interesting if not true, and are, moreover, quite opposed to the aesthetics of the genre, to the credo of the amourist, of the poet who writes to exercise his pen. We have seen before what a contradiction facts, newly come to light, have given to those who pretended that Ronsard's Cassandre, a far more shadowy being than Shakespeare's dark lady, had been nothing but "a creature of his fancy" to apply to her Sidney Lee's words. She turns out to have been a real woman, and her romantic name to have been her true name, she was Cassandra Salviati. Like Shakespeare's friend and like Jodelle's, she was dark, and so well established was then the rule that a poet's idol must needs be fair, that the mere fact of one being described as otherwise would go far to show that a real person, whose real colouring could not be easily disposed of, was in question. Shakespeare and Jodelle do not conceal their disgust; Ronsard, on the contrary, takes pride in the sombre complexion of his Italian beauty: Je veux mourir pour le brun de ce teint. All three think of a real woman of flesh and blood. Shakespeare's sonnets have the number of lines, but not the difficult metrical arrangement of the Italian or French sonnet. They are composed of three quatrains with alternate rimes, each strophe having its own set of rimes, and of a couplet, which serves as a conclusion. In the series which they form, one hundred and twentysix are devoted to a friend, the good angel, the others to a mistress, the dark angel. For the friend, Shakespeare is all admiration, tenderness, and indulgence; the vocabulary he uses, the emotions and the jealousy he feels, are those Vol. II. p. 385. of the most ardent passion; he trembles, he remains speechless, As an unperfect actor on the stage, Who with his fear is put besides his part. That passion is so intense that its reality must, the poet thinks, appear to all eyes-so intense, That every word doth almost tell my name. He has that exaggerated sense of his indignity and of his lowliness in comparison with the supreme merits of the friend which every lover has felt, and every poet has described. More than one of his sonnets are what he ironically calls elsewhere "discourses of disability." Like innumerable poets of the century, too, he takes comfort in the thought of the immortality of his verse. Something morbid exhales from these poems. The spirit of the Renaissance is clearly discernible in them, as well as an unconscious and involuntary platonism, the platonism of Plato, and not that of latter-day commentators, the real one, that which, for all that it rose as high as the clouds, none the less struck its roots beneath the miry earth. Here the roots are partly visible, and pagans never wrote anything more pagan than this series of sonnets. That which causes most of the poet's transports and ecstasies is the mere material beauty of his friend, the beauty of his eye, his lips, his hand, his foot; it is his "form," his "loveliness," And all those beauties whereof now he's king,' which must be perpetuated; it would be a crime of lèse "Two Gentlemen," iv. 4. • Sonnets i, xiii, lxiii, cvi. humanity to let that "beauty's treasure" perish; it must be propagated and reproduced, let him marry and have children; seventeen sonnets develop this idea. The friend, "thou my rose," has nothing else to propagate but his "woman's face with Nature's own hand painted." Those who "look into the beauty of [his] mind" find there only corruption and "the rank smell of weeds": O what a mansion have those vices got! The friend loves himself, is fond of his own beauty, is "contracted to [his] own bright eyes." No other philosophical or moral argument is invoked by the poet than that of Horace: time flies, beware of the wrinkles and of the gloom of the fortieth year; summer wanes, the violet fades Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, The poet recurs incessantly to his advice: "breed another thee"; to do so is to live again, to secure a kind of immortality. Physical beauty is of such value that it secures its owner pardon for every sin; physical ugliness is the fault for which there is no remission. The man friend and the woman seem to have been differently endowed by Nature in this respect, but to have had the same kind of morals, and to have been so well made to understand each other that they did. The duped poet who, like Othello, would have been happy "so he had nothing known,"3 is all A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted 2 Sonnets i, lxix, lx. 3 So shall I live supposing thou art true, indulgence for his friend: nothing but good can come from beauty; he is all disdain, scorn, and hate for the woman who, devoid of beauty, has surely all the wrong on her side and must have been the instigator. He overwhelms her with coarse insults, he reproaches her for her "so foul a face," her "dun" complexion, her "breath" which "reeks," the "black wires" that "grow on her head"; he makes her pay, by his sarcasms, for the disgust he feels for himself and for the weakness which brings him ever back to his demon "as black as hell," like him married, and the violator of vows as sacred as his own.1 Villon scarcely speaks more freely of his "grosse Margot." The final impression is one of sadness, sadness of the morrow after a lewd feast, harbinger of an evening still sadder. The poet reminds himself too of the flight of time, the coming of wrinkles, the failure of no one knows what ambitions I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. He feels regret at having neither the beauty of this one, nor the friends of that other, nor the art of yet a third; at his life being spent in a dubious social rank; he resents the humiliation of depending upon the applause of the vulgar, of knowing he is ill-spoken of, and that his friend will perhaps be reproached for having loved a friend "nothing worth." He upbraids Fortune, That did not better for my life provide Than public means, which public manners breeds. Your love and pity doth th' impression fill Which vulgar scandal stampt upon my brow." He feels, in those moments, the melancholy pessimism 'Sonnets cxlii and clii. 2 Ibid., xxx, cxi, cxii. of the weary epicurean; but then, at times, Love plays the consoler, and all is again triumph and joy: When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, ... From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remember'd, such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (xxix.) Sadness recurs; he feels old and he says so: a proof, commentators have declared, that he is developing a purely literary theme, for he was scarcely thirty-five. But the sense of the passing of time is one of those which act the most on the impressionable souls of poets, and many at all epochs have, as early in life and even earlier, contemplated with emotion the "phantom with blanched lips" Le fantôme est venu de la trentième année. (Bourget.) Spenser, as we have seen, had displayed the same apprehensiveness, "ætatis suæ" twenty-seven.2 As for the shadowy beyond, Shakespeare speaks of it in his sonnets, but in the same strains as Claudio or Hamlet; For example, in the beautiful sonnet lxxiii : That time of the year thou may'st in me behold In me thou see'st the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west. Above, vol. II. p. 467. |