Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/134

 Now a hasty critic may dismiss the most obvious device by which the style is raised in these as merely the old trick, familiar for generations before Shakespeare, and already almost caricatured by men like Fisher and Berners—the trick of combining native and imported elements. But there is something much more than a mere draft on the Teutonic and Romance columns of a conveniently arranged Dictionary of Synonyms. The double source Is drawn upon; 'backward' and 'earthy' do stand to 'abysm' and 'abhorred' as the pairs so familiar in Bible and Prayer-book do to each other. But Shakespeare is not content with this grammar-school antithesis. In the first place, he varies the meaning in 'backward' and 'abysm', giving waste horizontal stretch in the one case and unplumbed depth in the other; and he also contrasts the mere sound of the words as much as possible, while deliberately adopting the form in 'ysm' for the sake of euphony. In the second he adds to the contrast of origin and sound a complete change of point of view. 'Earthy' is a quality of the commands; 'abhorred' an attitude of the mind commanded. He has tapped not one but many of the Longinian 'sources'; he has blended the products of his tapping. And yet these are mere everyday instances, the ordinaire, as it were, of his cellar.

Pass from the almost certainly last to one of the certainly earliest plays, the Two Gentlemen, and, avoiding the apex already quoted from it, taking (at whatever may be their full value) the imperfect construction, the more imperfect characterization, the superabundant evidences of the novitiate in conceit and word-play and trifling—consider for a moment one line of its second greatest passage (I. ii. 84),

The uncertain glory of an April day.

'Quite commonplace,' says the quite commonplace reader. 'Everybody knows that April days are uncertain.' But