the external analysis of his dramatic work. The Germans have asserted the superiority of their criticism with a strange arrogance; Gervinus, for example, contends that, till he was interpreted by Lessing, Shakespeare was never properly understood; and undoubtedly the Germans have thrown a fresh and strong light on the subject. In the beginning of the present century, Augustus Schlegel, perceiving that it was uncritical to apply to the work of Shakespeare an æsthetic test based on the purely conventional rules of the French stage, set himself to divine the actual artistic motives of the English poet. Of his general line of thought I have already spoken; the confidence with which he applied his a priori system of interpretation to the dramas of Shakespeare may be inferred from the following passage:

In an essay on Romeo and Juliet, written a number of years ago, I went through the whole of the scenes in their order, and demonstrated the inward necessity of each with reference to the whole; I showed why such a particular circle of characters and relations was placed around the two lovers; I explained the signification of the mirth here and there scattered, and justified the use of the occasional heightening given to the poetical colours. From all this it seemed to follow unquestionably that with the exception of a few witticisms now become unintelligible or foreign to the present taste, nothing could be taken away, nothing added, nothing otherwise arranged, without mutilating and disfiguring the perfect work.2

Other German exponents of "æsthetic" criticism followed in the steps of Schlegel, notably Gervinus and Ulrici, the latter of whom carried the a priori method to the farthest possible extreme, on a principle which may be cited as characteristic of the school :

:

It thus becomes necessary that there should be a definite substance of thought for that inner unity in the formation and construction of every drama; the various conceptions of the one general view which life acquires in the poetic imagination, according to the different standpoints, are substantially the ideas which guided Shakespeare in his artistic activity; they are the nominative central thoughts, or, as Goethe says, "the ideas to 1 Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries (Bunning's Translation), vol. i. p. 18. 2 Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, p. 361.

which he referred all the details." Goethe, even "old" Goethe, could not possibly have found such ideas in Shakespeare's poems, had he not himself been conscious that he too, like every poet, had allowed himself to be guided by ideas in this sense.1

That every great poet imitates Nature, according to a regular system and design in his own mind, is a truth which will of course be universally recognised. But that any critic can discover what this is by his own intuition, and without an accurate knowledge of the character of the nation to which the poet belongs, or of the ways of thinking peculiar to the age in which he lived, is by no means so clear. The German critics seem to be for the most part unaware that, in their interpretation of Shakespeare's plays, they are dealing with an English author, whose mind is not made on the German pattern. The consequence is, as any Englishman can see, that their account of his plays is often not only wrong, but ridiculous. Listen, for example, to what Gervinus says about Launce and his dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona :

A deeper sense still have the stories of the rough Launce and his dog Crab, the very scenes which undoubtedly occur to the gentler reader as most offensive. To the silly semi-brute fellow, who sympathises with his beast almost more than with man, his dog is his best friend. He has suffered stripes for him, he has taken his faults upon himself, and has been willing to sacrifice everything to him. At last self-sacrificing, like Valentine and Julia, even this friend himself he will resign, his best possession he will abandon, to do a service to his master. With this capacity for sacrifice, this simple child of Nature is placed by the side of that splendid model of manly endowments, Proteus, who, self-seeking, betrayed friend and lover. And thus this fine relation of the lower to the higher parts of the piece is so skilfully concealed by the removal of all moralising from the action, that the cultivated examiner of the piece finds the objective effect of the action in no wise disturbed, while the groundling of the pit tastes unimpeded his pure delight in common nature.2

Gervinus, it is plain, has not the least suspicion that Shakespeare, as a dramatist, may have had to take into

1 Ulrici, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art (Bohn's Edition), Preface, p. x. 2 Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries, vol. i. p. 226.

account the rude taste of his audience, which asked for such episodes of purely realistic imitation as that of Launce and his dog, quite independently of the main plot of the play. Ulrici's interpretation of the moral meaning in A Midsummer-Night's Dream is much of the same kind :

In the first place it is self-evident that the play is based upon the comic view of life, that is to say, upon Shakespeare's idea of comedy. This is here expressed without reserve and in the clearest manner possible, in so far as it is not only in particular cases that the maddest freaks of accident come into conflict with human capriciousness, folly and perversity, thus thwarting one another in turn, but that the principal spheres of life are made mutually to parody one another in mirthful irony. This last feature distinguishes A Midsummer-Night's Dream from other comedies. Theseus and Hippolyta appear obviously to represent the grand, heroic, historical side of human nature. In place, however, of maintaining their greatness, power and dignity, it is exhibited as spent in the every-day occurrence of a marriage, which can claim no greater significance than it possesses for ordinary mortals; their heroic greatness parodies itself inasmuch as it appears to exist for no other purpose than to be married in suitable fashion. The band of mechanics-the carpenter, joiner, weaver, bellows-mender and tinker-in contrast to the above higher regions of existence, represent the lowest sphere in the full prose of everyday life. But even they-in place of remaining in their own sphere and station, where they are fully justified, and even somewhat poetical-force themselves into the domain of the tragic muse, and accordingly not merely exhibit themselves in an exceedingly ludicrous light, but are, as it were, a parody on themselves, as well as on the higher sphere of the tragic and heroic. Midway between these two extremes stand the two loving couples who belong to the middle stratum of human society. But in place of endeavouring to regard life from its inner and central point-in accordance with their position-they also lose themselves in the fantastic play of their own selfish love, and thus they too are a parody on themselves and their station in life.1

Not only does the incredible lack of humour, betrayed in criticisms like these, make it impossible that the commentators should be in sympathy with Shakespeare, but it is plain, as I shall try to show hereafter, that the

1 Ulrici, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art (Bohn), vol. ii. p. 72.

character of plot and under-plot in Shakespeare's plays was determined by dramatic considerations of a kind very different from what is supposed by Gervinus and Ulrici. It is perhaps not wonderful that, considering the contempt with which the German critics have spoken of every method of interpreting Shakespeare but their own, their commentaries should have been handled somewhat roughly by the opposite school.

Not a little of the Shakespearean criticism of this kind that exists (says Grant White, an excellent American editor of Shakespeare) is the mere result of an effort to say something fine about what needs no gilding, no such prism play of light to enhance or bring out its beauties. I will not except from these remarks much of what Coleridge himself has written about Shakespeare. But the German critics whom he emulated are worse than he is. Avoid them. The German pretence that Germans have taught us folk of English blood and speech to understand Shakespeare is the most absurd and arrogant that could be set up. Shakespeare owes them nothing, and we have received from them little more than some maundering mystification and much ponderous platitude.1

White himself recommended the reader to study Shakespeare in a good text and without notes, and his description of Shakespeare's "motives" in the construction of Romeo and Juliet may be usefully contrasted with that of Schlegel :

Shakespeare merely dramatised the old ballad to make a play to please his audience, just as the hack playwright might to-day who was engaged by the manager to do a like task. It merely happened that he was William Shakespeare, and had a peculiar way of doing such things. As to a moral, plainly nothing was further from Shakespeare's thoughts. The tragedy is hardly tragic, but rather a dramatic love-poem with a sad ending.2

This opinion rushes into as violent an extreme in one direction as that of Schlegel and his German followers in the other. If Shakespeare had written like any "hack playwright," if, like so many of the dramatists of his time, -Beaumont and Fletcher, for example-he had thought solely of pleasing the audience before him in the theatre,

1 Studies in Shakespeare, by Richard Grant White, pp. 53, 54.

2 Ibid. p. 36.

then it is certain that his characters would have had something of an abstract air; they would have lacked that intense individual life which Pope speaks of, and which not only keeps them alive in the imagination of the reader, but makes it still possible to represent them upon the stage. These ideal creations would not have convinced us so immediately as they now do of their truth and reality; however the intellect might have apprehended the poet's meaning, the heart would have remained untouched by a feeling of its truth; nor would a thousand of Shakespeare's sentiments and images have become a spiritual part of every community which speaks the English tongue. The Germans are right in ascribing to Shakespeare" the general view which life acquires in the poetic imagination"; they are wrong only in thinking that the view of life which he held can be discovered a priori by their own metaphysical systems. Shakespeare, it is evident, expressed his personal emotions through the mouth of the ideal persons he created. "We see him," says Hallam, "not in himself but in a reflex image, from the objectivity in which he was manifested: he is Falstaff, and Mercutio, and Malvolio, and Jaques, and Portia, and Imogen, and Lear, and Othello." And from this it seems necessarily to follow that, if we would understand the whole significance of these characters, and feel to the full the pathos, the humour, the truth of the situations in which they play their part, we must not only consider them abstractedly in themselves, but also be able to divine something of the character and feelings of their creator.

A large debt of gratitude is therefore due from all lovers of Shakespeare to those who, like Mr. Halliwell-Phillips -the father of modern Shakespearean biography-Professor Dowden, and Dr. Brandes, have busied themselves with collecting all the facts that can be discovered relating to the life of the poet. The crown of their labours has been reached in the recent admirable volume on the subject produced by Mr. Sidney Lee. It may safely be decided that the results of his industry and research are exhaustive, and

1 Literary History (1860), vol. ii, p. 276.