'33Z. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 BY 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 A 
 
 PRINTED FOR THE 
 
 WOODBERRY SOCIETY 
 
 1916 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 
 
 THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS BOSTON 
 
THIS ADDRESS WAS DELIVERED AT THE CEL- 
 EBRATION OF THE TERCENTENARY OF THE 
 DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE, UNDER THE AUSPICES 
 OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH OF BROWN 
 UNIVERSITY, IN SAYLES HALL, APRIL 26, 1916 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 IT is not for any single voice to bear to 
 Shakespeare the plaudits of the thea- 
 tre. The mere multiplicity of the events 
 of this wide commemoration, the volume 
 of universal applause of the generations, 
 force us to realize the insignificance of 
 any particular expression of the general 
 praise. As in a popular festival, each parti- 
 cipant, as he passes, follows his own whim 
 in the common carnival. The scholar will 
 turn the leaves of his book and linger 
 caressingly over recondite difficulties of 
 the text or the meaning; the player will 
 fit the costume to the mind, and play the 
 part from his bosom. Everything will go 
 on as in a play. To-day all the world 's a 
 stage. For the most part, it is by the eye 
 that Shakespeare's world will be seen, 
 embodied in a fantastic round of revels, 
 a general masquerade, a pageant, how 
 varied, how familiar, how interminable! 
 
2 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare's world! 
 
 " Create he can 
 Forms more real than living man!" 
 
 Falstaff, Ariel,Titania's Indian Boy! How 
 they throng the memory as if coming 
 through a hundred-gated Thebes! If it is 
 by its transitoriness that we know life, it 
 is by its permanence that we know the 
 ideal. There is an eternal quality, an ever- 
 lasting freshness, on the intellectual cre- 
 ations of man, analogous to the morning 
 lustre that still lingers on the Eros, the 
 Apollo, the Hermes, of ancient days. Who 
 of English speech, bred to the traditions 
 of his race, does not recognize Hamlet 
 in his "inky cloak" at a glance? Not to 
 know him would argue one's self un- 
 taught in the chief glories of his language. 
 With what a welcome eye we greet the 
 Henrys, old John of Gaunt, old York, 
 and how many a young prince of brief 
 or long renown! We are able to look 
 in Prosperous Magic Book, though bur- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 3 
 
 led deeper than ever plummet sounded. 
 What a story is recorded there, familiar 
 to our sight since our childish eyes first 
 fell on some glorious pifture of the lumi- 
 nous leaf! What is most impressive to me, 
 in a world whose characteristic it is to pass 
 away, is the permanence of these ideal in- 
 carnations of human life in its vital flow 
 and infinite variety. It is three hundred 
 years since the Maker of Magic passed ; 
 yet his figures seem to have left us but an 
 hour ago. They combine, as they recede, 
 into a Renaissance procession, wreathing 
 along in another age than ours; they com- 
 pose, in the distance, into a true triumph 
 of time, with many a mediaeval and classi- 
 cal element of look and gesture ; and yet, 
 ere the scene fades, it has opened to our 
 eyes, we know, the timeless vision of life. 
 Two things in this great vision fasci- 
 nate me: the charm of the youths, the 
 wisdom of mature age. It is in the earlier 
 plays that I find the spirit of April, mount- 
 
4 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 ing with each year into a richer and more 
 delicate bloom. In Richard II, the tender- 
 est of ill-starred princes unfitted for a 
 crown in this tough world, how piercing 
 is the poetic appeal ! There is weakness in 
 his lyrical eloquence, but how it climbs 
 the heavens of youth! Biron, on the other 
 hand, is too clever by half for a true court, 
 and needs the protection of a love's nun- 
 nery to give his wits room and air. In this 
 morning mood Shakespeare seems like 
 his own Mercury, 
 
 u New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,"- 
 
 so irresponsibly vital is his gayety, the 
 mere play of his mind in all the ways of 
 beauty and sentiment, of wit and laugh- 
 ter, of courage as quick as it is perfect, 
 of grace in the aftion, and of courtesy, 
 which is the grace of the mind. No less 
 appealing is the maturer atmosphere of 
 his manlier day : the grave demeanor of 
 Theseus, the inviolable peace of Pros- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 5 
 
 pero. In these two I find touches of an 
 almost Lucretian calm, that quiet, 
 
 u Yearned after by the wisest of the wise, 
 Passionless bride, divine tranquillity," 
 
 but never so brought down to earth as in 
 Shakespeare's dream. For to my eyes the 
 great vision, at either limit of its range, 
 in its charm of youth, in its wisdom of 
 age, wears the aspe6t of a dream. There 
 Shakespeare's poetry, as apart from its 
 dramatic grasp of the passions, was at its 
 ripest. The fabric is compact of illusion ; 
 yet this charm, this wisdom, are compel- 
 ling in all lands. You may sketch the 
 frontiers of civilization by the echo of 
 Shakespeare's name. Truth sometimes 
 uses a dream as its best medium : such 
 is poetic truth. There is an abstract ele- 
 ment in poetic truth; it is not for an age, 
 but for all time. Truth in Shakespeare 
 that which greatly distinguishes him 
 is poetic truth. It is capacity to express 
 poetic truth that measures a civilization. 
 
6 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 To realize life in the abstract as noble 
 or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so 
 with radiance upon it, that is civiliza- 
 tion in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief 
 modern example of this supreme faculty 
 of mankind. 
 
 Prospero, you remember, is sometimes 
 taken as a symbol of creative genius. He 
 declares his might: 
 
 "graves at my command 
 
 Have waked their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth 
 By my so potent art." 
 
 The characters, it is true, bear the old 
 names that they once bore in history or 
 romance before their waking ; but when 
 they walk a second time, they are made 
 of a finer than earthly substance, they 
 have more than mortal speech ; they have 
 suffered an ideal change. They are crea- 
 tures seen by the mind's eye. They are 
 no longer individuals; a universal ele- 
 ment has entered into them, wherein 
 if any man look he sees his own face. 
 
'SHAKESPEARE 7 
 
 These are not men, but man ; it is thence 
 that they are immortal in literature. The 
 power of evocation, such as Prospero de- 
 scribes it, is the most convincing proof of 
 genius. Evocation is its royal stamp. So 
 the statue slept in marble until Michael 
 Angelo evoked it from the block; so 
 music sleeps until it is evoked from the 
 chords; so the Virgin's face is evoked 
 from the canvas. The vision seems magi- 
 cal at its first creation, whatever be the 
 art through whose medium it comes. 
 
 Art, thus, from the beginning of civili- 
 zation has brought new worlds into being. 
 They blaze out like intermittent stars and 
 fade away: the divine sphere of Plato's 
 youths, the world of Plutarch's men, the 
 thronged region of the Renaissance ro- 
 mances whence came Shakespeare's ideal 
 women. How many worlds of art there 
 have been ! how strange it is to fall in with 
 one of them unexpectedly, like some lost 
 province of the mind or some far country 
 
8 SHAKESPEARE ' 
 
 that we know not of! I remember years 
 ago at Naples coming upon the Pompeian 
 painting of the ancient time. It was then 
 that the figures of the mythological world 
 and the legendary age of Greece first be- 
 came visible images to me, a Theseus, 
 a Jason, a Medea; and the Greek past, 
 which had lain in my mind in a sculptural 
 form rather than pidtorially, took on the 
 romance of color with a certain strange- 
 ness in the look of the men, a racial 
 strangeness. It was as if I had wandered 
 into a forgotten chamber of the world. 
 Art, in all the fields of the imagination, 
 has many of these lost provinces in its 
 domain, stretching over the centuries of 
 man's various fortunes with the soul. 
 
 There is something foreign to us in any 
 past ; but the past is known to us, in its 
 spiritual part, only by these evocations 
 embodying the passions of life. They are 
 not historic; they are ideal. They are not 
 individual; they are abstract. They are 
 
SHAKESPEARE 9 
 
 more or less intelligible according to our 
 own understanding powers; but taken 
 together, they constitute the true story 
 of man's life. As we review the record, 
 even to the "dark backward and abysm 
 of time/ 'notwithstanding all strangeness 
 in the aspeft of the vision under the vary- 
 ing light of time's changes, these evoca- 
 tions of art in all its forms are the clearest 
 memorial of the soul's life, age after age. 
 It is the least encumbered with uncon- 
 cerning things. It writes one truth large 
 on the ruins of time in each great age, 
 whatever be the city or the people: this 
 truth, that it is the victory in the field 
 of the spirit that decides a nation's glory. 
 Shakespeare is the chief glory of Eng- 
 land. What Homer was to the ancient 
 world, Virgil to imperial Rome, Dante to 
 mediaeval Italy, that Shakespeare was to 
 the English. His name, as we envisage it, 
 breaks , like a constellation , into stars , som e 
 major some minor, a cluster of world- 
 
10 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 names now, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, 
 Macbeth, a progeny endless as Banquo's 
 line. Each character clothes himself with 
 a new world, as it were, new heavens 
 and a new earth. What noble landscapes ! 
 the forest of Arden, the Midsummer 
 Wood, the enchanted isle, Venice, Ve- 
 rona, Rome ! In theart of evocation Shake- 
 speare held a master's wand. Scarce any 
 other poet seems so facile and so various 
 in creation. It is, perhaps, an error of per- 
 spective that gives so strong a character 
 of multiplicity to his imaginative world. 
 The drama has crowded its own stage in 
 every poetic land. There was much detail 
 and variety in Virgil, if one attends to 
 them, in the changeful flow of the verse. 
 Shakespeare seems to us more abundant, 
 too, in part because we are native to his 
 world. It was our childhood region. I 
 began to know his work, where I like 
 to think he first made acquaintance with 
 himself, in the Histories. I first saw him, 
 
SHAKESPEARE 11 
 
 I remember, in that company of English 
 Kings, which is one of the bravest pano- 
 ramas of history. Every verse in those 
 great chronicles vibrates with English 
 blood. It was thus as a national poet that 
 he first trod the stage. To this day there 
 is no such vital history as he wrote, be 
 the scene where it may. In him Holinshed 
 and even Plutarch, noble as they are in 
 their own speech, leapt to a life above 
 life. But it is the Rose of England that he 
 most summons from the dust. It is a bap- 
 tism of patriotism for a boy to be nursed 
 on the English plays. Shakespeare was so 
 great an Englishman from the first. 
 
 "This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle, 
 This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
 This other Eden, demi-paradise ; 
 This fortress built by Nature for herself . . . 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea, . . . 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England ! " 
 
 With what a flow, with what a strength, 
 with what a radiance the verse mounts! 
 
12 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 And in many another passage of martial 
 ardor or the victorious cry of arms, one 
 hears the living echo of Agincourt still 
 pulsing along that far horizon-air. Yet 
 this was but the golden portal of Shake- 
 speare's verse. 
 
 The first incarnation of his genius was 
 in history; the last incarnation, more 
 powerfully spiritual, was in fate. There 
 was an interval when his spirit walked in 
 an enchanted pastoral land, sown with 
 wild forest and vistas of Italy; and there 
 was an afterworld of poetic romance, from 
 which everything except pure reality has 
 been eliminated, which was his farewell 
 to life. In these comedies of either group 
 there was the glamour of another age than 
 ours. In the Histories and Tragedies we 
 encounter a reality more distinctly of our 
 world, a reality seen with the serious- 
 ness of youth in the one, with the serious- 
 ness of age in the other. What gives to the 
 Comedies their tranquil atmosphere, their 
 
SHAKESPEARE 13 
 
 touch of fantasy, their other- worldliness, 
 is the Renaissance, the preceding age out 
 of which their characters trooped, bring- 
 ing their landscape with them, together 
 with their costume, revels, and speech. 
 The substance of the Comedies is the very 
 stuff of the Renaissance in its earthly look 
 and mortal feeling. It is a world of acci- 
 dents garbed in romance, the world of 
 the Renaissance imagination. In the Tra- 
 gedies, on the other hand, the garment of 
 Time is stripped off. The world may be 
 Denmark or Scotland; it is indifferent. 
 Cyprus and Britain are but names. It is a 
 world of realities, the world of the stark 
 soul. It is true that whatever be the sensi- 
 ble garniture of the play, its times, occa- 
 sions and mental modes, the ideas are still 
 the ideas of the Renaissance. Shakespeare 
 is, essentially, the emanation of the Re- 
 naissance. The overflow of his fame on the 
 Continent in later years was but the sequel 
 of the flood of the Renaissance in West- 
 
14 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 ern Europe. He was the child of that great 
 movement, and marks its height as it pen- 
 etrated the North with civilization. That 
 was his world-position. It made him even 
 a greater European than he was a great 
 Englishman, and gave him a vaster coun- 
 try than his nativity conferred. His genius 
 exceeds his age, and is a universal posses- 
 sion; and this is because he transcended 
 the accidents of the Renaissance, fair and 
 far-spread as they were and much as he 
 employed them ; and in the great trage- 
 dies which seem at times supra-mortal, 
 while still using the spell of the ideas that 
 the Renaissance gave him, read the fates 
 of men, in a universal tongue. 
 
 Every great movement, nevertheless, 
 such as we name universal, has the limi- 
 tations of its arc. Our understanding of 
 Shakespeare already depends largely on 
 the vitality of Renaissance elements in our 
 education. Each man must live in his own 
 generation, as the saying is ; but the gen- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 15 
 
 erations are bound together by thegolden 
 links of the great tradition of civilization. 
 A writer is justly called universal when 
 he is understood within the limits of his 
 civilization, though that be bounded by 
 a country or an age. Seasonal changes, as 
 it were, take place in history, when there 
 is practically an almost universal death, 
 a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. 
 Such were the intervals between the an- 
 cient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval 
 and the modern. The immense amount of 
 commentary on Shakespeare proves the 
 decay of his material, and of his modes 
 of thought and expression, quite as much 
 as it illustrates his profundity. The Re- 
 naissance has long been a past age, and 
 now rapidly recedes. Shakespeare's scenic 
 world, at least, begins to have the strange- 
 ness of aspect which I said I first recog- 
 nized in Pompeian painting. Much in the 
 present festivals in his memory recon- 
 stru6tions of his epoch is antiquarian. 
 
16 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 He has still his lightning-stroke at the 
 moment of fate, his musical eloquence in 
 speech, his lovely settings of emotion; 
 but the eye is blind that does not see 
 that Shakespeare's imaged world is as 
 remote as 
 
 "all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
 Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come." 
 
 Art, I know, by the apparent con- 
 temporaneity of its masterpieces denies 
 time. Genius has an eternal quality in its 
 substance. Beauty has everlastingness. 
 I walk through the museum of Athens, 
 by the calm bas-reliefs of the farewells of 
 death, with no thought of antiquity. I read 
 a knightly romance as if the morning 
 sunlight still bathed its green forest and 
 shining armor. The violets I find in my 
 books are the same that grow in my gar- 
 den. Life is always a present moment. 
 But when art, like Prospero plucking off' 
 his magic garment, lays aside its apparent 
 contemporaneity, that illusion of eter- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 17 
 
 nity which is implicit in our consciousness 
 of the present moment, it resumes mor- 
 tality ; it contracts decay ; it disintegrates 
 into history. Shakespeare's art suffers the 
 common fate, yet with a difference, with 
 an immortal greatness. It grows remote. 
 Strangeness creeps into its aspect. But it 
 is equal to its peers, and still looks at us 
 with the unfathomed eyes of Apollo or of 
 Oedipus 
 
 The changelessness of art depends 
 upon the slowness of change in man's 
 appreciation of it. That change may be as 
 gradual as a summer's day ; it may be as 
 abrupt as an earthquake rift ; but finally it 
 transforms a civilization. Through what- 
 ever secular changes, the expression in 
 the eyes of life is mystery. Such, too, 
 is the final expression in the eyes of 
 art. To me the expression seems more 
 and more enigmatic as art recedes. The 
 mystery of the fates of men is, I think, 
 best expressed in English with poetic 
 
18 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 truth in the tragedies of Shakespeare, 
 as the beauty of life is best displayed in 
 his pastoral comedies and kindred plays. 
 However time may pluck at them, they 
 still speak a universal language. It is true 
 that Shakespeare concentrated the Re- 
 naissance age, and that was another world 
 than ours ; we see it in an evening light ; 
 but we are its lineal children and its lan- 
 guage is native to our minds. No greater 
 age ever robed humanity in a shining 
 garment. The garment may fade, but the 
 soul remembers long its great epochs and 
 makes of their master-spirits its sacred 
 guardians ; for the unseen commonwealth , 
 the true State, is spiritual, and has spirit- 
 ual guardians. 
 
 Art and I always mean to include in 
 the general term the fine art of literature 
 art, so understood, is the solvent of the 
 nations. That is how Shakespeare came 
 to be a great European. The Renaissance 
 liberated him from nationality in a pro- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 19 
 
 vincial sense. He was one of the fathers, 
 and is now a chief pillar, of the invisible 
 republic of letters, or intellectual State, 
 which is the core of modern civilization. 
 Impalpable as any ideal commonwealth 
 of old thinkers, this State is a spiritual 
 reality. Shakespeare helped materially 
 to shape its present form. The commu- 
 nity of scholars in mediaeval days rested 
 on a universal language, Latin. The Re- 
 naissance broke the bonds of that great 
 tongue, rich with the accumulations of 
 thought and knowledge through the cen- 
 turies of its millennial career; but not 
 before a common mould of thought had 
 been established in the diverse nations, 
 and mental intercommunication between 
 them assured. Latinity receded from the 
 world in all forms, especially in language; 
 but art still made a universal appeal in so 
 far as it spoke dire6lly to the senses in 
 painting and sculpture, architecture and 
 music; and though poetic art uses a screen 
 
20 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of language and approaches the senses 
 through the mind, its creations, when they 
 become visible through the screen of lan- 
 guage, are found to be woven of the same 
 original stuff that the sister arts employ. 
 There is this kinship and essential iden- 
 tity in all the arts. Shakespeare, indeed, 
 employed his special tongue, the Eng- 
 lish, with a superb touch on its forms 
 of expression ; but far greater than any 
 linguistic skill was that creative might 
 with which, time and again, he modelled 
 a world of the universal mind, so compact 
 of loveliness, sweetness, or grandeur that 
 the words are but its initial harmonies. It 
 is in this world of the mind that he is so 
 great a master. Therefore other realms 
 than England quickly stripped the screen 
 of language from his work and made him 
 European by their diverse tongues as he 
 already embodied the intellectual fires 
 and romantic horizons of the general age. 
 He contributed powerfully , by his sheer 
 
SHAKESPEARE 21 
 
 inner worth and charm as a poet, to the 
 transfusion of national cultures which has 
 long characterized western civilization, 
 has made its nations intellectually hospi- 
 table, and has most continued the inher- 
 itance of that great tradition which poured 
 originally from antiquity, and through the 
 Renaissance overspread Europe. It is thus, 
 however slowly, that the world is unified. 
 The republic of letters has no frontiers. 
 
 u Greece and her foundations are 
 Built below the tides of war." 
 
 It is a spiritual State, and bears in its hands 
 "olives of endless peace." 
 
 Shakespeare, through embodying the 
 Renaissance, was thus a main force in 
 " humanizing," in the scholarly sense, the 
 modern age. By the brilliancy of his genius 
 he conciliated nations. This was to serve 
 humanity greatly. It should not be for- 
 gotten on his anniversary. But the effect 
 of Shakespeare historically on world-cur- 
 rents is less to us to-day than his elemen- 
 
22 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 tal magic in the ways of genius. Genius is 
 known by its works. There it is obvious 
 to all ; but who would dare analyze its cre- 
 ative light? I only venture the sugges- 
 tion that one characteristic of genius in 
 its works is immediate vision, what is 
 sometimes called intuitive vision, and 
 that one measure of its force is the in- 
 tensity of the vision. Genius in its creative 
 works does not proceed by calculation, 
 by any adaptation of means to ends, or 
 by any mode of mechanical processes. It 
 uses neither foresight nor afterthought; 
 its works are made at a single cast. That 
 is why I have spoken of its works in the 
 arts as " evocations/' The summons is in- 
 stantaneous, and instantly obeyed. Genius 
 does not proceed as if by mental logic 
 from step to step ; it does not reason things 
 out; it makes no use of analysis. It sees 
 its object as if by revelation, as an image 
 disclosed. It resembles rather, in its oper- 
 ation, the processes of vital growth. How- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 23 
 
 ever long may be the unconscious prepa- 
 ration of nature, the plant blossoms in a 
 night, a single unguessed and exquisite 
 bloom. The vision of genius comes as a 
 whole and instantaneous, as a face floats 
 into the air of memory. 
 
 There is this immediacy in the creations 
 of art as they arise in the mind. So little 
 are they foreseen that they are always 
 a surprise. So little are they planned that 
 they often puzzle their own creator to in- 
 terpret them. So little are they indebted to 
 ordinary reason that poets have always 
 called them "inspirations." They do not 
 spring from observation, however long 
 or profound. Never do they repeat any 
 experience of the aftual. They are free 
 from the world of nature. These creations 
 have a world of their own, a mental 
 world. Shakespeare's visible world is in 
 "the mind's eye. "The mental world is 
 a true world, like nature; but it contains 
 greater reality. Balzac used to say, turn- 
 
24 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 ing from his callers to his books, " Now 
 for real people/' A universal element en- 
 ters into the mental world. It is the sphere 
 of poetic truth, Shakespeare's world. It 
 was the place of his vision of life. Nothing 
 of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, was 
 ever a6lual in experience ; nothing such 
 as their fatal histories was ever observed. 
 The truth their souls contain is purely 
 mental; it is poetic truth. Shakespeare 
 presents truth in a vision of that world 
 which exists only in "the mind's eye." 
 Yet who does not perceive that his world 
 is more "real than living man," and un- 
 veils the fates of men with a revealing 
 range and search beyond nature? It is 
 here that genius inhabits and creates. 
 
 In this poetic world Shakespeare, as he 
 matured, developed in his genius a pene- 
 tration and intensity that seem not only 
 beyond nature, but at times beyond mor- 
 tal power. It is in the four great trage- 
 dies that he most impresses us so. Tra- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 25 
 
 gedy is for youth. Nature draws a film 
 over the eyes of youth which tempers the 
 sight to that fierce light; but for older 
 eyes, 
 
 " Grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars," 
 
 it is too strong a ray. Even in youth one 
 sometimes lays down the book. The mind 
 turns from the four tragedies to the ear- 
 lier "moonlight and music and feeling" 
 of the charmed meadows and woods and 
 cities of the pastoral plays and their kin, 
 much as Tennyson turned from Milton's 
 angel hosts to delights of Paradise: 
 
 "Me rather all that bowery loneliness, 
 And brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, 
 And bloom profuse and cedar arches 
 Charm." 
 
 So, too, one turns from the Inferno of 
 Dante to the sweetness and glory of the 
 Paradiso. The genius of the tragedies is, 
 indeed, more transcendent; but there is 
 greater fascination in beauty than in ter- 
 ror. It may be noticed that the tragedies 
 
26 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 are full of vision, not doftrine. No judg- 
 ment is passed on what is revealed. It is as 
 if the poet said," Look, and pass/' This is 
 what I have called the world of the stark 
 soul. At times it scarcely suffers words. 
 The pastoral comedies, on the other hand, 
 are garmented with lovely phrase. They 
 are not free from melancholy shades, as 
 at the close of "Love's Labor's Lost." 
 "The scene begins to cloud," says Biron, 
 but it is only with natural grief. For the 
 most part the tragic lot of man is in the 
 background, if it intrude at all. We know 
 the sadness of Antonio, in the " Merchant 
 of Venice," but not what secrets of mor- 
 tality it concealed. 
 
 In the pastoral comedies, as I some- 
 what inaptly term them from their senti- 
 ment rather than from their landscape, 
 we are in the old, almost antique world 
 of romance. Romanticism had its nest in 
 Greece. We feel its nativity in such a play 
 as "Pericles." The chance adventures of 
 
SHAKESPEARE 27 
 
 travel, the outlandish regions, the sur- 
 prising incidents, the ship wrecks, the gen- 
 eral sense of a roving world, in brief, a 
 thousand details of composition, remind 
 us how recently the drama had emerged 
 from a chaos of romantic fiction. The 
 world of Shakespeare is full of this vari- 
 ety in detail, like a book of the Italian 
 Renaissance, and with the variety there 
 blended an omnipresent strangeness 
 equally characterizing that age of which 
 the very breath was mental discovery. 
 The human spirit was like an immigrant 
 in a new country : anything might happen 
 there. The tradition of the past is felt in 
 Shakespeare's story, both in its materials 
 and its methods of narration; but it is a 
 past whose breath of life was romance, 
 and awoke in Shakespeare's mind as in a 
 world about to be born. Shakespeare was 
 great as an Englishman; he was greater 
 as an emanation of the Renaissance which 
 he drew into himself; but, greatest of all, 
 
28 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 he was the blazing star of romanticism, 
 when its unearthly beauty took posses- 
 sion of the European world. 
 
 It is characteristic of genius when it is 
 greatest, to include a broad arc of man's 
 progress in its own career. Thus pra6li- 
 cally an entire cycle of romantic art may 
 be observed in Shakespeare's drama. It 
 began in archaism ; it ended in a climax 
 of perfeftion. It is multiple and compos- 
 ite, characterized by an incessant change 
 of theme and heterogeneity of material. It 
 has the miscellaneousness as well as the 
 large horizons of the Elizabethan mind. 
 It is a drama as romantic in method as in 
 subjeCt. Exuberance is the quality of the 
 creative genius that produced it, and infi- 
 nite variety marks its works. His genius is 
 ever companioned by a wandering spirit. 
 Consider the many disguises in which 
 he uses the device of the episode, as, for 
 instance, the play within the play, the in- 
 troduced dance or masque, the tale, the 
 
SHAKESPEARE 29 
 
 soliloquy, or more subtly in the brief 
 idyllic passages that are for poetry what 
 "purple patches" are for rhetoric. Yet, 
 however far or often genius may accom- 
 pany this wandering elf, it keeps within 
 the magic limit which holds all in true 
 unity. This romantic surface, like phos- 
 phorescence playing over the dramas, is 
 an incessant and growing phenomenon 
 of Shakespeare's art. Not less obvious is 
 the unity of feeling in them what is 
 sometimes called "keeping" which is 
 an essential part of romantic unity, and 
 which operates with such force in Shake- 
 speare as to place each of his plays in a 
 world of its own. 
 
 The singularity of his genius is that 
 while expressing itself so admirably that 
 at each new disclosure it seems to have 
 arrived at perfection in its kind, it grows 
 nobler, grander, or sweeter at each new 
 creation. It belongs to most of us to seize 
 on some single aspeft of art, and to cleave 
 
SO SHAKESPEARE 
 
 to it. Taste, by a reversion of type, may 
 recur to the archaic and primitive, espe- 
 cially under the impulse of a preference 
 for simplicity. It may, at least, without 
 going to such lengths, require that there 
 be only few elements in high beauty, 
 a single bloom in an isolated vase, or, as 
 the custom now often is in museums, one 
 supreme statue in a room dedicated to it. 
 Taste, such as this, finds romantic art too 
 distracting in theme, too overwhelming 
 in feeling. The tragedies and later ro- 
 mances have too much depth of thought, 
 too much richness of decoration, too much 
 mystery (whether of terror or beauty), 
 for minds of such a calibre. At most they 
 find pleasure in the golden comedies that 
 sprang to light before Shakespeare's gen- 
 ius reached its climax of power. 
 
 These comedies, which for many are 
 the centre of delight, if not of worship, 
 in Shakespeare's work, have a smooth- 
 ness and softness of execution and effect, 
 
SHAKESPEARE 31 
 
 somewhat Victorian in the quality of their 
 art, if I may venture to say so, somewhat 
 Tennysonian in exquisiteness of impres- 
 sion: not that Shakespeare resembles 
 Tennyson in style, but there is a kinship 
 of genius between them at that stage of 
 Shakespeare. This period of smoothness 
 and softness in art marks a point of per- 
 feftion \vhich lasts but a moment. Art 
 roughens again, in mood and a6l, as it 
 bends to the new age. There is a Michael 
 Angelo for a Rafael then ; or the Perga- 
 mon marbles replace the Parthenon. It 
 may be for better or for worse, but the 
 new age will have its way. The peculiar- 
 ity in Shakespeare's case is that he him- 
 self brought in the new age, with the tra- 
 gedies and the last romances. Though 
 Webster and Ford followed him, he had 
 already struck the hour. The cycle of ro- 
 mantic art in the drama was complete, 
 though there might be a long after-play 
 of its fires. 
 
32 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare not only embodied the 
 spirit of romantic art in his own age; he 
 heralded a greater movement in time. Art 
 has a double visage: it looks before and 
 after. Romance is its forward-looking 
 face. The germ of growth is in romanti- 
 cism. Formalism, on the other hand, con- 
 solidates tradition; gleans what has been 
 gained and makes it facile to the hand or 
 the mind; economizes the energy of gen- 
 ius. Formalism supports feebler spirits, 
 directs, and restrains. Formalism is a 
 backward looking mode, and archaic with 
 respect to its own time. Romance ploughs 
 in the field of the future as in an eternal 
 spring. It is true that the reaction from 
 Shakespeare's art was extreme in Eng- 
 land. An intellectual, rather than a poetic, 
 age succeeded. But when the earth began 
 to expand again with an April season of 
 the world, how the seed of romanticism 
 sprang everywhere, like grass, as if it 
 were life's natural verdure! Romantic 
 
SHAKESPEARE 33 
 
 art did not then, indeed, put forth one 
 all-embracing genius, like Shakespeare; 
 it required a Byron, a Tennyson, and a 
 Browning to complete the cycle in our 
 age just past; but the voice of the modern 
 triad is that of romance once more a- wing 
 for a supreme flight. The Renaissance 
 found a new birth in Keats and Shelley 
 and many another; and though romanti- 
 cism, spreading through a wide circle of 
 art and thought, seems less exclusively, 
 less predominantly literary, in that age of 
 the nineteenth century, it gave breath to 
 a whole spiritual movement. Its leaders 
 were not more indebted to Shakespeare 
 than to the other great spiritual guardians, 
 as I have called them, of the international 
 State that exists invisibly at the core of 
 modern civilization; but they are indebted 
 to him, as one of those guardians, there 
 sitting with his peers. 
 
 Shakespeare has been praised in Eng- 
 lish more than anything mortal except 
 
34 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in 
 his eulogy. "The myriad-minded one" 
 is his best designation. Wholly apart, 
 however, from his extraordinary mental 
 inclusiveness, the comprehensive grasp 
 and intuitive penetration of his visionary 
 genius, such that he seemed to create 
 worlds of being like separate stars, and 
 apart also from the substance of wisdom 
 which the dramas contained, he was espe- 
 cially wonderful, let me add, as a man 
 of letters merely, that is, as a man 
 accustomed to express ideas in written 
 words. An excess of linguistic power over 
 language, equally with an excess of met- 
 rical power over verse, characterized the 
 latest plays. A marvellous power of ex- 
 pression over language often distinguishes 
 genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases 
 seems independent of the bonds of lan- 
 guage as of the bonds of metre. But he 
 was something more and other than liter- 
 ary. He was a wonderful example of the 
 
SHAKESPEARE 35 
 
 human spirit, and in his creative power 
 affefts one with a sense of the inexplica- 
 ble, like a natural force. Above all, he was 
 intensely human in his spirituality; that 
 is why he is so often thought unspiritual. 
 Hence he gathers the world under the 
 spell of his genius. It is thus that he is 
 beheld at last as an arch-leader in the 
 world of the spirit of man, one of those 
 few who, however distant in country or 
 epoch, are, after centuries, the true " sons 
 of memory." 
 
 1 have set forth Shakespeare, you per- 
 ceive, immortal as he is, in the light of 
 an historic world lapsing now into the 
 shadows of time. I remember once, when 
 I was sailing over the Aegean Sea north- 
 ward from Athens, I saw what was after- 
 ward for me a Iong-recolle6led scene. 
 Naturally my eyes were fastened on the 
 Parthenon, visible from afar. Shores and 
 promontories slowly became obscure in 
 the growing distance. At last nothing re- 
 
36 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 mained except the temple seen against 
 the setting sun. Every touch of earth had 
 departed from it, a vision as it were in 
 the golden west. I thought how some 
 young Ionian, approaching, thus saw it 
 under the dawn, ages since, with the glint 
 on Athene's lifted spear, first a gleam, 
 then the temple, then the " darling city." 
 I saw it in my departure, garmented with 
 light, a ruin alone in the sun. It was to 
 me then the symbol of antique beauty. It 
 is so that I see Shakespeare's world in the 
 light of a receding age. 
 
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