[Footnote 103: As evidence of this neglect we may cite the "Journal" of the Rev. John Ward, Incumbent of Stratford-upon-Avon, to which he was appointed in 1662. This diary, which has been published by Doctor Severn, "from the original MSS.," preserved in the library of the Medical Society of London, contains but two pages relating to Shakespeare, and those contain but scanty and unsatisfactory notices. I will quote only two sentences: "Remember to peruse Shakespeare's Plays—bee much versed in them, that I may not bee ignorant in that matter, whether Dr. Heylin does well, in reckoning up the dramatick poets which have been famous in England, to omit Shakespeare" (p. 184). Shakespeare's daughter was still alive when this was written, as appears from the sentence that immediately follows: it seems to us wonderful that so soon after the poet's death a shrewd and clever clergyman and physician (for Mr. Ward was both) should have known so little about his celebrated townsman's works or life. ]
It appears as though they were scarcely conscious of the great and brilliant luminary of English literature which was shining still, or had but lately passed away; and as though they could not anticipate either the admiration which was to succeed their duller perceptions of his unapproachable grandeur, or the eager desire which this would generate of knowing even the smallest details of its rise, its appearance, its departure. For by the biography of Shakespeare one cannot understand the records of what he bought, of what he sold, or the recital of those acts which only confound him with the common mass which surrounded him, and make him appear as the worthy burgess or the thrifty merchant; though even about the ordinary commonplace portions of his life such uncertainty exists, that doubts have been thrown on the very genuineness of that house which he is supposed to have inhabited.
Now, it is the characteristic individualizing quality, actions, and mode of executing his works, to whatever class of excellence he may belong, that we long to be familiar with in order to say that we know the man. What matters it to us that he paid so many marks or [{550}] shillings to purchase a homestead in Stratford-upon-Avon? The simple autograph of his name is now worth all the sums that he thus expended. One single line of one of his dramas, written in his own hand, would be worth to his admirers all the sums which are known to have passed between him and others. What has become of the goodly folios which must have once existed written in his own hand? Where are the books annotated or even scratched by his pen, from which he drew the subjects and sometimes the substance of his dramas? What vandalism destroyed the first, or dispersed the second of these valuable treasures? How is it that we know nothing of his method of composition? Was it in solitude and sacred seclusion, self-imprisoned for hours beyond the reach of the turmoil of the street or the domestic sounds of home? Or were his unrivalled works produced in scraps of time and fugitive moments, even perhaps in the waiting-room of the theatre, or the brawling or jovial sounds of the tavern?
Was he silent, thoughtful, while his fertile brain was seething and heaving in the fermentation of his glorious conceptions; so that men should have said—"Hush! Shakespeare is at work with some new and mighty imaginings!" or wore he always that light and careless spirit which often belongs to the spontaneous facility of genius; so that his comrades may have wondered when, and where, and how his grave characters, his solemn scenes, his fearful catastrophes, and his sublime maxims of original wisdom, were conceived, planned, matured, and finally written down, to rule for ever the world of letters? Almost the only fact connected with his literary life which has come down to us is one which has been recorded, perhaps with jealousy, certainly with ill-temper, by his friend Ben Jonson—that he wrote with overhaste, and hardly ever erased a line, though it would have been better had he done so with many.
This almost total absence of all external information, this drying-up of the ordinary channels of personal history, forces us to seek for the character and the very life of Shakespeare in his own works. But how difficult, in analyzing the complex constitution of such a man's principles, motives, passions, and affections, to discriminate between what he has drawn for himself, and what he has created by the force of his imagination. Dealing habitually with fictions, sometimes in their noblest, sometimes in their vilest forms—here gross and even savage, there refined and sometimes ethereal, how shall we discover what portions of them were copied from the glass which he held before himself, what from the magic mirrors across which flitted illusive or fanciful imagery? The work seems hopeless. It is not like that of the printer, who, from a chaotic heap of seemingly unmeaning lead, draws out letter after letter, and so disposes them that they shall make senseful and even brilliant lines. It is more like the hopeless labor of one who, from the fragments of a tesselated pavement, should try to draw the elegant and exquisitely tinted figure which once it bore.
This difficulty of appreciating, and still more of delineating, the character of our great poet, makes him, without perhaps an exception, the most difficult literary theme in English letters.
How to reduce the subject to a lecture seems indeed a literal paradox. But when to this difficulty is added that of an impossible compression into narrow limits of the widest and vastest compass ever embraced by any one man's genius, it must appear an excess of rashness in any-one to presume that he can do justice to the subject on which I am addressing you.
It seems, therefore, hardly wonderful that even the last year, dedicated naturally to the tercentenary commemoration of William Shakespeare, should have passed over without any public eulogy of his greatness in this our metropolis. It seemed, indeed, as if the magnitude of that one man's genius was too oppressive for this generation. It was not, I believe, an undervaluing [{551}] of his merits which produced the frustration of efforts, and the disappointment of expectations, that seemed to put to rout and confusion, or rather to paralyze, the exertions so strenuously commenced to mark the year as a great epoch in England's literary history. I believe, on the contrary, that the dimensions of Shakespeare had grown so immeasurably in the estimation of his fellow-countrymen, that the proportions of his genius to all that had followed him, and all that surround us, had grown so enormously in the judgment and feeling of the country, from the nobleman to the workman, that the genius of the man oppressed us, and made us feel that all our multiplied resources of art and speech were unequal to his worthy commemoration. No plan proposed for this purpose seemed adequate to attain it. Nothing solid and permanent that could either come up to his merits or to our aspirations seemed to be within the grasp either of the arts or of the wealth of our country. The year has passed away, and Shakespeare remains without any monument, except that which, by his wonderful writings, he has raised for himself. Even the research after a site fit for the erection of a monument to him, in the city of squares, of gardens, and of parks, seemed only to work perplexity and hopelessness.
Presumptuous as it may appear, the claim to connect myself with that expired and extinct movement is my only apology for my appearing before you. If, a year after its time, I take upon myself the eulogy of Shakespeare, if I appear to come forward as with a funeral oration, to give him, in a manner, posthumous glory, it is because my work has dropped out of its place, and not because I have inopportunely misplaced it. In the course of the last year, it was proposed to me, both directly and indirectly, to deliver a lecture on Shakespeare. I was bold enough to yield my assent, and thus felt that I had contracted an obligation to the memory of the bard, as well as to those who thought that my sharing what was done for his honor would possess any value. A task undertaken becomes a duty unfulfilled. When, therefore, it was proposed to me to perform my portion of the homage which I considered due to him, though it was to be a month too late, I felt it would be cowardice to shrink from its performance.
For in truth the undertaking required some courage; and to retire before its difficulties might be stigmatized as a dastardly timidity. It is a work of courage at any time and in any place to undertake a lecture upon Shakespeare, more in fact than to venture on the delivery of a series. The latter gives scope for the thousand things which one would wish to say—it affords ample space for apposite illustration—and it enables one to enrich the subject with the innumerable and inimitable beauties that are flung like gems or flowers over every page of his magnificent works. But in the midst of public, or rather universal, celebration of a national and secular festival in his honor, in the presence probably of the most finished literary characters in this highly-educated country, still more certainly before numbers of those whom the nation acknowledges as deeply read in the works of our poet as the most accomplished critic of any age has been in the writings of the classics—men who have introduced into our literature a class-name—that of "Shakespearian scholars"—to have ventured to speak on this great theme might seem to have required, not courage, but temerity. Why, it might have been justly asked, do none of those who have consumed their lives in the study of him, not page by page, but line by line, who have pressed his sweet fruits between their lips till they have absorbed all their lusciousness, who have made his words their study, his thoughts their meditation,—why does not one at least among them stand forward now, and leave for posterity the record of his matured observation? Perhaps I may assign the reason which I have before, that they [{552}] know, too, the unapproachable granduer of the theme, and the rare powers which are required to grasp and to hold it.