Brutus dies in consequence of the death of Caesar; no one desired more than himself the blow which killed him; no one resolved on his death by a freer choice of his reason; he had not, like Hamlet, a ghost to dictate to him his duty; in himself alone he found that severe law to which he sacrificed his repose, his affections, and his inclinations; no one is more thoroughly master of himself; and yet, like all the rest, he dies, powerless to resist fate. With him perishes the liberty which he aspired to save; the hope of rendering his death useful does not even flash across his mind; and yet Shakspeare does not make him exclaim, when dying, "Virtue, thou art only an empty name!" And why not? Because above this terrible conflict of man against necessity soars his moral existence, independent and sovereign, free from all the perils of the combat. The mighty genius whose view had embraced the whole destiny of man could not have failed to recognize its sublime secret; a sure instinct revealed to him this final explanation, without which all is darkness and uncertainty. Furnished, therefore, with the moral thread which never breaks in his hands, he proceeds with firm steps through the embarrassments of circumstances and the perplexities of varied feelings; nothing can be simpler at bottom than Shakspeare's action; nothing less complicated than the impression which it leaves upon our minds. Our interest is never divided, and still less does it waver between two opposite inclinations, or two equally powerful affections. As soon as the characters become known, and their position is developed, our choice is made; we know what we desire and what we fear, whom we hate and whom we love. There is also as little conflict of duties as of interests; and the conscience wavers no more than the affections. In the midst of political revolutions, in times when society is at war with itself, and can no longer guide individuals by those laws which it has imposed upon them for the maintenance of its unity, then alone does Shakspeare's judgment hesitate, and allow ours to hesitate also; he can himself no longer accurately determine on which side lies the right, or what duty requires, and he is therefore unable to tell us. "King John," "Richard II.," and the three parts of "Henry VI.," furnish examples of this. In every other drama, the moral position is evident, free from ambiguity, and undisguised by complaisance; the characters are not represented as deceiving or deceived, hovering between vice and virtue, weakness and crime; what they are, they are frankly and openly; their actions are depicted in vigorous outlines, so that even the weakest eyesight can not mistake them. And yet—so admirable is his perception of truths—in these actions, so positive, complete, and consistent, all the inconsistencies and fantastic mixtures of human nature exist and are displayed. Macbeth has fully made up his mind to crime; no link binds his conduct any longer to virtue; and yet who can doubt that, in the character of Macbeth, side by side with the passions which stimulate him to crime, there still exist those inclinations which constitute virtue? The mother of Hamlet has set no bounds to her incestuous love; she knows her crime and boldly commits it; her position is that of a shameless culprit; but her soul is that of a woman capable of loving modesty, and finding happiness within the bounds of duty. Even Claudius himself, the wretch Claudius, would wish to be able still to pray; he can not do so, but he wishes he could. Thus the keen vision of the philosopher enlightens and directs the imagination of the poet; thus man appears to Shakspeare only when fully furnished with all that belongs to his nature. The truth is always there, before the eyes of the poet: he looks down and writes.
But there is one truth which Shakspeare does not observe in this manner, which he derives from himself, and without which all the external truths which he contemplates would be merely cold and sterile images; and that is, the feeling which these truths excite within him. This feeling is the mysterious bond which unites us to the outer world, and makes us truly know it; when our mind has taken realities into consideration, our soul is moved by an analogous and spontaneous impression; but for the anger with which we are inspired by the sight of crime, whence should we obtain the revelation of that element which renders crime odious? No one has ever combined, in an equal degree with Shakspeare, this double character of an impartial observer and a man of profound sensibility. Superior to all by his reason, and accessible to all by sympathy, he sees nothing without judging it, and he judges it because he feels it. Could any one who did not detest Iago have penetrated, as Shakspeare has done, into the recesses of his execrable character? To the horror with which he regards the criminal must be ascribed the terrible energy of the language which he puts into his mouth. Who could make us tremble, so much as Lady Macbeth herself, at the action for which she prepares with so little fear? But when it becomes needful to express pity or tenderness, the unrestraint of love, the extravagance of maternal apprehension, or the stern and deep grief of manly affection—then the observer may quit his post, and the judge his tribunal. Shakspeare himself develops all the abundance of his nature, and gives expression to those familiar feelings of his soul which are set in motion by the slightest contact with his imagination. Women, children, old men—who has described them with such truthfulness as he? Where the ingenuousness of requited affection given birth to a purer flower than Desdemona? Has old age, when shamefully deserted, and driven to madness by the weakness of senility and the violence of grief, ever given utterance to more pathetic lamentations than in "King Lear?" Who has not felt his heart assailed by all the emotions of anguish which childhood can inspire, on beholding the scene in which Hubert, in performance of his promise to King John, is about to burn out the eyes of young Arthur? And if this barbarous project were carried into execution, who could endure it? But in such a case Shakspeare would not have described the scene. There is an excess of grief in presence of which he pauses; he takes pity on himself, and repels impressions too powerful to be borne. Scarcely does he permit Juliet to utter any words between Romeo's death and her own; Macduff is silent after the massacre of his wife and children; and Constance dies before we are allowed to behold the death of Arthur. Othello alone approaches the whole of his sufferings without mitigation; but his misfortune was so horrible, when he was ignorant of it, that the impression which he receives from it, after the discovery of his error, becomes almost a consolation.
Thus moved by all that moves us, Shakspeare obtains our confidence; we yield ourselves in security to that open soul in which our feelings have already reverberated, and to that ready imagination which is as much illumined by the splendid sun of Italy as darkened by the sombre fogs of Denmark. Dramatic in the portraiture of a mother's gambols with her child, and simple in the terrible apparition which opens the first scene of "Hamlet," the poet is never unequal to the realities which ho has to delineate, or the man to the emotions with which he wishes to imbue our hearts.
Why, then, are we sometimes painfully compelled to pause while following him? Why does a sort of impatience and fatigue frequently disturb the admiration which we feel for his works? One misfortune happened to Shakspeare; though he was always lavish of his wealth, he was not always able to distribute it either opportunely or skillfully. This was frequently the misfortune of Corneille also. Ideas accumulated about Corneille, as about Shakspeare, confusedly and tumultuously, and neither of them had the courage to treat his own mind with prudent severity. They forgot the position of the character they were describing, in order to indulge in the thoughts which it awakened in the soul of the poet. In Shakspeare, especially, this excessive indulgence in his own ideas and feelings sometimes arrests and interrupts the emotions awakened in the breast of the spectator, in a manner which is fatal to the dramatic effect. It is not merely, as in Corneille, the ingenious loquacity of a rather talkative mind; but it is the restless and fantastic reverie of a mind astonished at its own discoveries, not knowing how to reproduce the whole impression which it has received from them, and heaping ideas, images, and expressions one upon another, in order to awaken in us feelings similar to those by which it is itself oppressed. The feelings developed at such length are not always, however, those which should properly occupy the personage by whom they are expressed; and not only is the harmony of the position injured by them, but we find ourselves compelled to undertake a certain labor which, in the end, diverts our attention from the subject on which it ought to be concentrated. Though always simple in their emotions, the heroes of Shakspeare are not always equally simple in their speeches; though always true and natural in their ideas, they are not as constantly true and natural in the combinations which they form from them. The poet's gaze embraced an immense field, and his imagination, traversing it with marvelous rapidity, perceived a thousand distant or singular relations between the objects which met his view, and passed from one to another by a multitude of abrupt and curious transitions, which it afterward imposed upon both the personages of the drama and the spectators. Hence arose the true and great fault of Shakspeare, the only one that originated in himself, and which is sometimes perceptible even in his finest compositions; and that is, a deceptive appearance of laborious research, which is occasioned, on the contrary, by the absence of labor. Accustomed, by the taste of his age, frequently to connect ideas and expressions by their most distant relations, he contracted the habit of that learned subtlety which perceives and assimilates every thing, and leaves no point of resemblance unnoticed; and this fault has more than once marred the gayety of his comedies, as well as destroyed the pathos of his tragedies. If meditation had taught Shakspeare to fall back upon himself, to contemplate his own strength, and to concentrate it by skillful management, he would soon have rejected the abuse which he has made of it, and would have speedily become conscious that neither his heroes nor his spectators could follow him in that prodigious movement of ideas, feelings, and intentions which, on every occasion, and under the slightest pretext, arose and obtruded themselves upon his own thought.
But so far as we are able, at the present day, to form any idea of Shakspeare's character, from the scattered and uncertain details which have reached us regarding his life and person, we have every reason to believe that he never bestowed so much care either on his labors or on his glory. More disposed to enjoy his own powers than to turn them to their best account—docile to the inspiration, rather than guided by the consciousness of his genius—vexed but little by a craving after success, and more inclined to doubt its value than attentive to the means of obtaining it—the poet advanced without measuring his progress, unvailing himself, as it were, at every step, and perhaps retaining, even at the end of his career, some remains of ingenuous ignorance of the marvelous riches which he scattered so lavishly in every direction. His sonnets alone, of all his works, contain a few allusions to his personal feelings, and to the condition of his soul and life; but we rarely meet in them with the idea, so natural to a poet, of the immortality which his works are destined to achieve. He could not have been a man who reckoned much upon posterity, or who cared at all about it, who ever displayed so little anxiety to throw light upon the only monuments of his private existence which posterity possesses concerning him.
Printed for the first time in 1609, these sonnets were, doubtless, published with Shakspeare's consent, although nothing seems to indicate that he took the slightest part in their publication. Neither his publisher nor himself has endeavored to impart to them an historical interest by naming the persons to whom they were addressed, or the occasions which inspired their composition. Thus the light which they throw upon some of the circumstances of his life is often so doubtful that it tends rather to perplex than to guide the biographer. The passionate style which pervades them all—even those which are evidently addressed merely to a friend—has thrown the commentators upon Shakspeare into great embarrassment. Of all the conjectures which have been hazarded in explanation of this fact, one alone, in my opinion, seems to possess any likelihood. At a time when the mind, tormented, as it were, by its youth and inexperience, tried all forms of expression, except simplicity—and at a court in which euphuism, the fashionable language, had introduced the most whimsical travesties, both of persons and ideas, into familiar conversation—it is possible that, in order to express real feelings, the poet may sometimes have assumed, in these fugitive compositions, the tone and language of conventionality. It is known, from a pamphlet published in 1598, that Shakspeare's "sugar'd sonnets," which were already celebrated, although they had not yet been printed, were the delight of his private circle of friends; and if it be remarked that the idea which terminates them is almost always repeated, with variations, in several successive sonnets, we shall feel strongly tempted to regard them as the simple amusements of a mind which could never resist the opportunity of expressing an ingenious idea. Not only, therefore, are Shakspeare's sonnets insufficient to explain the facts to which they allude, but it is only by a more or less logical process of induction that they can be made to supply any details regarding the occupations of Shakspeare's life during his residence in London, and during those thirty years, now so glorious, regarding which he has been at such pains to supply us with no information.
Perhaps his position, as well as his character, may have contributed to cause this silence. A feeling of pride, as much as a sentiment of modesty, may have induced Shakspeare to leave in oblivion an existence which gave him but little satisfaction. The condition of an actor then possessed, in England, neither consistency nor reputation. Whatever difference Hamlet may place between strolling players and those who belonged to an established theatre, the latter could not but bear the weight of the coarseness of the public upon whom they were dependent, as well as that of the colleagues with whom they shared the task of diverting the public.