“To favour and to prettiness”; the definition of his utmost merit and demerit, his final achievement and shortcoming, is here complete and exact. Witness the sweet quiet example of idyllic work which I extract from a scene beginning in the regular amœbæan style of ancient pastoral.
Edward. Thou hear’st me say that I do dote on thee.
Countess. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst;
Though little, I do prize it ten times less:
If on my virtue, take it if thou canst;
For virtue’s store by giving doth augment:
Be it on what it will that I can give
And thou canst take away, inherit it.Edward. It is thy beauty that I would enjoy.
Countess. O, were it painted, I would wipe it off,
And dispossess myself to give it thee:
But, sovereign, it is soldered to my life;
Take one and both; for like an humble shadow
It haunts the sunshine of my summer’s life.Edward. But thou mayst lend it me to sport withal.
Countess. As easy may my intellectual soul
Be lent away, and yet my body live,
As lend my body, palace to my soul,
Away from her, and yet retain my soul.
My body is her bower, her court, her abbey,
And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted;
If I should lend her house, my lord, to thee,
I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me.
Once more, this last couplet is very much in the style of Shakespeare’s sonnets; nor is it wholly unlike even the dramatic style of Shakespeare in his youth—and some dozen other poets or poeticules of the time. But throughout this part of the play the recurrence of a faint and intermittent resemblance to Shakespeare is more frequently noticeable than elsewhere. [{252}] A student of imperfect memory but not of defective intuition might pardonably assign such couplets, on hearing them cited, to the master-hand itself; but such a student would be likelier to refer them to the sonnetteer than to the dramatist. And a casual likeness to the style of Shakespeare’s sonnets is not exactly sufficient evidence to warrant such an otherwise unwarrantable addition of appendage to the list of Shakespeare’s plays.
A little further on we come upon the first and last passage which does actually recall by its wording a famous instance of the full and ripened style of Shakespeare.
He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp
Shall die, my lord: and will your sacred self
Commit high treason ’gainst the King of heaven,
To stamp his image in forbidden metal,
Forgetting your allegiance and your oath?
In violating marriage’ sacred law
You break a greater honour than yourself;
To be a king is of a younger house
Than to be married: your progenitor,
Sole reigning Adam on the universe,
By God was honoured for a married man,
But not by him anointed for a king.
Every possible reader, I suppose, will at once bethink himself of the famous passage in Measure for Measure which here may seem to be faintly prefigured:
It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven’s image
In stamps that are forbid:
and the very difference of style is not wider than the gulf which gapes between the first style of Shakespeare and the last. But men of Shakespeare’s stamp, I venture to think, do not thus repeat themselves. The echo of the passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, describing the girlish friendship of Hermia and Helena, which we find in the first act of The Two Noble Kinsmen, describing the like girlish friendship of Emilia and Flavina, is an echo of another sort. Both, I need hardly say, are unquestionably Shakespeare’s; but the fashion in which the matured poet retouches and completes the sketch of his earlier years—composes an oil painting, as it were, from the hints and suggestions of a water-colour sketch long since designed and long since half forgotten—is essentially different from the mere verbal and literal trick of repetition which sciolists might think to detect in the present instance. Again we must needs fall back on the inevitable and indefinable test of style; a test which could be of no avail if we were foolish enough to appeal to scholiasts and their attendant dunces, but which should be of some avail if we appeal to experts and their attentive scholars; and by this test we can but remark that neither the passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream nor the corresponsive passage in The Two Noble Kinsmen could have been written by any hand known to us but Shakespeare’s; whereas the passage in King Edward III. might as certainly have been written by any one out of a dozen poets then living as the answering passage in Measure for Measure could assuredly have been written by Shakespeare alone.
As on a first reading of the Hippolytus of Euripides we feel that, for all the grace and freshness and lyric charm of its opening scenes, the claim of the poem to our ultimate approval or disapproval must needs depend on the success or failure of the first interview between Theseus and his calumniated son; and as on finding that scene to be feeble and futile and prosaic and verbose we feel that the poet who had a woman’s spite against women has here effectually and finally shown himself powerless to handle the simplest elements of masculine passion, of manly character and instinct; so in this less important case we feel that the writer, having ventured on such a subject as the compulsory temptation of a daughter by a father, who has been entrapped into so shameful an undertaking through the treacherous exaction of an equivocal promise unwarily confirmed by an inconsiderate oath, must be judged by the result of his own enterprise; must fail or stand as a poet by its failure or success. And his failure is only not complete; he is but just redeemed from utter discomfiture by the fluency and simplicity of his equable but inadequate style. Here as before we find plentiful examples of the gracefully conventional tone current among the lesser writers of the hour.
Warwick. How shall I enter on this graceless errand?
I must not call her child; for where’s the father
That will in such a suit seduce his child?
Then, Wife of Salisbury;—shall I so begin?
No, he’s my friend; and where is found the friend
That will do friendship such endamagement?—[{255}]
Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend’s wife,
I am not Warwick, as thou think’st I am,
But an attorney from the court of hell;
That thus have housed my spirit in his form
To do a message to thee from the king.