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.
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