The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 20, June, 1859 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

by Various

ACT I.

SCENE I.—A Hall in Timon's House.

Now he has reflected that his first object is to interest his audience in the action and passion of the piece,—at the very outset, if possible, to catch their fancies and draw them into the mimic life of the play,—to beguile and attract them without their knowing it. He has reflected upon this, we say,—for see how artfully he opens the scene, and how soon the empty stage is peopled with life! He chooses to begin by having two persons enter from opposite wings, whose qualities are known at once to the reader of the play, but not to an audience. The stage-direction informs us:—

[Enter Poet, Painter, Jeweller, Merchant, and others, at several doors.

We shall see how at the same time they introduce and unfold their own characters and awaken an interest in the main action. In writing, we are obliged to name them. They do not all enter quite at once. At first comes

Poet. Good day, Sir. Painter. I am glad to see you well. Poet. I have not seen you long; how goes the world? Painter. It wears, Sir, as it grows.

This shows them to be acquaintances.—While the next reply is made, in which the Poet begins to talk in character even before the audience know him, two others enter from the same side, as having just met, and others in the background.

Poet. Ay, that's well known:— But what particular rarity? what strange, That manifold record not matches? See,

And we fancy him waving his hand in an enthusiastic manner,—

Magic of bounty! all these spirits thy power
Hath conjured to attend.

Which manner is only a high-flowing habit, for he adds in the same breath, dropping his figure suddenly,—

I know the merchant.
Painter. I know them both; t'other's a jeweller.

It is certainly natural that painters should know jewellers,—and, perhaps, that poets should be able to recognize merchants, though the converse might not hold. We now know who the next speakers are, and soon distinguish them.

Merchant. Oh, 'tis a worthy lord!
Jeweller. Nay, that's most fixed.
Merchant. A most incomparable man; breathed as it were
To an untirable and continuate goodness:
He passes.
Jeweller. I have a jewel here.

The Jeweller being known, the Merchant is; and, it will be noticed that the first speaks in a cautious manner.

Merchant. Oh, pray, let's see it! For the lord Timon, Sir? Jeweller. If he will touch the estimate; but, for that——

We begin to suspect who is the "magic of bounty" and the "incomparable man," and also to have an idea that all these people have come to his house to see him.—While the Merchant examines the jewel, the first who spoke, the high-flown individual, is pacing and talking to himself near the one he met:—

Poet. When we for recompense have praised the vile, It stains the glory in that happy verse Which aptly sings the good.

Perhaps he is thinking of himself. The Merchant and Jeweller do not hear him;—they stand in twos at opposite sides of the stage.

Merchant. 'Tis a good form. [Looking at the jewel.

He observes only that the stone is well cut; but the Jeweller adds,—

Jeweller. And rich: here is a water, look you.

While they are interested in this and move backward, the two others come nearer the front.

Painter. You are rapt, Sir, in some work, some dedication
To the great lord.

This is said, of course, with reference to the other's recent soliloquy.
And now we are going to know them.

Poet. A thing slipped idly from me.
Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes
From whence 'tis nourished. The fire i' the flint
Shows not till it be struck; our gentle flame
Provokes itself, and like the current files
Each bound it chafes.—What have you there?

We perceive that he is a poet, and a rather rhetorical than sincere one.
He has the art, but, as we shall see, not the heart.

Painter. A picture, Sir.—And when comes your book forth?

Poet. Upon the heels of my presentment, Sir— Let's see your piece. Painter. 'Tis a good piece.

We know that the Poet has come to make his presentment. The Painter, the more modest of the two, wishes his work to be admired, but is apprehensive, and would forestall the Poet's judgment. He means, it is a "tolerable" piece.

Poet. So 'tis: this comes off well and excellent.

Painter. Indifferent.

Poet. Admirable. How this grace
Speaks his own standing! What a mental power
This eye shoots forth! How big imagination
Moves in this lip! To the dumbness of the gesture
One might interpret.

He, at all events, means to flatter the Painter,—or he is so habituated to ecstasies that he cannot speak without going into one. But with what Shakspearean nicety of discrimination! The "grace that speaks his own standing," the "power of the eye," the "imagination of the lip," are all true; and so is the natural impulse, in one of so fertile a brain as a poet from whom verse "oozes" to "interpret to the dumb gesture,"—to invent an appropriate speech for the figure (Timon, of course) to be uttering. And all this is but to preoccupy our minds with a conception of the lord Timon!

Painter. It is a pretty mocking of the life. Here's a touch; is't good?

Poet. I'll say of it It tutors Nature: artificial strife Lives in these touches livelier than life.

He has thought of too fine a phrase; but it is in character with all his fancies.

[Enter certain Senators, and pass over.

Painter. How this lord's followed!

Poet. The senators of Athens: happy men!

This informs us who they are that pass over. The Poet also keeps up the
Ercles vein; while the Painter's eye is caught.

Painter. Look, more!

Poet. You see this confluence, this great flood of visitors.

I have, in this rough work, shaped out a man
Whom this beneath world doth embrace and hug
With amplest entertainment: my free drift
Halts not particularly, but moves itself
In a wide sea of wax: no levelled malice
Infects one comma in the course I hold:
But flies an eagle flight, bold, and forth on,
Leaving no tract behind.

This flight of rhetoric is intended to produce a sort of musical effect, in preparing us by its lofty sound for readily apprehending the lord Timon with "amplest entertainment." The same is true of all that follows. The Poet and Painter do but sound a lordly note of preparation, and move the curtain that is to be lifted before a scene of profusion. Call it by what name we please, it surely was not accident or unconscious inspiration,—a rapture or frenzy,—which led Shakspeare to open this play in this manner. If we remember the old use of choruses, which was to lift up and excite the fancy, we may well believe that he intended this flourishing Poet to act as a chorus,—to be a "mighty whiffler," going before, elevating "the flat unraised spirits" of his auditory, and working on their "imaginary forces." He is a rhetorical character, designed to rouse the attention of the house by the pomp of his language, and to set their fancies in motion by his broad conceptions. How well he does it! No wonder the Painter is a little confused as he listens to him.

Painter. How shall I understand you?

Poet. I'll unbolt to you.

You see how all conditions, how all minds,
(As well of glib and slippery creatures, as
Of grave and austere quality,) tender down
Their services to Lord Timon; his large fortune,
Upon his good and gracious nature hanging,
Subdues and properties to his love and tendance
All sorts of hearts; yea, from the glass-faced flatterer
To Apemantus, that few things loves better
Than to abhor himself; even he drops down
The knee before him, and returns in peace,
Most rich in Timon's nod.

There was almost a necessity that the spectator should be made acquainted with the character of Timon before his appearance; for his profuseness could be illustrated, after being known, better than it could make itself known in dialogue and action in which he should bear a part. And of the hundreds of English plays opening with an explanation or narrative of foregone matters, there is none where the formality is concealed by a more ingenious artifice than is used in this scene. The spectator is fore-possessed with Timon's character, and (in the outline the Poet is proceeding to give) with a suspicion that he is going to see him ruined in the course of the piece; and this is accomplished in the description of a panegyric, incidentally, briefly, picturesquely, artfully, with an art that tutors Nature, and which so well conceals itself that it can scarcely be perceived except in this our microscopic analysis. Here also we have Apemantus introduced beforehand. And with all this, the Painter and Poet speak minutely and broadly in character; the one sees scenes, the other plans an action (which is just what his own creator had done) and talks in poetic language. It is no more than the text warrants to remark that the next observation, primarily intended to break the poet's speech, was also intended to be the natural thought and words of a

Painter. I saw them speak together.

Poet. Sir, I have upon a high and pleasant hill
Feigned Fortune to be throned: the base of
the mount
Is ranked with all deserts, all kinds of natures
That labor on the bosom of this sphere
To propagate their states; amongst them all,
Whose eyes are on this sovereign lady fixed,
One do I personate of Lord Timon's frame,
Whom Fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her;
Whose present grace to present slaves and servants
Translates his rivals.

Painter. 'Tis conceived to scope.
This throne, this Fortune, and this hill, methinks,
With one man beckoned from the rest below,
Bowing his head against the steepy mount
To climb his happiness, would be well expressed
In our condition.

Poet. Nay, Sir, but hear me on.

The artifice is to secure the attention of the spectator. The interruptions give naturalness and force to the narrative; and the questions and entreaties, though addressed to each other by the personages on the stage, have their effect in the front. The same artifice is employed in the most obvious manner where Prospero (Tempest, Act i. Sc. 2) narrates his and her previous history to Miranda. The Poet continues:—

All those which were his fellows but of late
(Some better than his value) on the moment
Follow his strides, his lobbies fill with tendance,
Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear,
Make sacred even his stirrup, and through him
Drink the free air.

Painter. Ay, marry, what of these?

The Poet has half deserted his figure, and is losing himself in a new description, from which the Painter impatiently recalls him. The text is so artificially natural that it will bear the nicest natural construction.

Poet. When Fortune, in her shift and
change of mood,
Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants,
Which labored after him to the mountain's
top,
Even on their knees and hands, let him slip
down,
Not one accompanying his declining foot.

Painter. 'Tis common:
A thousand moral paintings I can show
That shall demonstrate these quick blows of
Fortune
More pregnantly than words. Yet you do
well
To show Lord Timon that mean eyes have
seen
The foot above the head.

[Trumpets sound. Enter Timon, attended; the servant of Ventidius talking with him.

Thus far (and it is of no consequence if we have once or twice forgotten it while pursuing our analysis) we have fancied ourselves present, seeing Shakspeare write this, and looking into his mind. But although divining his intentions, we have not made him intend any more than his words show that he did intend. Let us presently fancy, that, before introducing his principal character, he here turns back to see if he has brought in everything that is necessary. It would have been easier to plan this scene after the rest of the play had been done,—and, as already remarked, it may have been so written; but when the whole coheres, the artistic purpose is more or less evident in every part; and the order in which each was put upon paper is of as little consequence as the place or time or date or the state of the weather. Wordsworth has been particular enough to let it be known, where he composed the last verse of a poem first. With some artists the writing is a mere copying from memory of what is completely elaborated in the whole or in long passages: Milton wrote thus, through a habit made necessary by his blindness; and so Mozart, whose incessant labors trained his genius in the paths of musical learning, or brought learning to be its slave, till his first conceptions were often beyond the reach of elaboration, and remained so clear in his own mind that he could venture to perform in public concertos to which he had written only the orchestral or accessory parts. Other artists work seriatim; some can work only when the pen is in their hands; and the blotted page speaks eloquently enough of the artistic processes of mind to which their most passionate passages are subjected before they come to the reader's eye. Think of the fac-simile of Byron's handwriting in "Childe Harold"! It shows a soul rapt almost beyond the power of writing. But the blots and erasures were not made by a "fine frenzy"; they speak no less eloquently for an artistic taste and skill excited and alert, and able to guide the frenzy and give it a contagious power through the forms of verse,—this taste and this skill and control being the very elements by which his expressions become an echo of the poet's soul,—pleasing, or, in the uncultivated, helping to form, a like taste in the hearer, and exciting a like imagined condition of feeling and poetic vision.

Yet if it were made a question, to be decided from internal evidence, whether the scene here analyzed was written before or after the rest of the piece, a strong argument for its being written before might be found in the peculiar impression it leaves upon the fancy. Let us suppose we follow the author while he runs it over, which he does quite rapidly, since there are no blotted lines, but only here and there a comma to be inserted. He designed to open his tragedy. He finds he has set a scene,—in his mind's eye the entrance-hall to an Athenian house, which he thinks he has presently intimated plainly enough to be Timon's house. Here he has brought forward four actors and made them speak as just meeting; they come by twos from different ways, and the first two immediately make it known that the other two are a merchant and jeweller, and almost immediately that they themselves are, one a painter, the other a poet. They have all brought gifts or goods for the lord Timon. The Athenian Senators pass over, and, as becomes their dignity, are at once received in an inner hall,—the first four remaining on the stage. All is so far clear. He has also, by the dialogue of the Painter and Poet, made in itself taking to the attention through the picture and the flighty recitation, suggested and interested us incidentally in the character of Timon, and conveyed a vague misgiving of misfortune to come to him. And there is withal a swelling pomp, three parts rhetorical and one part genuinely poetical, in the Poet's style, which gives a tone, and prepares the fancy to enter readily into the spirit of the tragedy. This effect the author wished to produce; he felt that the piece required it; he was so preoccupied with the Timon he conceived that he sets to work with a Timon-rich hue of fancy and feeling; to this note he pitches himself, and begins his measured march "bold and forth on." What he has assumed to feel he wishes spectators to feel; and he leaves his style to be colored by his feeling, because he knows that such is the way to make them feel it. And we do feel it, and know also that we are made thus to feel through an art which we can perceive and admire. On the whole, this introduction opens upon the tragedy with just such a display of high-sounding phrases, such a fine appropriateness, such a vague presentiment, and such a rapid, yet artful, rising from indifference to interest, that it seems easiest to suppose the author to be writing while his conceptions of what is to follow are freshest and as yet unwrought out. We cannot ask him; even while we have overlooked him in his labor, his form has faded, and we are again in this dull every-day Present.

We have seen him take up his pen and begin a tragedy; or, to drop the fancy, we have made it real to ourselves in what manner Shakspeare's writing evidences that he wrought as an artist,—one who has an idea in his mind of an effect he desires to produce, and elaborates it with careful skill, not in a trance or ecstasy, but "in clear dream and solemn vision." The subtile tone of feeling to be struck is as much a matter of art as the action or argument to be opened. And it is no less proper to judge (as we have done) of the presence of art by its result in this respect than in respect to what relates to the form or story. An introduction is before us, a dramatic scene, in which characters are brought forward and a dialogue is given, apparently concerning a picture and poem that have been made, but having a more important reference to a character yet to be unfolded. Along with this there is also expressed, in the person of a professed panegyrist, a certain lofty and free opinion of his own work, in a confident declamatory style of description,—

"Sir, I have upon a high and pleasant hill
Feigned Fortune to be throned," etc.,—

that is levelled with exquisite tact just on the verge of bombast. This is not done to make the hearer care for the thing described, which is never heard of after, but to give a hint of Timon and what is to befall him, and to create a melodic effect upon the hearer's sense which shall put him in a state to yield readily to the illusion of the piece.

It is not possible to conceive Shakspeare reviewing his lines and thinking to himself, "That is well done; my genius has not deserted me; I could not have written anything more to my liking, if I had set about it deliberately!" But it is easy to see him running it over with a sensation of "This will serve; my poet will open their eyes and ears; and now for the hall and banquet scene."

The sense of fitness and relation operates among thoughts and feelings as well as among fancies, and its results cannot be mistaken for accident. Ariel and his harpies could not interrupt a scene with a more discordant action than the phase of feeling or the poetic atmosphere pervading it would be interrupted by, if a cloud of distraction came across the poet and the faculties of his mind rioted out of his control. For he not only feels, but sees his feeling; he takes it up as an object and holds it before him,—a feeling to be conveyed. Just as a sculptor holds in his mind a form and models it out of clay, undiverted by other forms thronging into his vision, or by the accidental forms that the plastic substance takes upon itself in the course of his work, till it stands forth the image of his ideal,—so the poet works out his states of poetic feeling. He grasps and holds and sustains them amidst the multiplicity of upflying thoughts and thick-coming fancies;—no matter how subtile or how aspiring they may be, he fastens them in the chamber of his imagination until his distant purpose is accomplished, and he has found a language for them which the world will understand. And this is where Shakspeare's art is so noble,—in that he conquers the entire universe of thought, sentiment, feeling, and passion,—goes into the whole and takes up and portrays characters the most extreme and diverse, passions the most wild, sentiment the most refined, feelings the most delicate,—and does this by an art in which he must make his characters appear real and we looking on, though he cannot use, to develop his dramas, a hundred-thousandth part of the words that would be used in real life,—that is, in Nature. He also always approaches us upon the level of our common sense and experience, and never requires us to yield it,—never breaks in or jars upon our judgment, or shocks or alarms any natural sensibility. After enlarging our souls with the stir of whatever can move us through poetry, he leaves us where he found us, refreshed by new thoughts, new scenes, and new knowledge of ourselves and our kind, more capable, and, if we choose to be so, more wise. His art is so great that we almost forget its presence,—almost forget that the Macbeth and Othello we have seen and heard were Shakspeare's, and that he MADE them; we can scarce conceive how he could feign as if felt, and retain and reproduce such a play of emotions and passions from the position of spectator, his own soul remaining, with its sovereign reason, and all its powers natural and acquired, far, far above all its creations,—a spirit alone before its Maker.

The opening of "Timon" was selected on account of its artful preparation for and relation to what it precedes. It shows the forethought and skill of its author in the construction or opening out of his play, both in respect to the story and the feeling; yet even here, in this half-declamatory prologue, the poet's dramatic art is also evident. His poet and painter are living men, and not mere utterers of so many words. Was this from intuition?—or because he found it easy to make them what he conceived them, and felt that it would add to the life of his introduction, though he should scarcely bring them forward afterwards? No doubt the mind's eye helps the mind in character-drawing, and that appropriate language springs almost uncalled to the pen, especially of a practised writer for the stage. But is his scene a dream which he can direct, and which, though he knows it all proceeds from himself, yet seems to keep just in advance of him,—his fancy shooting ahead and astonishing him with novelties in dialogue and situation? There are those who have experienced this condition in sickness, and who have amused themselves with listening to a fancied conversation having reference to subjects of their own choosing, yet in which they did not seem to themselves to control the cause of the dialogue or originate the particular things said, until they could actually hear the voices rising from an indistinct whisper to plain speech. I knew an instance, (which at least is not related in the very curious work of M. Boismont on the "Natural History of Hallucinations,") where an invalid, recovering from illness, could hear for half a night the debates and doings of an imaginary association in the next chamber, the absurdity of which often made him laugh so that he could with difficulty keep quiet enough to listen; while occasionally extracts would be read from books written in a style whose precision and eloquence excited his admiration, or whose affecting solemnity moved him deeply, though he knew perfectly well that the whole came from his own brain. This he could either cause or permit, and could in an instant change the subject of the conversation or command it into silence. He would sometimes throw his pillow against the wall and say, "Be still! I'll hear no more till daybreak!" And this has taken place when he was in calm health in mind, and, except weakness, in body, and broad awake. What was singular, the voices would cease at his bidding, and in one instance (which might have startled him, had he not known how common it is for persons to wake at an hour they fix) they awoke him at the time appointed. Their language would bear the ordinary tests of sanity, and was like that we see in daily newspapers; but the various knowledge brought in, the complicated scenes gone through, made the whole resemble intricate concerted music, from the imperfect study of which possibly came the power to fabricate them. That they were owing to some physical cause was shown by their keeping a sort of cadence with the pulse, and in the fact, that, though not disagreeable, they were wearisome; especially as they always appeared to be got up with some remote reference to the private faults and virtues of that tedious individual who is always forcing his acquaintance upon us, avoid him however we may,—one's self.

Shall we suppose that Shakspeare wrote in such an opium dream as this? Did his "wood-notes wild" come from him as tunes do from a barrel-organ, where it is necessary only to set the machine and disturb the bowels of it by turning? Was it sufficient for him to fore-plan the plots of his plays, the story, acts, scenes, persons,—the general rough idea, or argument,—and then to sit at his table, and, by some process analogous to mesmeric manipulations, put himself into a condition in which his genius should elaborate and shape what he, by the aid of his poetic taste and all other faculties, had been able to rough-hew? How far did his consciousness desert him?—only partially, as in the instance just given, so that he marvelled, while he wrote, at his own fertility, power, and truth?—or wholly, as in a Pythonic inspiration, so that the frenzy filled him to his fingers' ends, and he wrote, he knew not what, until he re-read it in his ordinary state? In fine, was he the mere conduit of a divinity within him?—or was he in his very self, in the nobility and true greatness of his being and the infinitude of his faculties, a living fountain,—he, he alone, in as plain and common a sense as we mean when we say "a man," the divinity?

These are "questions not to be asked," or, at least, argued, any more than the question, Whether the blessed sun of heaven shall eat blackberries. The quality of Shakspeare's writing renders it impossible to suppose that it was produced in any other state than one where all the perceptions that make good sense, and not only good, but most excellent sense, were present and alert. Howsoever "apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes" his brain may be, it never gambols from the superintendence of his reason and understanding. In truth, it is the perfectness of the control, the conscious assurance of soundness in himself, which leaves him so free that the control is to so many eyes invisible; they perceive nothing but luxuriant ease in the midst of intricate complexities of passion and character, and they think he could have followed the path he took only by a sort of necessity which they call Nature,—that he wrote himself quite into his works, bodily, just as he was, every thought that came and went, and every expression that flew to his pen,—leaving out only a few for shortness. They are so thoroughly beguiled by the very quality they do not see, that they are like spectators who mistake the scene on the stage for reality; they cannot fancy that a man put it all there, and that it is by the artistic and poetic power of him, this man, who is now standing behind or at the wing, and counting the money in the house, that they are beguiled of their tears or thrown into such ecstasies of mirth.

It exalts, and not degrades, the memory of Shakspeare to think of him in this manner, as a man: for he was a man; he had eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, and so forth, the same that a Jew hath; a good many people saw him alive. Had we lived in London between 1580 and 1610, we might have seen him,—a man who came from his Maker's hand endowed with the noblest powers and the most godlike reason,—who had the greatest natural ability to become a great dramatic poet,—the native genius and the aptness to acquire the art, and who did acquire the highest art of his age, and went on far beyond it, exhibiting new ingenuities and resources, and a breadth that has never been equalled, and which admits at once and harmonizes the deepest tragedy and the broadest farce, and, in language, the loftiest flights of measured rhetoric along with the closest imitation of common talk;—and all this he so used, so elaborated through it the poetic creations of his mind, in such glorious union and perfection of high purpose and art and reach of soul, that he was the greatest and most universal poet the world has known.

Rowe observes, in regard to Shakspeare,—"Art had so little and Nature so large a share in what he did, that, for aught I know, the performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, and had the most fire and strength of imagination in them, were the best. I would not be thought by this to mean that his fancy was so loose and extravagant as to be independent on the rule and government of judgment; but that what he thought was commonly so great, so justly and rightly conceived in itself, that it wanted little or no correction, and was immediately approved by an impartial judgment at the first sight."

The last sentence is true; but Mr. Rowe really means to say that he was as great an artist as natural poet,—that his creative and executive powers wrought in almost perfect spontaneity and harmony,—the work of the making part of him being generally at once approved by the shaping part, and each and both being admirable. When a man creates an Othello, feigns his story and his passion, assumes to be him and to observe him at the same time, figures him so exactly that all the world may realize him also, brings in Desdemona and Iago and the rest, everything kept in propriety and with the minutest perfection of detail, which does most, Art or Nature? How shall we distinguish? Where does one leave off and the other begin? The truth of the passion, that is Nature; but can we not perceive that the Art goes along with it? Do we not at once acknowledge the Art when we say, "How natural!"? In such as Iago, for example, it would seem as if the least reflective spectator must derive a little critical satisfaction,—if he can only bring himself to fancy that Iago is not alive, but that the great master painted him and wrote every word he utters. As we read his words, can we not see how boldly he is drawn, and how highly colored? There he is, right in the foreground, prominent, strong, a most miraculous villain. Did Nature put the words into his mouth, or Art? The question involves a consideration of how far natural it is for men to make Iagos, and to make them speaking naturally. Though it be natural, it is not common; and if its naturalness is what must be most insisted on, it may be conceded, and we may say, with Polixenes, "The Art itself is Nature."

There is a strong rapture that always attends the full exercise of our highest faculties. The whole spirit is raised and quickened into a secondary life. This was felt by Shakspeare,—felt, and at the same time controlled and guided with the same strictness over all thoughts, feelings, passions, fancies, that thronged his mind at such moments, as he had over those in his dull every-day hours. When we are writing, how difficult it is to avoid pleasing our own vanity! how hard not to step aside a little, now and then, for a brilliant thought or a poetic fancy, or any of the thousand illusions that throng upon us! Even for the sake of a well-sounding phrase we are often tempted to turn. The language of passion,—how hard it is to feign, to write it! how harder than all, to keep the tone, serious, or whatever it may be, with which we begin, so that no expressions occur to break it,—lapses of thought or speech, that are like sudden stumbles or uneasy jolts! And if this is so in ordinarily elevated prose, how much more must it be so in high dramatic poetry, where the poet rides on the whirlwind and tempest of passion and "directs the storm." There must go to the conception and execution of this sort of work a resolved mind, strong fancies, thoughts high and deep, in fine, a multitude of powers, all under the grand creative, sustaining imagination. When completed, the work stands forth to all time, a great work of Art, and bulwark of all that is high against all that is low. It is a great poetic work, the work of a maker who gives form and direction to the minds of men.

In a certain sense, it is not an extravagance to say that all who are now living and speak English have views of life and Nature modified by the influence of Shakspeare. We see the world through his eyes; he has taught us how to think; the freedom of soul, the strong sense, the grasp of thought,—above all, the honor, the faith, the love,—who has imparted such noble ideas of these things as he? Not any one, though there were giants in those days as well as he. Hence he has grown to seem even more "natural" than he did in his own day, his judges being mediately or immediately educated by him. The works are admired, but the nobleness of soul in him that made them is not perceived, and his genius and power are degraded into a blind faculty by unthinking minds, and by vain ones that flatter themselves they have discovered the royal road to poetry. What they seem to require for poetry is the flash of thought or fancy that starts the sympathetic thrill,—the little jots,—the striking, often-quoted lines or "gems." The rest is merely introduced to build up a piece; these are the "pure Nature," and all that.

And it is not to be denied that they are pure Nature; for they are true to Nature, and are spontaneous, beautiful, exquisite, deserving to be called gems, and even diamonds.

"The sweet South,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor":—

thousands of such lines we keep in our memories' choicest cells; yet they are but the exterior adornments of a great work of Art. They are the delightful finishes and lesser beauties which the great work admits, and, indeed, is never without, but which are not to be classed among its essentials. Their beauty and fitness are not those of the grand columns of the temple; they are the sculptures upon the frieze, the caryatides, or the graceful interlacings of vines. They catch the fancy of those whose field of vision is not large enough to take in the whole, and upon whom all excellences that are not little are lost. Beautiful in themselves, their own beauty is frequently all that is seen; the beauty of their propriety, the grace and charm with which they come in, are overlooked. Many people will have it that nothing is poetry or poetic but these gems of poetry; and because the apparent spontaneousness of them is what makes them so striking, these admirers are unwilling to see that it is through an art that they are brought in so beautifully in their spontaneousness and give such finish to larger effects. And we have no end of writers who are forever trying to imitate them, forgetting that the essence of their beauty is in their coming unsought and in their proper places as unexpected felicities and fine touches growing out of and contributing to some higher purpose. They are natural in this way:—when the poet is engaged upon his work, these delicate fancies and choice expressions throng into his mind; he instantly, by his Art-sense, accepts some, and rejects more; and those he accepts are such as he wants for his ulterior purpose, which will not admit the appearance of art; hence he will have none that do not grow out of his feeling and harmonize with it. All this passes in an instant, and the apt simile or the happy epithet is created,—an immortal beauty, both in itself and as it occurs in its place. It was put there by an art; the poet knew that the way to make expressions come is to assume the feeling; he knew that he

"But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit"

that his whole function would suit with expressions to his conceit. He then withdrew his judgment from within, and cheated his fancy into supposing he had given her the rein, letting the feigned state be as real to him as it could, and writing from that primarily,—humoring Nature by his art in leaving her to do what she alone could do. So that the very gems we admire as natural are the offspring of Nature creating under Art. To make streaked gillyflowers, we marry a gentler scion to the wildest stock, and Nature does the rest. So in poetry, we cannot get at the finest excellences by seeking for them directly, but we put Nature in the way to suggest them. We do not strive to think whether "the mobled queen" is good; we do not let our vanity keep such a strict look-out upon Nature; she will not desert us, if we follow her modes,—which we must do with all the art and fine tact we can acquire and command, not only in order to gain the minute beauties, but to compass the great whole.

The analogies that might be drawn from music would much assist in making all this clear, if they could be used with a chance of being understood. But, unfortunately, the ability to comprehend a great work, as a whole, is even rarer in music than in poetry. The little taking bits of melody are all that is thought of or perceived; the great epos or rhapsody, the form and meaning of the entire composition,—which is a work of Art in no other sense than a poem is one, except that it uses, instead of speech, musical forms, of greater variety and symmetry,—are not at all understood. Nor is the subtile and irresistible coherence in successions of clear sunny melody, in which Mozart so abounds, in any great degree understood, even by some who call themselves artists. They think only of the sudden flashes, the happinesses, and, if such a word may be used once only, the smartnesses,—like children who care for nothing in their cake but the frosting and the plums. But in continuing the study of the art with such notions of its expression, the relish for it soon cloys, the mind ceases to advance, the enthusiasm deadens, progress becomes hopeless, and the little gained is soon lost; whereas, if the student is familiarized with the most perfect forms of the art, and led on by them, both by committing a few of them to memory, and by fully understanding their structure, it will soon be evident that an intellectual study of music, pursued with a true love of it, can, more than any other study, strengthen the imaginative faculty.

The forms of poetry have only the rhythmic analogy, as forms, to those of music; but in their foundation in the same Nature, and in their manner of development, there is a closer resemblance. Both in music and poetry, the older artists regarded with most strictness the carrying through of the whole; they cared little for the taking tunes or the striking passages; they looked with eyes single to their ultimate purposes. Shakspeare came, and accomplished at once, for dramatic art, what the fathers of modern music began for their art nearly a century later. He made the strict form yield to and take new shape from natural feeling. This feeling, whose expression is the musical element of poetry, he brought up to its proper relation with all the other qualities. Look at the terrific bombast which preceded him,—the mighty efforts of mighty men to draw music or the power of sound into their art; Hieronymo is like some portentous convulsion of Nature,—the upheaval of a new geological era. The writers felt that there must be style suited to passion, and that they must attain it,—but how? By artificial pomp?—or by yielding with artful reserve to the natural eloquence of passion?

Shakspeare has answered the question for all time; and he uses both, each in its proper place. Nothing, even in music, ever showed an art growing out of a nicer sensibility in sound than his variety and appropriateness in style. For an art it is, and we cannot make a definition of that word which shall include other forms of art and not include it. If the passion and the feeling make the style, it is the poet's art that leaves them free to do it; he superintends; he feigns that which he leaves to make; he shares his art with "great creating Nature." All is unreal; all comes out of him; and all that has to do with the form and expression of his products is, of course, included in the manifest when his ship of fancy gets its clearance at the custom-house of his judgment. The style he assumes cannot but be present to his consciousness in the progress of a long drama. He must perceive, as he writes, if he has the common penetration of humanity, that the flow and cadence of his "Henry the Eighth" are not like those of his "Midsummer Night's Dream"; and he must preserve his tone, with, at times, direct art, not leaving everything to the feeling. That he does so is as evident as if he had chosen a form of verse more remote from the language of Nature and obliged himself to conform to its requirements. The terrible cursing of Margaret in "Richard III.," for example, is not the remorseless, hollow monotony of it, while it so heightens the passion, as evident to Shakspeare as to us; or had he no ear for verse, and just let his words sound on as they would, looking only at the meaning, and counting his iambics on his fingers,—not too carefully either? If the last supposition is to be insisted on, we must confine our notions of his perceptions and powers within very ordinary bounds, and make dramatic art as unpoetic as the art of brickmaking.

The beauty of Shakspeare's art is in its comprehensiveness. It takes in every quality of excellence. It looks at the great whole, and admits the little charms and graces. It includes constructiveness in story, character-drawing, picturesqueness, musicalness, naturalness,—in fine, whatever art may combine with poetry or the soul of poetry admit in art. To the young and unobservant, and all who are unable to consider the poet's writing, as we have in this article endeavoured to study a single passage of it, from his position, the art is not apparent; the mimic scene is reality, or some supernatural inspiration or schoolboy-like enthusiasm has produced the work. But there are others, created with different faculties, who begin to perceive the art almost as soon as they feel its power, and who love to study it and to live in the spirit of poetry that breathes through it; these come gradually to think of the man, as well as of his works,—to feel more and more the influence upon them of his greatness and beauty of soul, and, as years pass by, to find consolation and repose in the loftiness of his wisdom.

* * * * *

MIEN-YAUN.

I.

Young Mien-yaun had for two years been the shining centre of the aristocratic circles of Pekin. Around him revolved the social system. He was the vitalizing element in fashionable life,—the radiant sun, diffusing conventional warmth of tone and brilliancy of polish. He created modes. He regulated reputations.

His smile or his frown determined the worldly fate of thousands. His ready assurance gave him preeminence with one sex, and his beauty made him the admiration of the other. When he talked, Mandarins listened; when he walked, maidens' eyes glistened. He was, in short, the rage,—and he knew it, and meant to remain so. He was a wonderful student, and understood politics like a second Confucius. With the literature of all ages, from the Shee-king, written four thousand years ago, down to the latest achievements of the modern poets, he was intimately acquainted. His accomplishments were rich and varied, and his Tartar descent endowed him with a spirit and animation that enabled him to exhibit them to every advantage. He sang like a veritable Orpheus, and sensitive women had been known to faint under the excitement of his Moo-lee-wha, or national song. He even danced,—a most rare faculty in Pekin, as in all China,—but this was frowned upon, as immoral, by his family. Comely indeed he was, especially on state occasions, when he appeared in all the radiance of rosy health, overflowing spirits, and the richest crapes and satins,—decorated with the high order of the peacock's feather, the red button, and numberless glittering ornaments of ivory and lapis-lazuli. Beloved or envied by all the men, and with all the women dying for him, he was fully able to appreciate the comforts of existence. Considering the homage universally accorded him, he was as little of a dandy as could reasonably be expected.

His family connections were very exalted. All his relatives belonged to the Tse,—the learned and governing class. His father had been one of the Tootche-yuen, a censor of the highest board, and was still a member of the council of ministerial Mandarins. His uncle was a personal noble, a prince, higher in rank than the best of the Mandarins, and directed the deliberations of the Ping-pu, the Council of War. Thus his station gave him access to all the best society. His career was a path of roses. He never knew a sorrow. All were friendly to him, even the jealous, because it was the fashion. The doors of the mighty opened at his approach, and the smiles of the noble greeted him. He lived in an atmosphere of adulation, and yet resisted the more intoxicating influences of his dangerous elevation. Young as he was, he had penetrated the social surface, and, marking its many uncertainties, had laid out for himself a system of diplomacy which he believed best calculated to fortify him in his agreeable position of master of modes and dictator of fashionable public opinion.

The course he adopted was thoroughly effective. His sway was never disputed for a moment. He knew his personal charms, and determined to enhance their value by displaying them sparingly. Accordingly, he began by refusing forty-nine out of every fifty public invitations,—his former habit having been to refuse but one in five. He appeared on the promenade only twice in three weeks, but on these occasions he always artfully contrived to throw the community into the wildest excitement. One day, he appeared arrayed from head to foot in yellow Nankin, a color always considered a special abomination in Pekin, but which was nevertheless instantly adopted by all the gallants about town,—a proceeding which caused so much scandal that an imperial edict had to be issued, forbidding the practice in future. Another time, he came out with an unparalleled twist to his tail, the construction of which had occupied his mind for some days, and which occasioned the death by suicide of three over-ambitious youths who found themselves unable to survive the mortification of an unsuccessful attempt to imitate it. Again, to the infinite horror of the Mandarins, he paraded himself one afternoon with decacuminated finger-nails, and came very near producing a riot by his unwillingness to permit them to grow again, besides calling forth another imperial decree, threatening ignominious death to all nobles throughout the empire who should encourage the practice. All these eccentricities served only to add to the consequence of the multipotent Mien-yaun. Then again, he was gifted with a bewitching smile; but he steadily refrained from making any use of it oftener than once a month, at which times the enthusiasm of his adherents knew no bounds, and it might have been supposed that all Pekin had administered unto itself a mild preparation of laughing-gas, so universal were the grimaces. On very rare and distinguished occasions, Mien-yaun permitted himself to be persuaded to sing; but as ladies sometimes swooned under his melodious influence, the natural goodness of his heart prevented him from frequent indulgence in the exercise of this accomplishment.

It may naturally be supposed that the popular and fascinating young Chinese nobleman was the devoted object of much matrimonial speculation. Managing mammas and aspiring daughters gave the whole of their minds to him. To look forward to the possible hope of sharing through life his fortunes and his fame was the continual employment of many a high-born damsel. And they the more readily and unreservedly indulged these fancies, as nothing in the laws of China could prevent Mien-yaun from taking as many wives as he chose, provided he could support them all, and supply all their natural wants. But our hero knew his value. He was fully conscious that a member of the Tse, a son of an ex-censor of the highest board, a nephew of a personal noble and the Secretary of War, and, above all, the brightest ornament of aristocratic society, was by no means the sort of person to throw himself lightly away upon any woman or any set of women. He preferred to wait.

His family had high hopes of him. He was largely gifted with filial piety, which is everything in China. Politics, religion, literature, government, all rest upon the broad principle of filial piety. Being very filially pious, of course Mien-yaun was eminent in all these varied accomplishments. Consequently his family had a right to have high hopes of him. The great statesman, Kei-ying,—who has very recently terminated a life of devoted patriotism and heroic virtues by a sublime death on the scaffold,—undertook his instruction in Chinese politics. One lesson completed his education. "Lie, cheat, steal, and honor your parents," were the elementary principles which Kei-ying inculcated. The readiness with which Mien-yaun mastered them inspired his tutor with a lively confidence in the young man's future greatness. He was pronounced a rising character. His popularity increased. His name was in everybody's mouth. He shunned society more sedulously than ever, and assumed new and loftier airs. He was seized with fits of ambition, each of which lasted a day, and then gave place to some new aspiration. First, he would be a poet; but, after a few hours' labor, he declared the exertion of hunting up rhymes too great an exertion. Next, he would be a moral philosopher, and commenced a work, to be completed in sixty volumes, on the Whole Duty of Chinamen; but he never got beyond the elementary principles he had imbibed from Kei-ying. Again, he would become a great painter; but, having in an unguarded moment permitted the claims of perspective to be recognized, he was discouraged from this attempt by a deputation of the first artists of the empire, who waited upon him, and with great respect laid before him the appalling effects that would inevitably follow any public recognition of perspective in painting. Finally, he renounced all ambition but that of ruling his fellow-creatures with a rod more tyrannical than that of political authority, and more respected than the sceptre of government itself.