Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/301

JULIETS RUNAWAY, ONCE MORE "—of saws, proverbs, nursery rhymes, of classic phrases whether scriptory or conveyed from mouth to mouth. Small thanks to an audacious bookman, like Ahrens, imperiously well equipped, who not only rewrites whole verses of Theocritus but transposes their entire succession in an idyl! Despite the undeniable, even bristling, errors in the First Folio, "runaway's eyes" does not excite my absolute scepticism; for I would not, like Warburton, White, and others, deem Phœbus the runaway, but would rather think that Juliet—all woman yet all child—applied that pretty appellation to her dainty self. To an editor who by chance was a bit of a poet, that notion might not seem half so fanciful as many of the conceits in Shakespeare's deathless apotheosis of youth, with all its efflorescence of speech and passion, its happy hapless voice and deed. But my acceptance of the word which so many censors have disallowed at last has been shaken—the argument through analogy being so convincing—by a chance comparison of Juliet's speech with its model in a play by resonant Kit Marlowe.

It used to be said that every French author owed it to himself to write one naughty book. Nowadays the maxim is reversed: he writes one virtuous book, teste Zola's "Le Rêve," as a personal and tributary rite. Nevertheless, I piously believe it is not wholly in the same spirit that these surmises, respecting one word of all that Shakespeare left us, are confided to the reader. [287]