CHAPTER VII.

THE DRAMA AND THE EPICIST.

WERE it not that the purpose of all criticism is, if doing its proper work, simply an introductory one, the end of which should be to lead to deeper study of its subject on broader lines of thought, there might appear to be delay in getting to very close considerations. But to meet with a great poet in his best work needs a praeparatio rather of suggestive width of thought than any wordmongering, or overflow of antiquarian and chronological matter. To tell such truth, among other necessities, skilled workers have made islands of Bohemia, put horns on lawgivers, written indifferent language titles to choice pictures, and done many similar wonderful but highly artistic things, so often looking like caprice or ignorance. The laws of freedom here are not the conventional ones, or at least they will not, as is thus shown, allow themselves to be ruled by the lower. It will be with such freer guidance that the road must be led by and bye to the fair palace of one far higher than the admired dramatist, namely, the epic poet.

If Shakespeare had been still more learned in the literature of the past, if he had not been held back at his ripe period by the wants common to those whose silver

spoons are not by luck or birth well known oral prerogative, he would have burst the dramatic shell which gathered about him, too much to the hurt of his better genius, long before he really did. Akin it is to so much that happens to those in the world of poetic gift, that clouds of bad fortune, most of all, the purely literary ones, should have kept this sun from a shining which might have reached man's perfect day. We must submit to understand and regret that the meagreness of his knowledge as a scholar, wide reader though it is possible but not so probable he may have been, has lost for us the powers of originally perhaps the most seeing soul; not lost certainly altogether, but to too large extent, when such gift is so rare in the centuries. This is not implication of anything more than that he stands not higher in many respects than less powerful souls. Quality certainly is of first importance, but fullness and wealth are proper attendants to genuine virtue. Humanity, in the persons of its elect ones, should not take the valley level, and build pyramids of untried materials thence; it ought to examine, and resume, when possible, the work of civilisation where the sovran dead left it, if there is ever to be any chance of taking heaven by the sweet artistic violence of purest love. We may see a man's sheer original strength by his building on a solitary system his world poem, yet weakness cannot but appear where no deep acquaintance exists with the previous cunning workmen in the special sphere where such works have been done. To far grander effort than dramatic does the regret at want and inefficiency of such element apply. In the dramas there is never the clear rise to the highest artistic single-souled full con

sciousness of the beauty which is infinite. When we come to the two pieces wrongly called dramas, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, the former being the correlative or forerunner to the latter, it is here we get the height of the poet's faculty, and it is here we find limited knowledge beside unrivalled artistic ability. On these two does his rank as a divine or world poet depend; and that his mind had not a richer furnishing from the past is the sole reason that he is not yet the perfect arrival at the fullest dream of humanity. As it is, these works of highest art are outlined with the absolutely firm hand, but they are not filled in to their capacity of carrying the rich adornments of chaste yet voluptuous dress. Speaking of his works generally, his 'small Latin and less Greek,' though it is discussed whether he must not have known the difficult Latin of Plautus, little French, and likely no Italian or other foreign literature, Aristotle and Milo quite ancient heroes to his Ulysses, with many a slip besides, as Dennis the critic was too fond of showing, gave him poor choice and comparison of architectural construction. What has been said of Calderon, that he mixed events on purpose to show that poetry is above time and place, just as Virgil makes Dido meet Æneas by eliminating a few hundred years, could not cover the curious mixtures of the Englishman, it is pretty clear, though there is wise criticism in the thought that his absolute idealisation of places and times, completely makes irrelevant the confined prosy but truly dramatic doctrines of the unities.

However paradoxical it may seem, the truth is that never could he through his whole life trust art of his own sole invention. He began work as an intensely appre

ciative paraphrast or commentator in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and only in The Tempest did he nearly escape from the conventional art of his time into clear trust of his own originality. Not having the complete field of comparison the fullest culture gives, he clung to the narrower shapes and readymade moulds of the period, poor substitutes for the insight he should have had from knowing, say, one great Greek. For mercantile use they did well; it is for higher things that it is pity these arts of extorting money did not fade to him for the light of true shape. It is strange indeed to see so strong a soul looking to the pure poetic heaven through the narrow quaint savage windows of those old playwrights. Perhaps the hypothesis of the innocence of genius accounts for such contentment, if contentment it was, and not destiny. After recognising greatly the worthiest field of work he could not rid himself of exits and entrances, nor of such a commonplace thing as a storm at the Bermudas, described in a trumpery book of his day. At the last, there was one line of limit to the grandest epic freedom with this powerful man. His originality is not actually embodied to perfection in the final and trained result of the energy of the highest poet of word and deed. Why he must not claim precedence over all others is to be found in this sphere of thought. The closeness of embrace of his intellectual love is that wherein his power is yet unmatched. An enemy expressed the fact by saying that he thought himself 'the only Shakescene in a country to bombast out a blank verse,' very well aware where his successful rival's power lay. His plots, when he makes a change from what is in the story he takes, are all of the

sudden temporary nature; and if they have a certain freshness of impulse, they have that, as all amateurish work has it, by reason of feminity or immature manhood of gift and acquirement.

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Who does not see that the English, if giants in energy of feeling, are children yet in poetic construction? Our language is not past its literary blossom towards fruit of finest shape. Wilson, the somewhat, to present eyes, absurd, if not ridiculous, almost braggart, bombastic, and certainly very diffuse Christopher North,' yet of undeniable poetic appreciation, after a long search through our poetry, hurriedly allows Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear to be great poems, but his heart evidently does not follow his words, which is easily seen by the eagerness of his last grasp, as if for salvation from the entire vacancy of the highest poetic sphere in the language, that Paradise Lost was the one GREAT POEM of England. Carlyle's theory that Shakespeare is the highest of our poets because the most unconscious, and Milton of far less calibre because continually conscious, blows up this rock of Wilson's out of the sea altogether, so that there is nothing for his foot to rest on. But on the theory that Shakespeare, though not in the poems of his Wilson hurriedly called great, but in his best work, is like Dante, supremely conscious, and Milton by no means so intellectually fixed as to what he had to do, the true test of the superiority of the former to the latter, there is still poorer ground for the hope that Paradise Lost was the thing wanted. Wordsworthian though Wilson, to his honour and fame, showed himself, The Excursion he knew to be amorphous, however deep and true at flashes.

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