says the troubled Brutus to Portia, who has expressed a misdoubting of his true and clear affection for her.
Is this "antiquated" English, and thence "unintelligible?"
"Viola.—My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
Duke.—And what's her history?
Viola.—A blank, my lord. She never told her love.
****
Duke.—But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
Viola.—I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers, too."
"Miranda.—I am a fool
To weep at what I am glad of.
Ferdinand.—Where should this music be?
I' th' air?—or th' earth?
It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon
Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence have I follow'd it,
Or it hath drawn me, rather. But 'tis gone—
No! it begins again.
****
The ditty does remember my drown'd father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes.—I hear it now above me."
Here we have an "antiquated" touch or two of what would have distressed Dryden. "Passion" is used in the old strong general sense of powerful, possessing emotion—in this example, filial sorrow; and lower down, we have the obsolete "OWES" for the modern "OWNS," which two vitiating reliques of antiquity, along with that "pestering," "affected," and "obscure" figure, "crept by me upon the waters," would explain, without doubt, the impossibility which the reader feels himself under, of deriving any pleasure from the passage, and, to speak strictly, of discovering any signification in it!!
Assuredly we do not design transcribing whole Shakspeare, in order to contradicting a rash word of Dryden's. It might not be politic, either; for we should now and then meet with hard sentences, which might seem, like unlucky witnesses, to give evidence against the party that brings them before the tribunal. They would not. It is not in twenty places, or not in a hundred, that the obsoleteness of a word or phrase makes Shakspeare hard, nor any thing in the world but his wit, his intellect in excess, that occasionally runs away with him, and wraps up his meaning in a phraseology of his own creating; enigmas that are embarrassing to disinvolve again—which might, indeed, be an antiquated manner of his age, but not an obsolete dictionary and grammar. Neither is it required of us to convince the reader, by copious extracts, that he really understands Shakspeare, one or other of whose volumes he has always in his pocket, and whose English he sits hearing by the hour, lisped, mouthed, and legitimately spoken upon the stage, and still fancying that he understands what he hears. But it seemed not altogether out of place, when the criticism of style is moved, and Shakspeare's English challenged, to recall into the liveliest consciousness of the reader, for a moment, the principal feature of the case, which is, without doubt, that Shakspeare is, in all our literature, the writer in whom this highest art of writing—namely—start not, good, innocent reader! for it must one day be said—THE ART OF SIMPLICITY—reaches its height; that magical art of steeping the words and idioms that fall from every lip at every minute, in music, and beauty, and pathos, and power, so that the familiar sound slips along the well-known inlets into the soul, and we are—"took ere we are 'ware."
Otherwise, for the general fact, that he, the reader of 1845, does understand, without much difficulty, the dramatic poet whom, in 1665, the gulf of years and the mutations of speech from father to son had rendered "unintelligible"—for the general verity of this unforeseen and improbable, but indisputable fact, the reader's recollection of his own personal history since he was eight or ten years old, may be left satisfactorily to vouch.
Neither was it, perhaps, unreasonable to snatch the occasion of alleging and manifesting the momentous and instructive truth—that the intenser working of the mind finds out, in every age, the perpetuities of a language.
Let us take our place for a moment in the Age of our poetry, which began with Dryden inclusive, and ended, or began ending, with Cowper exclusive. It was the UNCREATIVE age of our poetry; or, if you insist upon a denomination positively grounded, the IMITATIVE; or it was the unimpassioned, or it was the rational. Only the stage—losing passion, and not being the place for reason—went mad; as with Nat Lee. However, it retained something like a creative energy in Otway—and, moreover, Cato was really and afflictingly a rational play.—The mere musical flow of the verse took the place of ever varying expression; and the name used as nearly equivalent with a good verse, at least for describing that which a verse should ordinarily be, is a smooth verse. Concurrent in time and cause was the invasion of the ten syllabled rhymed couplet, which, in place of the old diversified measures, took possession—off the stage—of our poetry. With all this went a transformation of the language accepted in verse; a severing and setting apart, as if a consecrating of the Parnassian dialect, which formerly was always caught up fresh from the lap of nature, at the risk, no doubt, of pulling weeds amongs the flowers.
In the incidental enunciations of criticism, we may easily gather notices of the movement this way, in the double matter of the language and the verse. In both, it receives, as it should do, the same name and description. It is the disengaging of Refinement—its birth from the bosom of Barbarism—distinct as mother and daughter. Shakspeare and Milton are the two great barbarous kings with a numerous court. If we try to give ourselves account of this Refinement and to vindicate for it the title, we are at a loss for names and notions. A Refinement which places the sluts of Dryden and his contemporaries above Imogen and Miranda, and above Eve. One hangs down the head in shame and perplexity. The history of England affords us a key in the name of Charles II. The Court, the Town, and Life-in-doors, are the words that resolve the mystery. The Muses that were Powers of Fell, and Flood, and Forest, and Field, that went with man wherever he went—in cottage and palace, in divan and in dungeon, in the student's or the miser's chamber, on the battle-plain, and at the dance of bacchanals—and when and wheresoever man spoke, heard their own mother-tongue, they were beguiled and imprisoned within the pale of artificial society and of high life. They had to learn the breeding of the drawing-room. Their auditors, in short, were gentlemen and ladies, who never forgot that they were such in the sudden overpowering consciousness of their being men and women.
There was therefore not only a denaturation, but an enervation of our poetry. There grew a dainty, fastidious, easily-loathing taste, betokening that the robust health of the older day—its healthy hunger, and its blood glowing and bounding like a forester's—was gone by. Never to come again? No! not so bad as that. We mark main lines. We have not room for the filling-up. The last century closing, opened another Age, and we of to-day renovate and reinvigorate ourselves the best we may.