Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/883

Rh men like Sidney. It is especially difficult for us to imagine the mood of a boy like Shakespeare strolling and dreaming along the banks of the Avon.

And again, much wonder has been expressed that he—after his great success in London; after having acquired wealth and honor, and enjoyed intercourse with all the genius and all the brilliance of his time; after being the admiration of all, from princes to apprentice boys—should, in the heyday of health and fame, have left everything to go down to Stratford (which was farther from London then than Aberdeen is now) to settle among farmers, wool-staplers, and cattle-dealers, and enjoy no better social intercourse than could be found at the Falcon Inn. Yet, as far as we can judge, his contemporaries were not surprised at this. It was a natural thing to do in an age when men felt that, except in the exercise of the most sacred of the affections, the highest delight for intellectual man lies in meditation, and that it is among the scenes of one's childhood that the scattered threads of one's own life can be gathered up and contemplated as one woof, that true meditation upon the universal life of man can be fostered with most success. These facts must always be considered when the chronology of the Shakespeare plays is attempted to be discovered by criticism of the nature and quality of the thoughts it contains.

But as to what the personality of Shakespeare was, though we may not be able to form a true conception of it, this we do know, that it was as unlike as it could possibly be to the character imagined by German transcendentalists. Four or five years ago, in an imaginative work, part of whose motif was to show that most men, if not all, have that instinct for making "assurance doubly sure" which characterizes both Hamlet and Macbeth when entangled in a net of conflicting evidence—the evidence of the spiritual and the evidence of the natural world—as those two characters were each entangled, I made some remarks upon them which aroused a good deal of discussion. My argument in that story was "that the paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, had nothing whatever to do with the explanation of it offered by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister—the explanation that a heavy task was laid upon a character whose grit was unequal to the performance of it—"as it were, an oak planted in a china vase." I contended, on the contrary, that the same paralysis is seen in Macbeth as much as in Hamlet; I contended that Shakespeare, having decided in the case of Macbeth to adopt the machinery he found in Holinshed, and in the case of Hamlet the machinery he found in the old Hamlet mentioned by Nash, or else in Belleforest, seems to have set himself the task of realizing the situation of a man oscillating between the evidence of two worlds, the physical and the spiritual—a man in each case unusually sagacious, and in each case endowed with the instinct for "making assurance doubly sure"—the instinct which seems, from many passages in his dramas, to have been a special characteristic of the poet's own, such, for instance, as the words in Pericles:

And if we really wish to form a mental picture of Shakespeare we must begin by studying these two plays together and glancing frequently at other Shakespearian plays. This was my contention; nothing more. But in reiterating an argument a writer who has once formulated it can never again advance it except by repeating his own words. This is what I said in the introduction to the English editions of Aylwin:

Why is it that Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion of the Mermaid, the wind-bibbing joker of the Falcon and the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately painted character in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so profoundly touched, the workings of his soul so thoroughly laid bare, that we seem to know him more completely than we know our most intimate friends. It is because the sea which washes between personality and personality is here, for once, rolled away, and we and this Hamlet touch, soul to soul. That is why we ask whether such a character can be the mere evolvement of the artistic mind at work. That is why we exclaim: