For that relative importance is measured by the chasm which sunders his work from the work of contemporaries labouring under like conditions; and if his Sonnets have little in common with Constable's, his narrative verse has still less in common with (say) Marston's Pygmalion.

Unless this view be admitted there is no excuse for republishing the Narrative Poems with the Sonnets: we can take down the Plays, or study, instead of the Sonnets, such conclusions upon Shakespeare's passionate experience as the commentator has been able to draw. And many of us do this, yielding to the bias of criticism deflected from its proper office by pre-occupation with matters outside the mood of æsthetic delight. But the mistake is ours, and the loss, which also is ours, is very great. The nature of it may be illustrated from that which comes upon the many who shrink from reading the earliest of Shakespeare's Plays, or read it only in search of arguments against his authorship. Starting from the improbable conjecture, that the character of an author may be guessed from the incidents he chooses to handle, critics have either alluded to Titus Andronicus with an apology, or have denied it to be Shakespeare's. But, read without prejudice or without anxiety to prove that Shakespeare could not have chosen the theme of Mutilation for the spring of unspeakable pathos, the play in no wise reeks of blood,' but, on the contrary, is sweet with the fragrance of woods and fields, is flooded with that infinite pity whose serene fountains well up within the walls of an hospital. It is true that Lavinia suffers a worse fate than Philomela in Ovid's tale; that her tongue is torn out, lest it should speak her wrong; that her hands are cut off, lest they should write it. But mark the treatment of these

1 Dowden, Shakespeare, His Mind and Art, pp 54, 55. Gerald Massey, Shakespeare's Sonnets and His Private Friends, p. 851. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, i. 79.

worse than brutalities.

(ii. 4) :—

Thus speaks Marcus of her hands

'Those sweet ornaments,

Whose circling shadows Kings have sought to sleep in,
And might not gain so great a happiness

As have thy love.'

And again :

'O, had the monster seen those lily hands
Tremble, like aspen-leaves, upon a lute,

And make the silken strings delight to kiss them,
He would not then have touched them for his life!'

And of her tongue (iii. 1):—

'O, that delightful engine of her thoughts,
That blabb'd them with such pleasing eloquence,
Is torn from forth its pretty hollow cage
Where, like a sweet melodious bird, it sung
Sweet varied notes, enchanting every ear.'

Who can listen to these lines or to those which tell how

'Fresh tears

Stood on her cheeks, as doth the honey-dew

Upon a gather'd lily almost wither'd,'

and yet conclude that 'if any portions of the Play be from his hand, it shows that there was a period in Shakespeare's authorship when the Poet had not yet discovered himself'? In the same scene, hark to the desolate family :

'Behold our cheeks

How they are stain'd, as meadows yet not dry

With miry slime left on them by a flood' :

and consider that daughter's kiss which can avail her father nothing:

'Alas, poor heart, that kiss is comfortless

As frozen water to a starved snake.'

These passages are stamped with the plain sign-manual of

Shakespeare not the creator who, living in the world, fashioned Hamlet and Falstaff and Lady Macbeth, but the lyrical poet, bred in Arden Forest, who wrote Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost, the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Venus and the Lucrece, and the Sonnets. They are of that sweet and liquid utterance, which conveys long trains of images caught so freshly from Nature that, like larks in cages, they seem still to belong to the fields and sky.

Our loss is great indeed if an impertinent solicitude for Shakespeare's morals, an officious care for his reputation as a creator of character, lead us to pass over Titus Andronicus, or to lend, in the other early plays, a half-reluctant ear to his 'enchanting song' and his succession of gracious images. But that loss, great as it is in the Plays, is greater and more gratuitous in the Poems, which belong to the same phase of his genius, and yield it a more legitimate expression. The liquid utterance by every character of such lovely imagery as only a poet can see and seize may be, and is most often, out of place in a drama: since it delays the action, falsifies the portraiture, and carries the audience from the scene back to the Playwright's boyhood in the Warwickshire glades. But in a poem it is the true, the direct, the inevitable revelation of the artist's own delight in Beauty. And it is too much to ask of those who drink in this melody without remorse from the Plays, that they shall sacrifice the Poems also to the fetish of characterisation, or shall mar their enjoyment of the Sonnets with vain guesses at a moral problem, whose terms no man has been able to state. Let those, who care for characterisation only, avoid the Poems and stick to the Plays: even as they neglect Chaucer's Troilus for his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Each must satisfy his own taste; but, if there be any that dwell overfondly (as it seems to others) on the sweet

ness of Shakespeare's earlier verse, let them remember that he too dwelt with a like fondness on Chaucer's long lyric of romantic love. The Troilus must certainly have been a part of Shakespeare's life, else he could never have written the opening to the Fifth Act of his Merchant of Venice :

"The moon shines bright; in such a night as this
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls
And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay that night.'

He had stood with the love-sick Prince through that passionate vigil on the wall, and had felt the sweet wind 'increasing in his face.' And if Shakespeare, 'qui après Dieu créa le plus,' found no cause in the Prologue for slighting the Troilus, surely we, who have created nothing, may frankly enjoy his Poems without disloyalty to his Plays?

Of course, to the making of these Poems, as to the making of every work of art, there went something of the author's personal experience, something of the manner of his country and his time; and these elements may be studied by a lover of Poetry. Yet only that he may better appreciate the amount superadded by the Poet. The impression which the artist makes on his material, in virtue of his inspiration from 'Beauty, and of his faculty acquired in the strenuous service of Art, must be the sole object and reward of artistic investigation. For the student of history and the lover of art are bound on diverse quests. The first may smelt the work of art in his crucible, together with other products of contemporary custom and morality, in order to extract the ore of historic truth. But for the second to shatter the finished creations of art in order to show what base material they are made ofsurely this argues a most grotesque inversion of his regard for

means and end? To ransack Renaissance literature for parallels to Shakespeare's verse is to discover, not Shakespeare's art but, the common measure of poetry in Shakespeare's day; to grope in his Sonnets for hints on his personal suffering is but to find that he too was a man, born into a world of confusion and fatigue. It is not, then, his likeness as a man to other men, but his distinction from them as an artist, which concerns the lover of art. And in his Poems we find that distinction to be this: that through all the vapid enervation and the vicious excitement of a career which drove some immediate forerunners down most squalid roads to death, he saw the beauty of this world both in the pageant of the year and in the passion of his heart, and found for its expression the sweetest song that has ever triumphed and wailed over the glory of loveliness and the anguish of decay.

II

To measure the amount in these Poems which is due to Shakespeare's art, let us consider the environment and accidents of his life, and then subtract so much as may be due to these. He was born at the very heart of this island in Stratford-on-Avon, a town in the ancient Kingdom of Mercia— the Kingdom of the Marches-whose place-names still attest the close and full commingling of Angle with Celt.2 And he was born April 22nd or 23rd, 1564-full eighty years after Bosworth Field, by closing the Middle Age, had opened a period of national union at home, and had made room and time for a crowd of literary and artistic influences from abroad. He

1 Among many sources of information let me acknowledge my special indebtedness to Professor Dowden, Mr. Robert Bell, and above all, the late Thomas Spencer Baynes. (Shakespeare Studies. Longmans, Green and Co., 1894.)

2 Cf. the Rev. Stopford Brooke's History of Early English Literature, and T. S. Baynes, who quotes J. R. Green and Matthew Arnold.