THE

WHAT WE KNOW OF

SHAKSPERE.

'HERE is, I suppose, no question that Shakspere is the best loved poet of the English race. His name rises to our lips as that of the man in whom the literary majesty of our language, and the literary expression of English thought have as yet culminated. When other poets, the spokesmen of our time, have need of a representative man whom to name, they take him. When Wordsworth has to justify the Sonnet form; not yet popular, perhaps never to be so; wherein were so many of his own triumphs, he calls to mind that "with this key Shakspere unlocked his heart." When a Vision of Poets rises before the mental ken of the greatest woman poet of our day, Shakspere seems to her to transcend them all in glory. When Charles Kingsley addresses the woman who seemed to him wisest and fairest of all, he conceives that he can praise her best in saying:

"Oh, thou hadst been a wife for Shakspere's self! No head save some world-genius ought to rest Above the treasures of that perfect breast."

There

There can be none who know not Matthew Arnold's Sonnet in which he likens Shakspere to

"the loftiest hill

Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty." Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning, Kingsley, Arnold; you will hardly find four teachers who more fitly express the matured conviction of the best minds of the age, in putting forward Shakspere as the wisest and greatest in the intellectual record of our nation.

If we look to the supreme name of each other country-I confine myself to modern days, the time we understand and whose thought we can in a measure gauge,-there is but one name we can compare with his ; Dante alone can be considered for a moment; the grandest German, Goethe, the most brilliant Frenchman, Voltaire-I speak of them only as intellectual giants,-the wisest and wittiest Spaniard, Cervantes, are out of all comparison. But if the definition of the supreme Poet would approximate as nearly as possible to that of the supreme man: "Perfect God and Perfect Man, of a Reasonable Soul, and Human Flesh subsisting" then I think that Dante would be found somewhat lacking on the human side, while Shakspere would not be found below Dante on the divine.

But in claiming for one of our own blood such magnificent, such pontifical rank in the great church whereinto the entrance depends not on re

pentance

pentance and faith, through the baptism of water, but on intellect alone, and most often through the baptism of fire and blood, it is well to be careful and to pause, lest English prejudice bias us overmuch. We may reassure ourselves, on testimony in no degree suspect.

To put it at its lowest estimate, Positivism is one of the great motive forces of the world at this present moment. It may not do all that Auguste Comte expected from it, but at least he is a man to be reckoned with, in the shaping of the age's thought. Now in framing the Calendar of his new divisions of the year, Comte selected thirteen names of men for those of the months, as typical of the phases through which the human mind has passed, and of various stages of human development. These stages overlap each other, but they are, roughly speaking, chronological, and the name of the person prefixed to each month is of him who exemplified most completely the character of each phase. In the month which bears the name of Shakspere, Auguste Comte summed up the spirit of the Modern Drama. If we study that Calendar, well deserving attention even from those who are not Positivists, we shall I think discover that the wide soul and luminous intelligence of its framer are shown in the fact that his own nationality moved him so little in his choice of names. It is strange that a Frenchman has not selected as his chief name Racine, nor

Corneille,

Corneille, but one whom even Voltaire had not known how to appreciate.

If we take the two men who, in Germany, during the last century are best known to us, we shall find Goethe and Heine in full agreement about Shakspere's preeminence. In Wilhelm Meister is to be found the most brilliant criticism which exists of Hamlet, while Heine's boundless admiration for Shakspere is but intensified by the scorn and distaste he felt for almost all else that was English. And cultivated Germans, their countrymen, know as a whole more about our Poet than we do ourselves. It is in no narrów spirit of provincialism that we put him among the greatest of the world.

Now, if we could call the dead to life, clasp their hands and bid them lead us, sit at their feet and pray them teach us, lay our head on their knees as little children do to their parents and tell them our perplexities and struggles, whom would we choose, we who are English men and English women of to-day? We should feel, to adopt Comte's list for a moment in default of another, that Moses and Homer and Charlemagne are too vague, their forms too veiled in mist to come at them; we should be like the disciples of old, who "feared as they entered into the cloud." St. Paul and Dante, tender and compassionate as we know their inmost hearts to have been, are too austere externally, too far withdrawn ; who would try to warm himself at a star? The philosophers, the

men

men of science, are full of aid for our intellect, but if we love them and seek them, it is not for the qualities which make them great. The one man to whom we should turn, the most human, who had the most varied knowledge of life in all its depths and windings, is he whom we now consider, our English Shakspere.

Yet how different is the look of Shakspere, as we know him, to that of any one else. It helps us much in our understanding of a man that we are aware of how he appeared to his fellows. Run over in your mind the great men who have influenced your lives; of some we can never know how they looked; they lived before painting or sculpture were Arts. But of the undoubted portraits of men whom we do know, all save one have the same characteristic; we see in them some likeness, more or less true, in many cases very true, of the men as they lived. Few, perhaps none, represent the whole man. Only a great painter here and there has ever succeeded in giving what we feel to be the entire character, as after many years the inner life had stamped itself upon the outward form. Bellini's Doge in the National Gallery, David's Pope Pius VII. at Fontainebleau, are such, but the generality of portraits give only a partial view of the spirit manifest in the flesh. But they are living, they can be understood. The face of Shakspere is not to be understood. It is the face of a man who was