do good. The
+poet is to do good; yes, but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of
+doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not to obtrude it in his
+poetry, or to show that he has a design upon us.[29] To make beauty is
+_his_ philanthropy. He will not succeed in it best by making what is only
+in part beauty,--something like the _Excursion_, half poem and half
+lecture. He must be unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish; by
+refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of helping by the
+desire to help in another way. This is the drift of Keats's thought. If
+we remember what he means by 'beauty' and 'poet,' and how he
+distinguishes the poet from the 'dreamer,'[30] we shall think it sound
+doctrine.
+
+Keats was by nature both dreamer and poet, and his ambition was to
+become poet pure and simple. There was, in a further sense, a double
+strain in his nature. He had in him the poetic temper of his time, the
+ever-present sense of an infinite, the tendency to think of this as an
+ideal perfection manifesting itself in reality, and yet surpassing
+reality, and so capable of being contrasted with it. He was allied here
+especially to Wordsworth and to Shelley, by the former of whom he was
+greatly influenced. But there was also in him another tendency; and
+this, it would seem, was strengthening at the expense of the first, and
+would in time have dominated it. It was perhaps the deeper and more
+individual. It may be called the Shakespearean strain, and it works
+against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real, or to
+magnify differences of grade into oppositions of kind. Keats had the
+impulse to interest himself in everything he saw or heard of, to be
+curious about a thing, accept it, identify himself with it, without
+first asking whether it is better or worse than another, or how far it
+is from the ideal principle. It is this impulse that speaks in the
+words, 'If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence
+and pick about the gravel';[31] and in the words, 'When she comes into a
+room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess';
+and in the feeling that she is fine, though Bishop Hooker is finer. It
+too is the source of his complaint that he has no personal identity, and
+of his description of the poetical character; 'It has no self; it is
+everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto,
+be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has
+as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the
+virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from
+its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for
+the bright one, because they both end in speculation.[32] A poet is the
+most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity. He
+is continually in, for, and filling some other body.'[33] That is not a
+description of Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley; neither does it apply
+very fully to Keats; but it describes something at least of the spirit
+of Shakespeare.
+
+Now this spirit, it is obvious, tends in poetry, I do not say to a
+realistic, but to what may be called a concrete method of treatment; to
+the vivid presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in preference
+to the expression of unembodied thoughts and feelings. The atmosphere of
+Wordsworth's age, as we have seen, was not, on the whole, favourable to
+it, and in various degrees it failed in strength, or it suffered, in all
+the greater poets. Scott had it in splendid abundance and vigour; but
+he had too little of the idealism or the metaphysical imagination which
+was common to those poets, and which Shakespeare united with his
+universal comprehension; nor was he, like Shakespeare and like some of
+them, a master of magic in language. But Keats had that magic in fuller
+measure, perhaps, than any of our poets since Milton; and, sharing the
+idealism of Wordsworth and Shelley, he possessed also wider sympathies,
+and, if not a more plastic or pictorial imagination than the latter, at
+least a greater freedom from the attraction of theoretic ideas. To what
+results might not this combination have led if his life had been as long
+as Wordsworth's or even as Byron's? It would be more than hazardous, I
+think, to say that he was the most highly endowed of all our poets in
+the nineteenth century, but he might well have written its greatest long
+poems.
+
+1905.
+
+
+  NOTE
+
+I have pointed out certain marked resemblances between _Alastor_ and
+_Endymion_, and it would be easy to extend the list. These resemblances
+are largely due to similarities in the minds of the two poets, and to
+the action of a common influence on both. But I believe that, in
+addition, Keats was affected by the reading of _Alastor_, which appeared
+in 1816, while his own poem was begun in the spring of 1817.
+
+The common influence to which I refer was that of Wordsworth, and
+especially of the _Excursion_, published in 1814. There is a quotation,
+or rather a misquotation, from it in the Preface to _Alastor_. The
+_Excursion_ is concerned in part with the danger of inactive and
+unsympathetic solitude; and this, treated of course in Shelley's own
+way, is the subject of _Alastor_, which also contains phrases
+reminiscent of Wordsworth's poem. Its Preface too reminds one
+immediately of the _Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peele Castle_; of
+the main idea, and of the lines,
+
+  Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,
+  Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind.
+
+As for Keats, the reader of his letters knows how much he was occupied
+in 1817 and 1818 with thoughts due to the reading of Wordsworth, and how
+great, though qualified, was his admiration of the _Excursion_. These
+thoughts concerned chiefly the poetic nature, its tendency to 'dream,'
+and the necessity that it should go beyond itself and feel for the
+sorrows of others. They may have been suggested _only_ by Wordsworth;
+but we must remember that _Alastor_ had been published, and that Keats
+would naturally read it. In comparing that poem with _Endymion_ I am
+obliged to repeat remarks already made in the lecture.
+
+_Alastor_, composed under the influence described, tells of the fate of
+a young poet, who is 'pure and tender-hearted,' but who, in his search
+for communion with the ideal influences of nature and of knowledge,
+keeps aloof from sympathies with his kind. 'So long as it is possible
+for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured,
+he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed.' But a time comes when he
+thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence like himself. His ideal
+requirements are embodied in the form of a being who appears to him in a
+dream, and to whom he is united in passionate love. But his
+'self-centred seclusion' now avenges itself. The 'spirit of sweet human
+love' vanishes as he wakes, and he wanders over the earth, vainly
+seeking the 'prototype' of the vision until he dies.
+
+In _Endymion_ the story of a dream-vision, of rapturous union with it,
+and of the consequent pursuit of it, re-appears, though the beginning
+and the end are different. The hero, before the coming of the vision,
+has of course a poetic soul, but he is not self-secluded, or inactive,
+or fragile, or philosophic; and his pursuit of the goddess leads not to
+extinction but to immortal union with her. It does lead, however, to
+adventures of which the main idea evidently is that the poetic soul can
+only reach complete union with the ideal (which union is immortality) by
+wandering in a world which seems to deprive him of it; by trying to
+mitigate the woes of others instead of seeking the ideal for himself;
+and by giving himself up to love for what seems to be a mere woman, but
+is found to be the goddess herself. It seems almost beyond doubt that
+the story of Cynthia and Endymion would not have taken this shape but
+for _Alastor_.
+
+The reader will find this impression confirmed if he compares the
+descriptions in _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, Book I., of the dreamer's
+feelings on awakening from his dream, of the disenchantment that has
+fallen on the landscape, and of his 'eager' pursuit of the lost vision.
+Everything is, in one sense, different, for the two poets differ
+greatly, and Keats, of course, was writing without any conscious
+recollection of the passage in _Alastor_; but the conception is the
+same.[34]
+
+Consider, again, the passage (near the beginning of _Endymion_, Book
+III.) quoted on p. 230 of the lecture. The hero is addressing the moon;
+and he says, to put it baldly, that from his boyhood everything that was
+beautiful to him was associated with his love of the moon's beauty. The
+passage continues thus:
+
+  On some bright essence could I lean, and lull
+  Myself to immortality: I prest
+  Nature's soft pillow in a wakeful rest.
+  But, gentle Orb! there came a nearer bliss--
+  My strange love came--Felicity's abyss!
+  She came, and thou didst fade, and fade away.
+
+In spite of the dissimilarities, surely the 'wakeful rest' here
+corresponds to the condition of the poet in _Alastor_ prior to the
+dream. 'So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards
+objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and
+self-possessed'; but when his 'strange love' comes these objects, like
+the objects of Endymion's earlier desires, no longer suffice him.
+
+There is, however, further evidence, indeed positive proof, of the
+effect of _Alastor_, and especially of its Preface, on Keats's mind. In
+the revised version of _Hyperion_, Book I., the dreamer in the Temple
+wonders why he has been preserved from death. The Prophetess tells him
+the reason (I italicise certain words):
+
+  'None can usurp this height,' returned that shade,
+  'But those to whom the _miseries of the world_
+  Are misery, and will not let them rest.
+  _All else_ who find a haven in the world,
+  Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
+  If by a chance into this fane they come,
+  Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.'
+  'Are there not thousands in the world,' said I,
+  Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,
+  'Who _love their fellows_ even to the death,
+  Who feel the giant agony of the world,
+  And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
+  Labour for mortal good?'
+
+If the reader compares with this the following passage from the Preface
+to _Alastor_, and if he observes the words I have italicised in it, he
+will hardly doubt that some unconscious recollection of the Preface was
+at work in Keats's mind. Shelley is distinguishing the self-centred
+seclusion of his poet from that of common selfish souls:
+
+'The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's
+self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible
+passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the
+luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by
+awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to
+a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its
+dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their
+delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no
+generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge,
+duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and
+cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their
+kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief;
+these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish,
+because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead.
+They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the
+world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to
+exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through
+the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when
+the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. _All else_,
+selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who
+constitute, together with their own, the lasting _misery_ and loneliness
+_of the world_. Those who _love not their fellow-beings_, live
+unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.'[35]
+
+I have still a passage to refer to. Let the reader turn to the quotation
+on p. 236 from Keats's reply to Shelley's letter of invitation to his
+home in Italy; and let him ask himself why Keats puts the word
+"self-concentration" in inverted commas. He is not referring to anything
+in Shelley's letter, and he is not in the habit in the letters of using
+inverted commas except to mark a quotation. Without doubt, I think, he
+is referring from memory to the Preface to _Alastor_ and the phrase
+'self-centred seclusion.' He has come to feel that this self-centred
+seclusion is _right_ for a poet like himself, and that the direct
+pursuit of philanthropy in poetry (which he supposes Shelley to
+advocate) is wrong. But this is another proof how much he had been
+influenced by Shelley's poem; and it is perhaps not too rash to
+conjecture that his consciousness of this influence was one reason why
+he had earlier refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might 'have
+his own unfettered scope.'[36]
+
+If it seems to anyone that these conclusions are derogatory to Keats,
+either as a man or a poet, I can only say that I differ from him
+entirely. But I will add that there seems to me some reason to
+conjecture that Shelley had read the _Ode to a Nightingale_ before he
+wrote the stanzas _To a Skylark_.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The Letters (except those to Miss Brawne, and a few others) have
+    been edited by Colvin, and (without exception) by Forman (pub. Gowans
+    & Gray). I refer to them by their numbers, followed by the initial of
+    the editor's name. Both editions reproduce peculiarities of
+    punctuation, etc.; but for my present purpose these are usually
+    without interest, and I have consulted the convenience of the reader
+    in making changes.
+
+  [2] Keats himself, it is strange to think, was born in the same year
+    as Carlyle.
+
+  [3] These passions were in his last two years overclouded at times,
+    but they remained to the end. When, in the bitterness of his soul, he
+    begged Severn to put on his tombstone no name, but only 'Here lies
+    one whose name was writ in water,' he was thinking not merely of the
+    reviewers who had robbed him of fame in his short life, but also of
+    those unwritten poems, of which 'the faint conceptions' in happier
+    days used to 'bring the blood into his forehead.'
+
+  [4] LII, C., LV, F. The quotations above are from XIV, XVI, C., XV,
+    XVII, XVIII, F. The verses are a parody of Wordsworth's lines, 'The
+    cock is crowing.'
+
+  [5] LXI, C., LXVI, F.
+
+  [6] LVI, C., LXI, F.
+
+  [7] LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. Mr. Hooker, I may remark, would not have
+    thanked Keats for his bishopric.
+
+  [8] From the letter last quoted. See also CXVI, CXVIII, CXIX, C.,
+    CXXXVII, CXXXIV, CXXXV, F.
+
+  [9] 'Pain had no sting and pleasure's wreath no flower.'
+
+  [10] XCII, C., CVI, F.
+
+  [11] XIX, C., XXI, F.
+
+  [12] LIV, C., LIX, F.
+
+  [13] CXXXI, C., CLII, F.
+
+  [14] CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F. The word 'turn' in the last sentence but
+    two seems to be doubtful. Mr. Colvin reads 'have.'
+
+  [15] Keats's use of the word is suggested, probably, by Milton's
+    'pure intelligence of heaven.'
+
+  [16] XCII, C., CVI, F.
+
+  [17] CLXVI, F., LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. In XLI, C., XLIV, F., occurs a
+    passage ending with the words, 'they are able to "_consecrate
+    whate'er they look upon_."' Is not this a quotation from the _Hymn_:
+
+      Spirit of BEAUTY that dost consecrate
+      With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon?
+
+    If so, and if my memory serves me, this is the only quotation from
+    Shelley's poetry in the letters of Keats. The _Hymn_ had been
+    published in Hunt's _Examiner_, Jan., 1817.
+
+  [18] The first critic, I believe, who seriously attempted to
+    investigate Keats's mind, and the ideas that were trying to take
+    shape in some of his poems, was F. M. Owen, whose _John Keats, a
+    Study_ (1880) never attracted in her too brief life-time the
+    attention it deserved. Mr. Bridges's treatment of these ideas is
+    masterly. To what is said above may be added that, although Keats was
+    dissatisfied with _Endymion_ even before he had finished it, he did
+    not at any time criticise it on the ground that it tried to put too
+    much meaning into the myth. On _Alastor_ and _Endymion_ see further
+    the Note appended to this lecture.
+
+  [19] A notable (but not isolated) remark, seeing that the poetic
+    genius of Keats showed itself soonest and perhaps most completely in
+    the rendering of Nature.
+
+  [20] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.
+
+  [21] CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F.
+
+  [22] XIX, C., XXI, F.
+
+  [23] XXXII, C., XXXIV, F.
+
+  [24] He contemplates even the study of metaphysics, LI, C., LIV, F.
+
+  [25] L, C., LIII, F.
+
+  [26] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.
+
+  [27] Cf. in addition to the letters already referred to, the obscure
+    letter to Bailey, XXII, C., XXIV, F., which, however, is early, and
+    not quite in agreement with later thoughts. I should observe perhaps
+    that if Keats's position, as formulated above, is accepted, the
+    question still remains whether a truth which is also beauty, or a
+    beauty which is also truth, can be found by man; and, if so, whether
+    it can, in strictness, be called by either of those names.
+
+  [28] CLV, C., CCVI, F. See on these sentences the Note at the end of
+    the lecture.
+
+  [29] An expression used in reference to Wordsworth, XXXIV, C., XXXVI,
+    F.
+
+  [30] I have not space to dwell on this distinction, but I must warn
+    the reader that he will probably misunderstand the important passage
+    in the revised _Hyperion_, 161 ff., unless he consults Mr. de
+    Selincourt's edition.
+
+  [31] XXII, C., XXV, F.
+
+  [32] That is, in 'half-knowledge,' 'doubts,' 'mysteries' (see p.
+    235), while the philosopher is sometimes supposed by Keats to have a
+    reasoned certainty about everything. It is curious to reflect that
+    great metaphysicians, like Spinoza and Hegel, are often accused of
+    the un-moral impartiality which Keats attributes to the poet.
+
+  [33] LXXVI, C., LXXX, F.
+
+  [34] The ultimate origin of the dream-passage in both poems may well
+    be Adam's dream in _Paradise Lost_, Book viii.:
+
+      She disappear'd, and left me dark: I waked
+      To find her, or for ever to deplore
+      Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.
+
+    Keats alludes to this in XXII, C., XXIV, F.
+
+  [35] It is tempting to conjecture with Mr. Forman that the full-stop
+    before the last sentence is a misprint, and that we should read 'the
+    world,--those who,' etc., so that the last two clauses would be
+    relative clauses co-ordinate with 'who love not their fellow-beings.'
+    Not to speak of the run of the sentences, this conjecture is tempting
+    because of the comma after 'fellow-beings,' and because the paragraph
+    is followed by the quotation ('those' should be 'they'),
+
+                          The good die first,
+      And those whose hearts are dry as summer's dust
+      Burn to the socket.
+
+    The good who die first correspond with the 'pure and tender-hearted'
+    who perish and, as we naturally suppose, perish young, like the poet
+    in _Alastor_. But, as the last sentence stands, these, as well as the
+    torpid, live to old age. It is hard to believe that Shelley meant
+    this; but as he was in England when _Alastor_ was printed, he
+    probably revised the proofs, and it is perhaps easier to suppose that
+    he wrote what is printed than that he passed unobserved the serious
+    misprint supposed by Mr. Forman.
+
+  [36] XVIII, C., XX, F.
+
+
+
+
+THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF
+
+
+THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF[1]
+
+
+Of the two persons principally concerned in the rejection of Falstaff,
+Henry, both as Prince and as King, has received, on the whole, full
+justice from readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been
+in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare's famous characters.
+All of them, in passing from the mind of their creator into other minds,
+suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony through the
+disproportionate attention bestowed on some one feature, or to lose
+their uniqueness by being conventionalised into types already familiar.
+But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself. The original character
+is to be found alive in the two parts of _Henry IV._, dead in _Henry
+V._, and nowhere else. But not very long after these plays were
+composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very
+entertaining piece called _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. Perhaps his
+company wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as one would rather
+believe, the tradition may be true that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with
+the Falstaff scenes of _Henry IV._, expressed a wish to see the hero of
+them again, and to see him in love. Now it was no more possible for
+Shakespeare to show his own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two
+into five. But he could write in haste--the tradition says, in a
+fortnight--a comedy or farce differing from all his other plays in this,
+that its scene is laid in English middle-class life, and that it is
+prosaic almost to the end. And among the characters he could introduce a
+disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and could call them
+Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. And he could represent this knight
+assailing, for financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in the
+event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked,
+mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is
+horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself
+could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the _Two Noble Kinsmen_. But it
+no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that
+parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the
+_Merry Wives_ is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky
+Sharp the dupe of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served the least of
+these tricks he would have had his brains taken out and buttered, and
+have given them to a dog for a New Year's gift. I quote the words of the
+impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him and gave to him a few
+sentences worthy of Falstaff himself. But they are only a few--one side
+of a sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet critics have
+solemnly debated at what period in his life Sir John endured the gibes
+of Master Ford, and whether we should put this comedy between the two
+parts of _Henry IV._, or between the second of them and _Henry V._ And
+the Falstaff of the general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible
+conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the Falstaff of the mere
+play-goer is certainly much more like the impostor than the true man.
+
+The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and
+is insisted on in almost all competent estimates of the character of
+Falstaff. I do not propose to attempt a full account either of this
+character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall connect the remarks I
+have to make on them with a question which does not appear to have been
+satisfactorily discussed--the question of the rejection of Falstaff by
+the Prince on his accession to the throne. What do we feel, and what are
+we meant to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what does our
+feeling imply as to the characters of Falstaff and the new King?
+
+
+  1.
+
+Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire, engaged in borrowing a
+thousand pounds from Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding
+helter-skelter from London, brings him the great news that the old King
+is as dead as nail in door, and that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir
+John, in wild excitement, taking any man's horses, rushes to London; and
+he carries Shallow with him, for he longs to reward all his friends. We
+find him standing with his companions just outside Westminster Abbey, in
+the crowd that is waiting for the King to come out after his coronation.
+He himself is stained with travel, and has had no time to spend any of
+the thousand pounds in buying new liveries for his men. But what of
+that? This poor show only proves his earnestness of affection, his
+devotion, how he could not deliberate or remember or have patience to
+shift himself, but rode day and night, thought of nothing else but to
+see Henry, and put all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were
+nothing else to be done but to see him. And now he stands sweating with
+desire to see him, and repeating and repeating this one desire of his
+heart--'to see him.' The moment comes. There is a shout within the Abbey
+like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour of trumpets, and the doors
+open and the procession streams out.
+
+  FAL. God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!
+
+  PIST. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
+
+  FAL. God save thee, my sweet boy!
+
+  KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
+
+  CH. JUST. Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you speak?
+
+  FAL. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
+
+  KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.
+  How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
+  I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
+  So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
+  But being awaked I do despise my dream.
+  Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
+  Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
+  For thee thrice wider than for other men.
+  Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
+  Presume not that I am the thing I was;
+  For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
+  That I have turn'd away my former self;
+  So will I those that kept me company.
+  When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
+  Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
+  The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
+  Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
+  As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
+  Not to come near our person by ten mile.
+  For competence of life I will allow you,
+  That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
+  And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
+  We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
+  Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
+  To see perform'd the tenour of our word.
+  Set on.
+
+The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff and his friends remain.
+He shows no resentment. He comforts himself, or tries to comfort
+himself--first, with the thought that he has Shallow's thousand pounds,
+and then, more seriously, I believe, with another thought. The King, he
+sees, must look thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private
+when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes of his friends. But
+even as he speaks, the Chief Justice, accompanied by Prince John,
+returns, and gives the order to his officers:
+
+  Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;
+  Take all his company along with him.
+
+Falstaff breaks out, 'My lord, my lord,' but he is cut short and hurried
+away; and after a few words between the Prince and the Chief Justice the
+scene closes, and with it the drama.
+
+What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our
+feelings about Falstaff. If we have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff
+scenes of the two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old
+reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward, but a cruel and
+dangerous ruffian, I suppose we enjoy his discomfiture and consider that
+the King has behaved magnificently. But if we _have_ keenly enjoyed the
+Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed them as Shakespeare surely meant
+them to be enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us solely or
+even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we feel, I think, during the
+King's speech, a good deal of pain and some resentment; and when,
+without any further offence on Sir John's part, the Chief Justice
+returns and sends him to prison, we stare in astonishment. These, I
+believe, are, in greater or less degree, the feelings of most of those
+who really enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not). Nor are
+these feelings diminished when we remember the end of the whole story,
+as we find it in _Henry V._, where we learn that Falstaff quickly died,
+and, according to the testimony of persons not very sentimental, died of
+a broken heart.[2] Suppose this merely to mean that he sank under the
+shame of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but the words of
+Mrs. Quickly, 'The king has killed his heart'; of Nym, 'The king hath
+run bad humours on the knight; that's the even of it'; of Pistol,
+
+       Nym, thou hast spoke the right,
+  His heart is fracted and corroborate,
+
+assuredly point to something more than wounded pride; they point to
+wounded affection, and remind us of Falstaff's own answer to Prince
+Hal's question, 'Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?' 'A thousand
+pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth a million: thou owest me thy
+love.'
+
+Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though
+undoubtedly striking, leaves an impression so unpleasant? I will venture
+to put aside without discussion the idea that he meant us throughout the
+two plays to regard Falstaff with disgust or indignation, so that we
+naturally feel nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies
+that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare with which it is idle
+to argue. And there is another and a much more ingenious suggestion
+which must equally be rejected as impossible. According to it, Falstaff,
+having listened to the King's speech, did not seriously hope to be sent
+for by him in private; he fully realised the situation at once, and was
+only making game of Shallow; and in his immediate turn upon Shallow when
+the King goes out, 'Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,' we are
+meant to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that we end the
+play with the delightful feeling that, while Henry has done the right
+thing, Falstaff, in his outward overthrow, has still proved himself
+inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a critic who understands
+Falstaff, and in the suggestion itself shows that he understands him.[3]
+But it provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and could not
+account for, that which follows the short conversation with Shallow.
+Falstaff's dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove
+beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as
+a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount.
+
+Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise admissible, would
+still leave our problem only partly solved. For what troubles us is not
+only the disappointment of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry. It was
+inevitable that on his accession he should separate himself from Sir
+John, and we wish nothing else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should
+have a competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly improbable
+case of his reforming himself. And if Henry could not trust himself
+within ten miles of so fascinating a companion, by all means let him be
+banished that distance: we do not complain. These arrangements would not
+have prevented a satisfactory ending: the King could have communicated
+his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in a private
+interview rich in humour and merely touched with pathos. But Shakespeare
+has so contrived matters that Henry could not send a private warning to
+Falstaff even if he wished to, and in their public meeting Falstaff is
+made to behave in so infatuated and outrageous a manner that great
+sternness on the King's part was unavoidable. And the curious thing is
+that Shakespeare did not stop here. If this had been all we should have
+felt pain for Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against Henry. But
+two things we do resent. Why, when this painful incident seems to be
+over, should the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison? Can
+this possibly be meant for an act of private vengeance on the part of
+the Chief Justice, unknown to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare
+would have shown at once that the King disapproved and cancelled it. It
+must have been the King's own act. This is one thing we resent; the
+other is the King's sermon. He had a right to turn away his former
+self, and his old companions with it, but he had no right to talk all of
+a sudden like a clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and
+insincere to speak of them as his 'misleaders,' as though in the days of
+Eastcheap and Gadshill he had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen
+his former self, and we know that it was nothing of the kind. He had
+shown himself, for all his follies, a very strong and independent young
+man, deliberately amusing himself among men over whom he had just as
+much ascendency as he chose to exert. Nay, he amused himself not only
+among them, but at their expense. In his first soliloquy--and first
+soliloquies are usually significant--he declares that he associates with
+them in order that, when at some future time he shows his true
+character, he may be the more wondered at for his previous aberrations.
+You may think he deceives himself here; you may believe that he
+frequented Sir John's company out of delight in it and not merely with
+this cold-blooded design; but at any rate he _thought_ the design was
+his one motive. And, that being so, two results follow. He ought in
+honour long ago to have given Sir John clearly to understand that they
+must say good-bye on the day of his accession. And, having neglected to
+do this, he ought not to have lectured him as his misleader. It was not
+only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably like an attempt
+to buy the praise of the respectable at the cost of honour and truth.
+And it succeeded. Henry _always_ succeeded.
+
+You will see what I am suggesting, for the moment, as a solution of our
+problem. I am suggesting that our fault lies not in our resentment at
+Henry's conduct, but in our surprise at it; that if we had read his
+character truly in the light that Shakespeare gave us, we should have
+been prepared for a display both of hardness and of policy at this point
+in his career, And although this suggestion does not suffice to solve
+the problem before us, I am convinced that in itself it is true. Nor is
+it rendered at all improbable by the fact that Shakespeare has made
+Henry, on the whole, a fine and very attractive character, and that here
+he makes no one express any disapprobation of the treatment of Falstaff.
+For in similar cases Shakespeare is constantly misunderstood. His
+readers expect him to mark in some distinct way his approval or
+disapproval of that which he represents; and hence where _they_
+disapprove and _he_ says nothing, they fancy that he does _not_
+disapprove, and they blame his indifference, like Dr. Johnson, or at the
+least are puzzled. But the truth is that he shows the fact and leaves
+the judgment to them. And again, when he makes us like a character we
+expect the character to have no faults that are not expressly pointed
+out, and when other faults appear we either ignore them or try to
+explain them away. This is one of our methods of conventionalising
+Shakespeare. We want the world's population to be neatly divided into
+sheep and goats, and we want an angel by us to say, 'Look, that is a
+goat and this is a sheep,' and we try to turn Shakespeare into this
+angel. His impartiality makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear to see
+him, like the sun, lighting up everything and judging nothing. And this
+is perhaps especially the case in his historical plays, where we are
+always trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us that Richard II.
+was unworthy to be king, and we at once conclude that he thought
+Bolingbroke's usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely, what under
+the conditions was bound to exist, an inextricable tangle of right and
+unright. Or, Bolingbroke being evidently wronged, we suppose
+Bolingbroke's statements to be true, and are quite surprised when, after
+attaining his end through them, he mentions casually on his death-bed
+that they were lies. Shakespeare makes us admire Hotspur heartily; and
+accordingly, when we see Hotspur discussing with others how large his
+particular slice of his mother-country is to be, we either fail to
+recognise the monstrosity of the proceeding, or, recognising it, we
+complain that Shakespeare is inconsistent. Prince John breaks a
+tottering rebellion by practising a detestable fraud on the rebels. We
+are against the rebels, and have heard high praise of Prince John, but
+we cannot help seeing that his fraud is detestable; so we say
+indignantly to Shakespeare, 'Why, you told us he was a sheep'; whereas,
+in fact, if we had used our eyes we should have known beforehand that he
+was the brave, determined, loyal, cold-blooded, pitiless, unscrupulous
+son of a usurper whose throne was in danger.
+
+To come, then, to Henry. Both as prince and as king he is deservedly a
+favourite, and particularly so with English readers, being, as he is,
+perhaps the most distinctively English of all Shakespeare's men. In
+_Henry V._ he is treated as a national hero. In this play he has lost
+much of the wit which in him seems to have depended on contact with
+Falstaff, but he has also laid aside the most serious faults of his
+youth. He inspires in a high degree fear, enthusiasm, and affection;
+thanks to his beautiful modesty he has the charm which is lacking to
+another mighty warrior, Coriolanus; his youthful escapades have given
+him an understanding of simple folk, and sympathy with them; he is the
+author of the saying, 'There is some soul of goodness in things evil';
+and he is much more obviously religious than most of Shakespeare's
+heroes. Having these and other fine qualities, and being without certain
+dangerous tendencies which mark the tragic heroes, he is, perhaps, the
+most _efficient_ character drawn by Shakespeare, unless Ulysses, in
+_Troilus and Cressida_, is his equal. And so he has been described as
+Shakespeare's ideal man of action; nay, it has even been declared that
+here for once Shakespeare plainly disclosed his own ethical creed, and
+showed us his ideal, not simply of a man of action, but of a man.
+
+But Henry is neither of these. The poet who drew Hamlet and Othello can
+never have thought that even the ideal man of action would lack that
+light upon the brow which at once transfigures them and marks their
+doom. It is as easy to believe that, because the lunatic, the lover, and
+the poet are not far apart, Shakespeare would have chosen never to have
+loved and sung. Even poor Timon, the most inefficient of the tragic
+heroes, has something in him that Henry never shows. Nor is it merely
+that his nature is limited: if we follow Shakespeare and look closely at
+Henry, we shall discover with the many fine traits a few less pleasing.
+Henry IV. describes him as the noble image of his own youth; and, for
+all his superiority to his father, he is still his father's son, the son
+of the man whom Hotspur called a 'vile politician.' Henry's religion,
+for example, is genuine, it is rooted in his modesty; but it is also
+superstitious--an attempt to buy off supernatural vengeance for
+Richard's blood; and it is also in part political, like his father's
+projected crusade. Just as he went to war chiefly because, as his father
+told him, it was the way to keep factious nobles quiet and unite the
+nation, so when he adjures the Archbishop to satisfy him as to his right
+to the French throne, he knows very well that the Archbishop _wants_ the
+war, because it will defer and perhaps prevent what he considers the
+spoliation of the Church. This same strain of policy is what Shakespeare
+marks in the first soliloquy in _Henry IV._, where the prince describes
+his riotous life as a mere scheme to win him glory later. It implies
+that readiness to use other people as means to his own ends which is a
+conspicuous feature in his father; and it reminds us of his father's
+plan of keeping himself out of the people's sight while Richard was
+making himself cheap by his incessant public appearances. And if I am
+not mistaken there is a further likeness. Henry is kindly and pleasant
+to every one as Prince, to every one deserving as King; and he is so not
+merely out of policy: but there is no sign in him of a strong affection
+for any one, such an affection as we recognise at a glance in Hamlet and
+Horatio, Brutus and Cassius, and many more. We do not find this in
+_Henry V._, not even in the noble address to Lord Scroop, and in _Henry
+IV._ we find, I think, a liking for Falstaff and Poins, but no more:
+there is no more than a liking, for instance, in his soliloquy over the
+supposed corpse of his fat friend, and he never speaks of Falstaff to
+Poins with any affection. The truth is, that the members of the family
+of Henry IV. have love for one another, but they cannot spare love for
+any one outside their family, which stands firmly united, defending its
+royal position against attack and instinctively isolating itself from
+outside influence.
+
+Thus I would suggest that Henry's conduct in his rejection of Falstaff
+is in perfect keeping with his character on its unpleasant side as well
+as on its finer; and that, so far as Henry is concerned, we ought not to
+feel surprise at it. And on this view we may even explain the strange
+incident of the Chief Justice being sent back to order Falstaff to
+prison (for there is no sign of any such uncertainty in the text as
+might suggest an interpolation by the players). Remembering his father's
+words about Henry, 'Being incensed, he's flint,' and remembering in
+_Henry V._ his ruthlessness about killing the prisoners when he is
+incensed, we may imagine that, after he had left Falstaff and was no
+longer influenced by the face of his old companion, he gave way to anger
+at the indecent familiarity which had provoked a compromising scene on
+the most ceremonial of occasions and in the presence alike of court and
+crowd, and that he sent the Chief Justice back to take vengeance. And
+this is consistent with the fact that in the next play we find Falstaff
+shortly afterwards not only freed from prison, but unmolested in his old
+haunt in Eastcheap, well within ten miles of Henry's person. His anger
+had soon passed, and he knew that the requisite effect had been produced
+both on Falstaff and on the world.
+
+But all this, however true, will not solve our problem. It seems, on the
+contrary, to increase its difficulty. For the natural conclusion is that
+Shakespeare _intended_ us to feel resentment against Henry. And yet that
+cannot be, for it implies that he meant the play to end disagreeably;
+and no one who understands Shakespeare at all will consider that
+supposition for a moment credible. No; he must have meant the play to
+end pleasantly, although he made Henry's action consistent. And hence it
+follows that he must have intended our sympathy with Falstaff to be so
+far weakened when the rejection-scene arrives that his discomfiture
+should be satisfactory to us; that we should enjoy this sudden reverse
+of enormous hopes (a thing always ludicrous if sympathy is absent); that
+we should approve the moral judgment that falls on him; and so should
+pass lightly over that disclosure of unpleasant traits in the King's
+character which Shakespeare was too true an artist to suppress. Thus our
+pain and resentment, if we feel them, are wrong, in the sense that they
+do not answer to the dramatist's intention. But it does not follow that
+they are wrong in a further sense. They may be right, because the
+dramatist has missed what he aimed at. And this, though the dramatist
+was Shakespeare, is what I would suggest. In the Falstaff scenes he
+overshot his mark. He created so extraordinary a being, and fixed him so
+firmly on his intellectual throne, that when he sought to dethrone him
+he could not. The moment comes when we are to look at Falstaff in a
+serious light, and the comic hero is to figure as a baffled schemer; but
+we cannot make the required change, either in our attitude or in our
+sympathies. We wish Henry a glorious reign and much joy of his crew of
+hypocritical politicians, lay and clerical; but our hearts go with
+Falstaff to the Fleet, or, if necessary, to Arthur's bosom or
+wheresomever he is.[4]
+
+In the remainder of the lecture I will try to make this view clear. And
+to that end we must go back to the Falstaff of the body of the two
+plays, the immortal Falstaff, a character almost purely humorous, and
+therefore no subject for moral judgments. I can but draw an outline, and
+in describing one aspect of this character must be content to hold
+another in reserve.
+
+
+  2.
+
+Up to a certain point Falstaff is ludicrous in the same way as many
+other figures, his distinction lying, so far, chiefly in the mere
+abundance of ludicrous traits. _Why_ we should laugh at a man with a
+huge belly and corresponding appetites; at the inconveniences he suffers
+on a hot day, or in playing the footpad, or when he falls down and there
+are no levers at hand to lift him up again; at the incongruity of his
+unwieldy bulk and the nimbleness of his spirit, the infirmities of his
+age and his youthful lightness of heart; at the enormity of his lies and
+wiles, and the suddenness of their exposure and frustration; at the
+contrast between his reputation and his real character, seen most
+absurdly when, at the mere mention of his name, a redoubted rebel
+surrenders to him--_why_, I say, we should laugh at these and many such
+things, this is no place to inquire; but unquestionably we do. Here we
+have them poured out in endless profusion and with that air of careless
+ease which is so fascinating in Shakespeare; and with the enjoyment of
+them I believe many readers stop. But while they are quite essential to
+the character, there is in it much more. For these things by themselves
+do not explain why, beside laughing at Falstaff, we are made happy by
+him and laugh _with_ him. He is not, like Parolles, a mere _object_ of
+mirth.
+
+The main reason why he makes us so happy and puts us so entirely at our
+ease is that he himself is happy and entirely at his ease. 'Happy' is
+too weak a word; he is in bliss, and we share his glory. Enjoyment--no
+fitful pleasure crossing a dull life, nor any vacant convulsive
+mirth--but a rich deep-toned chuckling enjoyment circulates continually
+through all his being. If you ask _what_ he enjoys, no doubt the answer
+is, in the first place, eating and drinking, taking his ease at his inn,
+and the company of other merry souls. Compared with these things, what
+we count the graver interests of life are nothing to him. But then,
+while we are under his spell, it is impossible to consider these graver
+interests; gravity is to us, as to him, inferior to gravy; and what he
+does enjoy he enjoys with such a luscious and good-humoured zest that we
+sympathise and he makes us happy. And if any one objected, we should
+answer with Sir Toby Belch, 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,
+there shall be no more cakes and ale?'
+
+But this, again, is far from all. Falstaff's ease and enjoyment are not
+simply those of the happy man of appetite;[5] they are those of the
+humorist, and the humorist of genius. Instead of being comic to you and
+serious to himself, he is more ludicrous to himself than to you; and he
+makes himself out more ludicrous than he is, in order that he and
+others may laugh. Prince Hal never made such sport of Falstaff's person
+as he himself did. It is _he_ who says that his skin hangs about him
+like an old lady's loose gown, and that he walks before his page like a
+sow that hath o'erwhelmed all her litter but one. And he jests at
+himself when he is alone just as much as when others are by. It is the
+same with his appetites. The direct enjoyment they bring him is scarcely
+so great as the enjoyment of laughing at this enjoyment; and for all his
+addiction to sack you never see him for an instant with a brain dulled
+by it, or a temper turned solemn, silly, quarrelsome, or pious. The
+virtue it instils into him, of filling his brain with nimble, fiery, and
+delectable shapes--this, and his humorous attitude towards it, free him,
+in a manner, from slavery to it; and it is this freedom, and no secret
+longing for better things (those who attribute such a longing to him are
+far astray), that makes his enjoyment contagious and prevents our
+sympathy with it from being disturbed.
+
+The bliss of freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff. His
+humour is not directed only or chiefly against obvious absurdities; he
+is the enemy of everything that would interfere with his ease, and
+therefore of anything serious, and especially of everything respectable
+and moral. For these things impose limits and obligations, and make us
+the subjects of old father antic the law, and the categorical
+imperative, and our station and its duties, and conscience, and
+reputation, and other people's opinions, and all sorts of nuisances. I
+say he is therefore their enemy; but I do him wrong; to say that he is
+their enemy implies that he regards them as serious and recognises their
+power, when in truth he refuses to recognise them at all. They are to
+him absurd; and to reduce a thing _ad absurdum_ is to reduce it to
+nothing and to walk about free and rejoicing. This is what Falstaff
+does with all the would-be serious things of life, sometimes only by his
+words, sometimes by his actions too. He will make truth appear absurd by
+solemn statements, which he utters with perfect gravity and which he
+expects nobody to believe; and honour, by demonstrating that it cannot
+set a leg, and that neither the living nor the dead can possess it; and
+law, by evading all the attacks of its highest representative and almost
+forcing him to laugh at his own defeat; and patriotism, by filling his
+pockets with the bribes offered by competent soldiers who want to escape
+service, while he takes in their stead the halt and maimed and the
+gaol-birds; and duty, by showing how he labours in his vocation--of
+thieving; and courage, alike by mocking at his own capture of Colvile
+and gravely claiming to have killed Hotspur; and war, by offering the
+Prince his bottle of sack when he is asked for a sword; and religion, by
+amusing himself with remorse at odd times when he has nothing else to
+do; and the fear of death, by maintaining perfectly untouched, in the
+face of imminent peril and even while he _feels_ the fear of death, the
+very same power of dissolving it in persiflage that he shows when he
+sits at ease in his inn. These are the wonderful achievements which he
+performs, not with the sourness of a cynic, but with the gaiety of a
+boy. And, therefore, we praise him, we laud him, for he offends none but
+the virtuous, and denies that life is real or life is earnest, and
+delivers us from the oppression of such nightmares, and lifts us into
+the atmosphere of perfect freedom.
+
+No one in the play understands Falstaff fully, any more than Hamlet was
+understood by the persons round him. They are both men of genius. Mrs.
+Quickly and Bardolph are his slaves, but they know not why. 'Well, fare
+thee well,' says the hostess whom he has pillaged and forgiven; 'I have
+known thee these twenty-nine years, come peas-cod time, but an honester
+and truer-hearted man--well, fare thee well.' Poins and the Prince
+delight in him; they get him into corners for the pleasure of seeing him
+escape in ways they cannot imagine; but they often take him much too
+seriously. Poins, for instance, rarely sees, the Prince does not always
+see, and moralising critics never see, that when Falstaff speaks ill of
+a companion behind his back, or writes to the Prince that Poins spreads
+it abroad that the Prince is to marry his sister, he knows quite well
+that what he says will be repeated, or rather, perhaps, is absolutely
+indifferent whether it be repeated or not, being certain that it can
+only give him an opportunity for humour. It is the same with his lying,
+and almost the same with his cowardice, the two main vices laid to his
+charge even by sympathisers. Falstaff is neither a liar nor a coward in
+the usual sense, like the typical cowardly boaster of comedy. He tells
+his lies either for their own humour, or on purpose to get himself into
+a difficulty. He rarely expects to be believed, perhaps never. He
+abandons a statement or contradicts it the moment it is made. There is
+scarcely more intent in his lying than in the humorous exaggerations
+which he pours out in soliloquy just as much as when others are by.
+Poins and the Prince understand this in part. You see them waiting
+eagerly to convict him, not that they may really put him to shame, but
+in order to enjoy the greater lie that will swallow up the less. But
+their sense of humour lags behind his. Even the Prince seems to accept
+as half-serious that remorse of his which passes so suddenly into glee
+at the idea of taking a purse, and his request to his friend to bestride
+him if he should see him down in the battle. Bestride Falstaff! 'Hence!
+Wilt thou lift up Olympus?'
+
+Again, the attack of the Prince and Poins on Falstaff and the other
+thieves on Gadshill is contrived, we know, with a view to the
+incomprehensible lies it will induce him to tell. But when, more than
+rising to the occasion, he turns two men in buckram into four, and then
+seven, and then nine, and then eleven, almost in a breath, I believe
+they partly misunderstand his intention, and too many of his critics
+misunderstand it altogether. Shakespeare was not writing a mere farce.
+It is preposterous to suppose that a man of Falstaff's intelligence
+would utter these gross, palpable, open lies with the serious intention
+to deceive, or forget that, if it was too dark for him to see his own
+hand, he could hardly see that the three misbegotten knaves were wearing
+Kendal green. No doubt, if he _had_ been believed, he would have been
+hugely tickled at it, but he no more expected to be believed than when
+he claimed to have killed Hotspur. Yet he is supposed to be serious even
+then. Such interpretations would destroy the poet's whole conception;
+and of those who adopt them one might ask this out of some twenty
+similar questions:--When Falstaff, in the men in buckram scene, begins
+by calling twice at short intervals for sack, and then a little later
+calls for more and says, 'I am a rogue if I drunk to-day,' and the
+Prince answers, 'O villain, thy lips are scarce wiped since thou
+drunk'st last,' do they think that _that_ lie was meant to deceive? And
+if not, why do they take it for granted that the others were? I suppose
+they consider that Falstaff was in earnest when, wanting to get
+twenty-two yards of satin on trust from Master Dombledon the
+silk-mercer, he offered Bardolph as security; or when he said to the
+Chief Justice about Mrs. Quickly, who accused him of breaking his
+promise to marry her, 'My lord, this is a poor mad soul, and she says up
+and down the town that her eldest son is like you'; or when he explained
+his enormous bulk by exclaiming, 'A plague of sighing and grief! It
+blows a man up like a bladder'; or when he accounted for his voice
+being cracked by declaring that he had 'lost it with singing of
+anthems'; or even when he sold his soul on Good-Friday to the devil for
+a cup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg. Falstaff's lies about Hotspur
+and the men in buckram do not essentially differ from these statements.
+There is nothing serious in any of them except the refusal to take
+anything seriously.
+
+This is also the explanation of Falstaff's cowardice, a subject on which
+I should say nothing if Maurice Morgann's essay,[6] now more than a
+century old, were better known. That Falstaff sometimes behaves in what
+we should generally call a cowardly way is certain; but that does not
+show that he was a coward; and if the word means a person who feels
+painful fear in the presence of danger, and yields to that fear in spite
+of his better feelings and convictions, then assuredly Falstaff was no
+coward. The stock bully and boaster of comedy is one, but not Falstaff.
+It is perfectly clear in the first place that, though he had
+unfortunately a reputation for stabbing and caring not what mischief he
+did if his weapon were out, he had not a reputation for cowardice.
+Shallow remembered him five-and-fifty years ago breaking Scogan's head
+at the court-gate when he was a crack not thus high; and Shallow knew
+him later a good back-swordsman. Then we lose sight of him till about
+twenty years after, when his association with Bardolph began; and that
+association implies that by the time he was thirty-five or forty he had
+sunk into the mode of life we witness in the plays. Yet, even as we see
+him there, he remains a person of consideration in the army. Twelve
+captains hurry about London searching for him. He is present at the
+Council of War in the King's tent at Shrewsbury, where the only other
+persons are the King, the two princes, a nobleman and Sir Walter Blunt.
+The messenger who brings the false report of the battle to
+Northumberland mentions, as one of the important incidents, the death of
+Sir John Falstaff. Colvile, expressly described as a famous rebel,
+surrenders to him as soon as he hears his name. And if his own wish that
+his name were not so terrible to the enemy, and his own boast of his
+European reputation, are not evidence of the first rank, they must not
+be entirely ignored in presence of these other facts. What do these
+facts mean? Does Shakespeare put them all in with no purpose at all, or
+in defiance of his own intentions? It is not credible.
+
+And when, in the second place, we look at Falstaff's actions, what do we
+find? He boldly confronted Colvile, he was quite ready to fight with
+him, however pleased that Colvile, like a kind fellow, gave himself
+away. When he saw Henry and Hotspur fighting, Falstaff, instead of
+making off in a panic, stayed to take his chance if Hotspur should be
+the victor. He _led_ his hundred and fifty ragamuffins where they were
+peppered, he did not _send_ them. To draw upon Pistol and force him
+downstairs and wound him in the shoulder was no great feat, perhaps, but
+the stock coward would have shrunk from it. When the Sheriff came to the
+inn to arrest him for an offence whose penalty was death, Falstaff, who
+was hidden behind the arras, did not stand there quaking for fear, he
+immediately fell asleep and snored. When he stood in the battle
+reflecting on what would happen if the weight of his paunch should be
+increased by that of a bullet, he cannot have been in a tremor of craven
+fear. He _never_ shows such fear; and surely the man who, in danger of
+his life, and with no one by to hear him, meditates thus: 'I like not
+such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life: which if I can
+save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked-for, and there's an end,' is not
+what we commonly call a coward.
+
+'Well,' it will be answered, 'but he ran away on Gadshill; and when
+Douglas attacked him he fell down and shammed dead.' Yes, I am thankful
+to say, he did. For of course he did not want to be dead. He wanted to
+live and be merry. And as he had reduced the idea of honour _ad
+absurdum_, had scarcely any self-respect, and only a respect for
+reputation as a means of life, naturally he avoided death when he could
+do so without a ruinous loss of reputation, and (observe) with the
+satisfaction of playing a colossal practical joke. For _that_ after all
+was his first object. If his one thought had been to avoid death he
+would not have faced Douglas at all, but would have run away as fast as
+his legs could carry him; and unless Douglas had been one of those
+exceptional Scotchmen who have no sense of humour, he would never have
+thought of pursuing so ridiculous an object as Falstaff running. So
+that, as Mr. Swinburne remarks, Poins is right when he thus
+distinguishes Falstaff from his companions in robbery: 'For two of them,
+I know them to be as true-bred cowards as ever turned back; and for the
+third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I'll forswear arms.' And
+the event justifies this distinction. For it is exactly thus that,
+according to the original stage-direction, Falstaff behaves when Henry
+and Poins attack him and the others. The rest run away at once;
+Falstaff, here as afterwards with Douglas, fights for a blow or two,
+but, finding himself deserted and outmatched, runs away also. Of course.
+He saw no reason to stay. _Any_ man who had risen superior to all
+serious motives would have run away. But it does not follow that he
+would run from mere fear, or be, in the ordinary sense, a coward.[7]
+
+
+  3.
+
+The main source, then, of our sympathetic delight in Falstaff is his
+humorous superiority to everything serious, and the freedom of soul
+enjoyed in it. But, of course, this is not the whole of his character.
+Shakespeare knew well enough that perfect freedom is not to be gained in
+this manner; we are ourselves aware of it even while we are sympathising
+with Falstaff; and as soon as we regard him seriously it becomes
+obvious. His freedom is limited in two main ways. For one thing he
+cannot rid himself entirely of respect for all that he professes to
+ridicule. He shows a certain pride in his rank: unlike the Prince, he is
+haughty to the drawers, who call him a proud Jack. He is not really
+quite indifferent to reputation. When the Chief Justice bids him pay his
+debt to Mrs. Quickly for his reputation's sake, I think he feels a
+twinge, though to be sure he proceeds to pay her by borrowing from her.
+He is also stung by any thoroughly serious imputation on his courage,
+and winces at the recollection of his running away on Gadshill; he knows
+that his behaviour there certainly looked cowardly, and perhaps he
+remembers that he would not have behaved so once. It is, further, very
+significant that, for all his dissolute talk, he has never yet allowed
+the Prince and Poins to _see_ him as they saw him afterwards with Doll
+Tearsheet; not, of course, that he has any moral shame in the matter,
+but he knows that in such a situation he, in his old age, must appear
+contemptible--not a humorist but a mere object of mirth. And, finally,
+he has affection in him--affection, I think, for Poins and Bardolph, and
+certainly for the Prince; and that is a thing which he cannot jest out
+of existence. Hence, as the effect of his rejection shows, he is not
+really invulnerable. And then, in the second place, since he is in the
+flesh, his godlike freedom has consequences and conditions;
+consequences, for there is something painfully wrong with his great toe;
+conditions, for he cannot eat and drink for ever without money, and his
+purse suffers from consumption, a disease for which he can find no
+remedy.[8] As the Chief Justice tells him, his means are very slender
+and his waste great; and his answer, 'I would it were otherwise; I would
+my means were greater and my waist slenderer,' though worth much money,
+brings none in. And so he is driven to evil deeds; not only to cheating
+his tailor like a gentleman, but to fleecing Justice Shallow, and to
+highway robbery, and to cruel depredations on the poor woman whose
+affection he has secured. All this is perfectly consistent with the
+other side of his character, but by itself it makes an ugly picture.
+
+Yes, it makes an ugly picture when you look at it seriously. But then,
+surely, so long as the humorous atmosphere is preserved and the humorous
+attitude maintained, you do not look at it so. You no more regard
+Falstaff's misdeeds morally than you do the much more atrocious misdeeds
+of Punch or Reynard the Fox. You do not exactly ignore them, but you
+attend only to their comic aspect. This is the very spirit of comedy,
+and certainly of Shakespeare's comic world, which is one of
+make-believe, not merely as his tragic world is, but in a further
+sense--a world in which gross improbabilities are accepted with a smile,
+and many things are welcomed as merely laughable which, regarded
+gravely, would excite anger and disgust. The intervention of a serious
+spirit breaks up such a world, and would destroy our pleasure in
+Falstaff's company. Accordingly through the greater part of these dramas
+Shakespeare carefully confines this spirit to the scenes of war and
+policy, and dismisses it entirely in the humorous parts. Hence, if
+_Henry IV._ had been a comedy like _Twelfth Night_, I am sure that he
+would no more have ended it with the painful disgrace of Falstaff than
+he ended _Twelfth Night_ by disgracing Sir Toby Belch.[9]
+
+But _Henry IV._ was to be in the main a historical play, and its chief
+hero Prince Henry. In the course of it his greater and finer qualities
+were to be gradually revealed, and it was to end with beautiful scenes
+of reconciliation and affection between his father and him, and a final
+emergence of the wild Prince as a just, wise, stern, and glorious King.
+Hence, no doubt, it seemed to Shakespeare that Falstaff at last must be
+disgraced, and must therefore appear no longer as the invincible
+humorist, but as an object of ridicule and even of aversion. And
+probably also his poet's insight showed him that Henry, as he conceived
+him, _would_ behave harshly to Falstaff in order to impress the world,
+especially when his mind had been wrought to a high pitch by the scene
+with his dying father and the impression of his own solemn consecration
+to great duties.
+
+This conception was a natural and a fine one; and if the execution was
+not an entire success, it is yet full of interest. Shakespeare's purpose
+being to work a gradual change in our feelings towards Falstaff, and to
+tinge the humorous atmosphere more and more deeply with seriousness, we
+see him carrying out this purpose in the Second Part of _Henry IV._ Here
+he separates the Prince from Falstaff as much as he can, thus
+withdrawing him from Falstaff's influence, and weakening in our minds
+the connection between the two. In the First Part we constantly see them
+together; in the Second (it is a remarkable fact) only once before the
+rejection. Further, in the scenes where Henry appears apart from
+Falstaff, we watch him growing more and more grave, and awakening more
+and more poetic interest; while Falstaff, though his humour scarcely
+flags to the end, exhibits more and more of his seamy side. This is
+nowhere turned to the full light in Part I.; but in Part II. we see him
+as the heartless destroyer of Mrs. Quickly, as a ruffian seriously
+defying the Chief Justice because his position as an officer on service
+gives him power to do wrong, as the pike preparing to snap up the poor
+old dace Shallow, and (this is the one scene where Henry and he meet) as
+the worn-out lecher, not laughing at his servitude to the flesh but sunk
+in it. Finally, immediately before the rejection, the world where he is
+king is exposed in all its sordid criminality when we find Mrs. Quickly
+and Doll arrested for being concerned in the death of one man, if not
+more, beaten to death by their bullies; and the dangerousness of
+Falstaff is emphasised in his last words as he hurries from Shallow's
+house to London, words at first touched with humour but at bottom only
+too seriously meant: 'Let us take any man's horses; the laws of England
+are at my commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends, and
+woe unto my Lord Chief Justice.' His dismissal to the Fleet by the Chief
+Justice is the dramatic vengeance for that threat.
+
+Yet all these excellent devices fail. They cause us momentary
+embarrassment at times when repellent traits in Falstaff's character are
+disclosed; but they fail to change our attitude of humour into one of
+seriousness, and our sympathy into repulsion. And they were bound to
+fail, because Shakespeare shrank from adding to them the one device
+which would have ensured success. If, as the Second Part of _Henry IV._
+advanced, he had clouded over Falstaff's humour so heavily that the man
+of genius turned into the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_, we should have
+witnessed his rejection without a pang. This Shakespeare was too much
+of an artist to do--though even in this way he did something--and
+without this device he could not succeed. As I said, in the creation of
+Falstaff he overreached himself. He was caught up on the wind of his own
+genius, and carried so far that he could not descend to earth at the
+selected spot. It is not a misfortune that happens to many authors, nor
+is it one we can regret, for it costs us but a trifling inconvenience in
+one scene, while we owe to it perhaps the greatest comic character in
+literature. For it is in this character, and not in the judgment he
+brings upon Falstaff's head, that Shakespeare asserts his supremacy. To
+show that Falstaff's freedom of soul was in part illusory, and that the
+realities of life refused to be conjured away by his humour--this was
+what we might expect from Shakespeare's unfailing sanity, but it was
+surely no achievement beyond the power of lesser men. The achievement
+was Falstaff himself, and the conception of that freedom of soul, a
+freedom illusory only in part, and attainable only by a mind which had
+received from Shakespeare's own the inexplicable touch of infinity which
+he bestowed on Hamlet and Macbeth and Cleopatra, but denied to Henry the
+Fifth.
+
+1902.
+
+
+  NOTE
+
+For the benefit of readers unacquainted with Morgann's Essay I reproduce
+here, with additions, some remarks omitted from the lecture for want of
+time. 'Maurice Morgann, Esq. the ingenious writer of this work,
+descended from an antient and respectable family in Wales; he filled the
+office of under Secretary of State to the late Marquis of Lansdown,
+during his first administration; and was afterwards Secretary to the
+Embassy for ratifying the peace with America, in 1783. He died at his
+house in Knightsbridge, in the seventy-seventh year of his age, on the
+28th March, 1802' (Preface to the edition of 1825). He was a remarkable
+and original man, who seems to have written a good deal, but, beyond
+this essay and some pamphlets on public affairs, all or nearly all
+anonymous, he published nothing, and at his death he left orders that
+all his papers should be destroyed. The _Essay on the Dramatic Character
+of Sir John Falstaff_ was first published in 1777. It arose out of a
+conversation in which Morgann expressed his belief that Shakespeare
+never meant Falstaff for a coward. He was challenged to explain and
+support in print what was considered an extraordinary paradox, and his
+essay bears on its title-page the quotation, 'I am not John of Gaunt,
+your grandfather: but yet no coward, Hal'--one of Falstaff's few serious
+sentences. But Morgann did not confine himself to the question of
+Falstaff's cowardice; he analysed the whole character, and incidentally
+touched on many points in Shakespearean criticism. 'The reader,' he
+observes, 'will not need to be told that this inquiry will resolve
+itself of course into a critique on the genius, the arts, and the
+conduct, of Shakespeare: for what is Falstaff, what Lear, what Hamlet,
+or Othello, but different modifications of Shakespeare's thought? It is
+true that this inquiry is narrowed almost to a single point; but general
+criticism is as uninstructive as it is easy: Shakespeare deserves to be
+considered in detail;--a task hitherto unattempted.'
+
+The last words are significant. Morgann was conscious that he was
+striking out a new line. The Eighteenth Century critics had done much
+for Shakespeare in the way of scholarship; some of them had praised him
+well and blamed him well; but they had done little to interpret the
+process of his imagination from within. This was what Morgann attempted.
+His attitude towards Shakespeare is that of Goethe, Coleridge, Lamb,
+Hazlitt. The dangers of his method might be illustrated from the Essay,
+but in his hands it yielded most valuable results. And though he did not
+attempt the eloquence of some of his successors, but wrote like a
+cultivated ironical man of the world, he wrote delightfully; so that in
+all respects his Essay, which has long been out of print, deserves to be
+republished and better known. [It was republished in Mr. Nichol Smith's
+excellent _Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_, 1903; and, in
+1912, by itself, with an introduction by W. A. Gill.]
+
+Readers of Boswell (under the year 1783) will remember that Morgann, who
+once met Johnson, favoured his biographer with two most characteristic
+anecdotes. Boswell also records Johnson's judgment of Morgann's Essay,
+which, says Mr. Swinburne, elicited from him 'as good a jest and as bad
+a criticism as might have been expected.' Johnson, we are told, being
+asked his opinion of the Essay, answered: 'Why, Sir, we shall have the
+man come forth again; and as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he
+may prove Iago to be a very good character.' The following passage from
+Morgann's _Essay_ (p. 66 of the 1825 edition, p. 248 of Mr. Nichol
+Smith's book) gives, I presume, his opinion of Johnson. Having referred
+to Warburton, he adds: 'Another has since undertaken the custody of our
+author, whom he seems to consider as a sort of wild Proteus or madman,
+and accordingly knocks him down with the butt-end of his critical staff,
+as often as he exceeds that line of sober discretion, which this learned
+Editor appears to have chalked out for him: yet is this Editor,
+notwithstanding, "a man, take him for all in all," very highly
+respectable for his genius and his learning.'
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] In this lecture and the three that follow it I have mentioned the
+    authors my obligations to whom I was conscious of in writing or have
+    discovered since; but other debts must doubtless remain, which from
+    forgetfulness I am unable to acknowledge.
+
+  [2] See on this and other points Swinburne, _A Study of Shakespeare_,
+    p. 106 ff.
+
+  [3] Roetscher, _Shakespeare in seinen hoechsten Charaktergebilden_,
+    1864.
+
+  [4] That from the beginning Shakespeare intended Henry's accession to
+    be Falstaff's catastrophe is clear from the fact that, when the two
+    characters first appear, Falstaff is made to betray at once the hopes
+    with which he looks forward to Henry's reign. See the First Part of
+    _Henry IV._, Act I., Scene ii.
+
+  [5] Cf. Hazlitt, _Characters of Shakespear's Plays_.
+
+  [6] See Note at end of lecture.
+
+  [7] It is to be regretted, however, that in carrying his guts away so
+    nimbly he 'roared for mercy'; for I fear we have no ground for
+    rejecting Henry's statement to that effect, and I do not see my way
+    to adopt the suggestion (I forget whose it is) that Falstaff spoke
+    the truth when he swore that he knew Henry and Poins as well as he
+    that made them.
+
+  [8] Panurge too was 'naturally subject to a kind of disease which at
+    that time they called lack of money'; it was a 'flux in his purse'
+    (Rabelais, Book II., chapters xvi., xvii.).
+
+  [9] I seem to remember that, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare did
+    disgrace Sir Toby--by marrying him to Maria!
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S _ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S _ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_[1]
+
+
+Coleridge's one page of general criticism on _Antony and Cleopatra_
+contains some notable remarks. 'Of all Shakespeare's historical plays,'
+he writes, '_Antony and Cleopatra_ is by far the most wonderful. There
+is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there
+are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so
+much--perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is
+greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained
+throughout.' In a later sentence he refers to the play as 'this
+astonishing drama.' In another he describes the style: '_feliciter
+audax_ is the motto for its style comparatively with that of
+Shakespeare's other works.' And he translates this motto in the phrase
+'happy valiancy of style.'
+
+Coleridge's assertion that in _Antony and Cleopatra_ Shakespeare
+followed history more minutely than in any other play might well be
+disputed; and his statement about the style of this drama requires some
+qualification in view of the results of later criticism as to the order
+of Shakespeare's works. The style is less individual than he imagined.
+On the whole it is common to the six or seven dramas subsequent to
+_Macbeth_, though in _Antony and Cleopatra_, probably the earliest of
+them, its development is not yet complete. And we must add that this
+style has certain special defects, unmentioned by Coleridge, as well as
+the quality which he points out in it. But it is true that here that
+quality is almost continuously present; and in the phrase by which he
+describes it, as in his other phrases, he has signalised once for all
+some of the most salient features of the drama.
+
+It is curious to notice, for example, alike in books and in
+conversation, how often the first epithets used in reference to _Antony
+and Cleopatra_ are 'wonderful' and 'astonishing.' And the main source of
+the feeling thus expressed seems to be the 'angelic strength' or 'fiery
+force' of which Coleridge wrote. The first of these two phrases is, I
+think, the more entirely happy. Except perhaps towards the close, one is
+not so conscious of fiery force as in certain other tragedies; but one
+is astonished at the apparent ease with which extraordinary effects are
+produced, the ease, if I may paraphrase Coleridge, of an angel moving
+with a wave of the hand that heavy matter which men find so intractable.
+We feel this sovereign ease in contemplating Shakespeare's picture of
+the world--a vast canvas, crowded with figures, glowing with colour and
+a superb animation, reminding one spectator of Paul Veronese and another
+of Rubens. We feel it again when we observe (as we can even without
+consulting Plutarch) the nature of the material; how bulky it was, and,
+in some respects, how undramatic; and how the artist, though he could
+not treat history like legend or fiction, seems to push whole masses
+aside, and to shift and refashion the remainder, almost with the air of
+an architect playing (at times rather carelessly) with a child's bricks.
+
+Something similar is felt even in the portrait of Cleopatra. Marvellous
+as it is, the drawing of it suggests not so much the passionate
+concentration or fiery force of _Macbeth_, as that sense of effortless
+and exultant mastery which we feel in the portraits of Mercutio and
+Falstaff. And surely it is a total mistake to find in this portrait any
+trace of the distempered mood which disturbs our pleasure in _Troilus
+and Cressida_. If the sonnets about the dark lady were, as need not be
+doubted, in some degree autobiographical, Shakespeare may well have used
+his personal experience both when he drew Cressida and when he drew
+Cleopatra. And, if he did, the story in the later play was the nearer to
+his own; for Antony might well have said what Troilus could never say,
+
+  When my love swears that she is made of truth,
+  I do believe her, though I know she lies.
+
+But in the later play, not only is the poet's vision unclouded, but his
+whole nature, emotional as well as intellectual, is free. The subject no
+more embitters or seduces him than the ambition of Macbeth. So that here
+too we feel the angelic strength of which Coleridge speaks. If we
+quarrelled with the phrase at all, it would be because we fancied we
+could trace in Shakespeare's attitude something of the irony of
+superiority; and this may not altogether suit our conception of an
+angel.
+
+I have still another sentence to quote from Coleridge: 'The highest
+praise, or rather form of praise, of this play which I can offer in my
+own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether
+the "Antony and Cleopatra" is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power
+in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of "Macbeth,"
+"Lear," "Hamlet," and "Othello."' Now, unless the clause here about the
+'giant power' may be taken to restrict the rivalry to the quality of
+angelic strength, Coleridge's doubt seems to show a lapse in critical
+judgment. To regard this tragedy as a rival of the famous four, whether
+on the stage or in the study, is surely an error. The world certainly
+has not so regarded it; and, though the world's reasons for its verdicts
+on works of art may be worth little, its mere verdict is worth much.
+Here, it seems to me, that verdict must be accepted. One may notice
+that, in calling _Antony and Cleopatra_ wonderful or astonishing, we
+appear to be thinking first of the artist and his activity, while in the
+case of the four famous tragedies it is the product of this activity,
+the thing presented, that first engrosses us. I know that I am stating
+this difference too sharply, but I believe that it is often felt; and,
+if this is so, the fact is significant. It implies that, although
+_Antony and Cleopatra_ may be for us as wonderful an achievement as the
+greatest of Shakespeare's plays, it has not an equal value. Besides, in
+the attempt to rank it with them there is involved something more, and
+more important, than an error in valuation. There is a failure to
+discriminate the peculiar marks of _Antony and Cleopatra_ itself, marks
+which, whether or no it be the equal of the earlier tragedies, make it
+decidedly different. If I speak first of some of these differences it is
+because they thus contribute to the individuality of the play, and
+because they seem often not to be distinctly apprehended in criticism.
+
+
+  1.
+
+Why, let us begin by asking, is _Antony and Cleopatra_, though so
+wonderful an achievement, a play rarely acted? For a tragedy, it is not
+painful. Though unfit for children, it cannot be called indecent; some
+slight omissions, and such a flattening of the heroine's part as might
+confidently be expected, would leave it perfectly presentable. It is, no
+doubt, in the third and fourth Acts, very defective in construction.
+Even on the Elizabethan stage, where scene followed scene without a
+pause, this must have been felt; and in our theatres it would be felt
+much more. There, in fact, these two and forty scenes could not possibly
+be acted as they stand. But defective construction would not distress
+the bulk of an audience, if the matter presented were that of _Hamlet_
+or _Othello_, of _Lear_ or _Macbeth_. The matter, then, must lack
+something which is present in those tragedies; and it is mainly owing to
+this difference in substance that _Antony and Cleopatra_ has never
+attained their popularity either on the stage or off it.
+
+Most of Shakespeare's tragedies are dramatic, in a special sense of the
+word as well as in its general sense, from beginning to end. The story
+is not merely exciting and impressive from the movement of conflicting
+forces towards a terrible issue, but from time to time there come
+situations and events which, even apart from their bearing on this
+issue, appeal most powerfully to the dramatic feelings--scenes of action
+or passion which agitate the audience with alarm, horror, painful
+expectation, or absorbing sympathies and antipathies. Think of the
+street fights in _Romeo and Juliet_, the killing of Mercutio and Tybalt,
+the rapture of the lovers, and their despair when Romeo is banished.
+Think of the ghost-scenes in the first Act of _Hamlet_, the passion of
+the early soliloquies, the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, the
+play-scene, the sparing of the King at prayer, the killing of Polonius.
+Is not _Hamlet_, if you choose so to regard it, the best melodrama in
+the world? Think at your leisure of _Othello_, _Lear_, and _Macbeth_
+from the same point of view; but consider here and now even the two
+tragedies which, as dealing with Roman history, are companions of
+_Antony and Cleopatra_. Recall in _Julius Caesar_ the first suggestion of
+the murder, the preparation for it in a 'tempest dropping fire,' the
+murder itself, the speech of Antony over the corpse, and the tumult of
+the furious crowd; in _Coriolanus_ the bloody battles on the stage, the
+scene in which the hero attains the consulship, the scene of rage in
+which he is banished. And remember that in each of these seven tragedies
+the matter referred to is contained in the first three Acts.
+
+In the first three Acts of our play what is there resembling this?
+Almost nothing. People converse, discuss, accuse one another, excuse
+themselves, mock, describe, drink together, arrange a marriage, meet and
+part; but they do not kill, do not even tremble or weep. We see hardly
+one violent movement; until the battle of Actium is over we witness
+scarcely any vehement passion; and that battle, as it is a naval action,
+we do not see. Even later, Enobarbus, when he dies, simply dies; he does
+not kill himself.[2] We hear wonderful talk; but it is not talk, like
+that of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, or that of Othello and Iago, at which
+we hold our breath. The scenes that we remember first are those that
+portray Cleopatra; Cleopatra coquetting, tormenting, beguiling her lover
+to stay; Cleopatra left with her women and longing for him; Cleopatra
+receiving the news of his marriage; Cleopatra questioning the messenger
+about Octavia's personal appearance. But this is to say that the scenes
+we remember first are the least indispensable to the plot. One at least
+is not essential to it at all. And this, the astonishing scene where she
+storms at the messenger, strikes him, and draws her dagger on him, is
+the one passage in the first half of the drama that contains either an
+explosion of passion or an exciting bodily action. Nor is this all. The
+first half of the play, though it forebodes tragedy, is not decisively
+tragic in tone. Certainly the Cleopatra scenes are not so. We read
+them, and we should witness them, in delighted wonder and even with
+amusement. The only scene that can vie with them, that of the revel on
+Pompey's ship, though full of menace, is in great part humorous.
+Enobarbus, in this part of the play, is always humorous. Even later,
+when the tragic tone is deepening, the whipping of Thyreus, in spite of
+Antony's rage, moves mirth. A play of which all this can truly be said
+may well be as masterly as _Othello_ or _Macbeth_, and more delightful;
+but, in the greater part of its course, it cannot possibly excite the
+same emotions. It makes no attempt to do so; and to regard it as though
+it made this attempt is to miss its specific character and the intention
+of its author.
+
+That character depends only in part on Shakespeare's fidelity to his
+historical authority, a fidelity which, I may remark, is often greatly
+exaggerated. For Shakespeare did not merely present the story of ten
+years as though it occupied perhaps one fifth of that time, nor did he
+merely invent freely, but in critical places he effected startling
+changes in the order and combination of events. Still it may be said
+that, dealing with a history so famous, he could not well make the first
+half of his play very exciting, moving, or tragic. And this is true so
+far as mere situations and events are concerned. But, if he had chosen,
+he might easily have heightened the tone and tension in another way. He
+might have made the story of Antony's attempt to break his bondage, and
+the story of his relapse, extremely exciting, by portraying with all his
+force the severity of the struggle and the magnitude of the fatal step.
+
+And the structure of the play might seem at first to suggest this
+intention. At the opening, Antony is shown almost in the beginning of
+his infatuation; for Cleopatra is not sure of her power over him, exerts
+all her fascination to detain him, and plays the part of the innocent
+victim who has yielded to passion and must now expect to be deserted by
+her seducer. Alarmed and ashamed at the news of the results of his
+inaction, he rouses himself, tears himself away, and speeds to Italy.
+His very coming is enough to frighten Pompey into peace. He reconciles
+himself with Octavius, and, by his marriage with the good and beautiful
+Octavia, seems to have knit a bond of lasting amity with her brother,
+and to have guarded himself against the passion that threatened him with
+ruin. At this point his power, the world's peace, and his own peace,
+appear to be secured; his fortune has mounted to its apex. But soon
+(very much sooner than in Plutarch's story) comes the downward turn or
+counter-stroke. New causes of offence arise between the brothers-in-law.
+To remove them Octavia leaves her husband in Athens and hurries to Rome.
+Immediately Antony returns to Cleopatra and, surrendering himself at
+once and wholly to her enchantment is quickly driven to his doom.
+
+Now Shakespeare, I say, with his matchless power of depicting an inward
+struggle, might have made this story, even where it could not furnish
+him with thrilling incidents, the source of powerful tragic emotions;
+and, in doing so, he would have departed from his authority merely in
+his conception of the hero's character. But he does no such thing till
+the catastrophe is near. Antony breaks away from Cleopatra without any
+strenuous conflict. No serious doubt of his return is permitted to
+agitate us. We are almost assured of it through the impression made on
+us by Octavius, through occasional glimpses into Antony's mind, through
+the absence of any doubt in Enobarbus, through scenes in Alexandria
+which display Cleopatra and display her irresistible. And, finally, the
+downward turn itself, the fatal step of Antony's return, is shown
+without the slightest emphasis. Nay, it is not shown, it is only
+reported; and not a line portrays any inward struggle preceding it. On
+this side also, then, the drama makes no attempt to rival the other
+tragedies; and it was essential to its own peculiar character and its
+most transcendent effects that this attempt should not be made, but that
+Antony's passion should be represented as a force which he could hardly
+even desire to resist. By the very scheme of the work, therefore, tragic
+impressions of any great volume or depth were reserved for the last
+stage of the conflict; while the main interest, down to the battle of
+Actium, was directed to matters exceedingly interesting and even, in the
+wider sense, dramatic, but not overtly either terrible or piteous: on
+the one hand, to the political aspect of the story; on the other, to the
+personal causes which helped to make the issue inevitable.
+
+
+  2.
+
+The political situation and its development are simple. The story is
+taken up almost where it was left, years before, in _Julius Caesar_.
+There Brutus and Cassius, to prevent the rule of one man, assassinate
+Caesar. Their purpose is condemned to failure, not merely because they
+make mistakes, but because that political necessity which Napoleon
+identified with destiny requires the rule of one man. They spill Caesar's
+blood, but his spirit walks abroad and turns their swords against their
+own breasts; and the world is left divided among three men, his friends
+and his heir. Here _Antony and Cleopatra_ takes up the tale; and its
+business, from this point of view, is to show the reduction of these
+three to one. That Lepidus will not be this one was clear already in
+_Julius Caesar_; it must be Octavius or Antony. Both ambitious, they are
+also men of such opposite tempers that they would scarcely long agree
+even if they wished to, and even if destiny were not stronger than they.
+As it is, one of them has fixed his eyes on the end, sacrifices
+everything for it, uses everything as a means to it. The other, though
+far the greater soldier and worshipped by his followers, has no such
+singleness of aim; nor yet is power, however desirable to him, the most
+desirable thing in the world. At the beginning he is risking it for
+love; at the end he has lost his half of the world, and lost his life,
+and Octavius rules alone. Whether Shakespeare had this clearly in his
+mind is a question neither answerable nor important; this is what came
+out of his mind.
+
+Shakespeare, I think, took little interest in the character of Octavius,
+and he has not made it wholly clear. It is not distinct in Plutarch's
+'Life of Antony'; and I have not found traces that the poet studied
+closely the 'Life of Octavius' included in North's volume. To
+Shakespeare he is one of those men, like Bolingbroke and Ulysses, who
+have plenty of 'judgment' and not much 'blood.' Victory in the world,
+according to the poet, almost always goes to such men; and he makes us
+respect, fear, and dislike them. His Octavius is very formidable. His
+cold determination half paralyses Antony; it is so even in _Julius
+Caesar_. In _Antony and Cleopatra_ Octavius is more than once in the
+wrong; but he never admits it; he silently pushes his rival a step
+backward; and, when he ceases to fear, he shows contempt. He neither
+enjoys war nor is great in it; at first, therefore, he is anxious about
+the power of Pompey, and stands in need of Antony. As soon as Antony's
+presence has served his turn, and he has patched up a union with him and
+seen him safely off to Athens, he destroys first Pompey and next
+Lepidus. Then, dexterously using Antony's faithlessness to Octavia and
+excesses in the East in order to put himself in the right, he makes for
+his victim with admirable celerity while he is still drunk with the joy
+of reunion with Cleopatra. For his ends Octavius is perfectly efficient,
+but he is so partly from his limitations. One phrase of his is
+exceedingly characteristic. When Antony in rage and desperation
+challenges him to single combat, Octavius calls him 'the old ruffian.'
+There is a horrid aptness in the phrase, but it disgusts us. It is
+shameful in this boy, as hard and smooth as polished steel, to feel at
+such a time nothing of the greatness of his victim and the tragedy of
+his victim's fall. Though the challenge of Antony is absurd, we would
+give much to see them sword to sword. And when Cleopatra by her death
+cheats the conqueror of his prize, we feel unmixed delight.
+
+The doubtful point in the character is this. Plutarch says that Octavius
+was reported to love his sister dearly; and Shakespeare's Octavius
+several times expresses such love. When, then, he proposed the marriage
+with Antony (for of course it was he who spoke through Agrippa), was he
+honest, or was he laying a trap and, in doing so, sacrificing his
+sister? Did he hope the marriage would really unite him with his
+brother-in-law; or did he merely mean it to be a source of future
+differences; or did he calculate that, whether it secured peace or
+dissension, it would in either case bring him great advantage?
+Shakespeare, who was quite as intelligent as his readers, must have
+asked himself some such question; but he may not have cared to answer it
+even to himself; and, in any case, he has left the actor (at least the
+actor in days later than his own) to choose an answer. If I were forced
+to choose, I should take the view that Octavius was, at any rate, not
+wholly honest; partly because I think it best suits Shakespeare's usual
+way of conceiving a character of the kind; partly because Plutarch
+construed in this manner Octavius's behaviour in regard to his sister at
+a later time, and this hint might naturally influence the poet's way of
+imagining his earlier action.[3]
+
+Though the character of Octavius is neither attractive nor wholly clear,
+his figure is invested with a certain tragic dignity, because he is felt
+to be the Man of Destiny, the agent of forces against which the
+intentions of an individual would avail nothing. He is represented as
+having himself some feeling of this sort. His lament over Antony, his
+grief that their stars were irreconcilable, may well be genuine, though
+we should be surer if it were uttered in soliloquy. His austere words to
+Octavia again probably speak his true mind:
+
+  Be you not troubled with the time, which drives
+  O'er your content these strong necessities;
+  But let determined things to destiny
+  Hold unbewailed their way.
+
+In any case the feeling of fate comes through to us. It is aided by
+slight touches of supernatural effect; first in the Soothsayer's warning
+to Antony that his genius or angel is overpowered whenever he is near
+Octavius; then in the strangely effective scene where Antony's soldiers,
+in the night before his last battle, hear music in the air or under the
+earth:
+
+  'Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,
+  Now leaves him.
+
+And to the influence of this feeling in giving impressiveness to the
+story is added that of the immense scale and world-wide issue of the
+conflict. Even the distances traversed by fleets and armies enhance this
+effect.
+
+And yet there seems to be something half-hearted in Shakespeare's appeal
+here, something even ironical in his presentation of this conflict. Its
+external magnitude, like Antony's magnificence in lavishing realms and
+gathering the kings of the East in his support, fails to uplift or
+dilate the imagination. The struggle in Lear's little island seems to us
+to have an infinitely wider scope. It is here that we are sometimes
+reminded of _Troilus and Cressida_, and the cold and disenchanting light
+that is there cast on the Trojan War. The spectacle which he portrays
+leaves Shakespeare quite undazzled; he even makes it appear inwardly
+small. The lordship of the world, we ask ourselves, what is it worth,
+and in what spirit do these 'world-sharers' contend for it? They are no
+champions of their country like Henry V. The conqueror knows not even
+the glory of battle. Their aims, for all we see, are as personal as if
+they were captains of banditti; and they are followed merely from
+self-interest or private attachment. The scene on Pompey's galley is
+full of this irony. One 'third part of the world' is carried drunk to
+bed. In the midst of this mock boon-companionship the pirate whispers to
+his leader to cut first the cable of his ship and then the throats of
+the two other Emperors; and at the moment we should not greatly care if
+Pompey took the advice. Later, a short scene, totally useless to the
+plot and purely satiric in its purport, is slipped in to show how
+Ventidius fears to pursue his Parthian conquests because it is not safe
+for Antony's lieutenant to outdo his master.[4] A painful sense of
+hollowness oppresses us. We know too well what must happen in a world so
+splendid, so false, and so petty. We turn for relief from the political
+game to those who are sure to lose it; to those who love some human
+being better than a prize, to Eros and Charmian and Iras; to Enobarbus,
+whom the world corrupts, but who has a heart that can break with shame;
+to the lovers, who seem to us to find in death something better than
+their victor's life.
+
+This presentation of the outward conflict has two results. First, it
+blunts our feeling of the greatness of Antony's fall from prosperity.
+Indeed this feeling, which we might expect to be unusually acute, is
+hardly so; it is less acute, for example, than the like feeling in the
+case of Richard II., who loses so much smaller a realm. Our deeper
+sympathies are focussed rather on Antony's heart, on the inward fall to
+which the enchantment of passion leads him, and the inward recovery
+which succeeds it. And the second result is this. The greatness of
+Antony and Cleopatra in their fall is so much heightened by contrast
+with the world they lose and the conqueror who wins it, that the
+positive element in the final tragic impression, the element of
+reconciliation, is strongly emphasised. The peculiar effect of the drama
+depends partly, as we have seen, on the absence of decidedly tragic
+scenes and events in its first half; but it depends quite as much on
+this emphasis. In any Shakespearean tragedy we watch some elect spirit
+colliding, partly through its error and defect, with a superhuman power
+which bears it down; and yet we feel that this spirit, even in the error
+and defect, rises by its greatness into ideal union with the power that
+overwhelms it. In some tragedies this latter feeling is relatively weak.
+In _Antony and Cleopatra_ it is unusually strong; stronger, with some
+readers at least, than the fear and grief and pity with which they
+contemplate the tragic error and the advance of doom.
+
+
+  3.
+
+The two aspects of the tragedy are presented together in the opening
+scene. Here is the first. In Cleopatra's palace one friend of Antony is
+describing to another, just arrived from Rome, the dotage of their great
+general; and, as the lovers enter, he exclaims:
+
+                       Look, where they come:
+  Take but good note, and you shall see in him
+  The triple pillar of the world transformed
+  Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see.
+
+With the next words the other aspect appears:
+
+  CLEO. If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
+
+  ANT. There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
+
+  CLEO. I'll set a bourne how far to be beloved.
+
+  ANT. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.
+
+And directly after, when he is provoked by reminders of the news from
+Rome:
+
+  Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
+  Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.
+  Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
+  Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life
+  Is to do thus.
+
+Here is the tragic excess, but with it the tragic greatness, the
+capacity of finding in something the infinite, and of pursuing it into
+the jaws of death.
+
+The two aspects are shown here with the exaggeration proper in dramatic
+characters. Neither the phrase 'a strumpet's fool,' nor the assertion
+'the nobleness of life is to do thus,' answers to the total effect of
+the play. But the truths they exaggerate are equally essential; and the
+commoner mistake in criticism is to understate the second. It is plain
+that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is destructive; that in some way
+it clashes with the nature of things; that, while they are sitting in
+their paradise like gods, its walls move inward and crush them at last
+to death. This is no invention of moralising critics; it is in the play;
+and any one familiar with Shakespeare would expect beforehand to find it
+there. But then to forget because of it the other side, to deny the name
+of love to this ruinous passion, to speak as though the lovers had
+utterly missed the good of life, is to mutilate the tragedy and to
+ignore a great part of its effect upon us. For we sympathise with them
+in their passion; we feel in it the infinity there is in man; even while
+we acquiesce in their defeat we are exulting in their victory; and when
+they have vanished we say,
+
+                   the odds is gone,
+  And there is nothing left remarkable
+  Beneath the visiting moon.
+
+Though we hear nothing from Shakespeare of the cruelty of Plutarch's
+Antony, or of the misery caused by his boundless profusion, we do not
+feel the hero of the tragedy to be a man of the noblest type, like
+Brutus, Hamlet, or Othello. He seeks power merely for himself, and uses
+it for his own pleasure. He is in some respects unscrupulous; and, while
+it would be unjust to regard his marriage exactly as if it were one in
+private life, we resent his treatment of Octavia, whose character
+Shakespeare was obliged to leave a mere sketch, lest our feeling for the
+hero and heroine should be too much chilled. Yet, for all this, we
+sympathise warmly with Antony, are greatly drawn to him, and are
+inclined to regard him as a noble nature half spoiled by his time.
+
+It is a large, open, generous, expansive nature, quite free from envy,
+capable of great magnanimity, even of entire devotion. Antony is
+unreserved, naturally straightforward, we may almost say simple. He can
+admit faults, accept advice and even reproof, take a jest against
+himself with good-humour. He is courteous (to Lepidus, for example, whom
+Octavius treats with cold contempt); and, though he can be exceedingly
+dignified, he seems to prefer a blunt though sympathetic plainness,
+which is one cause of the attachment of his soldiers. He has none of the
+faults of the brooder, the sentimentalist, or the man of principle; his
+nature tends to splendid action and lusty enjoyment. But he is neither a
+mere soldier nor a mere sensualist. He has imagination, the temper of an
+artist who revels in abundant and rejoicing appetites, feasts his senses
+on the glow and richness of life, flings himself into its mirth and
+revelry, yet feels the poetry in all this, and is able also to put it
+by and be more than content with the hardships of adventure. Such a man
+could never have sought a crown by a murder like Macbeth's, or, like
+Brutus, have killed on principle the man who loved him, or have lost the
+world for a Cressida.
+
+Beside this strain of poetry he has a keen intellect, a swift perception
+of the lie of things, and much quickness in shaping a course to suit
+them. In _Julius Caesar_ he shows this after the assassination, when he
+appears as a dexterous politician as well as a warm-hearted friend. He
+admires what is fine, and can fully appreciate the nobility of Brutus;
+but he is sure that Brutus's ideas are moonshine, that (as he says in
+our play) Brutus is mad; and, since his mighty friend, who was
+incomparably the finest thing in the world, has perished, he sees no
+reason why the inheritance should not be his own. Full of sorrow, he yet
+uses his sorrow like an artist to work on others, and greets his success
+with the glee of a successful adventurer. In the earlier play he proves
+himself a master of eloquence, and especially of pathos; and he does so
+again in the later. With a few words about his fall he draws tears from
+his followers and even from the caustic humorist Enobarbus. Like Richard
+II., he sees his own fall with the eyes of a poet, but a poet much
+greater than the young Shakespeare, who could never have written
+Antony's marvellous speech about the sunset clouds. But we listen to
+Antony, as we do not to Richard, with entire sympathy, partly because he
+is never unmanly, partly because he himself is sympathetic and longs for
+sympathy.
+
+The first of living soldiers, an able politician, a most persuasive
+orator, Antony nevertheless was not born to rule the world. He enjoys
+being a great man, but he has not the love of rule for rule's sake.
+Power for him is chiefly a means to pleasure. The pleasure he wants is
+so huge that he needs a huge power; but half the world, even a third of
+it, would suffice. He will not pocket wrongs, but he shows not the
+slightest wish to get rid of his fellow Triumvirs and reign alone. He
+never minded being subordinate to Julius Caesar. By women he is not only
+attracted but governed; from the effect of Cleopatra's taunts we can see
+that he had been governed by Fulvia. Nor has he either the patience or
+the steadfastness of a born ruler. He contends fitfully, and is prone to
+take the step that is easiest at the moment. This is the reason why he
+consents to marry Octavia. It seems the shortest way out of an awkward
+situation. He does not intend even to try to be true to her. He will not
+think of the distant consequences.
+
+A man who loved power as much as thousands of insignificant people love
+it, would have made a sterner struggle than Antony's against his
+enchantment. He can hardly be said to struggle at all. He brings himself
+to leave Cleopatra only because he knows he will return. In every moment
+of his absence, whether he wake or sleep, a siren music in his blood is
+singing him back to her; and to this music, however he may be occupied,
+the soul within his soul leans and listens. The joy of life had always
+culminated for him in the love of women: he could say 'no' to none of
+them: of Octavia herself he speaks like a poet. When he meets Cleopatra
+he finds his Absolute. She satisfies, nay glorifies, his whole being.
+She intoxicates his senses. Her wiles, her taunts, her furies and
+meltings, her laughter and tears, bewitch him all alike. She loves what
+he loves, and she surpasses him. She can drink him to his bed, out-jest
+his practical jokes, out-act the best actress who ever amused him,
+out-dazzle his own magnificence. She is his play-fellow, and yet a great
+queen. Angling in the river, playing billiards, flourishing the sword he
+used at Philippi, hopping forty paces in a public street, she remains
+an enchantress. Her spirit is made of wind and flame, and the poet in
+him worships her no less than the man. He is under no illusion about
+her, knows all her faults, sees through her wiles, believes her capable
+of betraying him. It makes no difference. She is his heart's desire made
+perfect. To love her is what he was born for. What have the gods in
+heaven to say against it? To imagine heaven is to imagine her; to die is
+to rejoin her. To deny that this is love is the madness of morality. He
+gives her every atom of his heart.
+
+She destroys him. Shakespeare, availing himself of the historic fact,
+portrays, on Antony's return to her, the suddenness and the depth of his
+descent. In spite of his own knowledge, the protests of his captains,
+the entreaties even of a private soldier, he fights by sea simply and
+solely because she wishes it. Then in mid-battle, when she flies, he
+deserts navy and army and his faithful thousands and follows her. 'I
+never saw an action of such shame,' cries Scarus; and we feel the
+dishonour of the hero keenly. Then Shakespeare begins to raise him
+again. First, his own overwhelming sense of shame redeems him. Next, we
+watch the rage of the dying lion. Then the mere sally before the final
+defeat--a sally dismissed by Plutarch in three lines--is magnified into
+a battle, in which Antony displays to us, and himself feels for the last
+time, the glory of his soldiership. And, throughout, the magnanimity and
+gentleness which shine through his desperation endear him to us. How
+beautiful is his affection for his followers and even for his servants,
+and the devotion they return! How noble his reception of the news that
+Enobarbus has deserted him! How touchingly significant the refusal of
+Eros either to kill him or survive him! How pathetic and even sublime
+the completeness of his love for Cleopatra! His anger is born and dies
+in an hour. One tear, one kiss, outweighs his ruin. He believes she has
+sold him to his enemy, yet he kills himself because he hears that she is
+dead. When, dying, he learns that she has deceived him once more, no
+thought of reproach crosses his mind: he simply asks to be carried to
+her. He knows well that she is not capable of dying because he dies, but
+that does not sting him; when, in his last agony, he calls for wine that
+he may gain a moment's strength to speak, it is to advise her for the
+days to come. Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch the final speech of
+Antony. It is fine, but it is not miraculous. The miraculous speeches
+belong only to his own hero:
+
+  I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
+  I here importune death awhile, until
+  Of many thousand kisses the poor last
+  I lay upon thy lips;
+
+or the first words he utters when he hears of Cleopatra's death:
+
+  Unarm, Eros: the long day's task is done,
+  And we must sleep.
+
+If he meant the task of statesman and warrior, that is not what his
+words mean to us. They remind us of words more familiar and less great--
+
+  No rest but the grave for the pilgrim of love.
+
+And he is more than love's pilgrim; he is love's martyr.
+
+
+  4.
+
+To reserve a fragment of an hour for Cleopatra, if it were not palpably
+absurd, would seem an insult. If only one could hear her own remarks
+upon it! But I had to choose between this absurdity and the plan of
+giving her the whole hour; and to that plan there was one fatal
+objection. She has been described (by Ten Brink) as a courtesan of
+genius. So brief a description must needs be incomplete, and Cleopatra
+never forgets, nor, if we read aright, do we forget, that she is a
+great queen. Still the phrase is excellent; only a public lecture is no
+occasion for the full analysis and illustration of the character it
+describes.
+
+Shakespeare has paid Cleopatra a unique compliment. The hero dies in the
+fourth Act, and the whole of the fifth is devoted to the heroine.[5] In
+that Act she becomes unquestionably a tragic character, but, it appears
+to me, not till then. This, no doubt, is a heresy; but as I cannot help
+holding it, and as it is connected with the remarks already made on the
+first half of the play, I will state it more fully. Cleopatra stands in
+a group with Hamlet and Falstaff. We might join with them Iago if he
+were not decidedly their inferior in one particular quality. They are
+inexhaustible. You feel that, if they were alive and you spent your
+whole life with them, their infinite variety could never be staled by
+custom; they would continue every day to surprise, perplex, and delight
+you. Shakespeare has bestowed on each of them, though they differ so
+much, his own originality, his genius. He has given it most fully to
+Hamlet, to whom none of the chambers of experience is shut, and perhaps
+more of it to Cleopatra than to Falstaff. Nevertheless, if we ask
+whether Cleopatra, in the first four Acts, is a tragic figure like
+Hamlet, we surely cannot answer 'yes.' Naturally it does not follow that
+she is a comic figure like Falstaff. This would be absurd; for, even if
+she were ridiculous like Falstaff, she is not ridiculous to herself; she
+is no humorist. And yet there is a certain likeness. She shares a
+weakness with Falstaff--vanity; and when she displays it, as she does
+quite naively (for instance, in the second interview with the
+Messenger), she does become comic. Again, though like Falstaff she is
+irresistible and carries us away no less than the people around her, we
+are secretly aware, in the midst of our delight, that her empire is
+built on sand. And finally, as his love for the Prince gives dignity and
+pathos to Falstaff in his overthrow, so what raises Cleopatra at last
+into pure tragedy is, in part, that which some critics have denied her,
+her love for Antony.
+
+Many unpleasant things can be said of Cleopatra; and the more that are
+said the more wonderful she appears. The exercise of sexual attraction
+is the element of her life; and she has developed nature into a
+consummate art. When she cannot exert it on the present lover she
+imagines its effects on him in absence. Longing for the living, she
+remembers with pride and joy the dead; and the past which the furious
+Antony holds up to her as a picture of shame is, for her, glory. She
+cannot see an ambassador, scarcely even a messenger, without desiring to
+bewitch him. Her mind is saturated with this element. If she is dark, it
+is because the sun himself has been amorous of her. Even when death is
+close at hand she imagines his touch as a lover's. She embraces him that
+she may overtake Iras and gain Antony's first kiss in the other world.
+
+She lives for feeling. Her feelings are, so to speak, sacred, and pain
+must not come near her. She has tried numberless experiments to discover
+the easiest way to die. Her body is exquisitely sensitive, and her
+emotions marvellously swift. They are really so; but she exaggerates
+them so much, and exhibits them so continually for effect, that some
+readers fancy them merely feigned. They are all-important, and everybody
+must attend to them. She announces to her women that she is pale, or
+sick and sullen; they must lead her to her chamber but must not speak to
+her. She is as strong and supple as a leopard, can drink down a master
+of revelry, can raise her lover's helpless heavy body from the ground
+into her tower with the aid only of two women; yet, when he is sitting
+apart sunk in shame, she must be supported into his presence, she cannot
+stand, her head droops, she will die (it is the opinion of Eros) unless
+he comforts her. When she hears of his marriage and has discharged her
+rage, she bids her women bear her away; she faints; at least she would
+faint, but that she remembers various questions she wants put to the
+Messenger about Octavia. Enobarbus has seen her die twenty times upon
+far poorer moment than the news that Antony is going to Rome.
+
+Some of her feelings are violent, and, unless for a purpose, she does
+not dream of restraining them; her sighs and tears are winds and waters,
+storms and tempests. At times, as when she threatens to give Charmian
+bloody teeth, or hales the luckless Messenger up and down by the hair,
+strikes him and draws her knife on him, she resembles (if I dare say it)
+Doll Tearsheet sublimated. She is a mother; but the threat of Octavius
+to destroy her children if she takes her own life passes by her like the
+wind (a point where Shakespeare contradicts Plutarch). She ruins a great
+man, but shows no sense of the tragedy of his ruin. The anguish of
+spirit that appears in his language to his servants is beyond her; she
+has to ask Enobarbus what he means. Can we feel sure that she would not
+have sacrificed him if she could have saved herself by doing so? It is
+not even certain that she did not attempt it. Antony himself believes
+that she did--that the fleet went over to Octavius by her orders. That
+she and her people deny the charge proves nothing. The best we can say
+is that, if it were true, Shakespeare would have made that clear. She is
+willing also to survive her lover. Her first thought, to follow him
+after the high Roman fashion, is too great for her. She would live on if
+she could, and would cheat her victor too of the best part of her
+fortune. The thing that drives her to die is the certainty that she
+will be carried to Rome to grace his triumph. That alone decides her.[6]
+
+The marvellous thing is that the knowledge of all this makes hardly more
+difference to us than it did to Antony. It seems to us perfectly
+natural, nay, in a sense perfectly right, that her lover should be her
+slave; that her women should adore her and die with her; that Enobarbus,
+who foresaw what must happen, and who opposes her wishes and braves her
+anger, should talk of her with rapture and feel no bitterness against
+her; that Dolabella, after a minute's conversation, should betray to her
+his master's intention and enable her to frustrate it. And when Octavius
+shows himself proof against her fascination, instead of admiring him we
+turn from him with disgust and think him a disgrace to his species. Why?
+It is not that we consider him bound to fall in love with her. Enobarbus
+did not; Dolabella did not; we ourselves do not. The feeling she
+inspires was felt then, and is felt now, by women no less than men, and
+would have been shared by Octavia herself. Doubtless she wrought magic
+on the senses, but she had not extraordinary beauty, like Helen's, such
+beauty as seems divine.[7] Plutarch says so. The man who wrote the
+sonnets to the dark lady would have known it for himself. He goes out of
+his way to add to her age, and tells us of her wrinkles and the waning
+of her lip. But Enobarbus, in his very mockery, calls her a wonderful
+piece of work. Dolabella interrupts her with the cry, 'Most sovereign
+creature,' and we echo it. And yet Octavius, face to face with her and
+listening to her voice, can think only how best to trap her and drag her
+to public dishonour in the streets of Rome. We forgive him only for his
+words when he sees her dead:
+
+                 She looks like sleep,
+  As she would catch another Antony
+  In her strong toil of grace.
+
+And the words, I confess, sound to me more like Shakespeare's than his.
+
+That which makes her wonderful and sovereign laughs at definition, but
+she herself came nearest naming it when, in the final speech (a passage
+surpassed in poetry, if at all, only by the final speech of Othello),
+she cries,
+
+  I am fire and air; my other elements
+  I give to baser life.
+
+The fire and air which at death break from union with those other
+elements, transfigured them during her life, and still convert into
+engines of enchantment the very things for which she is condemned. I can
+refer only to one. She loves Antony. We should marvel at her less and
+love her more if she loved him more--loved him well enough to follow him
+at once to death; but it is to blunder strangely to doubt that she loved
+him, or that her glorious description of him (though it was also meant
+to work on Dolabella) came from her heart. Only the spirit of fire and
+air within her refuses to be trammelled or extinguished; burns its way
+through the obstacles of fortune and even through the resistance of her
+love and grief; and would lead her undaunted to fresh life and the
+conquest of new worlds. It is this which makes her 'strong toil of
+grace' unbreakable; speaks in her brows' bent and every tone and
+movement; glorifies the arts and the rages which in another would merely
+disgust or amuse us; and, in the final scenes of her life, flames into
+such brilliance that we watch her entranced as she struggles for
+freedom, and thrilled with triumph as, conquered, she puts her conqueror
+to scorn and goes to meet her lover in the splendour that crowned and
+robed her long ago, when her barge burnt on the water like a burnished
+throne, and she floated to Cydnus on the enamoured stream to take him
+captive for ever.[8]
+
+Why is it that, although we close the book in a triumph which is more
+than reconciliation, this is mingled, as we look back on the story, with
+a sadness so peculiar, almost the sadness of disenchantment? Is it that,
+when the glow has faded, Cleopatra's ecstasy comes to appear, I would
+not say factitious, but an effort strained and prodigious as well as
+glorious, not, like Othello's last speech, the final expression of
+character, of thoughts and emotions which have dominated a whole life?
+Perhaps this is so, but there is something more, something that sounds
+paradoxical: we are saddened by the very fact that the catastrophe
+saddens us so little; it pains us that we should feel so much triumph
+and pleasure. In _Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, though in a
+sense we accept the deaths of hero and heroine, we feel a keen sorrow.
+We look back, think how noble or beautiful they were, wish that fate had
+opposed to them a weaker enemy, dream possibly of the life they might
+then have led. Here we can hardly do this. With all our admiration and
+sympathy for the lovers we do not wish them to gain the world. It is
+better for the world's sake, and not less for their own, that they
+should fail and die. At the very first they came before us, unlike those
+others, unlike Coriolanus and even Macbeth, in a glory already
+tarnished, half-ruined by their past. Indeed one source of strange and
+most unusual effect in their story is that this marvellous passion comes
+to adepts in the experience and art of passion, who might be expected to
+have worn its charm away. Its splendour dazzles us; but, when the
+splendour vanishes, we do not mourn, as we mourn for the love of Romeo
+or Othello, that a thing so bright and good should die. And the fact
+that we mourn so little saddens us.
+
+A comparison of Shakespearean tragedies seems to prove that the tragic
+emotions are stirred in the fullest possible measure only when such
+beauty or nobility of character is displayed as commands unreserved
+admiration or love; or when, in default of this, the forces which move
+the agents, and the conflict which results from these forces, attain a
+terrifying and overwhelming power. The four most famous tragedies
+satisfy one or both of these conditions; _Antony and Cleopatra_, though
+a great tragedy, satisfies neither of them completely. But to say this
+is not to criticise it. It does not attempt to satisfy these conditions,
+and then fail in the attempt. It attempts something different, and
+succeeds as triumphantly as _Othello_ itself. In doing so it gives us
+what no other tragedy can give, and it leaves us, no less than any
+other, lost in astonishment at the powers which created it.
+
+1905
+
+
+  NOTE A
+
+We are to understand, surely, that Enobarbus dies of 'thought'
+(melancholy or grief), and has no need to seek a 'swifter mean.' Cf. IV.
+vi. 34 _seq._, with the death-scene and his address there to the moon as
+the 'sovereign mistress of true melancholy' (IV. ix.). Cf. also III.
+xiii., where, to Cleopatra's question after Actium, 'What shall we do,
+Enobarbus?' he answers, 'Think, and die.'
+
+The character of Enobarbus is practically an invention of Shakespeare's.
+The death-scene, I may add, is one of the many passages which prove that
+he often wrote what pleased his imagination but would lose half its
+effect in the theatre. The darkness and moonlight could not be
+represented on a public stage in his time.
+
+
+  NOTE B
+
+The scene is the first of the third Act. Here Ventidius says:
+
+  Caesar and Antony have ever won
+  More in their officer than person: Sossius,
+  One of my place in Syria, his lieutenant,
+  For quick accumulation of renown,
+  Which he achieved by the minute, lost his favour.
+
+Plutarch (North, sec. 19) says that 'Sossius, one of Antonius'
+lieutenants in Syria, did notable good service,' but I cannot find in
+him the further statement that Sossius lost Antony's favour. I presume
+it is Shakespeare's invention, but I call attention to it on the bare
+chance that it may be found elsewhere than in Plutarch, when it would
+point to Shakespeare's use of a second authority.
+
+
+  NOTE C
+
+Since this lecture was published (_Quarterly Review_, April, 1906) two
+notable editions of _Antony and Cleopatra_ have been produced. Nothing
+recently written on Shakespeare, I venture to say, shows more thorough
+scholarship or better judgment than Mr. Case's edition in the Arden
+series; and Dr. Furness has added to the immense debt which students of
+Shakespeare owe to him, and (if that is possible) to the admiration and
+respect with which they regard him, by the appearance of _Antony and
+Cleopatra_ in his New Variorum edition.
+
+On one question about Cleopatra both editors, Mr. Case more tentatively
+and Dr. Furness very decidedly, dissent from the interpretation given in
+the last pages of my lecture. The question is how we are to understand
+the fact that, although on Antony's death Cleopatra expresses her
+intention of following him, she does not carry out this intention until
+she has satisfied herself that Octavius means to carry her to Rome to
+grace his triumph. Though I do not profess to feel certain that my
+interpretation is right, it still seems to me a good deal the most
+probable, and therefore I have not altered what I wrote. But my object
+here is not to defend my view or to criticise other views, but merely to
+call attention to the discussion of the subject in Mr. Case's
+Introduction and Dr. Furness's Preface.
+
+
+  NOTE D
+
+Shakespeare, it seems clear, imagined Cleopatra as a gipsy. And this, I
+would suggest, may be the explanation of a word which has caused much
+difficulty. Antony, when 'all is lost,' exclaims (IV. x. 38):
+
+  O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,--
+  Whose eye beck'd forth my wars, and call'd them home,
+  Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,--
+  Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
+  Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.
+
+Pope changed 'grave' in the first line into 'gay.' Others conjecture
+'great' and 'grand.' Steevens says that 'grave' means 'deadly,' and
+that the word 'is often used by Chapman' thus; and one of his two
+quotations supports his statement; but certainly in Shakespeare the word
+does not elsewhere bear this sense. It could mean 'majestic,' as Johnson
+takes it here. But why should it not have its usual meaning? Cleopatra,
+we know, was a being of 'infinite variety,' and her eyes may sometimes
+have had, like those of some gipsies, a mysterious gravity or solemnity
+which would exert a spell more potent than her gaiety. Their colour,
+presumably, was what is called 'black'; but surely they were not, like
+those of Tennyson's Cleopatra, '_bold_ black eyes.' Readers interested
+in seeing what criticism is capable of may like to know that it has been
+proposed to read, for the first line of the quotation above, 'O this
+false fowl of Egypt! haggard charmer.' [Though I have not cancelled this
+note I have modified some phrases in it, as I have not much confidence
+in my suggestion, and am inclined to think that Steevens was right.]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] As this lecture was composed after the publication of my
+    _Shakespearean Tragedy_ I ignored in it, as far as possible, such
+    aspects of the play as were noticed in that book, to the Index of
+    which I may refer the reader.
+
+  [2] See Note A.
+
+  [3] 'Now whilest Antonius was busie in this preparation, Octavia his
+    wife, whom he had left at Rome, would needs take sea to come unto
+    him. Her brother Octauius Caesar was willing vnto it, not for his
+    respect at all (as most authors do report) as for that he might haue
+    an honest colour to make warre with Antonius if he did misuse her,
+    and not esteeme of her as she ought to be.'--_Life of Antony_
+    (North's Translation), sect. 29. The view I take does not, of course,
+    imply that Octavius had no love for his sister.
+
+  [4] See Note B.
+
+  [5] The point of this remark is unaffected by the fact that the play
+    is not divided into acts and scenes in the folios.
+
+  [6] See Note C.
+
+  [7] See Note D.
+
+  [8] Of the 'good' heroines, Imogen is the one who has most of this
+    spirit of fire and air; and this (in union, of course, with other
+    qualities) is perhaps the ultimate reason why for so many readers she
+    is, what Mr. Swinburne calls her, 'the woman above all Shakespeare's
+    women.'
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE THE MAN
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE THE MAN
+
+
+Such phrases as 'Shakespeare the man' or 'Shakespeare's personality'
+are, no doubt, open to objection. They seem to suggest that, if we could
+subtract from Shakespeare the mind that produced his works, the residue
+would be the man himself; and that his mind was some pure impersonal
+essence unaffected by the accidents of physique, temperament, and
+character. If this were so, one could but echo Tennyson's thanksgiving
+that we know so little of Shakespeare. But as it is assuredly not so,
+and as 'Shakespeare the man' really means the one indivisible
+Shakespeare, regarded for the time from a particular point of view, the
+natural desire to know whatever can be known of him is not to be
+repressed merely because there are people so foolish as to be careless
+about his works and yet curious about his private life. For my own part
+I confess that, though I should care nothing about the man if he had not
+written the works, yet, since we possess them, I would rather see and
+hear him for five minutes in his proper person than discover a new one.
+And though we may be content to die without knowing his income or even
+the surname of Mr. W. H., we cannot so easily resign the wish to find
+the man in his writings, and to form some idea of the disposition, the
+likes and dislikes, the character and the attitude towards life, of the
+human being who seems to us to have understood best our common human
+nature.
+
+The answer of course will be that our biographical knowledge of
+Shakespeare is so small, and his writings are so completely dramatic,
+that this wish, however natural, is idle. But I cannot think so.
+Doubtless, in trying to form an idea of Shakespeare, we soon reach the
+limits of reasonable certainty; and it is also true that the idea we can
+form without exceeding them is far from being as individual as we could
+desire. But it is more distinct than is often supposed, and it _is_
+reasonably certain; and although we can add to its distinctness only by
+more or less probable conjectures, they are not mere guesses, they
+really have probability in various degrees. On this whole subject there
+is a tendency at the present time to an extreme scepticism, which
+appears to me to be justified neither by the circumstances of the
+particular case nor by our knowledge of human nature in general.
+
+This scepticism is due in part to the interest excited by Mr. Lee's
+discussion of the Sonnets in his _Life_ of Shakespeare, and to the
+importance rightly attached to that discussion. The Sonnets are lyrical
+poems of friendship and love. In them the poet ostensibly speaks in his
+own person and expresses his own feelings. Many critics, no doubt, had
+denied that he really did so; but they had not Mr. Lee's knowledge, nor
+had they examined the matter so narrowly as he; and therefore they had
+not much weakened the general belief that the Sonnets, however
+conventional or exaggerated their language may sometimes be, do tell us
+a good deal about their author. Mr. Lee, however, showed far more fully
+than any previous writer that many of the themes, many even of the
+ideas, of these poems are commonplaces of Renaissance sonnet-writing;
+and he came to the conclusion that in the Sonnets Shakespeare
+'unlocked,' not 'his heart,' but a very different kind of armoury, and
+that the sole biographical inference deducible from them is that 'at one
+time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an
+endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank.'
+Now, if that inference is correct, it certainly tells us something about
+Shakespeare the man; but it also forbids us to take seriously what the
+Sonnets profess to tell us of his passionate affection, with its hopes
+and fears, its pain and joy; of his pride and his humility, his
+self-reproach and self-defence, his weariness of life and his
+consciousness of immortal genius. And as, according to Mr. Lee's
+statement, the Sonnets alone of Shakespeare's works 'can be held to
+throw any illumination on a personal trait,' it seems to follow that, so
+far as the works are concerned (for Mr. Lee is not specially sceptical
+as to the external testimony), the only idea we can form of the man is
+contained in that single inference.
+
+Now, I venture to surmise that Mr. Lee's words go rather beyond his
+meaning. But that is not our business here, nor could a brief discussion
+do justice to a theory to which those who disagree with it are still
+greatly indebted. What I wish to deny is the presupposition which seems
+to be frequently accepted as an obvious truth. Even if Mr. Lee's view of
+the Sonnets were indisputably correct, nay, if even, to go much further,
+the persons and the story in the Sonnets were as purely fictitious as
+those of _Twelfth Night_, they might and would still tell us something
+of the personality of their author. For however free a poet may be from
+the emotions which he simulates, and however little involved in the
+conditions which he imagines, he cannot (unless he is a mere copyist)
+write a hundred and fifty lyrics expressive of those simulated emotions
+without disclosing something of himself, something of the way in which
+he in particular _would_ feel and behave under the imagined conditions.
+And the same thing holds in principle of the dramas. Is it really
+conceivable that a man can write some five and thirty dramas, and
+portray in them an enormous amount and variety of human nature, without
+betraying anything whatever of his own disposition and preferences? I do
+not believe that he could do this, even if he deliberately set himself
+to the task. The only question is how much of himself he would betray.
+
+One is entitled to say this, I think, on general grounds; but we may
+appeal further to specific experience. Of many poets and novelists we
+know a good deal from external sources. And in these cases we find that
+the man so known to us appears also in his works, and that these by
+themselves would have left on us a personal impression which, though
+imperfect and perhaps in this or that point even false, would have been
+broadly true. Of course this holds of some writers much more fully than
+of others; but, except where the work is very scanty in amount, it seems
+to hold in some degree of all.[1] If so, there is an antecedent
+probability that it will apply to Shakespeare too. After all, he was
+human. We may exclaim in our astonishment that he was as universal and
+impartial as nature herself; but this is the language of religious
+rapture. If we assume that he was six times as universal as Sir Walter
+Scott, which is praise enough for a mortal, we may hope to form an idea
+of him from his plays only six times as dim as the idea of Scott that we
+should derive from the Waverley Novels.
+
+And this is not all. As a matter of fact, the great majority of
+Shakespeare's readers--lovers of poetry untroubled by theories and
+questions--do form from the plays some idea of the man. Knowingly or
+not, they possess such an idea; and up to a certain point the idea is
+the same. Ask such a man whether he thinks Shakespeare was at all like
+Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Milton, and it will not occur to him to
+answer 'I have not the faintest notion'; he will answer unhesitatingly
+No. Ask him whether he supposes that Shakespeare was at all like
+Fielding or Scott, and he will probably be found to imagine that, while
+differing greatly from both, he did belong to the same type or class.
+And such answers unquestionably imply an idea which, however deficient
+in detail, is definite.
+
+Again, to go a little further in the same direction, take this fact.
+After I had put together my notes for the present lecture, I re-read
+Bagehot's essay on Shakespeare the Man, and I read a book by Goldwin
+Smith and an essay by Leslie Stephen (who, I found, had anticipated a
+good deal that I meant to say).[2] These three writers, with all their
+variety, have still substantially the same idea of Shakespeare; and it
+is the idea of the competent 'general reader' more fully developed. Nor
+is the value of their agreement in the least diminished by the fact that
+they make no claim to be Shakespeare scholars. They show themselves much
+abler than most scholars, and if they lack the scholar's knowledge they
+are free from his defects. When they wrote their essays they had not
+wearied themselves with rival hypotheses, or pored over minutiae until
+they lost the broad and deep impressions which vivid reading leaves.
+Ultra-scepticism in this matter does not arise merely or mainly from the
+humility which every man of sense must feel as he creeps to and fro in
+Shakespeare's prodigious mind. It belongs either to the clever faddist
+who can see nothing straight, or it proceeds from those dangers and
+infirmities which the expert in any subject knows too well.
+
+The remarks I am going to make can have an interest only for those who
+share the position I have tried to indicate; who believe that the most
+dramatic of writers must reveal in his writings something of himself,
+but who recognise that in Shakespeare's case we can expect a reasonable
+certainty only within narrow limits, while beyond them we have to trust
+to impressions, the value of which must depend on familiarity with his
+writings, on freedom from prejudice and the desire to reach any
+particular result, and on the amount of perception we may happen to
+possess. I offer my own impressions, insecure and utterly unprovable as
+I know them to be, simply because those of other readers have an
+interest for me; and I offer them for the most part without argument,
+because even where argument might be useful it requires more time than a
+lecture can afford. For the same reason I shall assume, without
+attempting to define it further, and without dilating on its
+implications, the truth of that general feeling about Shakespeare and
+Fielding and Scott.
+
+But, before we come to impressions at all, we must look at the scanty
+store of external evidence: for we may lay down at once the canon that
+impressions derived from the works must supplement and not contradict
+this evidence, so far as it appears trustworthy. It is scanty, but it
+yields a decided outline.
+
+  This figure that thou here seest put,
+  It was for gentle Shakespeare cut:
+
+--so Jonson writes of the portrait in the Folio, and the same adjective
+'gentle' is used elsewhere of Shakespeare. It had not in Elizabethan
+English so confined a meaning as it has now; but it meant something, and
+I do not remember that their contemporaries called Marlowe or Jonson or
+Marston 'gentle.' Next, in the earliest extant reference that we have to
+Shakespeare, the writer says that he himself has seen his 'demeanour' to
+be 'civil.'[3] It is not saying much; but it is not the first remark an
+acquaintance would probably have made about Ben Jonson or Samuel
+Johnson. The same witness adds about Shakespeare that 'divers of worship
+have reported his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty.'
+'Honesty' and 'honest' in an Elizabethan passage like this mean more
+than they would now; they answer rather to our 'honourable' or 'honour.'
+Lastly we have the witness borne by Jonson in the words: 'I loved the
+man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He
+was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature.' With this notable
+phrase, to which I shall have to return, we come to an end of the
+testimony of eye-witnesses to Shakespeare the Man (for we have nothing
+to do with references to the mere actor or author). It is scanty, and
+insufficient to discriminate him from other persons who were gentle,
+civil, upright in their dealings, honourable, open, and free: but I
+submit that there have been not a few writers to whom all these
+qualities could not be truly ascribed, and that the testimony therefore
+does tell us something definite. To which must be added that we have
+absolutely no evidence which conflicts with it. Whatever Greene in his
+jealous embitterment might have said would carry little weight, but in
+fact, apart from general abuse of actors, he only says that the upstart
+had an over-weening opinion of his own capacities.
+
+There remain certain traditions and certain facts; and without
+discussing them I will mention what seems to me to have a more or less
+probable significance. Stratford stories of drinking bouts may go for
+nothing, but not the consensus of tradition to the effect that
+Shakespeare was a pleasant and convivial person, 'very good company, and
+of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit.'[4] That after his retirement
+to Stratford he spent at the rate of L1000 a year is incredible, but
+that he spent freely seems likely enough. The tradition that as a young
+man he got into trouble with Sir Thomas Lucy for deer-stealing (which
+would probably be an escapade rather than an essay in serious poaching)
+is supported by his unsavoury jest about the 'luces' in Sir Robert
+Shallow's coat. The more general statement that in youth he was wild
+does not sound improbable; and, obscure as the matter is, I cannot
+regard as comfortable the little we know of the circumstances of his
+very early marriage. A contemporary story of an amorous adventure in
+London may well be pure invention, but we have no reason to reject it
+peremptorily as we should any similar gossip about Milton. Lastly,
+certain inferences may safely be drawn from the facts that, once
+securely started in London, Shakespeare soon began to prosper, and
+acquired, for an actor and playwright, considerable wealth; that he
+bought property in his native town, and was consulted sometimes by
+fellow-townsmen on matters of business; that he enforced the payment of
+certain debts; and that he took the trouble to get a coat of arms. But
+what cannot with any logic or any safety be inferred is that he, any
+more than Scott, was impelled to write simply and solely by the desire
+to make money and improve his social position; and the comparative
+abundance of business records will mislead only those who are
+thoughtless enough to forget that, if they buy a house or sue a debtor,
+the fact will be handed down, while their kind or generous deeds may be
+recorded, if at all, only in the statement that they were 'of an open
+and free nature.'
+
+That Shakespeare was a good and perhaps keen man of business, or that he
+set store by a coat of arms, we could not have inferred from his
+writings. But we could have judged from them that he worked hard, and
+have guessed with some probability that he would rather have been a
+'gentleman' than an actor. And most of the other characteristics that
+appear from the external evidence would, I think, have seemed probable
+from a study of the works. This should encourage us to hope that we may
+be right in other impressions which we receive from them. And we may
+begin with one on which the external evidence has a certain bearing.
+
+Readers of Shakespeare, I believe, imagine him to have been not only
+sweet-tempered but modest and unassuming. I do not doubt that they are
+right; and, vague as the Folio portrait and the Stratford bust are, it
+would be difficult to believe that their subject was an irritable,
+boastful, or pushing person. But if we confine ourselves to the works,
+it is not easy to give reasons for the idea that their author was modest
+and unassuming; and a man is not necessarily so because he is open,
+free, and very good company. Perhaps we feel that a man who was not so
+would have allowed much more of himself to appear in his works than
+Shakespeare does. Perhaps again we think that anything like presumption
+or self-importance was incompatible with Shakespeare's sense of the
+ridiculous, his sublime common-sense, and his feeling of man's
+insignificance. And, lastly, it seems to us clear that the playwright
+admires and likes people who are modest, unassuming, and plain; while it
+may perhaps safely be said that those who lack these qualities rarely
+admire them in others and not seldom despise them. But, however we may
+justify our impression that Shakespeare possessed them, we certainly
+receive it; and assuming it to be as correct as the similar impression
+left by the Waverley Novels indubitably is, I go on to observe that the
+possession of them does not of necessity imply a want of spirit, or of
+proper self-assertion or insistence on rights.[5] It did not in Scott,
+and we have ground for saying that it did not in Shakespeare. If it had,
+he could not, being of an open and free nature, have prospered as he
+prospered. He took offence at Greene's attack on him, and showed that he
+took it. He was 'gentle,' but he liked his debts to be paid. However his
+attitude as to the enclosure at Welcombe may be construed, it is clear
+that he had to be reckoned with. It appears probable that he held
+himself wronged by Sir Thomas Lucy, and, pocketing up the injury because
+he could not resent it, gave him tit for tat after some fifteen years.
+The man in the Sonnets forgives his friend easily, but it is not from
+humility; and towards the world he is very far from humble. Of the
+dedication of _The Rape of Lucrece_ we cannot judge, for we do not know
+Shakespeare's relations with Lord Southampton at that date; but, as for
+the dedication of _Venus and Adonis_, could modesty and dignity be
+better mingled in a letter from a young poet to a great noble than they
+are there?
+
+Some of Shakespeare's writings point to a strain of deep reflection and
+of quasi-metaphysical imagination in his nature; and a few of them seem
+to reveal a melancholy, at times merely sad, at times embittered or
+profound, if never hopeless. It is on this side mainly that we feel a
+decided difference between him and Fielding, and even between him and
+Scott. Yet nothing in the contemporary allusions or in the traditions
+would suggest that he was notably thoughtful or serious, and much less
+that he was melancholy. And although we could lay no stress on this fact
+if it stood alone, it is probably significant. Shakespeare's writings,
+on the whole, leave a strong impression that his native disposition was
+much more gay than grave. They seem always to have made this impression.
+Fuller tells us that 'though his genius generally was jocular and
+inclining him to festivity, yet he could, when so disposed, be solemn
+and serious, as appears by his tragedies.'[6] Johnson agreed with Rymer
+that his 'natural disposition' led him to comedy; and, although Johnson
+after his manner distorts a true idea by wilful exaggeration and by
+perverting distinctions into antitheses, there is truth in his
+development of Rymer's remark. It would be easy to quote nineteenth
+century critics to the same effect; and the study of Shakespeare's early
+works leads to a similar result. It has been truly said that we feel
+ourselves in much closer contact with his personality in the early
+comedies and in _Romeo and Juliet_ than in _Henry VI._ and _Richard
+III._ and _Titus Andronicus_. In the latter, so far as we suppose them
+to be his own, he seems on the whole to be following, and then improving
+on, an existing style, and to be dealing with subjects which engage him
+as a playwright without much appealing to him personally. With _Romeo
+and Juliet_, on the other hand, and with _Richard II._ (which seems
+clearly to be his first attempt to write historical tragedy in a manner
+entirely his own), it is different, and we feel the presence of the
+whole man. The stories are tragic, but it is not precisely the _tragic_
+aspect of them that attracts him most; and even Johnson's statement,
+grotesquely false of the later tragedies, that 'in tragedy he is always
+struggling after some occasion to be comic,' is no more than an
+exaggeration in respect to _Romeo and Juliet_.[7] From these tragedies,
+as from _Love's Labour's Lost_ and the other early comedies, we should
+guess that the author was a young man, happy, alert, light-hearted, full
+of romance and poetry, but full also of fun; blessed with a keen
+enjoyment of absurdities, but, for all his intellectual subtlety and
+power, not markedly reflective, and certainly not particularly grave or
+much inclined to dejection. One might even suspect, I venture to think,
+that with such a flow of spirits and such exceeding alacrity of mind he
+might at present be a trifle wanting in feeling and disposed to levity.
+In any case, if our general impression is correct, we shall not find it
+hard to believe that the author of these plays and the creator of
+Falstaff was 'very good company' and a convivial good-fellow; and it
+might easily happen that he was tempted at times to 'go here and there'
+in society, and 'make himself a motley to the view' in a fashion that
+left some qualms behind.[8]
+
+There is a tradition that Shakespeare was 'a handsome well-shaped man.'
+If the Stratford monument does not lie, he was not in later life a
+meagre man. And if our notion of his temperament has any truth, he can
+hardly have been physically feeble, bloodless, or inactive. Most readers
+probably imagine him the reverse. Even sceptical critics tell us that he
+was fond of field-sports; and of his familiar knowledge of them there
+can be no question. Yet--I can but record the impression without trying
+to justify it--his writings do not at all suggest to me that he was a
+splendidly powerful creature like Fielding, or that he greatly enjoyed
+bodily exertion, or was not easily tired. He says much of horses, but he
+does not make one think, as Scott does, that a gallop was a great
+delight to him. Nor again do I feel after reading him that he had a
+strong natural love of adventurous deeds, or longed to be an explorer or
+a soldier. The island of his boyish dreams--if he heard much of voyages
+as a boy--was, I fancy, the haunt of marmosets and hedgehogs, quaint
+moon-calves and flitting sprites, lovely colours, sounds and sweet airs
+that give delight and hurt not, less like Treasure Island than the Coral
+Island of Ballantyne in the original illustrations, and more full of
+wonders than of dangers. He would have liked the Arabian Nights better
+than Dumas. Of course he admired men of action, understood them, and
+could express their feelings; but we do not feel particularly close to
+his personality as we read the warrior speeches of Hotspur, Henry,
+Othello, Coriolanus, as we do when we read of Romeo or Hamlet, or when
+we feel the attraction of Henry's modesty. In the same way, I suppose
+nobody feels Shakespeare's personal presence in the ambition of Macbeth
+or the pride of Coriolanus; many feel it in Macbeth's imaginative
+terrors, and in the disgust of Coriolanus at the idea of recounting his
+exploits in order to win votes. When we seem to hear Shakespeare's
+voice--and we hear it from many mouths besides Romeo's or Hamlet's--it
+is the voice of a man with a happy, enjoying, but still contemplative
+and even dreamy nature, not of a man richly endowed with the impulses
+and feelings either of strenuous action or of self-assertion. If he had
+drawn a Satan, we should not have felt his personality, as we do
+Milton's, in Satan's pride and indomitable courage and intolerance of
+rule.
+
+We know how often Shakespeare uses the antithesis of blood or passion,
+and judgment or reason; how he praises the due commingling of the two,
+or the control of the first by the second; how frequently it is the want
+of such control that exposes his heroes to the attack of Fortune or
+Fate. What, then, were the passions or the 'affections of the blood'
+most dangerous to himself? Not, if we have been right, those of pride or
+ambition; nor yet those of envy, hatred, or revenge; and still less that
+of avarice. But, in the first place, let us remember Jonson's words, 'he
+was honest and of an open and free nature,' and let me repeat an
+observation, made elsewhere in passing, that these words are true also
+of the great majority of Shakespeare's heroes, and not least of his
+tragic heroes. Jonson almost quotes Iago:
+
+  The Moor is of a free and open nature,
+  That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.
+
+The king says that Hamlet,
+
+                              being remiss,
+  Most generous, and free from all contrivings,
+  Will not peruse the foils.
+
+The words 'open and free' apply no less eminently to Brutus, Lear, and
+Timon. Antony and Coriolanus are men naturally frank, liberal, and
+large. Prospero lost his dukedom through his trustfulness. Romeo and
+Troilus and Orlando, and many slighter characters, are so far of the
+same type. Now such a free and open nature, obviously, is specially
+exposed to the risks of deception, perfidy, and ingratitude. If it is
+also a nature sensitive and intense, but not particularly active or (if
+the word may be excused) volitional, such experiences will tempt it to
+melancholy, embitterment, anger, possibly even misanthropy. If it _is_
+thus active or volitional, it may become the prey of violent and
+destructive passion, such as that of Othello and of Coriolanus, and such
+as Lear's would be if he were not so old. These affections, passions,
+and sufferings of free and open natures are Shakespeare's favourite
+tragic subject; and his favouritism, surely, goes so far as to
+constitute a decided peculiarity, not found thus in other tragic poets.
+Here he painted most, one cannot but think, what his own nature was most
+inclined to feel. But it would rather be melancholy, embitterment, an
+inactive rage or misanthropy, than any destructive passion; and it would
+be a further question whether, and how far, he may at any time have
+experienced what he depicts. I am speaking here only of his
+disposition.[9]
+
+That Shakespeare was as much inclined to be a lover as most poets we may
+perhaps safely assume; but can we conjecture anything further on this
+subject? I will confine myself to two points. He treats of love
+romantically, and tragically, and humorously. In the earlier plays
+especially the humorous aspect of the matter, the aspect so prominent in
+the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, the changefulness, brevity,
+irrationality, of the feeling, is at least as much dwelt on as the
+romantic, and with at least as much relish:
+
+  Lord! what fools these mortals be!
+
+Now, if there is anything peculiar in the pictures here, it is, perhaps,
+the special interest that Shakespeare seems to take in what we may call
+the unreality of the feeling of love in an imaginative nature. Romeo as
+he first appears, and, in a later play, Orsino, are examples of this.
+They are perfectly sincere, of course, but neither of them is really in
+love with a woman; each is in love with the state of being in love. This
+state is able to attach itself to a particular object, but it is not
+induced by the particular qualities of that object; it is more a dream
+than a passion, and can melt away without carrying any of the lover's
+heart with it; and in that sense it is unreal. This weakness, no doubt,
+is not confined to imaginative natures, but they may well be specially
+disposed to it (as Shelley was), and Shakespeare may have drawn it from
+his own experience. The suspicion is strengthened when we think of
+_Richard II_. In Richard this imaginative weakness is exhibited again,
+though not in relation to love. He luxuriates in images of his royal
+majesty, of the angels who guard his divine right, and of his own
+pathetic and almost sacred sufferings. The images are not insincere, and
+yet they are like dreams, for they refuse to touch earth and to connect
+themselves either with his past misdeeds or with the actions he ought
+now to perform. A strain of a similar weakness appears again in Hamlet,
+though only as one strain in a much more deep and complex nature. But
+this is not a common theme in poetry, much less in dramatic poetry.[10]
+
+To come to our second question. When Shakespeare painted Cressida or
+described her through the mouth of Ulysses ('O these encounterers,'
+etc.), or, again, when he portrayed the love of Antony for Cleopatra,
+was he using his personal experience? To answer that he _must_ have done
+so would be as ridiculous as to argue that Iago must be a portrait of
+himself; and the two plays contain nothing which, by itself, would
+justify us even in thinking that he probably did so. But we have the
+series of sonnets about the dark lady; and if we accept the sonnets to
+the friend as to some considerable extent based on fact and expressive
+of personal feelings, how can we refuse to take the others on the same
+footing? Even if the stories of the two series were not intertwined, we
+should have no ground for treating the two in different ways, unless we
+could say that external evidence, or the general impression we derive
+from Shakespeare's works, forbids us to believe that he could ever have
+been entangled in an intrigue like that implied in the second series, or
+have felt and thought in the manner there portrayed. Being unable to say
+this, I am compelled, most regretfully, to hold it probable that this
+series is, in the main, based on personal experience. And I say 'most
+regretfully,' not merely because one would regret to think that
+Shakespeare was the victim of a Cressida or even the lover of a
+Cleopatra, but because the story implied in these sonnets is of quite
+another kind. They leave, on the whole, a very disagreeable impression.
+We cannot compare it with the impressions produced, for example, by the
+'heathen' spirit of Goethe's _Roman Elegies_, or by the passion of
+Shakespeare's Antony. In these two cases, widely dissimilar of course,
+we may speak of 'immorality,' but we are not discomfited, much less
+disgusted. The feeling and the attitude are poetic, whole-hearted, and
+in one case passionate in the extreme. But the state of mind expressed
+in the sonnets about the dark lady is half-hearted, often prosaic, and
+never worthy of the name of passion. It is uneasy, dissatisfied,
+distempered, the state of mind of a man who despises his 'passion' and
+its object and himself, but, standing intellectually far above it, still
+has not resolution to end it, and only pains us by his gross and joyless
+jests. In _Troilus and Cressida_--not at all in the portrayal of
+Troilus's love, but in the atmosphere of the drama--we seem to trace a
+similar mood of dissatisfaction, and of intellectual but practically
+impotent contempt.
+
+In this connection it is natural to think of the 'unhappy period' which
+has so often been surmised in Shakespeare's life. There is not time here
+to expand the summary remarks made elsewhere on this subject; but I may
+refer a little more fully to a persistent impression left on my mind by
+writings which we have reason to assign to the years 1602-6.[11] There
+is surely something unusual in their tone regarding certain 'vices of
+the blood,' regarding drunkenness and sexual corruption. It does not lie
+in Shakespeare's _view_ of these vices, but in an undertone of disgust.
+Read Hamlet's language about the habitual drunkenness of his uncle, or
+even Cassio's words about his casual excess; then think of the tone of
+_Henry IV._ or _Twelfth Night_ or the _Tempest_; and ask if the
+difference is not striking. And if you are inclined to ascribe it wholly
+to the fact that _Hamlet_ and _Othello_ are tragedies, compare the
+passages in them with the scene on Pompey's galley in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_. The intent of that scene is terrible enough, but in the tone
+there is no more trace of disgust than in _Twelfth Night_. As to the
+other matter, what I refer to is not the transgression of lovers like
+Claudio and Juliet, nor even light-hearted irregularities like those of
+Cassio: here Shakespeare's speech has its habitual tone. But, when he is
+dealing with lechery and corruption, the undercurrent of disgust seems
+to become audible. Is it not true that in the plays from _Hamlet_ to
+_Timon_ that subject, in one shape or another, is continually before us;
+that the intensity of loathing in Hamlet's language about his mother's
+lust is unexampled in Shakespeare; that the treatment of the subject in
+_Measure for Measure_, though occasionally purely humorous, is on the
+whole quite unlike the treatment in _Henry IV._ or even in the brothel
+scenes of _Pericles_;[12] that while _Troilus and Cressida_ is full of
+disgust and contempt, there is not a trace of either in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, though some of the jesting there is obscene enough; that
+this same tone is as plainly heard in the unquestioned parts of _Timon_;
+and that, while it is natural in Timon to inveigh against female lechery
+when he speaks to Alcibiades and his harlots, there is no apparent
+reason why Lear in his exalted madness should choose this subject for
+similar invectives? 'Pah! give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to
+sweeten my imagination'--it is a fainter echo of this exclamation that
+one seems to hear in the plays of those years. Of course I am not
+suggesting that it is mainly due, or as regards drunkenness due in the
+least, to any private experience of Shakespeare's. It may have no
+connection whatever with that experience. It might well be connected
+with it only in so far as a man frequently wearied and depressed might
+be unusually sensitive to the ugly aspects of life. But, if we do not
+take the second series of sonnets to be purely fanciful, we shall think
+it probable that to some undefined extent it owed its origin to the
+experience depicted in them.[13]
+
+There remain the sonnets addressed to the friend. Even if it were
+possible to discuss the general question about them here, it would be
+needless; for I accept almost wholly, and in some points am greatly
+indebted to, the views put forward by Mr. Beeching in his admirable
+edition, to which I may therefore refer my hearers.[14] I intend only to
+state the main reason why I believe the sonnets to be, substantially,
+what they purport to be, and then to touch upon one or two of the points
+where they seem to throw light on Shakespeare's personality.
+
+The sonnets to the friend are, so far as we know, unique in Renaissance
+sonnet literature in being a prolonged and varied record of the intense
+affection of an older friend for a younger, and of other feelings
+arising from their relations. They have no real parallel in any series
+imitative of Virgil's second Eclogue, or in occasional sonnets to
+patrons or patron-friends couched in the high-flown language of the
+time. The intensity of the feelings expressed, however, ought not, by
+itself, to convince us that they are personal. The author of the plays
+could, I make no doubt, have written the most intimate of these poems to
+a mere creature of his imagination and without ever having felt them
+except in imagination. Nor is there any but an aesthetic reason why he
+should not have done so if he had wished. But an aesthetic reason there
+is; and this is the decisive point. No capable poet, much less a
+Shakespeare, intending to produce a merely 'dramatic' series of poems,
+would dream of inventing a story like that of these sonnets, or, even if
+he did, of treating it as they treat it. The story is very odd and
+unattractive. Such capacities as it has are but slightly developed. It
+is left obscure, and some of the poems are unintelligible to us because
+they contain allusions of which we can make nothing. Now all this is
+perfectly natural if the story is substantially a real story of
+Shakespeare himself and of certain other persons; if the sonnets were
+written from time to time as the relations of the persons changed, and
+sometimes in reference to particular incidents; and if they were written
+_for_ one or more of these persons (far the greater number for only
+one), and perhaps in a few cases for other friends,--written, that is to
+say, for people who knew the details and incidents of which we are
+ignorant. But it is all unnatural, well-nigh incredibly unnatural, if,
+with the most sceptical critics, we regard the sonnets as a free product
+of mere imagination.[15]
+
+Assuming, then, that the persons of the story, with their relations, are
+real, I would add only two remarks about the friend. In the first place,
+Mr. Beeching seems to me right in denying that there is sufficient
+evidence of his standing to Shakespeare and the 'rival' poet or poets in
+the position of a literary patron; while, even if he did, it appears to
+me quite impossible to take the language of many of the sonnets as that
+of interested flattery. And in the second place I should be inclined to
+push even further Mr. Beeching's view on another point. It is clear that
+the young man was considerably superior to the actor-dramatist in social
+position; but any gentleman would be so, and there is nothing to prove
+that he was more than a gentleman of some note, more than plain 'Mr. W.
+H.' (for these, on the obvious though not compulsory interpretation of
+the dedication, seem to have been his initials). It is remarkable
+besides that, while the earlier sonnets show much deference, the later
+show very little, so little that, when the writer, finding that he has
+pained his young friend by neglecting him, begs to be forgiven, he
+writes almost, if not quite, as an equal. Read, for example, sonnets
+109, 110, 120, and ask whether it is probable that Shakespeare is
+addressing here a great nobleman. It seems therefore most likely (though
+the question is not of much importance) that the sonnets are, to quote
+Meres's phrase,[16] his 'sonnets among his private friends.'
+
+If then there is, as it appears, no obstacle of any magnitude to our
+taking the sonnets as substantially what they purport to be, we may
+naturally look in them for personal traits (and, indeed, to repeat a
+remark made earlier, we might still expect to find such traits even if
+we knew the sonnets to be purely dramatic). But in drawing inferences we
+have to bear in mind what is implied by the qualification
+'substantially.' We have to remember that _some_ of these poems may be
+mere exercises of art; that all of them are poems, and not letters, much
+less _affidavits_; that they are Elizabethan poems; that the Elizabethan
+language of deference, and also of affection, is to our minds habitually
+extravagant and fantastic;[17] and that in Elizabethan plays friends
+openly express their love for one another as Englishmen now rarely do.
+Allowance being made, however, on account of these facts, the sonnets
+will still leave two strong impressions--that the poet was exceedingly
+sensitive to the charm of beauty, and that his love for his friend was,
+at least at one time, a feeling amounting almost to adoration, and so
+intense as to be absorbing. Those who are surprised by the first of
+these traits must have read Shakespeare's dramas with very inactive
+minds, and I must add that they seem to be somewhat ignorant of human
+nature. We do not necessarily love best those of our relatives, friends,
+and acquaintances who please our eyes most; and we should look askance
+on anyone who regulated his behaviour chiefly by the standard of beauty;
+but most of us, I suppose, love any human being, of either sex and of
+any age, the better for being beautiful, and are not the least ashamed
+of the fact. It is further the case that men who are beginning, like the
+writer of the sonnets, to feel tired and old, are apt to feel an
+increased and special pleasure in the beauty of the young.[18] If we
+remember, in addition, what some critics appear constantly to forget,
+that Shakespeare was a particularly poetical being, we shall hardly be
+surprised that the beginning of this friendship seems to have been
+something like a falling in love; and, if we must needs praise and
+blame, we should also remember that it became a 'marriage of true
+minds.'[19] And as to the intensity of the feeling expressed in the
+sonnets, we can easily believe it to be characteristic of the man who
+made Valentine and Proteus, Brutus and Cassius, Horatio and Hamlet; who
+painted that strangely moving portrait of Antonio, middle-aged, sad, and
+almost indifferent between life and death, but devoted to the young,
+brilliant spendthrift Bassanio; and who portrayed the sudden compelling
+enchantment exercised by the young Sebastian over the Antonio of
+_Twelfth Night_. 'If you will not murder me for your love, let me be
+your servant.' Antonio is accused of piracy: he may lose his life if he
+is identified:
+
+  I have many enemies in Orsino's court,
+  But, come what may, I do adore thee so
+  That danger shall seem sport, and I will go.
+
+The adoration, the 'prostration,' of the writer of the sonnets is of one
+kind with this.
+
+I do not remember what critic uses the word 'prostration.' It applies to
+Shakespeare's attitude only in some of the sonnets, but there it does
+apply, unless it is taken to suggest humiliation. _That_ is the term
+used by Hallam, but chiefly in view of a particular point, namely the
+failure of the poet to 'resent,' though he 'felt and bewailed,' the
+injury done him in 'the seduction of his mistress.' Though I think we
+should substitute 'resent more strongly' for the mere 'resent,' I do not
+deny that the poet's attitude in this matter strikes us at first as
+surprising as well as unpleasant to contemplate. But Hallam's
+explanation of it as perhaps due to the exalted position of the friend,
+would make it much more than unpleasant; and his language seems to show
+that he, like many critics, did not fully imagine the situation. It is
+not easy to speak of it in public with the requisite frankness; but it
+is necessary to realise that, whatever the friend's rank might be, he
+and the poet were intimate friends; that, manifestly, it was rather the
+mistress who seduced the friend than the friend the mistress; and that
+she was apparently a woman not merely of no reputation, but of such a
+nature that she might readily be expected to be mistress to two men at
+one and the same time. Anyone who realises this may call the situation
+'humiliating' in one sense, and I cannot quarrel with him; but he will
+not call it 'humiliating' in respect of Shakespeare's relation to his
+friend; nor will he wonder much that the poet felt more pain than
+resentment at his friend's treatment of him. There is something
+infinitely stranger in a play of Shakespeare's, and it may be
+symptomatic. Ten Brink called attention to it. Proteus actually offers
+violence to Sylvia, a spotless lady and the true love of his friend
+Valentine; and Valentine not only forgives him at once when he professes
+repentance, but offers to resign Sylvia to him! The incident is to us so
+utterly preposterous that we find it hard to imagine how the audience
+stood it; but, even if we conjecture that Shakespeare adopted it from
+the story he was using, we can hardly suppose that it was so absurd to
+him as it is to us.[20] And it is not the Sonnets alone which lead us to
+surmise that forgiveness was particularly attractive to him, and the
+forgiveness of a friend much easier than resentment. From the Sonnets we
+gather--and there is nothing in the plays or elsewhere to contradict the
+impression--that he would not be slow to resent the criticisms,
+slanders, or injuries of strangers or the world, and that he bore
+himself towards them with a proud, if silent, self-sufficiency. But, we
+surmise, for anyone whom he loved
+
+  He carried anger as a flint bears fire;
+  Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark
+  And straight is cold again;
+
+and towards anyone so fondly loved as the friend of the Sonnets he was
+probably incapable of fierce or prolonged resentment.
+
+
+The Sonnets must not occupy us further; and I will not dwell on the
+indications they afford that Shakespeare sometimes felt bitterly both
+the social inferiority of his position as an actor,[21] and its
+influence on his own character; or that (as we have already conjectured)
+he may sometimes have played the fool in society, sometimes felt weary
+of life, and often was over-tired by work. It is time to pass on to a
+few hesitating conjectures about what may be called his tastes.
+
+Some passages of his about music have become household words. It is not
+downright impossible that, like Bottom, having only a reasonable good
+ear, he liked best the tongs and the bones; that he wondered, with
+Benedick, how sheeps-guts should hale souls out of men's bodies; and
+that he wrote the famous lines in the _Merchant of Venice_ and in
+_Twelfth Night_ from mere observation and imagination. But it is futile
+to deal with scepticism run well-nigh mad, and certainly inaccessible to
+argument from the cases of poets whose tastes are matter of knowledge.
+Assuming therefore that Shakespeare was fond of music, I may draw
+attention to two points. Almost always he speaks of music as having a
+softening, tranquillising, or pensive influence. It lulls killing care
+and grief of heart to sleep. It soothes the sick and weary, and even
+makes them drowsy. Hamlet calls for it in his hysterical excitement
+after the success of the play scene. When it is hoped that Lear's long
+sleep will have carried his madness away, music is played as he awakes,
+apparently to increase the desired 'temperance.' It harmonises with the
+still and moon-lit night, and the dreamy happiness of newly-wedded
+lovers. Almost all the rare allusions to lively or exciting music,
+apart from dancing, refer, I believe, to 'the lofty instruments of
+_war_.' These facts would almost certainly have a personal significance
+if Shakespeare were a more modern poet. Whether they have any, or have
+much, in an Elizabethan I do not venture to judge.
+
+The second point is diminutive, but it may be connected with the first.
+The Duke in _Measure for Measure_ observes that music often has
+
+                       a charm
+  To make bad good and good provoke to harm.
+
+If we ask how it should provoke good to harm, we may recall what was
+said (p. 326) of the weaknesses of some poetic natures, and that no one
+speaks more feelingly of music than Orsino; further, how he refers to
+music as 'the food of love,' and who it is that almost repeats the
+phrase.
+
+  Give me some music: music, moody food
+  Of us that trade in love:
+
+--the words are Cleopatra's.[22] Did Shakespeare as he wrote them
+remember, I wonder, the dark lady to whose music he had listened (Sonnet
+128)?
+
+We should be greatly surprised to find in Shakespeare signs of the
+nineteenth century feeling for mountain scenery, but we can no more
+doubt that within certain limits he was sensitive to the beauty of
+nature than that he was fond of music.[23] The only question is whether
+we can guess at any preferences here. It is probably inevitable that the
+flowers most often mentioned should be the rose and the lily;[24] but
+hardly that the violet should come next and not far behind, and that the
+fragrance of the violet should be spoken of more often even than that of
+the rose, and, it seems, with special affection. This may be a fancy,
+and it will be thought a sentimental fancy too; but poets, like other
+people, may have favourite flowers; that of Keats, we happen to know,
+was the violet.
+
+Again, if we may draw any conclusion from the frequency and the
+character of the allusions, the lark held for Shakespeare the place of
+honour among birds; and the lines,
+
+  Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
+    And Phoebus gins arise,
+
+may suggest one reason for this. The lark, as several other collocations
+show, was to him the bird of joy that welcomes the sun; and it can
+hardly be doubted that dawn and early morning was the time of day that
+most appealed to him. That he felt the beauty of night and of moonlight
+is obvious; but we find very little to match the lines in _Richard II._,
+
+  The setting sun, and music at the close,
+  As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last;
+
+and still less to prove that he felt the magic of evening twilight, the
+'heavenliest hour' of a famous passage in _Don Juan_. There is a
+wonderful line in Sonnet 132,
+
+  And that full star that ushers in the even,
+
+but I remember little else of the same kind. Shakespeare, as it happens,
+uses the word 'twilight' only once, and in an unforgetable passage:
+
+  In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
+  As after sunset fadeth in the west:
+  Which by and by black night doth take away,
+  Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
+
+And this feeling, though not often so solemn, is on the whole the
+prevailing sentiment in the references to sunset and evening twilight.
+It corresponds with the analogy between the times of the day and the
+periods of human life. The sun sets from the weariness of age; but he
+rises in the strength and freshness of youth, firing the proud tops of
+the eastern pines, and turning the hills and the sea into burnished
+gold, while jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops, and the
+lark sings at the gate of heaven. In almost all the familiar lines about
+dawn one seems to catch that 'indescribable gusto' which Keats heard in
+Kean's delivery of the words:
+
+  Stir with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk.
+
+Two suggestions may be ventured as to Shakespeare's feelings towards
+four-footed animals. The first must be very tentative. We do not expect
+in a writer of that age the sympathy with animals which is so beautiful
+a trait in much of the poetry of the last hundred and fifty years. And I
+can remember in Shakespeare scarcely any sign of _fondness_ for an
+animal,--not even for a horse, though he wrote so often of horses. But
+there are rather frequent, if casual, expressions of pity, in
+references, for example, to the hunted hare or stag, or to the spurred
+horse:[25] and it may be questioned whether the passage in _As You Like
+It_ about the wounded deer is quite devoid of personal significance. No
+doubt Shakespeare thought the tears of Jaques sentimental; but he put a
+piece of himself into Jaques. And, besides, it is not Jaques alone who
+dislikes the killing of the deer, but the Duke; and we may surely hear
+some tone of Shakespeare's voice in the Duke's speech about the life in
+the forest. Perhaps we may surmise that, while he enjoyed field-sports,
+he felt them at times to be out of tune with the harmony of nature.
+
+On the second point, I regret to say, I can feel no doubt. Shakespeare
+did not care for dogs, as Homer did; he even disliked them, as Goethe
+did. Of course he can write eloquently about the points of hounds and the
+music of their voices in the chase, and humorously about Launce's love
+for his cur and even about the cur himself; but this is no more
+significant on the one side than is his conventional use of 'dog' as a
+term of abuse on the other. What is significant is the absence of
+allusion, or (to be perfectly accurate) of sympathetic allusion, to the
+characteristic virtues of dogs, and the abundance of allusions of an
+insulting kind. Shakespeare has observed and recorded, in some instances
+profusely, every vice that I can think of in an ill-conditioned dog. He
+fawns and cringes and flatters, and then bites the hand that caressed
+him; he is a coward who attacks you from behind, and barks at you the
+more the farther off you go; he knows neither charity, humanity, nor
+gratitude; as he flatters power and wealth, so he takes part against the
+poor and unfashionable, and if fortune turns against you so does he.[26]
+The plays swarm with these charges. Whately's exclamation--uttered after
+a College meeting or a meeting of Chapter, I forget which--'The more I
+see of men, the more I like dogs,' would never have been echoed by
+Shakespeare. The things he most loathed in men he found in dogs too. And
+yet all this might go for nothing if we could set anything of weight
+against it. But what can we set? Nothing whatever, so far as I remember,
+except a recognition of courage in bear-baiting, bull-baiting mastiffs.
+For I cannot quote as favourable to the spaniel the appeal of Helena:
+
+  I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
+  The more you beat me I will fawn on you:
+  Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
+  Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
+  Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
+
+This may show that Shakespeare was alive to the baseness of a
+spaniel-owner, but not that he appreciated that self-less affection
+which he describes. It is more probable that it irritated him, as it
+does many men still; and, as for its implying fidelity, there is no
+reference, I believe, to the fidelity of the dog in the whole of his
+works, and he chooses the spaniel himself as a symbol of flattery and
+ingratitude: his Caesar talks of
+
+  Knee-crooked court'sies and base spaniel-fawning;
+
+his Antony exclaims:
+
+                              the hearts
+  That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave
+  Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
+  On blossoming Caesar.
+
+To all that he loved most in men he was blind in dogs. And then we call
+him universal!
+
+This line of research into Shakespeare's tastes might be pursued a good
+deal further, but we must return to weightier matters. We saw that he
+could sympathise with anyone who erred and suffered from impulse,
+affections of the blood, or even such passions as were probably no
+danger to himself,--ambition, for instance, and pride. Can we learn
+anything more about him by observing virtues or types of character with
+which he appears to feel little sympathy, though he may approve them? He
+certainly does not show this imperfect sympathy towards self-control; we
+seem to feel even a special liking for Brutus, and again for Horatio,
+who has suffered much, is quietly patient, and has mastered both himself
+and fortune. But, not to speak of coldly selfish natures, he seems
+averse to bloodless people, those who lack, or those who have deadened,
+the natural desires for joy and sympathy, and those who tend to be
+precise.[27] Nor does he appear to be drawn to men who, as we say, try
+to live or to act on principle; nor to those who aim habitually at
+self-improvement; nor yet to the saintly type of character. I mean, not
+that he _could_ not sympathise with them, but that they did not attract
+him. Isabella, in _Measure for Measure_, is drawn, of course, with
+understanding, but, it seems to me, with little sympathy. Her readiness
+to abandon her pleading for Claudio, out of horror at his sin and a
+sense of the justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing his pardon, is
+doubtless in character; but if Shakespeare had sympathised more with her
+at this point, so should we; while, as it is, we are tempted to exclaim,
+
+  She loves him not, she wants the natural touch;
+
+and perhaps if Shakespeare had liked her better and had not regarded her
+with some irony, he would not have allowed himself, for mere
+convenience, to degrade her by marrying her to the Duke. Brutus and
+Cordelia, on the other hand, are drawn with the fullest imaginative
+sympathy, and they, it may be said, are characters of principle; but
+then (even if Cordelia could be truly so described) they are also
+intensely affectionate, and by no means inhumanly self-controlled.
+
+The mention of Brutus may carry us somewhat farther. Shakespeare's
+Brutus kills Caesar, not because Caesar aims at absolute power, but
+because Brutus fears that absolute power may make him cruel. That is not
+Plutarch's idea, it is Shakespeare's. He could fully sympathise with the
+gentleness of Brutus, with his entire superiority to private aims and
+almost entire freedom from personal susceptibilities, and even with his
+resolution to sacrifice his friend; but he could not so sympathise with
+mere horror of monarchy or absolute power. And now extend this a little.
+Can you imagine Shakespeare an enthusiast for an 'idea'; a devotee of
+divine right, or the rights of Parliament, or any particular form of
+government in Church or State; a Fifth Monarchy man, or a Quaker, or a
+thick-and-thin adherent of any compact, exclusive, abstract creed, even
+if it were as rational and noble as Mazzini's? This type of mind, even
+at its best, is alien from his. Scott is said, rightly or wrongly, to
+have portrayed the Covenanters without any deep understanding of them;
+it would have been the same with Shakespeare. I am not praising him, or
+at least not merely praising him. One may even suggest that on this side
+he was limited. In any age he would have been safe against fanaticism
+and one-sided ideas; but perhaps in no age would he have been the man to
+insist with the necessary emphasis on those one-sided ideas which the
+moment may need, or even to give his whole heart to men who join a
+forlorn hope or are martyred for a faith. And though it is rash to
+suggest that anything in the way of imagination was beyond his reach,
+perhaps the legend of Faust, with his longings for infinite power and
+knowledge and enjoyment of beauty, would have suited him less well than
+Marlowe; and if he had written on the subject that Cervantes took, his
+Don Quixote would have been at least as laughable as the hero we know,
+but would he have been a soul so ideally noble and a figure so
+profoundly pathetic?
+
+This would be the natural place to discuss Shakespeare's politics if we
+were to discuss them at all. But even if the question whether he shows
+any interest in the political differences of his time, or any sympathies
+or antipathies in regard to them, admits of an answer, it could be
+answered only by an examination of details; and I must pass it by, and
+offer only the briefest remarks on a wider question. Shakespeare, as we
+might expect, shows no sign of believing in what is sometimes called a
+political 'principle.' The main ideas which, consciously or
+unconsciously, seem to govern or emerge from his presentation of state
+affairs, might perhaps be put thus. National welfare is the end of
+politics, and the criterion by which political actions are to be judged.
+It implies of necessity 'degree'; that is, differences of position and
+function in the members of the body politic.[28] And the first
+requisites of national welfare are the observance of this degree, and
+the concordant performance of these functions in the general interest.
+But there appear to be no further absolute principles than these: beyond
+them all is relative to the particular case and its particular
+conditions. We find no hint, for example, in _Julius Caesar_ that
+Shakespeare regarded a monarchical form of government as intrinsically
+better than a republican, or _vice versa_; no trace in _Richard II._
+that the author shares the king's belief in his inviolable right, or
+regards Bolingbroke's usurpation as justifiable. We perceive, again,
+pretty clearly in several plays a dislike and contempt of demagogues,
+and an opinion that mobs are foolish, fickle, and ungrateful. But these
+are sentiments which the most determined of believers in democracy, if
+he has sense, may share; and if he thinks that the attitude of
+aristocrats like Volumnia and Coriolanus is inhuman and as inexcusable
+as that of the mob, and that a mob is as easily led right as wrong and
+has plenty of good nature in it, he has abundant ground for holding that
+Shakespeare thought so too. That Shakespeare greatly liked and admired
+the typical qualities of the best kind of aristocrat seems highly
+probable; but then this taste has always been compatible with a great
+variety of political opinions. It is interesting but useless to wonder
+what his own opinions would have been at various periods of English
+history: perhaps the only thing we can be pretty sure of in regard to
+them is that they would never have been extreme, and that he would never
+have supposed his opponents to be entirely wrong.
+
+We have tried to conjecture the impulses, passions, and errors with
+which Shakespeare could easily sympathise, and the virtues and types of
+character which he may have approved without much sympathy. It remains
+to ask whether we can notice tendencies and vices to which he felt any
+special antipathy; and it is obvious and safe to point to those most
+alien to a gentle, open, and free nature, the vices of a cold and hard
+disposition, self-centred and incapable of fusion with others. Passing
+over, again, the plainly hideous forms or extremes of such vice, as we
+see them in characters like Richard III., Iago, Goneril and Regan, or
+the Queen in _Cymbeline_, we seem to detect a particular aversion to
+certain vices which have the common mark of baseness; for instance,
+servility and flattery (especially when deliberate and practised with a
+view to self-advancement), feigning in friendship, and ingratitude.
+Shakespeare's _animus_ against the dog arises from the attribution of
+these vices to him, and against them in men are directed the invectives
+which seem to have a personal ring. There appears to be traceable also a
+feeling of a special, though less painful, kind against unmercifulness.
+I do not mean, of course, cruelty, but unforgivingness, and even the
+tendency to prefer justice to mercy. From no other dramatic author,
+probably, could there be collected such prolonged and heart-felt praises
+of mercy as from Shakespeare. He had not at all strongly, I think, that
+instinct and love of justice and retribution which in many men are so
+powerful; but Prospero's words,
+
+                 they being penitent,
+  The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
+  Not a jot further,
+
+came from his heart. He perceived with extreme clearness the connection
+of acts with their consequences; but his belief that in this sense 'the
+gods are just' was accompanied by the strongest feeling that forgiveness
+ought to follow repentance, and (if I may so put it) his favourite
+petition was the one that begins 'Forgive us our trespasses.' To
+conclude, I have fancied that he shows an unusual degree of disgust at
+slander and dislike of censoriousness; and where he speaks in the
+Sonnets of those who censured him he betrays an exceptionally decided
+feeling that a man's offences are his own affair and not the
+world's.[29]
+
+Some of the vices which seem to have been particularly odious to
+Shakespeare have, we may notice, a special connection with prosperity
+and power. Men feign and creep and flatter to please the powerful and
+to win their own way to ease or power; and they envy and censure and
+slander their competitors in the race; and when they succeed, they are
+ungrateful to their friends and helpers and patrons; and they become
+hard and unmerciful, and despise and bully those who are now below them.
+So, perhaps, Shakespeare said to himself in those years when, as we
+imagine, melancholy and embitterment often overclouded his sky, though
+they did not obscure his faith in goodness and much less his
+intellectual vision. And prosperity and power, he may have added, come
+less frequently by merit than by those base arts or by mere fortune. The
+divorce of goodness and power was, to Shelley, the 'woe of the world';
+if we substitute for 'goodness' the wider word 'merit,' we may say that
+this divorce, with the evil bred by power, is to Shakespeare also the
+root of bitterness. This fact, presented in its extreme form of the
+appalling cruelty of the prosperous, and the heart-rending suffering of
+the defenceless, forms the problem of his most tremendous drama. We have
+no reason to surmise that his own sufferings were calamitous; and the
+period which seems to be marked by melancholy and embitterment was one
+of outward, or at least financial, prosperity; but nevertheless we can
+hardly doubt that he felt on the small scale of his own life the
+influence of that divorce of power and merit. His complaint against
+Fortune, who had so ill provided for his life, runs through the Sonnets.
+Even if we could regard as purely conventional the declarations that his
+verses would make his friend immortal, it is totally impossible that he
+can have been unaware of the gulf between his own gifts and those of
+others, or can have failed to feel the disproportion between his
+position and his mind. Hamlet had never experienced
+
+                       the spurns
+  That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
+
+and that make the patient soul weary of life; the man who had
+experienced them was the writer of Sonnet 66, who cried for death
+because he was tired with beholding
+
+              desert a beggar born,
+  And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
+
+--a beggarly soul flaunting in brave array. Neither had Hamlet felt in
+his own person 'the insolence of office'; but the actor had doubtless
+felt it often enough, and we can hardly err in hearing his own voice in
+dramatic expressions of wonder and contempt at the stupid pride of mere
+authority and at men's slavish respect for it. Two examples will
+suffice. 'Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar, and the
+creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of
+authority. A dog's obeyed in office': so says Lear, when madness has
+cleared his vision, and indignation makes the Timon-like verses that
+follow. The other example is almost too famous for quotation but I have
+a reason for quoting it:
+
+                   man, proud man,
+  Drest in a little brief authority,
+  Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
+  His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
+  Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
+  As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
+  Would all themselves laugh mortal.
+
+It is Isabella who says that; but it is scarcely in character;
+Shakespeare himself is speaking.[30]
+
+It is with great hesitation that I hazard a few words on Shakespeare's
+religion. Any attempt to penetrate his reserve on this subject may
+appear a crowning impertinence; and, since his dramas are almost
+exclusively secular, any impressions we may form must here be even more
+speculative than usual. Yet it is scarcely possible to read him much
+without such speculations; and there are at least some theories which
+may confidently be dismissed. It cannot be called absolutely impossible
+that Shakespeare was indifferent to music and to the beauty of Nature,
+and yet the idea is absurd; and in the same way it is barely possible,
+and yet it is preposterous, to suppose that he was an ardent and devoted
+atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic, and that all the indications to
+the contrary are due to his artfulness and determination not to get into
+trouble. There is no absurdity, on the other hand, nor of necessity
+anything hopeless, in the question whether there are signs that he
+belonged to this or that church, and was inclined to one mode of thought
+within it rather than to another. Only the question is scarcely worth
+asking for our present purpose, unless there is some reason to believe
+that he took a keen interest in these matters. Suppose, for example,
+that we had ground to accept a tradition that he 'died a papist,' this
+would not tell us much about him unless we had also ground to think that
+he lived a papist, and that his faith went far into his personality. But
+in fact we receive from his writings, it appears to me, a rather strong
+impression that he concerned himself little, if at all, with differences
+of doctrine or church government.[31] And we may go further. Have we not
+reason to surmise that he was not, in the distinctive sense of the word,
+a religious man--a man, that is to say, whose feelings and actions are
+constantly and strongly influenced by thoughts of his relation to an
+object of worship? If Shakespeare had been such a man, is it credible
+that we should find nothing in tradition or in his works to indicate the
+fact; and is it likely that we should find in his works some things
+that we do find there?[32]
+
+Venturing with much doubt a little farther I will put together certain
+facts and impressions without at once drawing any conclusion from them.
+Almost all the speeches that can be called pronouncedly religious and
+Christian in phraseology and spirit are placed in the mouths of persons
+to whom they are obviously appropriate, either from their position
+(_e.g._ bishops, friars, nuns), or from what Shakespeare found in
+histories (_e.g._ Henry IV., V., and VI.), or for some other plain
+reason. We cannot build, therefore, on these speeches in the least. On
+the other hand (except, of course, where they are hypocritical or
+politic), we perceive in Shakespeare's tone in regard to them not the
+faintest trace of dislike or contempt; nor can we find a trace anywhere
+of such feelings, or of irreverence, towards Christian ideas,
+institutions, or customs (mere humorous irreverence is not relevant
+here); and in the case of 'sympathetic' characters, living in Christian
+times but not in any decided sense religious, no disposition is visible
+to suppress or ignore their belief in, and use of, religious ideas. Some
+characters, again, Christian or heathen, who appear to be drawn with
+rather marked sympathy, have strong, if simple, religious convictions
+(e.g. Horatio, Edgar, Hermione); and in others, of whom so much can
+hardly be said, but who strike many readers, rightly or wrongly, as
+having a good deal of Shakespeare in them (_e.g._ Romeo and Hamlet), we
+observe a quiet but deep sense that they and other men are neither their
+own masters nor responsible only to themselves and other men, but are in
+the hands of 'Providence' or guiding powers 'above.'[33]
+
+To this I will add two remarks. To every one, I suppose, certain
+speeches sound peculiarly personal. Perhaps others may share my feeling
+about Hamlet's words:
+
+  There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
+  Rough-hew them how we will;
+
+and about those other words of his:
+
+  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy;
+
+and about the speech of Prospero ending, 'We are such stuff as dreams
+are made on.'[34] On the other hand, we observe that Hamlet seems to
+have arrived at that conviction as to the 'divinity' after reflection,
+and that, while he usually speaks as one who accepts the received
+Christian ideas, yet, when meditating profoundly, he appears to ignore
+them.[35] In the same way the Duke in _Measure for Measure_ is for the
+most part, and necessarily, a Christian; yet nobody would guess it from
+the great speech, 'Be absolute for death,' addressed by a supposed friar
+to a youth under sentence to die, yet containing not a syllable about a
+future life.[36]
+
+Without adducing more of the endless but baffling material for a
+conclusion, I will offer the result left on my mind, and, merely for the
+sake of brevity, will state it with hardly any of the qualifications it
+doubtless needs. Shakespeare, I imagine, was not, in the sense assigned
+to the word some minutes ago, a religious man. Nor was it natural to him
+to regard good and evil, better and worse, habitually from a theological
+point of view. But (this appears certain) he had a lively and serious
+sense of 'conscience,' of the pain of self-reproach and
+self-condemnation, and of the torment to which this pain might rise.[37]
+He was not in the least disposed to regard conscience as somehow
+illusory or a human invention, but on the contrary thought of it (I use
+the most non-committal phrase I can find) as connected with the power
+that rules the world and is not escapable by man. He realised very fully
+and felt very keenly, after his youth was past and at certain times of
+stress, the sufferings and wrongs of men, the strength of evil, the
+hideousness of certain forms of it, and its apparent incurability in
+certain cases. And he must sometimes have felt all this as a terrible
+problem. But, however he may have been tempted, and may have yielded, to
+exasperation and even despair, he never doubted that it is best to be
+good; felt more and more that one must be patient and must forgive;[38]
+and probably maintained unbroken a conviction, practical if not
+formulated, that to be good is to be at peace with that unescapable
+power. But it is unlikely that he attempted to theorise further on the
+nature of the power. All was for him, in the end, mystery; and, while we
+have no reason whatever to attribute to him a belief in the ghosts and
+oracles he used in his dramas, he had no inclination to play the spy on
+God or to limit his power by our notions of it. That he had dreams and
+ponderings about the mystery such as he never put into the mouths of
+actors I do not doubt; but I imagine they were no more than dreams and
+ponderings and movings about in worlds unrealised.
+
+Whether to this 'religion' he joined a more or less conventional
+acceptance of some or all of the usual Christian ideas, it is impossible
+to tell. There is no great improbability to me in the idea that he did
+not, but it is more probable to me that he did,--that, in fact, though
+he was never so tormented as Hamlet, his position in this matter was, at
+least in middle life (and he never reached old age), much like Hamlet's.
+If this were so it might naturally happen that, as he grew older and
+wearier of labour, and perhaps of the tumult of pleasure and thought and
+pain, his more personal religion, the natural piety which seems to gain
+in weight and serenity in the latest plays, came to be more closely
+joined with Christian ideas. But I can find no clear indications that
+this did happen; and though some have believed that they discovered
+these ideas displayed in full, though not explicitly, in the _Tempest_,
+I am not able to hear there more than the stream of Shakespeare's own
+'religion' moving with its fullest volume and making its deepest and
+most harmonious music.[39]
+
+This lecture must end, though its subject is endless, and I will touch
+on only one point more,--one that may to some extent recall and connect
+the scattered suggestions I have offered.
+
+If we were obliged to answer the question which of Shakespeare's plays
+contains, not indeed the fullest picture of his mind, but the truest
+expression of his nature and habitual temper, unaffected by special
+causes of exhilaration or gloom, I should be disposed to choose _As You
+Like It_. It wants, to go no further, the addition of a touch of Sir
+Toby or Falstaff, and the ejection of its miraculous conversions of
+ill-disposed characters. But the misbehaviour of Fortune, and the
+hardness and ingratitude of men, form the basis of its plot, and are a
+frequent topic of complaint. And, on the other hand, he who is reading
+it has a smooth brow and smiling lips, and a heart that murmurs,
+
+               Happy is your grace,
+  That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
+  Into so quiet and so sweet a style.
+
+And it is full not only of sweetness, but of romance, fun, humour of
+various kinds, delight in the oddities of human nature, love of modesty
+and fidelity and high spirit and patience, dislike of scandal and
+censure, contemplative curiosity, the feeling that in the end we are all
+merely players, together with a touch of the feeling that
+
+  Then is there mirth in heaven
+  When earthly things made even
+    Atone together.
+
+And, finally, it breathes the serene holiday mood of escape from the
+toil, competition, and corruption of city and court into the sun and
+shadow and peace of the country, where one can be idle and dream and
+meditate and sing, and pursue or watch the deer as the fancy takes one,
+and make love or smile at lovers according to one's age.[40]
+
+If, again, the question were put to us, which of Shakespeare's
+characters reveals most of his personality, the majority of those who
+consented to give an answer would answer 'Hamlet.' This impression may
+be fanciful, but it is difficult to think it wholly so, and, speaking
+for those who share it, I will try to trace some of its sources. There
+is a good deal of Shakespeare that is not in Hamlet. But Hamlet, we
+think, is the only character in Shakespeare who could possibly have
+composed his plays (though it appears unlikely, from his verses to
+Ophelia, that he could have written the best songs). Into Hamlet's mouth
+are put what are evidently Shakespeare's own views on drama and acting.
+Hamlet alone, among the great serious characters, can be called a
+humorist. When in some trait of another character we seem to touch
+Shakespeare's personality, we are frequently reminded of Hamlet.[41]
+When in a profound reflective speech we hear Shakespeare's voice, we
+usually hear Hamlet's too, and his peculiar humour and turns of phrase
+appear unexpectedly in persons otherwise unlike him and unlike one
+another. The most melancholy group of Sonnets (71-74) recalls Hamlet at
+once, here and there recalls even his words; and he and the writer of
+Sonnet 66 both recount in a list the ills that make men long for death.
+And then Hamlet 'was indeed honest and of an open and free nature';
+sweet-tempered and modest, yet not slow to resent calumny or injury; of
+a serious but not a melancholy disposition; and the lover of his friend.
+And, with these traits, we remember his poet ecstasy at the glory of
+earth and sky and the marvellous endowments of man; his eager
+affectionate response to everything noble or sweet in human nature; his
+tendency to dream and to live in the world of his own mind; his
+liability to sudden vehement emotion, and his admiration for men whose
+blood and judgment are better commingled; the overwhelming effect of
+disillusionment upon him; his sadness, fierceness, bitterness and
+cynicism. All this, and more: his sensitiveness to the call of duty; his
+longing to answer to it, and his anguish over his strange delay; the
+conviction gathering in his tortured soul that man's purposes and
+failures are divinely shaped to ends beyond his vision; his incessant
+meditation, and his sense that there are mysteries which no meditation
+can fathom; nay, even little traits like his recourse to music to calm
+his excitement, or his feeling on the one hand that the peasant should
+not tread on the courtier's heels, and on the other that the mere
+courtier is spacious in the possession of dirt--all this, I say,
+corresponds with our impression of Shakespeare, or rather of
+characteristic traits in Shakespeare, probably here and there a good
+deal heightened, and mingled with others not characteristic of
+Shakespeare at all. And if this is more than fancy, it may explain to us
+why Hamlet is the most fascinating character, and the most
+inexhaustible, in all imaginative literature. What else should he be, if
+the world's greatest poet, who was able to give almost the reality of
+nature to creations totally unlike himself, put his own soul straight
+into this creation, and when he wrote Hamlet's speeches wrote down his
+own heart?[42]
+
+1904.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning, who
+    in _At the Mermaid_ and _House_ wrote as though he imagined that
+    neither his own work nor Shakespeare's betrayed anything of the inner
+    man. But if we are to criticise those two poems as arguments, we must
+    say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we have
+    to choose between a self-revelation like Byron's and no
+    self-revelation at all, and that the relation between a poet and his
+    work is like that between the inside and the outside of a house.
+
+  [2] Almost all Shakespearean criticism, of course, contains something
+    bearing on our subject; but I have a practical reason for mentioning
+    in particular Mr. Frank Harris's articles in the _Saturday Review_
+    for 1898. A good many of Mr. Harris's views I cannot share, and I had
+    arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some
+    on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers. But I found in
+    them also valuable ideas which were quite new to me and would
+    probably be so to many readers. It is a great pity that the articles
+    are not collected and published in a book. [Mr. Harris has published,
+    in _The Man Shakespeare_, the substance of the articles, and also
+    matter which, in my judgment, has much less value.]
+
+  [3] He is apologising for an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet
+    of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer.
+
+  [4] It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not
+    played some kingly parts in sport (_i.e._ on the stage), he would
+    have been a companion for a king.
+
+  [5] Nor, _vice versa_, does the possession of these latter qualities
+    at all imply, as some writers seem to assume, the absence of the
+    former or of gentleness.
+
+  [6] Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to
+    assume this. His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare and
+    Jonson, in their wit combats, to an English man-of-war and a Spanish
+    great galleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating on the
+    reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses.
+
+  [7] See, for example, Act IV. Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in
+    the later tragedies.
+
+  [8] I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching's note on which seems to be
+    unquestionably right: 'There is no reference to the poet's profession
+    of player. The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of
+    society.' This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it
+    begins with 107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend,
+    though there are _also_ references to his profession and its effect
+    on his nature and his reputation. (By a slip Mr. Beeching makes the
+    neglect last for three years.)
+
+  [9] It is perhaps most especially in his rendering of the shock and
+    the effects of _disillusionment_ in open natures that we seem to feel
+    Shakespeare's personality. The nature of this shock is expressed in
+    Henry's words to Lord Scroop:
+
+                       I will weep for thee;
+      For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
+      Another fall of man.
+
+  [10] There is nothing of this semi-reality, of course, in the
+    _passion_ of love as portrayed, for example, in men so different as
+    Orlando, Othello, Antony, Troilus, whose love for Cressida resembles
+    that of Romeo for Juliet. What I have said of Romeo's 'love' for
+    Rosaline corresponds roughly with Coleridge's view; and, without
+    subscribing to all of Coleridge's remarks, I believe he was right in
+    finding an intentional contrast between this feeling and the passion
+    that displaces it (though it does not follow that the feeling would
+    not have become a genuine passion if Rosaline had been kind). Nor do
+    I understand the notion that Coleridge's view is refuted and even
+    rendered ridiculous by the mere fact that Shakespeare found the
+    Rosaline story in Brooke (Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines_, 7th ed.,
+    illustrative note 2). Was he compelled then to use whatever he found?
+    Was it his practice to do so? The question is always _why_ he used
+    what he found, and _how_. Coleridge's view of this matter, it need
+    hardly be said, is far from indisputable; but it must be judged by
+    our knowledge of Shakespeare's mind and not of his material alone. I
+    may add, as I have referred to Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare
+    made changes in the story he found; that it is arbitrary to assume
+    (not that it matters) that Coleridge, who read Steevens, was unaware
+    of Shakespeare's use of Brooke; and that Brooke was by no means a
+    'wretched poetaster.'
+
+  [11] _Hamlet_, _Measure for Measure_, _Othello_, _Troilus and
+    Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Timon of Athens_. See _Shakespearean
+    Tragedy_, pp. 79-85, 275-6. I should like to insist on the view there
+    taken that the tragedies subsequent to _Lear_ and _Timon_ do not show
+    the pressure of painful feelings.
+
+  [12] It is not implied that these scenes are certainly Shakespeare's;
+    but I see no sufficient ground for decisively rejecting them.
+
+  [13] That experience, certainly in part and probably wholly, belongs
+    to an earlier time, since sonnets 138 and 144 were printed in the
+    _Passionate Pilgrim_. But I see no difficulty in that. What bears
+    little fruit in a normal condition of spirits may bear abundant fruit
+    later, in moods of discouragement and exasperation induced largely by
+    other causes.
+
+  [14] _The Sonnets of Shakespeare with an Introduction and Notes._
+    Ginn & Co., 1904.
+
+  [15] I find that Mr. Beeching, in the Stratford Town edition of
+    Shakespeare (1907), has also urged these considerations.
+
+  [16] I do not mean to imply that Meres necessarily refers to the
+    sonnets we possess, or that all of these are likely to have been
+    written by 1598.
+
+  [17] A fact to be remembered in regard to references to the social
+    position of the friend.
+
+  [18] Mr. Beeching's illustration of the friendship of the sonnets
+    from the friendship of Gray and Bonstetten is worth pages of
+    argument.
+
+  [19] In 125 the poet repudiates the accusation that his friendship is
+    too much based on beauty.
+
+  [20] This does not imply that the Sonnets are as early as the _Two
+    Gentlemen of Verona_, and much less that they are earlier.
+
+  [21] This seems to be referred to in lines by John Davies of
+    Hereford, reprinted in Ingleby's _Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse_,
+    second edition, pp. 58, 84, 94. In the first of these passages, dated
+    1603 (and perhaps in the second, 1609), there are signs that Davies
+    had read Sonnet 111, a fact to be noted with regard to the question
+    of the chronology of the Sonnets.
+
+  [22] 'Mistress Tearsheet' too 'would fain hear some music,' and
+    'Sneak's noise' had to be sent for (2 _Henry IV._, II. iv. 12).
+
+  [23] It is tempting, though not safe, to infer from the _Tempest_ and
+    the great passage in _Pericles_ that Shakespeare must have been in a
+    storm at sea; but that he felt the poetry of a sea-storm is beyond
+    all doubt. Few moments in the reading of his works are more
+    overwhelming than that in which, after listening not without
+    difficulty to the writer of the first two Acts of _Pericles_,
+    suddenly, as the third opens, one hears the authentic voice:
+
+      Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
+      That wash both heaven and hell.... The seaman's whistle
+      Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
+      Unheard.
+
+    Knowing that this is coming, I cannot stop to read the Prologue to
+    Act III., though I believe Shakespeare wrote it. How it can be
+    imagined that he did more than touch up Acts I. and II. passes my
+    comprehension.
+
+    I may call attention to another point. Unless I mistake, there is
+    nothing in Shakespeare's authorities, as known to us, which
+    corresponds with the feeling of Timon's last speech, beginning,
+
+      Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
+      Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
+      Upon the beached verge of the salt flood:
+
+    a feeling made more explicit in the final speech of Alcibiades.
+
+  [24] The lily seems to be in almost all cases the Madonna lily. It is
+    very doubtful whether the lily of the valley is referred to at all.
+
+  [25] But there is something disappointing, and even estranging, in
+    Sonnet 50, which, promising to show a real sympathy, cheats us in the
+    end. I may observe, without implying that the fact has any personal
+    significance, that the words about 'the poor beetle that we tread
+    upon' are given to a woman (Isabella), and that it is Marina who
+    says:
+
+      I trod upon a worm against my will,
+      But I wept for it.
+
+  [26] Three times in one drama Shakespeare refers to this detestable
+    trait. See _Shakespearean Tragedy_, p. 268, where I should like to
+    qualify still further the sentence containing the qualification 'on
+    the whole.' Good judges, at least, assure me that I have admitted too
+    much against the dog.
+
+  [27] Nor can I recall any sign of liking, or even approval, of that
+    'prudent, _cautious_, self-control' which, according to a passage in
+    Burns, is 'wisdom's root.'
+
+  [28] The _locus classicus_, of course, is _Troilus and Cressida_, I.
+    iii. 75 ff.
+
+  [29] Of all the evils inflicted by man on man those chosen for
+    mention in the dirge in _Cymbeline_, one of the last plays, are the
+    frown o' the great, the tyrant's stroke, slander, censure rash.
+
+  [30] Having written these paragraphs, I should like to disclaim the
+    belief that Shakespeare was habitually deeply discontented with his
+    position in life.
+
+  [31] Allusions to puritans show at most what we take almost for
+    granted, that he did not like precisians or people hostile to the
+    stage.
+
+  [32] In the Sonnets, for example, there is an almost entire absence
+    of definitely religious thought or feeling. The nearest approach to
+    it is in Sonnet 146 ('Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth'),
+    where, however, there is no allusion to a divine law or judge.
+    According to Sonnet 129, lust in action is
+
+      The expense of spirit in a waste of shame;
+
+    but no word shows that it is also felt as alienation from God. It
+    must be added that in 108 and 110 there are references to the Lord's
+    Prayer and, perhaps, to the First Commandment, from which a decidedly
+    religious Christian would perhaps have shrunk. Of course I am not
+    saying that we can draw any _necessary_ inference from these facts.
+
+  [33] It is only this 'quiet but deep sense' that is significant. No
+    inference can be drawn from the fact that the mere belief in powers
+    above seems to be taken as a matter of course in practically all the
+    characters, good and bad alike. On the other hand there may well be
+    something symptomatic in the apparent absence of interest in
+    theoretical disbelief in such powers and in the immortality of the
+    soul. I have observed elsewhere that the atheism of Aaron does not
+    increase the probability that the conception of the character is
+    Shakespeare's.
+
+  [34] With the first compare, what to me has, though more faintly, the
+    same ring, Hermione's
+
+                      If powers divine
+      Behold our human actions, as they do:
+
+    with the second, Helena's
+
+      It is not so with Him that all things knows
+      As 'tis with us that square our guess by shows;
+      But most it is presumption in us when
+      The help of heaven we count the act of men:
+
+    followed soon after by Lafeu's remark:
+
+      They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons
+      to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless.
+      Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves
+      into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an
+      unknown fear.
+
+  [35] It is worth noting that the reference, which appears in the
+    First Quarto version of 'To be or not to be,' to 'an everlasting
+    judge,' disappears in the revised versions.
+
+  [36] The suggested inference, of course, is that this speech, thus
+    out of character, and Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' (though that is
+    in character), show us Shakespeare's own mind. It has force, I think,
+    but not compulsory force. The topics of these speeches are, in the
+    old sense of the word, commonplaces. Shakespeare may have felt, Here
+    is my chance to show what I can do with certain feelings and thoughts
+    of supreme interest to men of all times and places and modes of
+    belief. It would not follow from this that they are not 'personal,'
+    but any inference to a non-acceptance of received religious ideas
+    would be much weakened. ('All the world's a stage' is a patent
+    example of the suggested elaboration of a commonplace.)
+
+  [37] What actions in particular _his_ conscience approved and
+    disapproved is another question and one not relevant here.
+
+  [38] This does not at all imply to Shakespeare, so far as we see,
+    that evil is never to be forcibly resisted.
+
+  [39] I do not mean to reject the idea that in some passages in the
+    _Tempest_ Shakespeare, while he wrote them with a dramatic purpose,
+    also thought of himself. It seems to me likely. And if so, there
+    _may_ have been such a thought in the words,
+
+      And thence retire me to my Milan, where
+      Every third thought shall be my grave;
+
+    and also in those lines about prayer and pardon which close the
+    Epilogue, and to my ear come with a sudden effect of great
+    seriousness, contrasting most strangely with their context. If they
+    _had_ a grave and personal under-meaning it cannot have been intended
+    for the audience, which would take the prayer as addressed to itself.
+
+  [40] It may be added that _As You Like It_, though idyllic, is not so
+    falsely idyllic as some critics would make it. It is based, we may
+    roughly say, on a contrast between court and country; but those who
+    inhale virtue from the woodland are courtiers who bring virtue with
+    them, and the country has its churlish masters and unkind or uncouth
+    maidens.
+
+  [41] This has been strongly urged and fully illustrated by Mr.
+    Harris.
+
+  [42] It may be suggested that, in the catalogue above, I should have
+    mentioned that imaginative 'unreality' in love referred to on p. 326.
+    But I do not see in Hamlet either this, or any sign that he took
+    Ophelia for an Imogen or even a Juliet, though naturally he was less
+    clearly aware of her deficiencies than Shakespeare.
+
+    I may add, however, another item to the catalogue. We do not feel
+    that the problems presented to most of the tragic heroes could have
+    been fatal to Shakespeare himself. The immense breadth and clearness
+    of his intellect would have saved him from the fate of Othello,
+    Troilus, or Antony. But we do feel, I think, and he himself may have
+    felt, that he could not have coped with Hamlet's problem; and there
+    is no improbability in the idea that he may have experienced in some
+    degree the melancholia of his hero.
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE.
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE.
+
+
+Why should we concern ourselves with Shakespeare's theatre and audience?
+The vast majority of his readers since the Restoration have known
+nothing about them, and have enjoyed his plays enormously. And if they
+have enjoyed without fully understanding, it was for want of imagination
+and of knowledge of human nature, and not from ignorance of the
+conditions under which his plays were produced. At any rate, such
+ignorance does not exclude us from the _soul_ of Shakespearean drama,
+any more than from the soul of Homeric epic or Athenian tragedy; and it
+is the soul that counts and endures. For the rest, we all know that
+Shakespeare's time was rough, indecorous, and inexpert in regard to
+machinery; and so we are prepared for coarse speech and primitive
+stage-arrangements, and we make allowance for them without thinking
+about the matter. Antiquarians may naturally wish to know more; but what
+more is needed for intelligent enjoyment of the plays?
+
+I have begun with these questions because I sympathise with their
+spirit. Everything I am going to speak of in this lecture is
+comparatively unimportant for the appreciation of that which is most
+vital in Shakespeare; and if I were allowed my choice between an hour's
+inspection of a performance at the Globe and a glimpse straight into his
+mind when he was planning the _Tempest_, I should not hesitate which to
+choose. Nevertheless, to say nothing of the intrinsic interest of
+antiquarian knowledge, we cannot make a clear division between the soul
+and body, or the eternal and the perishable, in works of art. Nor can we
+lay the finger on a line which separates that which has poetic interest
+from that which has none. Nor yet can we assume that any knowledge of
+Shakespeare's theatre and audience, however trivial it may appear, may
+not help us to appreciate, or save us from misapprehending, the 'soul'
+of a play or a scene. If our own souls were capacious and vivid enough,
+every atom of information on these subjects, or again on the material he
+used in composing, would so assist us. The danger of devotion to such
+knowledge lies merely in our weakness. Research, though toilsome, is
+easy; imaginative vision, though delightful, is difficult; and we may be
+tempted to prefer the first. Or we note that in a given passage
+Shakespeare has used what he found in his authority; and we excuse
+ourselves from asking why he used it and what he made of it. Or we see
+that he has done something that would please his audience; and we
+dismiss it as accounted for, forgetting that perhaps it also pleased
+_him_, and that we have to account for _that_. Or knowledge of his stage
+shows us the stage-convenience of a scene; and we say that the scene was
+due to stage-convenience, as if the cause of a thing must needs be
+single and simple. Such errors provoke the man who reads his Shakespeare
+poetically, and make him blaspheme our knowledge. But we ought not to
+fall into them; and we cannot reject any knowledge that may help us into
+Shakespeare's mind because of the danger it brings.
+
+I cannot attempt to describe Shakespeare's theatre and audience, and
+much less to discuss the evidence on which a description must be based,
+or the difficult problems it raises. I must confine myself for the most
+part to a few points which are not always fully realised, or on which
+there is a risk of misapprehension.
+
+
+  1.
+
+Shakespeare, we know, was a popular playwright. I mean not only that
+many of his plays were favourites in his day, but that he wrote, mainly
+at least, for the more popular kind of audience, and that, within
+certain limits, he conformed to its tastes. He was not, to our
+knowledge, the author of masques composed for performance at Court or in
+a great mansion, or of dramas intended for a University or one of the
+Inns of Court; and though his company for some time played at the
+Blackfriars, we may safely assume that the great majority of his works
+were meant primarily for a common or 'public' theatre like the Globe.
+The broad distinction between a 'private' and a 'public' theatre is
+familiar, and I need only remind you that at the former, which was
+smaller, provided seats even in the area, and was nowhere open to the
+weather, the audience was more select. Accordingly, dramatists who
+express their contempt for the audience, and their disapproval of those
+who consult its tastes, often discriminate between the audiences at the
+private and public theatres, and reserve their unmeasured language for
+the latter. It was for the latter that Shakespeare mainly wrote; and it
+is pretty clear that Jonson, who greatly admired and loved him, was
+still of opinion that he condescended to his audience.[1]
+
+So far we seem to be on safe ground; and yet even here there is some
+risk of mistake. We are not to imagine that the audience at a private
+theatre (say the Blackfriars) accepted Jonson's dramatic theories,
+while the audience at the Globe rejected them; or that the one was
+composed chiefly of cultured and 'judicious' gentlemen, and the other of
+riotous and malodorous plebeians; and still less that Shakespeare tried
+to please the latter section in preference to the former, and was
+beloved by the one more than by the other. The two audiences must have
+had the same general character, differing only in degree. Neither of
+them accepted Jonson's theories, nor were the 'judicious' of one mind on
+that subject. The same play was frequently offered to both. Both were
+very mixed. The tastes to which objection was taken cannot have been
+confined to the mob. From our knowledge of human nature generally, and
+of the Elizabethan nobility and gentry in particular, we may be sure of
+this; and Jonson himself implies it. Nor is it credible that an
+appreciation of the best things was denied to the mob, which doubtless
+loved what we should despise, but appears also to have admired what we
+admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than most of us can stomach.
+Neither can these groundlings have formed the majority of the 'public'
+audience or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it was possible
+for dramatists (Shakespeare included) to say such rude things of them to
+their faces. We must not delude ourselves as to these matters; and in
+particular we must realise that the mass of the audience in both kinds
+of theatre must have been indifferent to the unities of time and place,
+and more or less so to improbabilities and to decorum (at least as we
+conceive it) both in manners and in speech; and that it must have liked
+excitement, the open exhibition of violent and bloody deeds, and the
+intermixture of seriousness and mirth. What distinguished the more
+popular audience, and the more popular section in it, was a higher
+degree of this indifference and this liking, and in addition a special
+fondness for certain sources of inartistic joy. The most prominent of
+these, perhaps, were noise; rant; mere bawdry; 'shews'; irrelevant
+songs, ballads, jokes, dances, and clownage in general; and, lastly,
+target-fighting and battles.[2]
+
+We may describe Shakespeare's practice in broad and general terms by
+saying that he neither resisted the wishes of his audience nor gratified
+them without reserve. He accepted the type of drama that he found, and
+developed it without altering its fundamental character. And in the same
+way, in particular matters, he gave the audience what it wanted, but in
+doing so gave it what it never dreamed of. It liked tragedy to be
+relieved by rough mirth, and it got the Grave-diggers in _Hamlet_ and
+the old countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_. It liked a 'drum and
+trumpet' history, and it got _Henry V._ It liked clowns or fools, and it
+got Feste and the Fool in _King Lear_. Shakespeare's practice was by no
+means always on this level, but this was its tendency; and I imagine
+that (unless perhaps in early days) he knew clearly what he was doing,
+did it deliberately, and, when he gave the audience poor stuff, would
+not seriously have defended himself. Jonson, it would seem, did not
+understand this position. A fool was a fool to him; and if a play could
+be called a drum and trumpet history it was at once condemned in his
+eyes. One can hardly doubt that he was alluding to the _Tempest_ and the
+_Winter's Tale_ when, a few years after the probable date of their
+appearance, he spoke of writers who 'make nature afraid in their plays,'
+begetting 'tales, tempests, and such like drolleries,' and bringing in
+'a servant-monster' or 'a nest of antiques.' Caliban was a 'monster,'
+and the London public loved to gape at monsters; and so, it appears,
+that wonderful creation was to Jonson something like the fat woman, or
+the calf with five legs, that we pay a penny to see at a fair. In fact
+(how could he fail to take the warning?) he saw Caliban with the eyes of
+Trinculo and Stephano. 'A strange fish!' says Trinculo: 'were I in
+England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday
+fool there but would give a piece of silver.' 'If I can recover him,'
+says Stephano, 'and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he's a
+present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's-leather.' Shakespeare
+understood his monster otherwise; but, I fancy, when Jonson fulminated
+at the Mermaid against Caliban, he smiled and said nothing.
+
+But my present subject is rather the tastes of the audience than
+Shakespeare's way of meeting them.[3] Let me give two illustrations of
+them which may have some novelty. His public, in the first place, dearly
+loved to see soldiers, combats, and battles on the stage. They swarm in
+some of the dramas a little earlier than Shakespeare's time, and the
+cultured dramatists speak very contemptuously of these productions, if
+not of Shakespeare's historical plays. We may take as an example the
+First Part of _Henry VI._, a feeble piece, to which Shakespeare probably
+contributed touches throughout, and perhaps one or two complete scenes.
+It appears from the stage directions (which may be defective, but cannot
+well be redundant) that in this one play there were represented a
+pitched battle of two armies, an attack on a city wall with
+scaling-ladders, two street-scuffles, four single combats, four
+skirmishes, and seven excursions. No genuine play of Shakespeare's, I
+suppose, is so military from beginning to end; and we know how in _Henry
+V._ he laments that he must disgrace the name of Agincourt by showing
+four or five men with vile and ragged foils
+
+  Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.
+
+Still he does show them; and his serious dramas contain such a profusion
+of combats and battles as no playwright now would dream of exhibiting.
+We expect these things perhaps in the English history-plays, and we
+find them in abundance there: but not there alone. The last Act in
+_Julius Caesar_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_, and
+_Cymbeline_; the fourth Act of _Antony and Cleopatra_; the opening Acts
+of _Coriolanus_,--these are all full of battle-scenes. If battle cannot
+be shown, it can be described. If it cannot be described, still soldiers
+can be shown, and twice in _Hamlet_ Fortinbras and his army march upon
+the stage.[4] At worst there can be street-brawls and single fights, as
+in _Romeo and Juliet_. In reading Shakespeare we scarcely realise how
+much of this kind is exhibited. In seeing him acted we do not fully
+realise it, for much of it is omitted. But beyond doubt it helped to
+make him the most popular dramatist of his time.
+
+If we examine Shakespeare's battles we shall observe a certain
+peculiarity, which is connected with the nature of his theatre and also
+explains the treatment of them in ours. In most cases he does not give a
+picture of two whole armies engaged, but makes a pair of combatants rush
+upon the stage, fight, and rush off again; and this pair is succeeded by
+a second, and perhaps by a third. This hurried series of single combats
+admitted of speech-making; perhaps it also gave some impression of the
+changes and confusion of a battle. Our tendency, on the other hand, is
+to contrive one spectacle with scenic effects, or even to exhibit one
+magnificent tableau in which nobody says a word. And this plan, though
+it has the advantage of getting rid of Shakespeare's poetry, is not
+exactly dramatic. It is adopted chiefly because the taste of our public
+is, or is supposed to be, less dramatic than spectacular, and because,
+unlike the Elizabethans, we are able to gratify such a taste. But there
+is another fact to be remembered here. Few playgoers now can appreciate
+a fencing-match, and much fewer a broad-sword and target fight. But the
+Elizabethan public went to see performances of this kind as we go to see
+cricket or football matches. They might watch them in the very building
+which at other times was used as a playhouse.[5] They could judge of the
+merit of the exhibition when Hotspur and Prince Henry fought, when
+Macduff 'laid on,' or when Tybalt and Mercutio used their rapiers. And
+this was probably another reason why Shakespeare's battles so often
+consist of single combats, and why these scenes were beloved by the
+simpler folk among his audience.
+
+Our second illustration concerns the popular appetite for musical and
+other sounds. The introduction of songs and dances[6] was censured as a
+corrupt gratification of this appetite. And so it was when the songs and
+dances were excessive in number, irrelevant, or out of keeping with the
+scene. I do not remember that in Shakespeare's plays this is ever the
+case; but, in respect of songs, we may perhaps take Marston's _Antonio
+and Mellida_ as an instance of abuse. For in each of the two Parts of
+that play there are directions for five songs; and, since not even the
+first lines of these songs are printed, we must suppose that the leader
+of the band, or the singing actor in the company, introduced whatever he
+chose. In addition to songs and dances, the musicians, at least in some
+plays, performed between the Acts; and the practice of accompanying
+certain speeches by low music--a practice which in some performances of
+Shakespeare now has become a pest--has the sanction of several
+Elizabethan playwrights, and (to a slight extent) of Shakespeare. It
+seems clear, for example, that in _Twelfth Night_ low music was played
+while the lovely opening lines ('That strain again') were being spoken,
+and also during a part of the dialogue preceding the song 'Come away,
+come away, death.' Some lines, too, of Lorenzo's famous speech about
+music in the _Merchant of Venice_ were probably accompanied; and there
+is a still more conspicuous instance in the scene where Lear wakes from
+his long sleep and sees Cordelia standing by his side.
+
+But, beyond all this, if we attend to the stage-directions we shall
+realise that in the serious plays of Shakespeare other musical sounds
+were of frequent occurrence. Almost always the ceremonial entrance of a
+royal person is marked by a 'flourish' or a 'sennet' on trumpets,
+cornets, or hautboys; and wherever we have armies and battles we find
+directions for drums, or for particular series of notes of trumpets or
+cornets appropriate to particular military movements. In the First Part
+of _Henry VI._, to take that early play again, we must imagine a dead
+march, two other marches, three retreats, three sennets, seven
+flourishes, eighteen alarums; and there are besides five directions for
+drums, one for a horn, and five for soundings, of a kind not specified,
+by trumpets. In the last three scenes of the first Act in
+_Coriolanus_--scenes containing less than three hundred and fifty
+lines--there are directions for a parley, a retreat, five flourishes,
+and eight alarums, with three, less specific, for trumpets, and four for
+drums. We find about twenty such directions in _King Lear_, and about
+twenty-five in _Macbeth_, a short play in which hautboys seem to have
+been unusually favoured.[7] It is evident that the audience loved these
+sounds, which, from their prevalence in passages of special kinds, seem
+to have been intended chiefly to stimulate excitement, and sometimes to
+heighten impressions of grandeur or of awe.
+
+But this is not all. Such purposes were also served by noises not
+musical. Four times in _Macbeth_, when the Witches appear, thunder is
+heard. It thunders and lightens at intervals through the storm-scenes in
+_King Lear_. Casca and Cassius, dark thoughts within them, walk the
+streets of Rome in a terrific thunderstorm. That loud insistent knocking
+which appalled Macbeth is repeated thrice at intervals while Lady
+Macbeth in vain endeavours to calm him, and five times while the Porter
+fumbles with his keys. The gate has hardly been opened and the murder
+discovered when the castle-bell begins its hideous alarum. The
+alarm-bell is used for the same purpose of intensifying excitement in
+the brawl that ruins Cassio, and its effect is manifest in Othello's
+immediate order, 'Silence that dreadful bell.' I will add but one
+instance more. In the days of my youth, before the melodrama audience
+dreamed of seeing chariot-races, railway accidents, or the infernal
+regions, on the stage, it loved few things better than the explosion of
+fire-arms; and its favourite weapon was the pistol. The Elizabethans had
+the same fancy for fire-arms, only they preferred cannon. Shakespeare's
+theatre was burnt down in 1613 at a performance of _Henry VIII._, not, I
+suppose, as Prynne imagined, by a Providence which shared his opinion of
+the drama, but because the wadding of a cannon fired during the play
+flew to the thatch of the roof and set it ablaze. In _Hamlet_
+Shakespeare gave the public plenty that they could not understand, but
+he made it up to them in explosions. While Hamlet, Horatio, and
+Marcellus are waiting for the Ghost, a flourish is heard, and then the
+roar of cannon. It is the custom to fire them when the King drinks a
+pledge; and this King drinks many. In the fencing-scene at the end he
+proposes to drink one for every hit scored by his beloved nephew; and
+the first hit is duly honoured by the cannon. Unexpected events
+prevented the celebration of the second, but the audience lost nothing
+by that. While Hamlet lies dying, a sudden explosion is heard.
+Fortinbras is coming with his army. And, as if that were not enough, the
+very last words of the play are, 'Go, bid the soldiers shoot,' and the
+very last sound of the performance is a peal of ordnance. Into this most
+mysterious and inward of his works, it would seem, the poet flung, as if
+in derision of his cultured critics, well-nigh every stimulant of
+popular excitement he could collect: 'carnal, bloody, and unnatural
+acts'; five deaths on the open stage, three appearances of a ghost, two
+of a mad woman, a dumb-show, two men raving and fighting in a grave at a
+funeral, the skulls and bones of the dead, a clown bandying jests with a
+prince, songs at once indecent and pathetic, marching soldiers, a
+fencing-match, then a litter of corpses, and explosions in the first Act
+and explosions in the last. And yet out of this sensational
+material--not in spite of it, but out of it--he made the most mysterious
+and inward of his dramas, which leaves us haunted by thoughts beyond the
+reaches of our souls; and he knew that the very audience that rejoiced
+in ghosts and explosions would listen, even while it was waiting for the
+ghost, to that which the explosion had suggested,--a general
+disquisition, twenty-five lines long, on the manner in which one defect
+may spoil a noble reputation. In this strange harmony of discords,
+surely unexampled before or since, we may see at a glance the essence of
+Elizabethan drama, of its poet, and of its audience.
+
+
+  2.
+
+We have been occupied so far with characteristics of the drama which
+reflect the more distinctively popular tastes objected to by critics
+like Jonson. We may now pass on to arrangements common to all public
+theatres, whether the play performed were Jonson's or Shakespeare's; and
+in the first instance to a characteristic common to the public and
+private theatres alike.
+
+As everyone knows, the female parts in stage-plays were taken by boys,
+youths, or men (a mask being sometimes worn in the last case). The
+indecorous Elizabethans regarded this custom almost entirely from the
+point of view of decorum and morality. And as to morality, no one, I
+believe, who examines the evidence, especially as it concerns the state
+of things that followed the introduction of actresses at the
+Restoration, will be very ready to dissent from their opinion. But it is
+often assumed as a matter beyond dispute that, on the side of dramatic
+effect, the Elizabethan practice was extremely unfortunate, if not
+downright absurd. This idea appears to me, to say the least,
+exaggerated. Our practice may be the better; for a few Shakespearean
+parts it _ought_ to be much better; but that, on the whole, it is
+decidedly so, or that the old custom had anything absurd about it, there
+seems no reason to believe. In the first place, experience in private
+and semi-private performances shows that female parts may be excellently
+acted by youths or men, and that the most obvious drawback, that of the
+adult male voice, is not felt to be nearly so serious as we might
+anticipate. For a minute or two it may call for a slight exertion of
+imagination in the audience; but there is no more radical error than to
+suppose that an audience finds this irksome, or to forget that the use
+of imagination at one point quickens it at other points, and so is a
+positive gain. And we have further to remember that the Elizabethan
+actor of female parts was no amateur, but a professional as carefully
+trained as an actress now; while dramatically he had this advantage over
+the actress, that he was regarded simply as a player, and not also as a
+woman with an attractive or unattractive person.[8]
+
+In the second place, if the current ideas on this subject were true,
+there would be, it seems to me, more evidence of their truth. We should
+find, for example, that when first the new fashion came in, it was hailed
+by good judges as a very great improvement on the old. But the traces of
+such an opinion appear very scanty and doubtful, while it is certain that
+one of the few actors who after the Restoration still played female parts
+maintained a high reputation and won great applause. Again, if these
+parts in Shakespeare's day were very inadequately performed, would not
+the effect of that fact be distinctly visible in the plays themselves?
+The roles in question would be less important in Shakespeare's dramas,
+for example, than in dramas of later times: but I do not see that they
+are. Besides, in the Shakespearean play itself the female parts would be
+much less important than the male: but on the whole they are not. In the
+tragedies and histories, it is true, the impelling forces of the action
+usually belong in larger measure to men than to women. But that is
+because the action in such plays is laid in the sphere of public life;
+and in cases where, in spite of this, the heroine is as prominent as the
+hero, her part--the part of Juliet, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth--certainly
+requires as good acting as his. As to the comedies, if we ask ourselves
+who are the central or the most interesting figures in them, we shall
+find that we pronounce a woman's name at least as often as a man's. I
+understate the case. Of Shakespeare's mature comedies the _Merchant of
+Venice_, I believe, is the only one where this name would unquestionably
+be a man's, and in three of the last five it would almost certainly be a
+woman's--Isabella's, Imogen's, Hermione's. How shall we reconcile with
+these facts the idea that in his day the female parts were, on the whole,
+much less adequately played than the male? And finally, if the dramatists
+themselves believed this, why do we not find frequent indications of the
+belief in their prologues, epilogues, prefaces, and plays?[9]
+
+We must conclude, it would seem, that the absence of actresses from the
+Elizabethan theatre, though at first it may appear to us highly
+important, made no great difference to the dramas themselves.
+
+
+  3.
+
+That certainly cannot be said of the construction and arrangements of
+the stage. On this subject a great deal has been written of late years,
+and as regards many details there is still much difference of
+opinion.[10] But fortunately all that is of great moment for our present
+purpose is tolerably certain. In trying to bring it out, I will begin by
+reminding you of our present stage. For it is the stage, and not the
+rest of the theatre, that is of special interest here; and no serious
+harm will be done if, for the rest, we imagine Shakespeare's theatre
+with boxes, circles, and galleries like our own, though in the shape of
+a more elongated horse-shoe than ours. We must imagine, of course, an
+area too; but there, as we shall see, an important difference comes in.
+
+
+Our present stage may be called a box with one of its sides knocked out.
+Through this opening, which has an ornamental frame, we look into the
+box. Its three upright sides (for we may ignore the bottom and the top)
+are composed of movable painted scenes, which are changed from time to
+time during the course of the play. Before the play and after it the
+opening is blocked by a curtain, dropped from the top of the frame; and
+this is also dropped at intervals during the performance, that the
+scenes may be changed.
+
+In all these respects the Elizabethan arrangement was quite different.
+The stage came forward to about the middle of the area; so that a line
+bisecting the house would have coincided with the line of footlights, if
+there had been such things. The stage was therefore a platform viewed
+from both sides and not only from the front; and along its sides, as
+well as in front of it, stood the people who paid least, the
+groundlings, sometimes punningly derided by dramatists as 'the men of
+understanding.' Obviously, the sides of this platform were open; nor
+were there movable scenes even at the back of it; nor was there any
+front curtain. It was overshadowed by a projecting roof; but the area,
+or 'yard,' where the groundlings stood, was open to the weather, and
+accordingly the theatre could not be darkened. It will be seen that,
+when the actors were on the forward part of the stage, they were (to
+exaggerate a little) in the middle of the audience, like the performers
+in a circus now. And on this forward naked part of the stage most of a
+Shakespearean drama was played. We may call it the main or front
+stage.[11]
+
+If now we look towards the rear of this stage, what do we find? In the
+first place, while the back of our present-day box consists of a
+movable scene, that of the Elizabethan stage was formed by the
+'tiring-house,' or dressing-room, of the actors. In its wall were two
+doors, by which entrances and exits were made. But it was not merely a
+tiring-house. In the play it might represent a room, a house, a castle,
+the wall of a town; and the doors played their parts accordingly. Again,
+when a person speaks 'from within,' that doubtless means that he is in
+the tiring-house, opens one of the doors a little, and speaks through
+the chink. So apparently did the prompter.
+
+Secondly, on the top of the tiring-house was the 'upper stage' or
+'balcony,' which looked down on the platform stage. It is hardly
+possible to make brief statements about it that would be secure. For our
+purposes it may be imagined as a balcony jutting forward a little from
+the line of the tiring-house; and it will suffice to add that, though
+the whole or part of it was on some occasions, or in some theatres,
+occupied by spectators, the whole or part of it was sometimes used by
+the actors and was indispensably requisite to the performance of the
+play. 'Enter above' or 'enter aloft' means that the actor was to appear
+on this upper stage or balcony. Usually, no doubt, he reached it by a
+ladder or stair inside the tiring-house; but on occasions there were
+ascents or descents directly from, or to, the main stage, as we see from
+'climbs the tree and is received above' or 'the citizens leap from the
+walls.' The reader of Shakespeare will at once remember many scenes
+where the balcony was used. On it, as the city wall, appeared the
+Governor and citizens of Harfleur, while King Henry and his train stood
+before the gates below. From it Arthur made his fatal leap. It was
+Cleopatra's monument, into which she and her women drew up the dying
+Antony. Juliet talked to Romeo from it; and from it Romeo ('one kiss and
+I'll descend') 'goeth down' to the main stage. Richard appeared there
+between the two bishops; and there the spectators imagined Duncan
+murdered in his sleep.[12] But they could not look into his chamber. The
+balcony could be concealed by curtains, running, like all Elizabethan
+stage curtains, on a rod.
+
+In the third place, there was, towards the back of the main stage, a
+part that could be curtained off, and so separated from the front part
+of that stage. Let us call it the back stage. It is the matter about
+which there is most difficulty and controversy; but the general
+description just given would be accepted by almost all scholars and will
+suffice for us. Here was the curtain (more strictly, the curtains)
+through which the actors peeped at the audience before the play began,
+and at which the groundlings hurled apples and other missiles to hasten
+their coming or signify disapproval of them. And this 'back stage' was
+essential to many performances, and was used in a variety of ways. It
+was the room where Henry IV. lay dying; the cave of Timon or of
+Belarius; probably the tent in which Richmond slept before the battle of
+Bosworth; the cell of Prospero, who draws the curtains apart and shows
+Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess within; and here, I imagine, and
+not on the balcony, Juliet, after drinking the potion, 'falls upon her
+bed within the curtains.'[13] Finally, the back stage accounts for those
+passages where, at the close of a death-scene, there is no indication
+that the corpse was carried off the stage. If the death took place on
+the open stage, as it usually did, this of course was necessary, since
+there was no front curtain to drop; and so we usually find in the
+dialogue words like 'Take up the bodies' (_Hamlet_), or 'Bear them from
+hence' (_King Lear_). But Desdemona was murdered in her bed on the back
+stage; and there died also Othello and Emilia; so that Lodovico orders
+the bodies to be 'hid,' not carried off. The curtains were drawn
+together, and the dead actors withdrew into the tiring-house unseen,[14]
+while the living went off openly.
+
+This triple stage is the primary thing to remember about Shakespeare's
+theatre: a platform coming well forward into the yard, completely open
+in the larger front part, but having further back a part that could be
+curtained off, and overlooked by an upper stage or balcony above the
+tiring-house. Only a few further details need be mentioned. Though
+scenery was unknown, there were plenty of properties, as may be gathered
+from the dramas and, more quickly, from the accounts of Henslowe, the
+manager of the Rose. Chairs, benches, and tables are a matter of course.
+Kent sat in the stocks. The witches had a caldron. Imogen slept in a
+bed, and Iachimo crept out of his trunk in her room. Falstaff was
+carried off the stage in a clothes-basket. I have quoted the direction
+'climb the tree.' A 'banquet' figures in Henslowe's list, and in the
+_Tempest_ 'several strange shapes' bring one in. He mentions a 'tomb,'
+and it is possible, though not likely, that the tomb of the Capulets was
+a property; and he mentions a 'moss-bank,' doubtless such as that where
+the wild thyme was blowing for Titania. Her lover, you remember, wore an
+ass's head, and the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_ a buck's. There were
+whole animals, too. 'A great horse with his legs' is in Henslowe's
+list; and in a play not by Shakespeare Jonah is cast out of the whale's
+belly on to the stage. Besides these properties there was a contrivance
+with ropes and pulleys, by which a heavenly being could descend from the
+stage-roof (the 'heaven'), as in _Cymbeline_ Jupiter descends upon his
+eagle. When his speech is over we find the direction 'ascends.' Soon
+after comes another direction: 'vanish.' This is addressed not to
+Jupiter but to various ghosts who are present. For there was a hollow
+space under the stage, and a trap-door into it. Through this ghosts
+usually made their entrances and exits; and 'vanish' seems commonly to
+mean an exit that way. Through it, too, arose and sank the witches'
+caldron and the apparitions shown to Macbeth. A person could speak from
+under the stage, as the Ghost does when Hamlet calls him 'old mole'; and
+the musicians could go and play there, as they do in the scene where
+Antony's soldiers hear strange music on the night before the battle;
+'Musicke of the Hoboyes is under the Stage' the direction runs
+('Hoboyes' were used also in the witch-scene just mentioned).
+
+
+  4.
+
+We have now to observe certain ways in which this stage with its
+arrangements influenced the dramas themselves; and we shall find that
+the majority of these influences are connected with the absence of
+scenery. In this, to begin with, lies the main, though not the whole,
+explanation of the shortness of the performance. In our Shakespeare
+revivals the drama is always considerably cut down; and yet, even where
+no excessive prominence is given to scenic display, the time occupied is
+seldom less than three hours, and often a good deal more. In
+Shakespeare's day, as we gather from various sources (_e.g._ from the
+Prologues to _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Henry VIII._), the customary time
+taken by the un-shortened play was about two hours. And the chief reason
+of this great difference obviously is that the time which we spend in
+setting and changing scenes his company spent in acting the piece. At a
+given signal certain characters appeared. Unless a placard announced the
+place where they were supposed to be,[15] the audience gathered this
+from their conversation, or in the absence of such indications asked no
+questions on the subject. They talked for a time and went away; and at
+once another set appeared. The intervals between the acts (if intervals
+there were, and however they were occupied) had no purpose connected
+with scene-changing, and must have been short; and the introduction and
+removal of a few properties would take next to no time from the
+performance.[16] We may safely assume that not less than a hundred of
+the hundred and twenty minutes were given to the play itself.
+
+The absence of scenery, however, will not wholly account for the
+difference in question. If you take a Shakespearean play of average
+length and read it at about the pace usual in our revivals, you will
+find, I think, that you have occupied considerably more than a hundred
+or a hundred and twenty minutes.[17] The Elizabethan actor can hardly
+have spoken so slowly. Probably the position of the stage, and
+especially of the front part of it where most of the action took place,
+was of advantage to him in this respect. Standing almost in the middle
+of his audience, and at no great distance from any section of it, he
+could with safety deliver his lines much faster than an actor can now.
+He could speak even a 'passionate' speech 'trippingly on the tongue.'
+Hamlet bids him do so, warns him not to mouth, and, when the time for
+his speech comes, calls impatiently to him to leave his damnable faces
+and begin; and this is not the only passage in Elizabethan literature
+which suggests that good judges objected to a slow and over-emphatic
+delivery. We have some actors not inferior in elocution, we must
+presume, to Burbage or Taylor, but even Mr. Vezin or Mr. Forbes
+Robertson may find it difficult to deliver blank verse intelligibly,
+musically, and rapidly out of our stage-box.[18]
+
+I return to the absence of scenery, which even in this matter must be
+more important than the position of the stage or the preference for
+rapid speech. It explains, secondly, the great difference between
+Elizabethan and more modern plays in the number of the scenes.[19] This
+number, with Shakespeare, averages somewhere about twenty: it reaches
+forty-two in _Antony and Cleopatra_, and sinks to nine in _Love's
+Labour's Lost_, the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, and the _Tempest_. In the
+fourth act of the first of these plays there are thirteen scenes, no one
+of them in the same place as the next. The average number in Schiller's
+plays seems to be about eight. In plays written now it corresponds not
+unfrequently with the number of acts.[20] The primary cause of this
+difference, though not the only one, is, I presume, that we expect to
+see appropriate surroundings, at the least, for every part of the
+story. Such surroundings mean more or less elaborate scenery, which,
+besides being expensive, takes a long time to set and change. For a
+dramatist accordingly who is a dramatist and wishes to hold his audience
+by the play itself, it is an advantage to have as few scenes as may be.
+And so the absence of scenery in Shakespeare's day, and its presence in
+ours, result in two totally different systems, not merely of theatrical
+effect, but of dramatic construction.
+
+In certain ways it was clearly an advantage to a playwright to be able
+to produce a large number of scenes, varying in length according to his
+pleasure, and separated by almost inappreciable intervals. Nor could
+there be any disadvantage in this freedom, if he had a strong feeling
+for dramatic construction, and a gift for it, and a determination to
+construct as well as he could. But, as a matter of fact, many, perhaps
+the majority, of the pre-Shakespearean dramas are put together very
+loosely; scene follows scene in the manner of a casual narrative rather
+than a play; and a good deal is admitted for the sake of its immediate
+attraction and not because it is essential to the plot. The freedom
+which we are considering, though it could not necessitate these defects,
+gave the widest scope for them; the majority of the audience probably
+was, and continued to be, well-nigh indifferent to them; and a large
+proportion of the plays of Shakespeare's time exhibits them in some
+degree. The average drama of that day has great merits of a strictly
+dramatic kind, but it is not well-built, it is not what we mean by 'a
+good play'; and if we look at it from the restricted point of view
+implied by that phrase we shall be inclined, I think, to believe that it
+would have been a better play if its author had been compelled by the
+stage-arrangements to halve the number of the scenes. These remarks will
+hold of Shakespeare himself. Some of his most delightful dramas,
+indeed,--for instance, the two Parts of _Henry IV._--make little or no
+pretence to be well-constructed wholes; and even in those which fully
+deserve that title a certain amount of matter not indispensable to the
+plot is usually to be found. In point of construction _Othello_ is the
+best of his tragedies, _Julius Caesar_ better than _King Lear_, and
+_Antony and Cleopatra_ perhaps the faultiest. To say that this depends
+solely on the number of scenes would be ridiculous, but still it is
+probably significant that the numbers are, respectively, fifteen,
+eighteen, twenty-one, and forty-two.
+
+The average Elizabethan play could not, of course, have been converted
+into a well-built fabric by a _mere_ reduction of the number of its
+scenes; and in some cases no amount of rearrangement of the whole
+material employed could have produced this result. This means, however,
+on the other hand, that the Elizabethans, partly from the very
+simplicity of their theatrical conditions, were able to handle with
+decided, though usually imperfect, dramatic effect subjects which would
+present difficulties still greater, if not insuperable, to a playwright
+now. And in Shakespeare we can trace, in this respect and in others, the
+advantages connected with the absence of scenery. He could carry his
+audience freely from one country, town, house or room, to another, or
+from this part of a battle-field to that, because the audience imagined
+each place and saw none. I take an extreme example. The Third Act of
+_Antony and Cleopatra_, according to modern editions, contains thirteen
+scenes, and these are the localities assigned to them: (1) a plain in
+Syria, (2) Rome, an ante-chamber in Caesar's house, (3) Alexandria,
+Cleopatra's palace, (4) Athens, a room in Antony's house, (5) the same,
+another room, (6) Rome, Caesar's house, (7) near Actium, Antony's camp,
+(8) a plain near Actium, (9) another part of the plain, (10) another
+part of the plain, (11) Alexandria, Cleopatra's palace, (12) Egypt,
+Caesar's camp, (13) Alexandria, Cleopatra's palace. I wonder how long
+this Act would take on our stage, where each locality must be
+represented. Three hours perhaps, of which the performance might occupy
+one-eighth. But in Shakespeare's day there was no occasion for any
+stage-direction as to locality throughout the Act.
+
+Again, Shakespeare's method of working a double plot depends largely on
+his ability to bring the persons belonging to the two plots on to the
+stage in alternate scenes of no great length until the threads are
+combined. This is easily seen in _King Lear_; and there we can observe,
+further, how he varies the pitch of feeling and provides relief by
+interposing short quiet scenes between longer exciting ones. By this
+means, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the Storm-scene on the heath,
+which if undivided would be intolerable, is broken into three, separated
+by very short duologues spoken within the Castle and in prose. Again,
+since scene follows scene without a pause, he could make one tell on
+another in the way either of intensification or of contrast. We catch
+the effect in reading, but in our theatres it is usually destroyed by
+the interval. Finally, however many scenes an Act may contain,
+Shakespeare can keep attention glued to the play throughout the Act,
+because there are no intervals. So can our playwrights, because they
+have but one or two scenes in the Act. But in our reproductions of
+Shakespeare, though the number of scenes is reduced, it can scarcely
+ever be reduced to that extent; so that several times during an Act, and
+many times during the play, we are withdrawn perforce from the dramatic
+atmosphere into that of everyday life, solitary impatience or ennui,
+distracting conversation, third-rate music, or, occasionally, good music
+half-drowned in a babble of voices.
+
+If we consider the characteristics on which I have been dwelling, and
+bear in mind also the rapidity of speech which we have found to be
+probable, we shall realise that a performance in Shakespeare's day,
+though more of the play was performed, must have been something much
+more variegated and changeful, and much lighter in movement, than a
+revival now. And this difference will have been observed by those who
+have seen Shakespeare acted by the Elizabethan Stage Society, under the
+direction of Mr. Poel, who not only played scene after scene without
+intervals, but secured in a considerable degree that rapidity of speech.
+
+A minor point remains. The Elizabethan stage, we have seen, had no front
+curtain. The front curtain and the use of scenery naturally came in
+together, for the second, so far as the front stage was concerned, was
+dependent on the first; and as we have already glanced at some effects
+of the absence of the second, that of the first will require but a few
+additional words. It was clearly in some ways a great disadvantage; for
+every situation at the front of the stage had to be begun and ended
+before the eyes of the audience. In our dramas the curtain may rise on a
+position which the actors then had to produce by movements not really
+belonging to the play; and, what is more important, the scene may
+advance to a striking climax, the effect of which would be greatly
+diminished and sometimes destroyed if the actors had to leave the stage
+instead of being suddenly hidden. In Elizabethan plays, accordingly, we
+seldom meet with this kind of effect, though it is not difficult to
+discover places where it would have been appropriate. But we shall not
+find them, I venture to think, in tragedies. This effect, in other
+words, appears properly to belong to comedy and to melodrama (if that
+species of play is to be considered here at all); and the Elizabethans
+lost nothing by their inability to misuse it in tragedy, and especially
+at the close of a tragedy. Whether it can be artistic to end any
+serious scene whatever at the point of greatest tension seems doubtful,
+but surely it is little short of barbarous to drop the curtain on the
+last dying words, or, it may be, the last convulsion, of a tragic hero.
+In tragedy the Elizabethan practice, like the Greek, was to lower the
+pitch of emotion from this point by a few quiet words, followed perhaps
+by sounds which, in intention at least, were majestic or solemn, and so
+to restore the audience to common life 'in calm of mind, all passion
+spent.' Thus Shakespeare's tragedies always close; and the end of
+Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_ is not _Exeunt Devils with Faustus_, but the
+speech beginning
+
+  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
+  And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough,
+  That sometime grew within this learned man.
+
+In this particular case Marlowe, if he had not been a poet, might have
+dispensed with the final descent, or ascent, from the violent emotions
+attending the catastrophe; but in the immense majority of their
+tragedies the Elizabethans, even if they had wished to do as we too
+often do, were saved from the temptation by the absence of a front
+curtain.[21]
+
+
+  5.
+
+Hitherto we have not considered a Shakespearean performance on the side,
+I will not say of its spectacular, but of its pictorial effect. This
+must be our last subject. We have to bear in mind here three things: the
+fact that the stage was viewed from three sides, its illumination by
+daylight throughout the play, and the absence of scenery. It is obvious
+that the last two deprived the audience of many attractive or impressive
+pictures; while, as to the first, it seems unlikely that actors who were
+watched from the sides as well as the front would study to group
+themselves as parts of a composition addressed to the eye. Indeed one
+may doubt whether, except in regard to costume, they seriously attended
+to the pictorial effect of a drama at all; their tiny crowds and armies,
+for example, cannot have provided much of a show. And in any case it is
+clear that the audience had to dispense with many more or less beautiful
+sights that we may now enjoy. But the question whether their loss was,
+on the whole, a disadvantage is not so easy to answer; for here again it
+freed them from a temptation--that of sacrificing dramatic to pictorial
+effect; and we cannot tell whether, or how far, they would have been
+proof against its influence. Let us try, however, to see the position
+clearly.
+
+The essence of drama--and certainly of Shakespearean drama--lies in
+actions and words expressive of inward movements of human nature.
+Pictorial effects (if for convenience' sake the various matters under
+consideration may be signified by that phrase) are in themselves no more
+dramatic than songs, dances, military music, or the jests of a 'fool.'
+Like these other things, they may be made dramatic. They may be used and
+apprehended, that is to say, as elements fused with the essential
+elements of dramatic effect. And, so far as this is the case and they
+thus contribute to that effect, they are, it seems clear, an unmixed
+advantage. But a distinct and separate attention to them is another
+matter; for, the moment it sets in, attention begins to be withdrawn
+from the actions and words, and therefore from the inward movements that
+these express. And experience shows that, as soon as pictorial
+attractions exceed a certain limit, impossible to specify in general
+terms, they at once influence the average play-goer in this mischievous
+way. It is, further, well-nigh inevitable that this should happen.
+However interesting the actions, words, and inward movements may be,
+they call for some effort of imagination and of other mental
+activities,[22] while stage-pictures demand very little; and
+accordingly, at the present time at any rate, the bulk of an audience to
+which the latter are abundantly presented will begin to enjoy them for
+their own sakes, or as parts of a panorama and not of a drama. No one, I
+think, can honestly doubt this who watches and listens to the people
+sitting near him at what the newspapers too truly call 'an amazing
+Shakespearean spectacle.' If we are offered a pretty picture of the
+changing colours of the sky at dawn, or of a forest glade with deer
+miraculously moving across its sunny grass, most of us cease for the
+time to be an audience and become mere spectators; and let Romeo and
+Juliet, or Rosalind and Orlando, talk as like angels as they will, they
+will talk but half-heeded. Our dramatists know this well enough. Mr.
+Barrie and Mr. Pinero and Mr. Shaw, who want the audience to listen and
+understand, take good care not to divert its attention and deaden its
+imagination by scenic displays. And yet, with the heartiest admiration
+for their best work, one may say that Shakespeare's requires more
+attention and imagination than theirs.
+
+Whether the Elizabethan companies, if they had had the power to use the
+attractions of scenery, would have abused it, and whether in that case
+the audience would have been as readily debauched as ours, it is useless
+to dispute. The audience was not composed mainly of groundlings; and
+even the groundlings in that age had drama in their blood. But I venture
+to disbelieve that the main fault in these matters lies, in any age,
+with the audience. It is like the populace in Shakespeare's plays, easy
+to lead wrong but just as easy to lead right. If you give people in the
+East End, or even in the Albert Hall, nothing but third-rate music, most
+of them will be content with it, and possibly may come to disrelish what
+is better. But if you have a little faith in great art and in human
+nature, and offer them, I do not say the Diabelli variations, but such
+music as the symphonies of Beethoven or even of Brahms, they will
+justify your faith. This is not theory, but fact; and I cannot think
+that it is otherwise with drama, or at least with the dramas of
+Shakespeare. Did they ever 'spell ruin to managers' if they were,
+through the whole cast, satisfactorily acted? What spells real ruin to
+managers and actors alike is what spells degradation to audiences.[23]
+
+But whether or no Shakespeare's audience could have been easily degraded
+by scenic pleasure, it had not the chance; and I will not raise the
+further question how far its disabilities were the cause of its virtues,
+but will end with a few words on two of the virtues themselves. It
+possessed, first, a vivid imagination. Shakespeare could address to it
+not in vain the injunction, 'Work, work your thoughts!' Probably in
+three scenes out of five the place and surroundings of the action were
+absolutely invisible to its eyes. In a fourth it took the barest symbol
+for reality. A couple of wretched trees made the Forest of Arden for it,
+five men with ragged foils the army that conquered at Agincourt: are we
+stronger than it, or weaker? It heard Romeo say
+
+      Look, love, what envious streaks
+  Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;
+
+and to its mind's eye they were there. It looked at a shabby old
+balcony, but as it listened it saw the swallows flitting round the
+sun-lit battlements of Macbeth's castle, and our pitiful sense of
+grotesque incongruity never troubled it.[24] The simplest convention
+sufficed to set its imagination at work. If Prospero entered wearing a
+particular robe, it knew that no one on the stage could see his solid
+shape;[25] and if Banquo, rising through the trap-door, had his bloody
+face dusted over with meal, it recognised him for a ghost and thrilled
+with horror; and we, Heaven help us, should laugh. Though the stage
+stood in broad daylight, again, Banquo, for it, was being murdered on a
+dark wet night, for he carried a torch and spoke of rain; and the
+chaste stars were shining for it outside Desdemona's chamber as the
+awful figure entered and extinguished the lamp. Consider how
+extraordinary is the fact I am about to mention, and what a testimony it
+bears to the imagination of the audience. In _Hamlet_, _Othello_, and
+_Macbeth_, not one scene here and there but actually the majority of the
+most impressive scenes take place at night, and, to a reader, depend not
+a little on the darkness for their effect. Yet the Ghost-scenes, the
+play-scene, the sparing of the king at prayer, that conversation of
+Hamlet with his mother which is opened by the killing of Polonius and
+interrupted by the appearance of the Ghost; the murder of Duncan, the
+murder of Banquo, the Banquet-scene, the Sleep-walking scene; the whole
+of the first Act of _Othello_, the scene of Cassio's drunken revel and
+fight, and the whole of the terrible last Act,--all of this was played
+in a theatre open to the afternoon sun, and was written by a man who
+knew that it was so to be played. But he knew his audience too.[26]
+
+That audience had not only imagination, and the power to sink its soul
+in the essence of drama. It had something else of scarcely less import
+for Shakespeare, the love of poetry. Ignorant, noisy, malodorous, too
+fond of dances and songs and dirty jokes, of soldiers and trumpets and
+cannon, the groundling might be: but he liked poetry. If he had not
+liked it, he, with his brutal manners, would have silenced it, and the
+Elizabethan drama could never have been the thing it was. The plays of
+Shakespeare swarm with long speeches, almost all of which are cut down
+or cut clean away for our theatres. They are never, of course,
+irrelevant; sometimes they are indispensable to the full appreciation
+of a character; but it is manifest that they were not written solely
+for a dramatic purpose, but also because the author and his audience
+loved poetry. A sign of this is the fact that they especially abound
+where, from the nature of the story, the dramatic structure is
+imperfect.[27] They abound in _Troilus and Cressida_ and _Henry V._ more
+than in _Othello_ or _Much Ado_. Remember, for a standard of size, that
+'To be or not to be' is thirty-three lines in length, and then consider
+the following fact. _Henry V._ contains seventeen speeches longer than
+that soliloquy. Five of them are between forty and fifty lines long, two
+between fifty and sixty, and two exceed sixty. Yet if any play entirely
+by Shakespeare were open to the charge of being a 'drum and trumpet
+history' written to please the populace, it would be _Henry V._ Not only
+then the cultured section of the audience loved poetry; the whole
+audience loved it. How long would they have continued to relish this
+'perpetual feast of nectared sweets' if their eyes had been feasted too?
+Or is it likely that, once habituated to spectacular stimulants, they
+would have welcomed 'the crystal clearness of the Muses' spring'?
+
+1902.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] This, one may suspect, was also the position of Webster, who
+    praises Shakespeare, but groups him with Dekker and Heywood, and
+    mentions him after Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher
+    (Preface to the _White Devil_).
+
+  [2] I am obliged to speak summarily. Some of these things declined in
+    popularity as time went on.
+
+  [3] The examples just cited show his method at its best, and it would
+    be easy to mention others far less satisfactory. Nor do I doubt that
+    his plays would be much more free from blemishes of various kinds if
+    his audience had added to their virtues greater cultivation. On the
+    other hand the question whether, or how far, he knowingly 'wrote down
+    to' his audience, in the sense of giving it what he despised, seems
+    to me very difficult, if not impossible, to answer: and I may mention
+    some causes of this difficulty.
+
+    (1) There is no general presumption against interpolations in an
+    Elizabethan drama published piratically or after the author's death.
+    We have, further, positive grounds of the strongest kind for
+    believing that 'Shakespeare's plays' contain a good deal that
+    Shakespeare never wrote. We cannot therefore simply take it for
+    granted that he wrote every silly or offensive thing that we find in
+    the volume; and least of all should we do this when the passage is
+    more or less irrelevant and particularly easy to excise. I do not say
+    that these considerations have great importance here, but they have
+    some; and readers of Shakespeare, and even some scholars, constantly
+    tend to forget them, and to regard the texts as if they had been
+    published by himself, or by scrupulously careful men of letters
+    immediately after his death.
+
+    (2) We must never take for granted that what seems to us feeble or
+    bad seemed so to Shakespeare. Evidently he was amused by puns and
+    quips and verbal ingenuities in which most of us find little
+    entertainment. Gross jokes, scarcely redeemed in our eyes by their
+    humour, may have diverted him. He sometimes writes, and clearly in
+    good faith, what seems to us bombastic or 'conceited.' So far as this
+    was the case he was not writing down to his audience. He shared its
+    tastes, or the tastes of some section of it. So it may have been,
+    again, with such a blot as the blinding of Gloucester on the open
+    stage.
+
+    (3) Jonson defied his audience, yet he wrote a good deal that we
+    think bad. In the same way certain of Shakespeare's faults _cannot_
+    be due to condescension to his audience: _e.g._ the obscurities and
+    distortions of language not infrequent in his later plays. And this
+    may be so with some faults which have the appearance of arising from
+    that condescension.
+
+    (4) Other defects again he might have deliberately defended; _e.g._
+    the highly improbable conclusions and the distressing mis-marriages
+    of some of the comedies. 'It is of the essence of romantic comedy,'
+    he might have said, 'to treat such things with indifference. There is
+    a convention that you should take the characters with some degree of
+    seriousness while they are in difficulties, and should cease to do so
+    when they are to be delivered from them.' Do not we ourselves adopt
+    this point of view to some extent when we go to the theatre now?
+
+    I added this note after reading Mr. Bridges's very interesting and
+    original contribution to the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare
+    (vol x.). I disagree with some of Mr. Bridges's remarks, and am not
+    always repelled by things that he dislikes. But this brief note is
+    not, of course, meant for an answer to his paper; it merely suggests
+    reasons for at least diminishing the proportion of defect
+    attributable to a conscious sacrifice of art to the tastes of the
+    audience.
+
+  [4] To us their first appearance is of interest chiefly because it
+    introduces the soliloquy 'How all occasions.' But, it is amusing to
+    notice, the Folio, which probably represents the acting version in
+    1623, omits the soliloquy but retains the marching soldiers.
+
+  [5] I do not refer to the Globe.
+
+  [6] The latter, no doubt, accompanied by the band, except when the
+    clown played the tabor while he danced alone.
+
+  [7] This may possibly be one of the signs that _Macbeth_ was altered
+    after Shakespeare's retirement or death.
+
+  [8] Surely every company that plays Shakespeare should include a boy.
+    There would then be no excuse for giving to a woman such parts as
+    Ariel and Brutus's boy Lucius.
+
+  [9] This question will not be answered by the citation of one famous
+    speech of Cleopatra's--a speech, too, which is strictly in character.
+    But, as to this matter and the other considerations put forward
+    above, I must add that, while my impression is that what has been
+    said of Shakespeare holds of most of the contemporary dramatists, I
+    have not verified it by a research. A student looking for a subject
+    for his thesis might well undertake such a research.
+
+  [10] When the lecture was given (in 1902) I went more fully into
+    details, having arrived at certain conclusions mainly by an
+    examination of Elizabethan dramas. I suppress them here because I
+    have been unable to study all that has since been written on the
+    Elizabethan stage. The reader who is interested in the subject should
+    refer in the first instance to an excellent article by Mr. Archer in
+    the _Quarterly Review_ for April, 1908.
+
+  [11] This is a description of a public theatre. A private one, it
+    will be remembered, had seats in the area (there called the pit), was
+    completely roofed, and could be darkened.
+
+  [12] 'The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their
+    charge with snores,' says Lady Macbeth on the stage below; and no
+    doubt the tiring-house doors _were_ open.
+
+  [13] This view, into the grounds of which I cannot go, implies that
+    Juliet's bedroom was, in one scene, the upper stage, and, in another,
+    the back stage; but the Elizabethans, I believe, would make no
+    difficulty about that.
+
+  [14] Perhaps. It seems necessary to suppose that the sides of the
+    backstage, as well as its front, could be open; otherwise many of the
+    spectators could not have seen what took place there. But it is not
+    _necessary_, so far as I remember, to suppose that the sides could be
+    closed by curtains. The Elizabethans probably would not have been
+    troubled by seeing dead bodies get up and go into the tiring-house
+    when a play or even a scene was over.
+
+  [15] Where this contrivance was used at all it probably only
+    announced the general place of the action throughout the play: _e.g._
+    _Denmark_, or, a little more fully, _Verona_, _Mantua_.
+
+  [16] It is possibly significant that _Macbeth_ and the _Tempest_,
+    plays containing more 'shews' than most, are exceptionally short.
+
+  [17] It suffices for this rough experiment to read a column in an
+    edition like the Globe, and then to multiply the time taken by the
+    number of columns in the play.
+
+  [18] I do not know whether the average size of our theatres differs
+    much from that of the Elizabethan. The diameter of the area at the
+    _Fortune_ and the _Globe_ seems to have been fifty feet.
+
+  [19] I mean by a scene a section of a play before and after which the
+    stage is unoccupied. Most editions of Shakespeare are faulty in the
+    division of scenes (see _Shakespearean Tragedy_, p. 451).
+
+  [20] So it very nearly does in some Restoration comedies. In the _Way
+    of the World_ the scenery is changed only twice in the five acts,
+    though there are more than five scenes.
+
+  [21] The 'back' stage, which had curtains, must, I suppose, have been
+    too small to accommodate the number of persons commonly present,
+    alive or dead, at the close of a tragedy. I do not know if any recent
+    writer has raised and discussed the questions how often the back
+    stage is used in the last scene of an Elizabethan play, and, again,
+    whether it is often employed at all in order to produce, by the
+    closing of the curtains, the kind of effect referred to in the
+    paragraph above. Perhaps the fact that the curtains had to be closed
+    by an actor, within them or without, made this effect impossible. Or
+    perhaps it was not desired. In Shakespeare's tragedies, if my memory
+    serves me, the only sudden or startling appeals of an outward kind
+    (apart, of course, from actions) are those produced by supernatural
+    appearances and disappearances, as in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_. These,
+    we have seen, were usually managed by means of the trap-door, which,
+    it would seem from some passages, must have been rather large. These
+    matters deserve investigation if they have not already received it.
+
+  [22] I do not refer to such deliberate and sustained effort as a
+    reader may sometimes make. It is not commonly realised that
+    continuous attention to any imaginative or intellectual matter,
+    however enjoyable, involves considerable strain. If at a lecture or
+    sermon a careless person makes himself observable in arriving late or
+    leaving early, the eyes of half the audience will turn to him and
+    follow him. And the reason is not always that the speaker bores them;
+    it is that involuntarily they seek relief from this strain. The same
+    thing may be seen in the concert-room or theatre, but very much less
+    at a panorama, because the mere use of the eyes, even when
+    continuous, is comparatively easy.
+
+  [23] I am not referring here, or elsewhere, to such a moderate use of
+    scenery in Shakespearean performances as most of our actor-managers
+    (_e.g._ Mr. Benson) now adopt. I regret it in so far as it involves a
+    curtailing of the play; but I do not think it withdraws from the play
+    any attention that is of value, and for some of the audience it
+    probably heightens the dramatic effect. Still, in my belief, it would
+    be desirable to decrease it, because the less there is of it, the
+    more is good acting necessary, and the more of the play itself can be
+    acted. Some use of scenery, with its consequences to the play, must
+    unquestionably be accepted as the rule, but I would add that it ought
+    always to be possible for us to see performances, such as we owed to
+    Mr. Poel, nearer to those of Shakespeare's time.
+
+  [24] When, in the time of Malone and Steevens, the question was
+    debated whether Shakespeare's stage had scenery, it was argued that
+    it must have had it, because otherwise the contrast between the words
+    and the visible stage in the passage referred to would have been
+    hopelessly ludicrous.
+
+  [25] 'Enter invisible' (a common stage-direction) means 'Enter in the
+    dress which means to the audience that you are invisible.'
+
+  [26] Probably he never needed to think of the audience, but wrote
+    what pleased his own imagination, which, like theirs, was not only
+    dramatic but, in the best sense, theatrical.
+
+  [27] Their abundance in _Hamlet_ results partly from the character of
+    the hero. They helped, however, to make that play too long; and the
+    omission of 'How all occasions' from the Folio doubtless means that
+    the company cut this soliloquy (whether they did so in the author's
+    life-time we cannot tell). It may be noticed that, where a play shows
+    clear signs of revision by Shakespeare himself, we rarely find a
+    disposition to shorten long poetical speeches.
+
+
+
+
+In some of these lectures[1]--for the duties and pleasures that have
+fallen to me as Professor of Poetry are now to end--I may have betrayed
+a certain propensity to philosophise. But I should ask pardon for this
+only if I believed it to intrude where it has no place, in the
+imaginative perception of poetry. Philosophy has long been at home in
+this University; in the remarkable development of English philosophical
+thought during the last five-and-thirty years Oxford has played a
+leading part; and I hope the time will never come when a son of hers
+will need to apologise to his brethren for talking philosophy. Besides,
+though I owe her gratitude for many gifts, and most for the friendships
+she gave me, her best intellectual gift was the conviction that what
+imagination loved as poetry reason might love as philosophy, and that in
+the end these are two ways of saying the same thing. And, finally, I
+hoped, by dwelling in these lectures (for instance, with reference to
+the poets of Wordsworth's time) on the connection of poetry with the
+wider life around it, to correct an impression which my opening lecture
+seems here and there to have left. Not that I can withdraw or even
+modify the view put forward then. So far as any single function of
+spiritual life can be said to have an intrinsic value, poetry, it seems
+to me, possesses it just as other functions do, and it is in each case
+irreplaceable. And further, it seems to me, poetry attains its own aim,
+and in doing so makes its contribution to the whole, most surely and
+fully when it seeks its own end without attempting to reach those of
+co-ordinate functions, such as the attainment of philosophic truth or
+the furtherance of moral progress. But then I believe this because I
+also believe that the unity of human nature in its diverse activities is
+so intimate and pervasive that no influence can affect any one of them
+alone, and that no one of them can operate or change without
+transmitting its influence to the rest. If I may use the language of
+paradox I would say that the pursuit of poetry for its own sake is the
+pursuit both of truth and of goodness. Devotion to it is devotion to
+'the good cause of the world'; and wherever the imagination is
+satisfied, there, if we had a knowledge we have not, we should discover
+no idle fancy but the image of a truth.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [1] As the order of the lectures has been changed for the purposes of
+    publication, I have been obliged to move these concluding sentences
+    from their original place at the end of the lecture on _The Long Poem
+    in the Age of Wordsworth_.
+
+
+
+
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