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soft and silvery touch: Beauty and Decay, Love, Constancy, the Immortalising of the Friend's beauty conceived as an incarnation of Ideal Beauty viewed from imaginary standpoints in Time. And interwoven with this re-handling, chiefly of the themes in the First and Fourth Groups, is an apology (CIX.CXII., CXVII.-CXX., CXXII.) for a negligence on the Poet's part of the rites of friendship, which he sets off (cxx.) against his Friend's earlier unkindness :-' That you were once unkind, befriends me now.' This apology offers the third, and only other, immediate reference to Shakespeare's personal experience; and, on these sonnets, as on those which treat of the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet, attention has been unduly concentrated. They seem founded on episodes and moods necessarily incidental to the life which we know Shakespeare must have led. To say that he could never have slighted his art as an actor:

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To what it works in like the dyer's hand' :

and then to seek for far-fetched and fantastic interpretations, is to evince an ignorance, not only of the obloquy to which actors were then exposed, and of the degradations they had to bear, but also of human nature as we know it even in heroes. Wellington is said to have wept over the carnage at Waterloo; the grossness of his material often infects the artist, and 'potter's rot' has its analogue in every profession. This feeling of undeserved degradation is a mood most incident to all who work, whether artists or men of action: an accident, real but transitory, which obliterates the contours of the soul, and leaves them intact, as a fog swallows the Town without destroying it.

In cxxi. there is a natural digression from this personal apology to reflexions cast on Shakespeare's good name. In cxxII. the

apology is resumed with particular reference to certain tablets, the gift of the Friend, but which the Poet has bestowed on another. He takes this occasion to resume the main theme of the whole group by pouring contempt on 'dates' and 'records' and 'tallies to score his dear love': the tablets, though in fact given away, are still within his brain, full charactered, beyond all date even to Eternity.' Thus does he lead up directly to the last three sonnets (CXXIII., CXXIV., cxxv.), which close this 'Satire to Decay,' and with it the whole series (1.-CXXV.). They are pieces of mingled splendour and obscurity in which Shakespeare presses home his metaphysical attack on the reality of Time; and the difficulty, inherent in an argument so transcendental, is further deepened by passing allusions to contemporary events and persons, which many have sought to explain, with little success. Here follows an Envoy

of six couplets to the whole Series.

The Second Series shows fewer traces of design in its sequence than the First. The magnificent cxxix. on 'lust in action' is wedged between two: one addressed to Shakespeare's mistress and cne descriptive of her charm; both playful in their fancy. CXLVI. to his soul, with its grave pathos and beauty, follows on a foolish verbal conceit, written in octosyllabic verse; while CLIII. and CLIV. are contrived in the worst manner of the French Renaissance on the theme of a Greek Epigram.1 But the rest are, all of them, addressed to a Dark Lady whom Shakespeare loved in spite of her infidelity, or they comment on the wrong she does him. It cannot be doubted that they were written at the same time and on the same subject as the sonnets in Group C, XXXIII.-XLII., or that they were excluded from that group on any ground except that of their being written to another than the Youth to whom the whole First Series is addressed. Like the numbers in Group C, they are alternately 1 Dowden, 1881.

playful and pathetic; their diction is often as exquisite, their discourse often as eloquent. But sometimes they are sardonic

and even fierce :

"For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.'

XVI

The division of the Sonnets into two Series and a number of subsidiary Groups, springs merely from the author's actual experiences, which were the occasions of their production, and from the order in time of those experiences. But the poetic themes suggested by such experiences and their treatment by Shakespeare belong to another sphere of consideration. They derive-not from the brute chances of life which, in a man not a poet, would have suggested no poetry, and, to a poet not Shakespeare, would have dictated poetry of another character and a lesser perfection, but-from Shakespeare's inborn temperament and acquired skill, both of selection and execution. These poetic themes are comparatively few in number, and recur again and again in the several Groups. Some are more closely connected with the facts of Shakespeare's life; others embody the general experience of man; others, again, detached, not only from the life of Shakespeare but, from the thought of most men, embody the transcendental speculations of rare minds which, at certain times and places-in Socratic Athens and in the Europe of the Renaissance-have commanded a wide attention. Follows a tabulation.

(1) Themes personal to Shakespeare:

His Friend's Error. Group C, XXXIII.-XLII., XCIV.-XCVI., cxx.

CXXXIII.-CXXXV.

The Dark Lady. Group C, and the Second Series, cxxvII. -CLII.
His Own Error.

XXXVI., CX., CXII., CXVII. -CXXII.

His Own Misfortune. xxv., XXIX., XXXVII., CXI.

The Rival Poets. xxi., xxxii. Group E, LXXVIII.-LXXXVI., and (as

I hold) LXVII., LXVIII., LXXVI., and cxxv.

That there were more Rival Poets than one is evident from

LXXVIII. 3 :

'Every alien pen hath got my use, And under thee their poesy disperse':

and from LXXXIII. 12:—

"For I impair not beauty, being mute

When others would give life.'

And among these others who still sing, while the Poet is himself silent, two are conspicuous :

"There lives more life in one of your fair eyes
Than both your poets can in praise devise.'

(2) Themes which embody general experience:

Love.

XX.-XXXII., XXXVII., XLIII.-LII., LVI., LXIII., LXVI., LXXI., LXXII., LXXV., LXXXVII.-XCII., XCVI., CII., CV., CXV.-CXVI. Absence. Group B, xxvI.-xxXI., XXXIX., XLIII.-LII., LVII., LVIII.,

XCVII., XCVIII.

Beauty and Decay. Group A, I.-XIX., XXII., LXXVII.

At times this Theme is treated in a mood of contemplation remote from general experience—as in LIV., LV., LX., LXIII.-LXV., -and, thus handled, may serve, with two Themes, derived from it :

Immortality by Breed. 1.-XIV., XVI., XVII.

Immortality by Verse. xv., XVII.-XIX., XXXVIII., LIV., LV., LX., LXV.,
LXXIV., LXXXI., C., CI., CVII. :—

for a transition to (3) Themes which are more abstruse and demand a more particular examination.

Identity with his Friend :—

xx' My glass shall not persuade me I am old
So long as youth and thou are of one date.

For all that beauty that doth cover thee

Is but the seemly raiment of my heart. . . .'

xxxix. 'What can mine own praise to mine own self bring? And what is 't but mine own when I praise thee? . . .''

XLII. 'But here's the joy: my friend and I are one.
LXII. "Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,

Painting my age with beauty of thy days. . . .

CXII. (See Note.)

CXXXIII. 'Me from my self thy cruel eye hath taken

And my next self (his friend) thou harder hast ingrossed'. . . CXXXIV. My self I'll forfeit, so that other mine

Thou wilt restore.'

The conceit of Identity with the person addressed is but a part of the machinery of Renaissance Platonics derived, at many removes, from discussions in the Platonic Academy at Florence. Michelangelo had written in 1553:-'If I yearn day and night without intermission to be in Rome, it is only in order to return again to life, which I cannot enjoy without the soul'1-viz., his friend.

The Idea of Beauty.

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In xxxvII. That I . by a part of all thy glory live' is a 'Shadow,' cast by his Friend's excellence, which yet 'doth such substance give' that I am not lame, poor, nor despised.' In xxxi. all whom the Poet has loved and 'supposed dead'—‘love and all Love's loving parts'-are not truly dead, 'but things removed that hidden in there lie'-viz.-in the Friend's bosom :

"Their images I lov'd I view in thee,

And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.'

The mystical confusion with and in the Friend of all that is beautiful or lovable in the Poet and others, is a development from the Platonic theory of the IDEA OF BEAUTY: the eternal type of which all beautiful things on earth are but shadows. It is derived by poetical hyperbole from the Poet's prior identification of the Friend's beauty with Ideal Beauty. The theory of Ideal Beauty was a common feature of Renaissance 1 J. A. Symonds' translation.

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