Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/13

1908.] character. His genius, his intellect, his sympathy are everywhere, in all and through all, from the first scene to the last. But he, the man, the son of and, is nowhere. He went out of himself and into his characters, leaving behind age and sex and every adventitious accident of mind and heart. And so oblivious was he of the limitations of his stage that the knowledge that boys were destined to impersonate women never caused him to forget for an instant das Ewig-Weibliche, or diminish one dowle in the plume that renders Juliet and Miranda, Perdita and Rosalind, Beatrice and Portia, so flawless, so feminine, and so true. Herein, let me add in parenthesis, lies a notable difference between Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists; it is incomprehensible that Shakespeare’s women were to be acted by boys; it is incomprehensible that the women of other contemporary dramatists were to be acted by anything else. Of course I speak broadly. To all general assertions there must be exceptions.

This, then, is one of Shakespeare’s crowns (he has many more than the tiara of the Pope) that, in conceiving a character, he could utterly obliterate himself. Will you here allow me to suggest a heresy which will freeze your young blood? Can dramatist, of imagination so compact that at will he becomes another person, different in every fibre of his nature from himself, have a decided character of his own? Can a strongly marked character, by any amount of imagination, be always obliterated? Can a man, stubbornly moulded, create Portia of Belmont, or Rosalind, or Juliet, or, most marvelous of all, Cleopatra? May it not be affirmed that the less decided a poet’s own personal character is, and the greater his imagination, the more perfect is his capacity to become a dramatist? Buffon said, “the style is the man himself.” But where there are fifty styles, where is the man himself?

And is our gentle Will thus to vanish into thin air, and be no more than such stuff as dreams are made on? Ah, no, let me not forget one most gracious heritage which Shakespeare bequeathed to us from the annals of his life. His prescient soul, that could forerun the ages, foresaw clearly enough the interest that, in the revolving years, his life and works would awaken, and so with a thoughtful kindness all his own, he kept himself concealed from public view for seven long years,—from 1585 to 1592 we know absolutely nothing about him (Halliwell thinks it was only during