‘This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever
Ran on the green-sward: nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself,
Too noble for this place.’
Here again the emphasis on descent is exaggerated and we resent it.
Leontes after the statue is unveiled—
‘But yet, Paulina,
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.’
Who can read this without choking? Like Exeter in Henry V.:
‘I had not so much of man in me,
And all my mother came into mine eyes,
And gave me up to tears.’
Could I have continued to live when that music sounded and she descended? I think not. I should have sought pardon and death.
‘Now, in age,
Is she become the suitor?’
Who can—I will not say express, but dream a tenderness deeper than that? Sixteen years she had waited, and then she embraces him! It is difficult to divine Shakespeare, the man, in his plays and poems, but in this passage and one or two others resembling it he seems to be revealed.
Pericles.—The last act of Pericles, and especially the first scene, is Shakespeare at his highest.