line of this sonnet is utterly inconsistent with passion.

In the next sonnet the friend repents, and weeps the "strong offence," and Shakespeare accepts the sorrow as salve that "heals the wound"; his friend's tears are pearls that "ransom all ill deeds." The next sonnet begins with the line:

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"No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done ";

Shakespeare will be an "accessory" to his friend's theft," though he admits that the robbery is still sour. Then come four sonnets in which he is content to forget all about the wrong he has suffered, and simply exhausts himself in praise of his friend. Sonnet 40 begins:

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call; All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more."

This is surely the very soul of tender affection; but it is significant that even here the word "true"” is emphasized and not "love"; he goes on:

"I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty; And yet love knows it is a greater grief

To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury.”

Never before was a man so gentle-kind; we might be listening to the lament of a broken-hearted woman who smiles through her tears to reassure her lover; yet there is no attempt to disguise the fact that Herbert has done " wrong." The next sonnet puts the poet's feeling as strongly as possible.

Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,
When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art.
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assail'd;
And when a woman woos, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevail'd?
Ay me! but yet thou might'st my seat forbear,
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth;
Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
Thine by thy beauty being false to me."

The first lines show that Shakespeare is pretending; he attempts not only to minimize the offence, but to find it charming. A mother who caught her young son kissing a girl would reproach him in this fashion; to her his faults would be the "pretty wrongs that liberty commits." But this is not the way passion speaks, and here again the sextet condemns Herbert in the plainest terms. At length we have the summing-up:

'That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I lov'd her dearly;
That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:

Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.

If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,

And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross:

But here's the joy; my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone."

This sonnet, with its affected word-play and wiredrawn consolation, leaves one gaping: Shakespeare's verbal affectations had got into his very blood. To my mind the whole sonnet is too extravagant to be sincere; it is only to be explained by the fact that Shakespeare's liking for Herbert was heightened by snobbishness and by the hope of patronage. None of it rings true except the first couplet. Yet the argument of it is repeated, strange to say, and emphasized in the sonnets addressed to the "dark lady" whom Shakespeare loved. Sonnet 144 is clear enough:

"Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man, right fair,
The worser spirit a woman, colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, yet, not directly tell;

But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:

Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out."

As soon as his mistress comes on the scene Shakespeare's passionate sincerity cannot be questioned. The truth is the intensity of his passion leads him to condemn and spite the woman, while the absence of passion allows him to pretend affection for the friend. Sonnet 133, written to the woman, is decisive:

"Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan For that deep wound it gives my friend and me!

Is't not enough to torture me alone,

But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engross'd:
Of him, myself, and thee, I am forsaken;
A torment thrice threefold thus to be cross'd.
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward,
But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard;
Thou canst not then use rigour in my gaol:

And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.'

The last couplet is to me "perforce" conclusive.

But let us take it that these sonnets prove the contention of the cry of critics that Shakespeare preferred friendship to love, and held his friend dearer than his mistress, and let us see if the plays corroborate the sonnets on this point. We may possibly find that the plays only strengthen the doubt which the sonnets implant in us.

"The Merchant of Venice" has always seemed to me important as helping to fix the date of the sonnets. Antonio, as I have shown, is an impersonation of Shakespeare himself. It seems to me Shakespeare would have found it impossible to write of Antonio's self-sacrificing love for Bassanio after he himself had been cheated by his friend. This play then must have been written shortly before his betrayal, and should give us Shakespeare's ordinary attitude. Many expressions in the play remind us of the sonnets, and one in especial of sonnet 41. In the sixth scene of the second act, Jessica, when escaping from her father's house, uses Shakespeare's voice to say:

"But love is blind and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit.”

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Here we have "the pretty follies" which is used again as pretty wrongs " in sonnet 41. Immediately afterwards Lorenzo, another mask of Shakespeare, praises Jessica as "wise, fair, and true," just as in sonnet 105 Shakespeare praises his friend as "kind, fair, and true," using again words which his passion for a woman has taught him.

The fourth act sets forth the same argument we find in the sonnets. When it looks as if Antonio would have to give his life as forfeit to the Jew, Bassanio exclaims:

Antonio, I am married to a wife

Which is as dear to me as life itself;
But life itself, my wife and all the world
Are not with me esteem'd above thy life.
I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all
Here to this devil to deliver you."

This is the language of passionate exaggeration, one might say. Antonio is suffering in Bassanio's place, paying the penalty, so to speak, for Bassanio's happiness. No wonder Bassanio exaggerates his grief and the sacrifice he would be prepared to make. But Gratiano has no such excuse for extravagant speech, and yet Gratiano follows in the self-same vein:

"I have a wife whom, I protest, I love:

I would she were in heaven, so she could

Entreat some power to change this currish Jew."

The peculiarity of this attitude is heightened by the fact that the two wives, Portia and Nerissa, both take the ordinary view. Portia says:

"Your wife would give you little thanks for that If she were by to hear you make the offer."