[Born at Stratford-on-Avon, 1564. Died there, 1616. Aged 52.]
William Shakspeare stands at the head of those whose intellectual domain is the spirit of man. This is the master character of his mind, to which poetry is in him an accidental direction. His insight into man is his title to universal interest. He is the chief painter of humanity that the world has seen, combining, at once, perfect intimate knowledge of human nature, and perfect creative power of representation. The drama had suddenly awakened in his country, and he obeyed the instinct of his time, the poetic bent of which was created for him, as he for it. There were with him, before him, and immediately after him, great poets, with whom the dramatic elements existed in high native strength and beauty; but in him alone are those elements mastered, so as to produce entire works of art, complete in power, and in consistent, though not regular, form. Sharing the intuition of Aristotle, which makes the action in the play the root out of which the characters and all else grow, he directs the stream of events as connectedly as it flows in the human world; and, as in the world, so in his inspired writing—agents appear born for their work, as the work to do seems to offer itself to the agents. All beauties of language, all flights of poetry, all particular scenes and speeches, powerful and impressive as they may be, are merely subordinate. No character, how exquisitely or elaborately soever conceived and finished, is drawn for itself; but one and all are relative to the scope of the play and to one another. He seems to have undertaken a great task, and to be seriously and solely intent upon advancing to its fulfilment. No form of human life is foreign to him; the most heroic and the humblest, the most illustrious and the most obscure, of all times, in all places, are in presence before him. He seizes the spirit of time, place, and theme. Natural, preternatural, light, weighty, laughter, tears, terror, are all alike to him—-all under his mastery, and flung forth with free power. Grace and gigantic strength, are spirits equally at his bidding. The learned and the unlearned are both attracted by his spell. The ignorant feel the fascination, the erudite have never exhausted the study. His country, with her innumerable titles to renown, ranks amongst the highest his great name. With school instruction of the most ordinary kind, by universal and unerring observation, by profound and intense meditation of men, with the creative power of the highest imagination, he gave out, spontaneously, works of that kind whose study makes men learned: and they are so viewed and studied by all civilized nations, every day more and more, at home and abroad. In him England competes for the crown of poetical glory with all other nations of old or modern fame. She has had other great poets, but they all, besides their own natural offerings, have brought poetry from other lands and languages, into their own. In him alone she feels, that what she displays SHE has produced. Little is known of the life of William Shakspeare.
[From the well-known monumental bust in the church at Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakspeare lies buried. It was executed by an artist named Gerard Johnson, very soon after the death of Shakspeare, and erected between 1616 and 1620. The original is in common limestone, and was painted to resemble life. The eyes were a light hazel, the hair and beard auburn: the doublet was scarlet, and the loose gown black. It was repainted precisely in the same manner in 1749. But in 1793, Malone officiously had it whitewashed, as it now exists. There is a great resemblance between this face from the Stratford monument and the portrait published in the first folio of Shakspeare’s works, by the actors, in 1623. No. 407A is from a very remarkable terracotta bust, in the possession of Professor Owen, of the College of Surgeons. It was discovered in pulling down the old Duke’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where it was placed over one of the stage-doors, the bust of Ben Jonson (accidentally destroyed by the workmen) occupying a corresponding place over the other door. Shakspeare having been rescued by the timely interposition of Mr. Clift, Professor Owen’s father-in-law, the bust became that gentleman’s property, and by him it was given to its present owner. There are two types of the Shakspeare portrait: the “round-faced,” as seen in the monument of Stratford-on-Avon, and the “oval-faced” of Cornelius Jansen. Roubilliac’s bust, and that in the possession of Professor Owen, are after Jansen. No. 407B is the bust by Roubilliac. The statues by Roubilliac and John Bell (see Handbook of Modern Sculpture, Nos. 56 and 9) are conventional, and represent the two types.]
| 407A. | - | William Shakspeare. Poet. | |
| 407B. |
408. John Milton. Poet.
[Born in London, 1608. Died there, 1674. Aged 66.]
The son of a scrivener. In his earliest years he became enamoured of the Muses, wrote exquisite poetry, travelled in Italy, returned hastily on the outbreak of the Civil war, and identified himself with the Republican party. Later in life, and as blindness was deepening upon him, he was appointed by Cromwell Latin Secretary to the Council of State. Retiring from politics on the death of the Protector, he would, under the Restoration, have suffered as a regicide, had not Sir William Davenant, to his great honour, interposed his own favour with the Court. So rescued, Milton withdrew into obscurity and poverty, unnoticed and forgotten. In his solitude and blindness he composed “Paradise Lost,” which he dictated chiefly to his eldest daughter. The poem was sold to a bookseller for ten pounds, and was not very popular during the lifetime of the poet. At one time he took pupils. He was three times married, was devoutly religious, austere in his morals, and simple in his ways of life. He is the great epic poet of England, distinguished by the strength and sublimity of his genius, and hardly less for sensibility to the graceful and beautiful. Laboriously learned, with an admiration as intelligent as devoted, of the great writings preserved from Greek and Roman antiquity, he, more than any other of our poets, has modelled his works on the type of his illustrious predecessors. He has, of all English poets, carried art in his writings to the highest pitch, but neither art nor imitation has tamed the wing of his muse, or impaired his praise of originality. He knew the greatness of his powers, viewing them as a gift to be used to the honour of the Giver; and his one paramount work, the “Paradise Lost,” having for its “great argument,” as he himself says, “to justify the ways of God to men,” must be regarded as his oblation, brought and laid on the Altar. He founded and formed English heroic blank verse,—a measure which, under his hand, rivals in richness and variety the music of his classical masters; and which alone could, by its majestic flow and inexhaustible powers of expression, have sustained the weight and amplitude of his subject. He loved and honoured Shakspeare.
409. Alexander Pope. Poet.
[Born in London, 1688. Died at Twickenham, 1744. Aged 56.]
Alexander Pope, the son of a linendraper, and a Roman Catholic, was his own instructor. He was sent home from school in his twelfth year for lampooning his tutor, and from that time he gave his teachers no further trouble. Already, as a boy, a happy versifier—twice happy, for an indulgent father smiled on his dawning skill—he was, in his maturer day, and for the remainder of his own century, the leading star in the sky of our English poetry. He received at the hands of his master, Dryden, the rhymed ten-syllable couplet. This couplet was not first by Dryden used harmoniously, forcibly, eloquently—for Hall in his Satires had done this—but by Dryden it was first raised into the reigning measure of English song. He sustained in it a free flow and bold sweep, suitable to his genius. Pope rather chained the movement, stamping even on his verse the peculiarity of his fine intellectual powers. When we search for Pope’s characteristic amongst poets, we find that he had reasoning—which is the earnest,—and wit—which is the sporting—of the logical faculty, both intimately blending themselves with the poetic vein. It was, accordingly, to a bright and sharp intellectual action that he fitted the couplet, apt by its nature for the service. Uniting to a lively, quick and keen intellect, so much of poetic passion as, in fact, secured the dedication of a life, he produced works which, by their mastery, must command admiration whilst the language is read, although in them, the deliberate skill predominates over the passionate expression. Viewed from the highest point, he was imitative, not original. His spirit active and perceptive in the study of his greater and less predecessors, not self-infused into the contemplation of Man and Nature. What is most felt as a fire in his verse is the ardency of writing, the zeal of an artist enamoured of his task: or he accepts and translates the passion of others, which, not having its home in its own bosom, does not receive justice there. Our grandfathers and our grandmothers knew by heart the “Essay on Man,” the “Essay on Criticism,” the “Moral Essays,” the “Characters of Women” (sparkling with wit and malice, but adding nothing to the observation and true ideal delineation of woman), and the “Rape of the Lock,” in which the playfulness, lying in the verse, exquisitely comes out, and a graceful half-ironical fancy amuses and captivates, but no steeping imagination subdues or transforms to its likeness. He introduces us again to Ariel, whom we have known before, but how different his Ariel and Shakspeare’s. Pope brought intellective precision into poetry, which should feed on the indefinite and the vague, and should flower out into the softened and the flowing. Hence, often when he is the most admirable, he is the most artificial.