Shakespeare.
Was Shakespeare lame, like Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott[274], and the Prayers, the daughters of Jupiter? If he was so in fact, the "Boy" of Stratford, far from being ashamed of his infirmity, as was Childe Harold, is not afraid to remind one of his mistresses of it:
So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite[275].
Shakespeare must have had many loves, if we were to count one for each sonnet. The creator of Desdemona and Juliet grew old without ceasing to be in love. Was the unknown woman to whom he addresses his charming verses proud and happy to be the object of Shakespeare's Sonnets? It may be doubted: glory is to an old man what diamonds are to an old woman; they adorn, but cannot make her beautiful. Says the English tragic poet to his mistress:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
. . . . . .
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay[276].
Shakespeare loved, but believed no more in love than he believed in other things: a woman to him was a bird, a zephyr, a flower, a thing that charms and passes. Through his indifference to, or ignorance of, his fame, through his condition, which set him without the pale of society and of a position to which he could not hope to attain, he seemed to have taken life as a light, unoccupied hour, a swift and gentle leisure.
Shakespeare, in his youth, met old monks driven from their cloister, who had seen Henry VIII., his reforms, his destructions of monasteries, his "fools," his wives, his mistresses, his headsmen. When the poet departed from life, Charles I. was sixteen years of age. Thus, with one hand, Shakespeare was able to touch the whitened heads once threatened by the sword of the second of the Tudors and, with the other, the brown head of the second of the Stuarts, destined to be laid low by the axe of the Parliamentarians. Leaning upon those tragic brows, the great tragedian sank into the tomb; he filled the interval of the days in which he lived with his ghosts, his blind kings, his ambitious men punished, his unfortunate women, so as to join together, through analogous fictions, the realities of the past and of the future.
Shakespeare is of the number of the five or six writers who have sufficed for the needs and nutriment of thought: those parent geniuses seem to have brought forth and suckled all the others. Homer impregnated antiquity: ‚Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace, Virgil are his sons. Dante engendered Modern Italy, from Petrarch to Tasso. Rabelais created French literature: Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière descend from him. England is all Shakespeare, and in these later days he has lent his language to Byron, his dialogue to Walter Scott.
Men often disown these supreme masters; they rebel against them; they reckon up their faults: they accuse them of tediousness, of length, of extravagance, of bad taste, what time they plunder them and deck themselves in their spoils; but they struggle in vain against their yoke. Everything wears their colours; they have left their traces everywhere; they invent words and names which go to swell the general vocabulary of the nations; their expressions become proverbs, their fictitious characters change into real characters, with heirs and a lineage. They open out horizons whence burst forth sheaves of light; they sow ideas, the germs of a thousand others; they supply all the arts with imaginations, subjects, styles: their works are the mines or the bowels of the human mind.
These geniuses occupy the first rank; their vastness, their variety, their fruitfulness, their originality cause them to be accepted from the very first as laws, models, moulds, types of the various forms of intellect, even as there are four or five races of men issuing from one single stock, of which the others are only branches. Let us take care how we insult the disorders into which these mighty beings sometimes fall: let us not imitate Ham, the accursed; let us not laugh if we see the sole and solitary mariner of the deep lying naked and asleep, in the shadow of the Ark resting upon the mountains of Armenia. Let us respect that diluvial navigator, who recommenced the Creation after the flood-gates of Heaven were shut up: let us, as pious children, blessed by our father, modestly cover him with our cloak.