ers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured. Lady Macbeth is 'unsexed;' Macbeth has forgotten that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers and the murder must be insulated-cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested-laid asleep, tranced, racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated, relations to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds; the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them."*

In Lear, where all else of Shakspere's art attains a deeper and more intense life than in any other of his poems, the interpenetration of the humorous, the pathetic, and the tragic has become complete. When Lear,

* De Quincey's Works (1st ed.), vol. xiv., p. 197. Bodenstedt (quoted by Furness, Variorum Shakespeare-Macbeth, p. 110) writes of the Porter, "After all, his uncouth comicality has a tragic background: he never dreams, while imagining himself a porter of hell, how near he comes to the truth. What are all these petty sinners who go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire compared with those great criminals whose gates b guards ?"

assisted by the most learned justicer poor Tom, and his yoke-fellow in equity the Fool, arraigns a joint-stool as Goneril, we do not smile, we hardly as yet can pity; we gaze on with suspended intellect, as if the entire spectacle were some mysterious, grotesque hieroglyph, the secret of which we were about to discover. In the smallest atom of the speeches of Lear, of Edgar, of the Fool, and equally in the entire drama, tragic earnestness is seen arrayed in fantastic motley. It is as if the writer were looking down at human life from a point of view without and above life, from which the whole appears as some monstrous farce-tragedy, in which all that is terrible is ludicrous, and all that is ludicrous terrible.

If, during this tragic period, Shakspere retain any tendency to observe the comedy of incident in life, the incident will be of another sort from that which moves our laughter in The Comedy of Errors. It will rather be a fragment of titanic burlesque, overhung by some impending horror, and inspired by a deep "idea of world-destruction."* Such a stupendous piece of burlesque, inspired by an idea of world - destruction, Shakspere found in Plutarch's life of Antony, and having allowed it to dilate and take color in his own imagination, he transferred it to his play. Aboard Pompey's galley the masters of the earth hold hands and dance the Egyptian bacchanals, joining in the volleying chorus, "Cup us, till the world goes round!" and Menas whispers his leader to bid him cut the cable and fall to the throats of the triumvirs. A great painting by Orcagna shows a terrible figure, Death, armed with the scythe, and sweeping down through bright air upon the glad and careless garden-party of noble and beautiful persons-men and women who lean to one another, and caress their dogs and hawks, while

* A word applied by Heine to Aristophanes― Weltvernichtungsidee.

they listen to the music of stringed instruments. In Shakspere's scene of revelry, death seems to be more secretly, more intimately present, seems more surely to dominate life; though it passes by, it passes, as it were, with an ironical smile at the security of the possessors of this world, and at the noisy insubstantial triumph of life, permitted for a while. If now Shakspere be a satirist, his satire will not resemble the bright, airy mockery of fashions and affectations which made the early Love's Labor's Lost effective with youthful aristocratic patrons of the theatre. How great a distance has been measured since then! Shakspere's satire will now be the deep or fierce complaint against the world, of a soul in its agony -the frenzied accusations of nature and of man uttered by Lear, or the Juvenalian satire of the Athenian misanthrope.

There is in every man of passionate genius a revolt against the insufficiency of the world, a revolt against the base facts of life. Most of us surrender to the world, sign a treaty of alliance with engagements of mutual service, and end by acquiescence. It is remarkable that Shakspere's revolt against the world increased in energy and comprehensiveness as he advanced in years. When he was thirty or five-and-thirty years of age, he found less in the world to arouse his indignation than when he was forty. Neither by force nor fraud, by bribe or menace, did the world subdue or gain over Shakspere. If he attained serenity, it was by some procedure other than that of selfish or indolent acquiescence. No mood of egoistic Laissez faire succeeded Shakspere's mood of indignation.

Serenity Shakspere did attain. Once again before the end his mirth is bright and tender. When in some Warwickshire field, one breezy morning, as the daffodil began to peer, the poet conceived his Autolycus, there might seem to be almost a return of the light-heartedness of

youth. But the same play that contains Autolycus contains the grave and noble figure of Hermione. From its elevation and calm Shakspere's heart can pass into the simple merriment of rustic festivity; he can enjoy the open-mouthed happiness of country clowns; he is delighted by the gay defiance of order and honesty which Autolycus, most charming of rogues, professes; he is touched and exquisitely thrilled by the pure and vivid joy of Perdita among her flowers. Now that Shakspere is most a householder, he enters most into the pleasures of truantship.* And in like manner it is when he is most grave that he can smile most brightly, most tenderly. But one kind of laughter Shakspere at this time found detestable-the laughter of an Antonio or a Sebastian, barren and forced laughter of narrow heads and irreverent and loveless hearts. The sly knavery of Autolycus has nothing in it that is criminal; heaven is his accomplice. "If I had a mind to be honest, I see Fortune would not suffer me; she drops booties in my mouth." Whether Schiller's Franz Moor made many robbers may be doubtful. But certainly no person of spirit can read A Winter's Tale without feeling a dishonest and delightful itching of the fingers, an interest not wholly virtuous in his neighbor's bleaching-green, and an impatience to be off for once on an adventure of roving and roguing with Autolycus.

* Readers of Mr. Browning's "Fifine at the Fair" will associate an esoteric sense with the word "householder," and will remember his admirably bright and vigorous study of the causes of our love of truantship in the opening sections of that poem.

CHAPTER VIII.

SHAKSPERE'S LAST PLAYS.

In these chapters we have been chiefly concerned with observing the growth of Shakspere's mind and art. The essential prerequisite of such a study was a scheme of the chronological succession of Shakspere's plays which could be accepted as trustworthy in the main. But for such a study it is fortunately not necessary that we should in every case determine how play followed play. It would for many reasons be important and interesting to ascertain the date at which each work of Shakspere came into existence; but as a fact this has not been accomplished, and we may safely say that it never will be accomplished. To understand in all essentials the history of Shakspere's character and Shakspere's art, we have obtained what is absolutely necessary when we have made out the succession, not of Shakspere's plays, but of Shakspere's chief visions of truth, his most intense moments of inspiration, his greater discoveries about human life.

In the history of every artist and of every man there are periods of quickened existence, when spiritual discovery is made without an effort, and attainment becomes easy and almost involuntary. One does not seek for truth, but rather is sought for by truth, and found; one does not construct beautiful imaginings, but beauty itself haunts and startles and waylays. These periods may be arrived at through prolonged moral conflict and victory, or through some sudden revelation of joy, or through supreme anguish and renouncement. Such epochs of