III.

SHAKSPEARE'S DRAMATIC STYLE, AND POETICAL VIEW OF THINGS IN GENERAL.

THE character of a Poet historically depends, partly on the contemporary condition of art, and partly on the circumstances of his age and nation. In the preceding sections I have attempted to sketch the character of Shakspeare under both these aspects. In his case, however, their influence was not so great as it usually is with most other poets; the former, however, was more considerable in this respect than the latter. With every true artist and poet, indeed, they can only act upon his poetical organization so far as they are the conditions and springs of the formation of his character as a man, and of his mental development as a poet or artist. As an individual, the poet is no doubt an organic member of the totality of his nation, as well as of history and humanity, and subject, therefore, to the conditions of time and finite existence. But as a genuine poetical genius, he stands at once above every special grade of the progress of art; he belongs to all times and to all people. The greater he is, the more independent will he be of all the particular and narrow interests, ideas, and tendencies of his age and country, and the higher will he soar above the special and existing development of his art. For the human, finite, individuality of the artist is as it were but the substratum and mechanism with which the eternal idea, the immutable mind of art, combines itself for its temporary realisation. Out of this combination arises a new life, and a special form of the universal spirit of art, in which the human, the individual, and the perishable, are fused together with the ever-enduring vitality of the idea, into organic unity, which, consequently, is the expression no doubt of individual character, but also at the same time the living portraiture and realization of the universal essence of art. This is, in

short, artistic genius. The particular manner in which Shakspeare, agreeably to his own individuality, apprehended the spirit and essence of art-the peculiar poetic view of the world and things, which pervades his works as their fundamental and animating principle, and from which arise all the characteristic and distinctive features of his poetry-these, in one word, are Shakspeare's self, in his special character as poet.

Now, in the first place, Shakspeare is pre-eminently a dramatic poet; this is sufficiently proved by such works of his as we possess, which are not directly of a dramatic character. In his lyrical pieces-the 154 Sonnets, and the collection entitled "The Passionate Pilgrim," he reveals not merely his own individual personality, he depicts not only the emotions of his own soul, his own experience and views, but still more the character of the personages (whether real or feigned) whom he is addressing, and it is only in the interwoven description of his own connexion with them that his individual feelings are allowed to transpire. These pieces, moreover, are chiefly of an epigrammatic turn, full of verbal play and antithesis, replete with wit and acuteness, and distinguished not so much by the free, poetic flow of feeling, or by the unbroken and harmonious echo of external life in the poet's rich and exquisite sensibility-wherein, in truth, the subjectmatter of lyrical poetry consists-as rather by the depth and fulness of the thoughts and reflections. They argue far too much; they are more like speeches than lyrical songs; indeed, we might justly describe them as dialogical, in so far as the reasons and objections, the principles and views, as well as the whole personal character of the persons to whom they are addressed, find distinct utterance in them. It is on this account that they can only be rightly understood in the order which Shakspeare himself has given to them, and that taken singly they are for the most part extremely obscure. His other minor poems-the "Venus and Adonis," "The Rape of Lucrece," "The Lover's Complaint," which have been wrongly termed epical, since they are more correctly described as idyllic (i. e. in the original sense of the term idyl -a short poetic picture in narrative verse) are also both in drawing and colouring of so dramatic a cast, that they seem to want nothing but the dialogue in order to be transferred to another domain of

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poetry. Lastly, the fourteen strophes of four and six lines each, belonging to some masque, and subscribed with the initials, W. Sh., which have been recently discovered by Collier among the manuscripts at Bridgewater House, (New Partic. p. 61, 64, &c.) since, to judge of the matter and form, they are most probably from Shakspeare's pen, may have belonged to those ornamental trifles which issued from time to time out of his great poetical laboratory. Consistently with their design, they bear a decidedly dramatic stamp.

In what light Shakspeare understood the essence and spirit of dramatic art, he himself tells us in "Hamlet," Act 3, scene 3.— Playing," he says, "both at the first, and now was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature; to shew virtue her own feature; scorn, her own image; and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." His idea, therefore, of the essence of the drama, which, as we shall presently shew, lies at the bottom of all his works, may be thus briefly expressed: the drama ought to be the poetical delineation of the history of the world. It is its part to hold up, as it were, the mirror to nature-i. e. by no means to imitate nature, but to lead it to a knowledge of itself, and man by it, to a full understanding of his nature and destination. For this end it is above all things important that man should gain a full insight into the essence both of good and evil, virtue and vice, and should know himself in his own virtues or vicious manifestations. Moreover, it is also essential that he should arrive at a clear perception of the true end of human existence the right way and means of attaining to it, and therefore of the form and procedure of the mental development, and the successive degrees of human improvementin short, of the form of the age, and whole body of the time. The true object-matter, consequently, of dramatic representation, is the history of the world; its end is to co-operate in effecting the end of that history, which is the recognition of man as the fundamental condition of all true knowledge, as well as the acknowledgment of God as the sum of all truth: in short, to be identical with that which, in universal history, is the self-fulfilling end of humanity.

But it may be asked, is not this the end also of lyrical and of epical poetry? Is it not the object and end of art generally to exhibit human life and character in its truth, and, consequently, in its

historical manifestation? Loosely understood, it is so undoubtedly, but not in the stricter sense in which the life of humanity first becomes history, and its manifestation historical; as far, that is, as it brings to view the development of the human mind in its progressive advancement through past, present, and future. For the epos exhibits human nature only in the past, wherein the evolution of the human mind is to a certain point complete, and no longer in an inchoate state, but appears objectively as an existence already mature and as fact. It is a narrative poetry, informing us of what has already taken place, and depicts the human mind, not so much from its subjective aspect, in which by the force of its self-determination (freedom) it first creates history, and is itself incipient history; but rather from its objective side, in which it has already advanced out of its subjectivity, the selfdetermining principle has already become determinate, and the will having passed into action, has itself become objective in action and passion, and therefore history. And it is only so far as it still continues to exist in the objective, still lives in and cooperates with it-i.e. mediately only, that the subjective appears on the surface of the epical poetry. The epos accordingly is the poetry of the past, and of the objectivity of mind. It may be denominated the plastic or statuesque of poetry, so far as in it the mind hast passed over into the outward form and sensuousness of phenomena, and is exhibited solely in its objective and sensible determinateness; and accordingly even this outward form cannot be individual and real, such as it is in actual life, where the operation of the mind never wholly ceases, but is of necessity general and ideal. All the heroes of epic poetry, however internally individual and distinct they may appear within the epos itself, seem nevertheless externally to be conceived in one certain typical and ideal pattern. Thus, in Homer, every hero-the cowardly Paris no less than the brave Hector or Achilles-is godlike. And even their intrinsic peculiarities are not brought forward, except so far as they are revealed in their actions and sufferings. In the epos, consequently, everything appears to be necessary and inevitable. For the deed once accomplished, all freedom of will is over, and all self-determination of mind has merged into determinateness; history in its past events bears the stamp of necessity. The deity, or destiny, the unchangeable order of nature, or a superhuman power and being

-in short, some superior energy or other, visibly governs all the transactions of the epical world; its agents are ruled by necessity; their actions seem to be suggested by some deity, or their sufferings inflicted by divine retribution. We may say, therefore, the epos exhibits human nature in its physical aspect, for in Nature, mind cannot manifest itself except as objective determinateness and necessity. On this account the genuine epos may well be distinguished as the poetry of nature, and stands on the first step of mental development as the expression of a view of things in which the human mind feels pre-eminently its determinate and sensuous objectivity, but at the same time regards the determinating power as a higher, a divine influence.

Lyrical poetry, on the other hand, is the direct contrary of epical. It is the poesy of the mind's subjectivity-of freedom and of the future. He is the true lyrical poet who pourtrays not his own personal subjectivity, but that of the human mind generally, of which his own is but a particular manifestation. Since it is with the creative activity of mind-its self-determinings before they have yet passed into determinations and actions, that lyrical poetry concerns itself, it necessarily exhibits it in the ferment of indecision and becoming; it delineates the mental states and impulses out of which events and destinies proceed, whereas the business of the epos is to narrate facts and deeds. In lyrical poetry, consequently, the objective is comprised in and borne on by the subjective in such a manner that both indeed are apparent, but the one mediately only, and through the other.

In the ferment of inclination there is as yet no determinateness and fixity of form; the mind has not as yet stepped out of itself, nor manifested itself by any objective volition and act; it is still perfectly absorbed within itself, but moving amid its own thoughts on the impressions of the outer world. It is in itself pure motion, a constantly living but ever varying relation between itself and external nature, a constant going and coming inwards and outwards. Lyrical poesy is as transitory and undulating as the emotions it depicts; its very form is an unrestrained and arbitrary variation of rhythms and metres, and therefore it may aptly be termed the music of poetry. By this, however, we must not be understood as conveying the idea that every lyrical poem must essentially be the expression of feelings.