men like Sidney. It is especially difficult for us to imagine the mood of a boy like Shakespeare strolling and dreaming along the banks of the Avon.

And again, much wonder has been expressed that he-after his great success in London; after having acquired wealth and honor, and enjoyed intercourse with all the genius and all the brilliance of his time; after being the admiration of all, from princes to apprentice boys should, in the heyday of health and fame, have left everything to go down to Stratford (which was farther from London then than Aberdeen is now) to settle among farmers, wool-staplers, and cattledealers, and enjoy no better social intercourse than could be found at the Falcon Inn. Yet, as far as we can judge, his contemporaries were not surprised at this. It was a natural thing to do in an age when men felt that, except in the exercise of the most sacred of the affections, the highest delight for intellectual man lies in meditation, and that it is among the scenes of one's childhood that the scattered threads of one's own life can be gathered up and contemplated as one woof, that true meditation upon the universal life of man can be fostered with most success. These facts must always be considered when the chronology of the Shakespeare plays is attempted to be discovered by criticism of the nature and quality of the thoughts it contains.

But as to what the personality of Shakespeare was, though we may not be able to form a true conception of it, this we do know, that it was as unlike as it could possibly be to the character imagined by German transcendentalists. Four or five years ago, in an imaginative work, part of whose motif was to show that most men, if not all, have that instinct for making 66 assurance doubly sure" which characterizes both Hamlet and Macbeth when entangled in a net of conflicting evidence the evidence of the spiritual and the evidence of the natural world-as those two characters were each entangled, I made some remarks upon them which aroused good deal of discussion. My argument in that story was 66 that the paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, had nothing

a

whatever to do with the explanation of it offered by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister

the explanation that a heavy task was laid upon a character whose grit was unequal to the performance of it-" as it were, an oak planted in a china vase." I contended, on the contrary, that the same paralysis is seen in Macbeth as much as in Hamlet; I contended that Shakespeare, having decided in the case of Macbeth to adopt the machinery he found in Holinshed, and in the case of Hamlet the machinery he found in the old Hamlet mentioned by Nash, or else in Belleforest, seems to have set himself the task of realizing the situation of a man oscillating between the evidence of two worlds, the physical and the spiritual-a man in each case unusually sagacious, and in each case endowed with the instinct for "making assurance doubly sure”—the instinct which seems, from many passages in his dramas, to have been a special characteristic of the poet's own, such, for instance, as the words in Pericles:

For truth can never be confirm'd enough, Though doubts did ever sleep.

And if we really wish to form a mental picture of Shakespeare we must begin by studying these two plays together and glancing frequently at other Shakespearian plays. This was my contention; nothing more. But in reiterating an argument a writer who has once formulated it can never again advance it except by repeating his own words. This is what I said in the introduction to the English editions of Aylwin:

Why is it that Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion of the Mermaid, the wind - bibbing joker of the Falcon and the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately painted character in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so profoundly touched, the workings of his soul so thoroughly laid bare, that we seem to know him more completely than we know our most intimate friends. It is because the sea which washes between personality and personality is here, for once, rolled away, and we and this Hamlet touch, soul to soul. That is why we ask whether such a character can be the mere evolvement of the artistic mind at work. That is why we exclaim:

"The man who painted Hamlet must have been painting himself." The perfection of the dramatist's work betrays him. For, really and truly, no man can paint another, but only himself, and what we call character painting is, at the best, but a poor mixing of painter and painted, a "third something' between these two; just as what we call colour and sound are born of the play of

undulation upon organism.

As to what was Shakespeare's personal reputation among his contemporaries, that is comparatively unimportant in discussing the question, What, at heart, was William Shakespeare? For often it is through literature alone that a soul will unfold itself to other souls. Was he really the calm, passionless mirror that some critics talk about, reflecting nature as an unruffled lake reflects the shifting cloud-pageantry of heaven? Or was he at heart the maker of those jokes at the Mermaid the reputation of which has come down to us? Or was he at heart the moody dreamer of Elsinore-morbid, yet daring; dreamy, yet designing and craftily manoeuvring; sombre, yet steeped in a humor so rich, so deep, that all other humor seems shallow in comparison?

And here I touch upon one great difference between the two plays I am comparing. While in Macbeth there is no attempt at humor, save in the porter's monologue, the entire tragic movement of Hamlet swings, as it were, in an atmosphere of cosmic humor-that is to say, a humor based upon a metaphysical apprehension of that deepest incongruity which can be felt by only the rarest and highest humorists-an incongruity that is not in any way relative to the social pyramid of the humorist's own epoch; a humor which, when Shakespeare wrote, was unique, though it has had an enormous influence upon every literature since; a humor which, taken up, as far as the strength of his intellect would allow, by Sterne, passed over through him to a few writers of Germany, where its most notable reproduction, the humor of Richter, was afterwards brought back by Carlyle to the literature which gave it birth.

Is it too fanciful to call it the absolute humor of the post-Reformation period which lived until the birth of Augustanism in England?

For the enormous difference between pre-Reformation and post-Reformation days is seen when we compare the humor of Hamlet and the Grave-digger, and Jaques in As You Like It, with the humor of Rabelais. The only kind of humor that preceded Shakespeare is closely connected with Pantagruelism—a form

of humor which even in Falstaff seems to be outside the Shakespearian range. Perhaps, indeed, perfect Pantagruelism is only possible under that spiritual freedom from responsibility which in Shakespeare's time was gone that freedom which had resulted from the paternal protection of an infallible Church, combined with that material protection of feudality which is the return of the fides of vassals, the humor of which the work of Rabelais gives the fullest expression. While Rabelais would not have understood the humor of Hamlet and Jaques

for to the Pantagruelist the only tragical catastrophe possible is that yearned for by Hamlet,

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!

not even Falstaff nor Sir Toby Belch could ever have reached Gargantuanism. Pantagruelism is nothing but that hilarious acceptance by the soul of the burden of the flesh which Aristophanes sometimes shows, and would have always shown had there been no cruel gods on Olympus and no black hand of destiny overshadowing gods and men alike. For so inextricably mingled are man's body and soul that the hilarity which should naturally come from the play of the universe upon a healthy organism is spoiled unless the soul, whose one quest is safety, is, like the body, content. And the soul can never reach the Rabelaisian beatitude so long as it is vexed, as Shakespeare's soul was vexed, with thoughts and fears about its latter end. That age only can afford to eat, drink, and be merry between whom and "the dreadful things of the dark" there stands a paternal Church. Shakespeare's time Luther had taught the soul that its fate was in its own hands. No wonder, then, that in Shakespeare Pantagruelistic abandon was checked by the thought that the dream which may follow this present dream may be no joke at all, and that

In

VOL. CIX

No. DCLIII

N the seventh story of the third deeade of the Hecatommithi of M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, "nobile Ferrarese," first published in 1565, there is an incident so beautifully imagined and so beautifully related that it seems at first inexplicable how Shakespeare, when engaged in transfiguring this story into the tragedy of Othello, can have struck it out of his version. The loss of the magic handkerchief which seals the doom of the hero and his fellow victim is far less plausibly and far less beautifully explained by a mere accident, and a most unlikely accident, than by a device which heightens at once the charm of Desdemona and the atrocity of Iago. It is through her tenderness for his little child that he takes occasion to destroy her. The ancient or ensign, who is nameless as every other actor in the story except the Moor's wife, is of course, if compared with Iago, a mere shadow cast before it by the advent of that awful figure. But none the less is he the remarkably powerful and original creature of a true and tragic genius. Every man may make for himself, and must allow that he cannot pretend to impose upon any other, his own image of the most wicked man ever created by the will of man or God. But Cinthio's villain is distinctly and vividly set before us: a man "of most beautiful presence, but of the wickedest nature that ever was man in the world." Less abnormal and less inhumanly intellectual than Iago, who loved Desdemona "not out of absolute lust" (perhaps the strangest and subtlest point of all that

go to make up his all but inscrutable character), this simpler villain, “no whit heeding the faith given to his wife, nor friendship, nor faith, nor obligation, that he might have to the Moor, fell most ardently in love with Disdemona. And he set all his thought to see if it might become possible for him to enjoy her."

This plain and natural motive would probably have sufficed for any of those great contemporaries who found it easier to excel all other tragic or comic poets since the passing of Sophocles and Aristophanes than to equal or draw near to Shakespeare. For him it was insufficient. Neither envy nor hatred nor jealousy nor resentment, all at work together in festering fusion of conscious and contemplative evil, can quite explain Iago even to himself: yet neither Macbeth nor even Hamlet is by nature more inevitably inf trospective. But the secret of the abyss of this man's nature lies deeper than did ever plummet sound save Shakespeare's. The bright and restless devil of Goethe's invention, the mournfuler and more majestic devil created by Marlowe, are spirits of less deep damnation than that incarnate in the bluff plain-spoken soldier whose honesty is the one obvious thing about him, the one unmistakable quality which neither man nor woman ever fails to recognize and to trust.

And what is even the loftier Faust, whose one fitting mate was Helen, if compared with the subjects of Iago's fathomless and bottomless malice? This quarry cries on havoc louder than when Hamlet fell. Shakespeare alone could