Other excellences there are in these works-excellences of truth and nobility, of intellect and passion; and we may note them, even as we must note them in the grander achievement of their creators: even as we may, if we choose, find much to wonder at or to revere in the lives of their creators. But in these things of special dedication we must seek in the first place for the love of Beauty perfectly expressed, or we rebel against their authors' purpose. Who cares now whether Phidias did, or did not, carve the likeness of Pericles and his own amidst the mellay of the Amazons? And who, intent on the exquisite response of Shakespeare's art to the inspiration of Beauty, need care whether his Sonnets were addressed to William Herbert or to another? A riddle will always arrest and tease the attention; but on that very account we cannot pursue the sport of running down the answer, unless we make a sacrifice of all other solace. Had the Sphinx's enigma been less transparent, it must have wrecked the play of Sophocles, for the minds of the audience would have stayed at the outset much in the manner of trippers to Hampton Court who spend their whole time in the Maze. Above all, must the mind be disencumbered, clean, and plastic, when, like a sensitive plate, it is set to receive the impression of a work of art. But are Shakespeare's Poems works of art? Can the Venus and Adonis, the Lucrece, and the Sonnets be received together as kindred expressions of the lyrical and elegiac mood? These questions will occur to every one acquainted with the slighting allusions of critics to the Narrative Poems, or with the portentous mass of theory and inference which has accumulated round the Sonnets. For to find these Poems and certain of these Sonnets so received we must turn back, over three hundred years, to one of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Francis Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, a laboured but pleasing' comparative discourse' of Elizabethan poets and the great ones of Italy, Greece, and Rome, wrote thus :-'As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucreece, his sugred sonnets among his private friends.' Meres, therefore, was the first to collect the titles or to comment on the character of Shakespeare's Poems. But although, since 1598, he has had many successors more competent than himself, and though nearly all have quoted his saying, not one has followed his example of reviewing the three works together and insisting on their common characteristic. The Poems, indeed, have but rarely been printed hand in hand (so to speak) and apart from the Plays. This strange omission did not follow, as I think, on any deliberate judgment: it was, rather, the accidental outcome of the greater interest aroused by the Plays. The Poems were long eclipsed; and critics, even when they turned to them again, were still thinking of the Plays-were rather seeking in the Poet for the man hid in the Playwright than bent on esteeming the loveliness of Shakespeare's lyrical art. For this purpose the Sonnets showed the fairer promise: so the critics have filled shelves with commentaries on them, scarcely glancing at the Venus and the Lucrece; and, even in scrutinising the Sonnets, they have been so completely absorbed in the personal problems these suggest as to discuss little except whether or how far they reveal the real life of the man who, in the Plays, has clothed so many imaginary lives with the semblance of reality. work done in this field has been invaluable on the whole. impossible to over-praise Mr. Tyler's patience in research, or to receive with adequate gratitude the long labour of Mr. Dowden's love. Yet even Mr. Dowden, when he turns from considering Shakespeare's art in the Plays, and would conjure up his soul from the Sonnets, cannot escape the retribution inseparable from his task. This probing in the Sonnets after their author's The It is story is so deeply perplexed an enterprise as to engross the whole energy of them that essay it: so that none bent on digging up the soil in which they grew has had time to count the blossoms they put forth. Some even (as Gervinus) have been altogether blinded by the sweat of their labour, holding that the 'Sonnets, æsthetically considered, have been over-estimated' (Shakespeare, Commentary, 452). He writes much of Shakespeare's supposed relation to Southampton; but 'for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poetry, caret.' Yet we know from Meres and others that Shakespeare impressed his contemporaries, during a great part of his life, not only as the greatest living dramatist but also, as a lyrical poet of the first rank. Thus in 1598 Richard Barnefield, after praising Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton :-1 1 'And Shakespeare thou, whose hony-flowing Vaine Well may the Body dye, but Fame dies never' : and thus John Weever in 1599 (Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut and Newest Fashion) : : 'Honie-tong'd Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue, I swore Apollo got them and none other, Their rosie-tainted features cloth'd in tissue, Some heaven-born goddesse said to be their mother; Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her, Chaste Lucretia, virgine-like her dresses, Prowd lust-stung Tarquine seeking still to prove her. ''A Remembrance of some English Poets: Poems in Divers Humors,' printed with separate title-page at the end of The Encomion of Lady Pecunia,' 1598. Michael Drayton in his Matilda, 1594-1596, after referring to Daniel's Rosamond, refers to Shakespeare's Lucrece. It is interesting to note that the reference is cut out of all subsequent editions. Now, these tributes were paid at a time when lyrical poetry was the delight of all who could read English. In one year (1600) three famous anthologies were published-England's Helicon, that is, England's Parnassus, and Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses; and, something more than a year later, the author of the Returne from Parnassus writes this of Shakespeare, when he reaches him in his review of the poets whose lyrics were laid under contribution for the Belvedere : Ingenioso. William Shakespeare. Judicio. Who loves Adonis' love, or Lucre's rape, His sweeter verse containes hart robbing life, Discounting somewhat from the academical asperity of his judgment, you find Shakespeare still regarded well into the Seventeenth Century1 as a love poet whose siren voice could steal men's hearts. In gauging the æsthetic value of a work of art we cannot always tell how it strikes a contemporary'; and, even when we can, it is often idle to consider the effect beside maturer judgments. But when, as in the case of these Poems, later critics have scarce so much as concerned themselves with æsthetic value, we may, unless we are to adventure alone, accept a reminder of the artist's intention from the men who knew him, who approved his purpose, and praised his success. To Francis Meres, living among poets who worshipped Beauty to the point of assigning a mystical importance to its every revelation through the eye, it was enough that Shakespeare, like Ovid, had wrought an expression for that worship out of the sound and the cadence of words, contriving them into harmonies haunted by such unexplained emotion as the soul suffers from beautiful sights. We need not set Meres as a critic beside, say, Hazlitt. 1 Dated by Arber. But when Hazlitt quarrels with the Narrative Poems because they are not realistic dramas, and when Gervinus takes the Sonnets for an attempt at autobiography, baulked only by the inherent difficulty of the Sonnet form, it may be profitable to reconsider the view of even the euphuist Meres. Still, none can be asked to accept that view without some warning of the risk he runs. To maintain, with Meres, that Shakespeare's Poems, including the Sonnets, are in the first place lyrical and elegiac, is to court a hailstorm of handy missiles. Hazlitt-who, to be sure, would none of Herrick,— denounced the Narrative Poems for 'ice-houses'; and Coleridge's ingenious defence-that their wealth of picturesque imagery was Shakespeare's substitute for dramatic gesture—is almost as damaging as Hazlitt's attack. The one states, the other implies, that they were awkward attempts at Drama, mere essays at the form in which the author was afterwards to find his vocation. And when we come to the Sonnets, the view of Meres, and of all who agree with Meres, draws a hotter fire: not only from those who push the personal theory to its extreme conclusion, treating the Sonnets as private letters written to assuage emotion with scarce a thought for art, but also from those who vigorously deny that any Sonnet can be lyrical. Yet the hazard must be faced; for the Venus, the Lucrece, and the Sonnets are, each one, in the first place lyrical and elegiac. They are concerned chiefly with the delight and the pathos of Beauty, and they reflect this inspiration in their forms: all else in them, whether of personal experience or contemporary art, being mere raw material and conventional trick, exactly as important to these works of Shakespeare as the existence of quarries at Carrara and the inspiration from antique marbles newly discovered were to the works of Michelangelo. It is easy to gauge the relative importance in Shakespeare's work between his achievement as an artist and his chances as a man. |