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VI

When his essay on Plutarch was finished, a friend demurred to his spending his time upon such toys of criticism. 'I know that you think I should be better employed on original work. But I find that I have a gift of keen imaginative appreciation combined with another of seeing the past as a whole philosophically, which enables me, as a critic, to say things which strike people as original.' Thus he wrote in defence of himself, and he wrote truly. It was no vain boast that he possessed the gift of imaginative appreciation, and having it he would have been untrue to himself had he cast it away. And he might have gone further, and urged that the art of criticism, as he saw it, was creative also. To rescue from the past the fading figures of great men, to select from the annals such facts. as shall give truth to portraiture, to set dead heroes in the light of day-this surely is an act of creation. Moreover, George Wyndham knew well that original work, in the higher sense, was out of his reach, so long as he was immersed in politics. No man shall serve God and Mammon, and the Mammon of politics stands in stern opposition to the God of originality. We cannot picture to ourselves a great poet sitting in the seat of a Prime Minister, and they who in the House of Commons have written fine prose may be counted on the fingers of a hand. George Wyndham, in truth, had obeyed the call of what he deemed to be duty; he had taken (and was taking) his share in the government of the country, and so long as he did this, he could count neither upon the leisure nor upon the egoism,

which is necessary for the doing of original work.'

Meanwhile he indulged his gift of imaginative appreciation, and proved that he had the rare faculty of placing on their feet before us the straylings of the past. In an essay, entitled The Poetry of the Prison, for instance, he has sketched Villon lightly and with a loyal sympathy. 'He writes of his shames,' says he, 'as an old soldier of his scars.' Thus is Villon's character revealed in a phrase. Without a hint of irrelevant censure, George Wyndham describes those shames as he knew them, and acclaims the great poet, 'whose verse is bitter with the bitterness, glad only with the insolence' of his age. By way of contrast turn to R. L. Stevenson's essay on Villon-surely a sad aberration in criticism. Stevenson judges Villon as the Elders of the Scottish Church judged Burns, and cannot contemplate him without a reproof upon his tongue. He tells us that Villon's 'sentiments are about as much to be relied upon as those of a professional beggar,' and proceeds to find in his work an unrivalled insincerity.' Unrivalled insincerity! You rub your eyes as you read the words, applied to a poet who in every word that he wrote was emotionally sincere. Still worse, Stevenson says contemptuously, 'it shall remain in the original for me,' of a poem, in which Matthew Arnold, no condoner of insincerity, finds the 'oπovSatórns, the high and excellent seriousness which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry,' the quality which Arnold himself perceives only in Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. Thus, while Stevenson dismisses Villon as 'the sorriest figure on the rolls of fame,' George Wyndham remembers that he writes of his shames, as an old soldier of

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his scars'; and who shall say that George Wyndham has not the better of it?

VII

With an equally keen perception of life, George Wyndham has drawn a sketch of Shakespeare's father. Acting upon a hint, thrown out by R. L. Stevenson in talk with Henley, he ascribes to John Shakespeare something of the whimsical temperament which belonged to the father of Charles Dickens. He paints him as a kind of Micawber, perplexed always by 'a happy-go-lucky incuriousness,' a man of that sanguine temper that is sure always that something will turn up' either in town or country, prosperous to-day, penniless to-morrow, immersed in lawsuits, crippled by mortgages, yet resolute in pride, and appealing always to the College of Heralds for a grant of arms. At last we see him 'coming not to church for fear of process for debt'; and the essential truth of the portrait helps to explain something of Shakespeare's own experience, especially his knowledge of law and heraldry. Indeed, throughout George Wyndham's essay on the Poems of Shakespeare, the reader will find a rare combination of research and understanding. He had read the texts with a discerning mind. He had discovered early in his quest, as all discover who study a literature, deeply and at first hand, that the critics who have written of it, have never read it, but merely handed on traditional judgments, for the most part astonishingly incorrect.' But it was not merely the texts that he was busied with. A quick perception brought the London and the life of Elizabeth's age clearly before

him. He could see it in his mind's eye, because he went wandering into the past, and knew what he himself would have felt in the cross-currents of that busy, turbulent time. 'All the talk was,' he was sure, of sea-fights and new editions: Drake and Lyly, Ralegh and Lodge, Greene and Marlowe and Grenville were names in every mouth.' There was nothing in the babbling activity of the eager town that did not appeal to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Poets and nobles were alike fervent worshippers of the stage, and gladly did George Wyndham picture Shakespeare as the friend of Herbert and Southampton.

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His criticism of the Poems is far divorced from any sort of pedantry, as well it might be, since it was written in the midst of engrossing duties.' 'In the character of "Johannes Factotum," he wrote in November 1895, 'I am at Aldershot doing some cavalry drill; next week I make political speeches. . . But all the time I am writing an introduction to Shakespeare's Poems.' The diversity of interest is shown in the work, not in any weakening of the interest, but in a resolute avoidance of irrelevant, conventional criticism. He cares not for the foolish problems which are wont to perplex the critics of the Sonnets. Mr. W. H. is not of supreme importance to him. He brushes Mr. Tyler's case aside, because it cannot be argued without the broaching of many issues outside the sphere of artistic appreciation.' In truth, he follows his quest not as a student of history but as a lover of art. He refrains from seeking parallels to Shakespeare's verse, for that method discovers not Shakespeare's art, but the common measure of poetry in Shakespeare's day.' What he sought in

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Shakespeare's Poems was the wealth of his imagery, the perfect beauty of his verbal melody.

Even while he sketches in brilliant colours the poet's environment, even while he sets in array the combatants on either side of the Poetomachia, he firmly detaches the Poems from Shakespeare's personal experience, and proves that they owe little enough to the poet's career. What he looked for was ' lyrical discourse'; what he found-in Sonnet 90 -was 'the perfection of human speech.' His letters, written while the Essay was in progress, are packed with enjoyment. What stuff it is! "Lucrece " and all-thus he writes, 'I had really never read "Lucrece," but just listen to this:

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"For sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell,

Once set on ringing, with his own weight goes."

Only William could have written that, and this must be driven into the people who glibly quote Hazlitt's Ice-houses, and wearily repeat that a lady in Lucrece's unfortunate predicament is little likely to apostrophize Time, Opportunity, Eternity, Sorrow and any other abstractions that suggest a good tirade.'

To this theme, then, he is constant: that Shakespeare is not a Rousseau, not a metaphysician, but a poet, who aims in his Poems at music and beauty; not at self-revelation or the betterment of others. But now and again he deserts the high-road of his argument for the by-paths of ingenious discovery. He suggests that the open-air effects of Venus and Adonis are taken one and all from Arden. He marks how the day waxes and wanes from dawn to eve, how even the weather changes, so that pausing at any stanza you might name the hour;

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