Part 2 (1/2)
”He hath a tear for pity, and a hand Open as day for melting charity.”
”That daffed the world aside, And bid it pa.s.s.”
”He is come to ope The purple testament of bleeding war.”
”She sat, like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief.”
”That strain again; it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor.”
”For courage mounts with occasion.”
”Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it.”
”Death's dateless night.”
”Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.”
”The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony.”
”Falstaff sweats to death, And lards the lean earth as he walks along.”
”I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die.”
”'T is better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than be perked up in glistering grief, And wear a golden sorrow.”
”An old man broken with the storms of state.”
”Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye.”
”Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.”
”Within the book and volume of my brain.”
”One vial full of Edward's blood is cracked, And all the precious liquor spilt.”
In such quest as this, one is enticed as if he followed the windings of a stream under the shadows of the trees. Past waterfall and banks of flowers and choiring of the birds, he goes on forever, except he force himself to pause. Shakespeare is always an enticement, whose turns of poetic thought and verbiage are a pure delight. Note this quality in the quotations--a word naturally expresses a thought. Shakespeare's figures express a series of thoughts as varied landscapes seen in pictures; in consequence, to read him is to see resemblances in things, because we have sharpened vision and can not, after reading him, be blind as we were before, but feel the plethora of our world with the poetic. After he has spoken for us and to us, the world's capacity is enlarged; we are, in truth, not so much as those who have read poetry as we are like those who have seen the world pa.s.s before our eyes. We thought the world a stream run dry; but lo! the bed is full of waters, flooded from remote hills, where snowdrifts melt and make perpetual rivers. After hearing him, we expect things of our world; its fertility seems so exhaustless.
Shakespeare has no hint of invalidism about him, but is the person, not the picture, of perfect health. Not an intimation of the hypochondriac nor of the convalescent do I find in him. He is healthy, and his voice rings out like a bell on a frosty night. Take his hand, and you feel shaking hands, not with Aesculapius, but with Health. To be ailing when Shakespeare is about is an impertinence for which you feel compelled to offer apology. Does not this express our feeling about this poet? He is well, always well, and laughs at the notion of sickness. He starts a-walking, and unconsciously runs, as a schoolboy after school. His smile breaks into ringing laughter; and he, not you, knows why he either smiles or laughs. He and sunlight seem close of kin. A mountain is a challenge he never refuses, but scales it by bounds, like a deer when pursued by the hunter and the hound. He is not tonic, but bracing air and perfect health and youth, which makes labor a holiday and care a jest. Shakespeare is never morose. Dante is the picture of melancholy, Shakespeare the picture of resilient joy.
Tennyson beheld ”three spirits, mad with joy, dash down upon a wayside flower;” and our dramatist is like them. Life laughs on greeting him; the grave grows dim to sight when he is near, and you see the deep sky instead, and across it wheel wild birds in happy motion. In Tennyson is perpetual melancholy--the mood and destiny of poetry, as I suppose--but Shakespeare is not melancholy, nor does he know how to be.
His face is never sad, I think, and he is fonder of Jack Falstaff than we are apt to suppose; for health riots in his blood. He weeps, smiles breaking through his weeping, and he turns from the grave of tragedy with laughter leaning from his eyes. Aeschylus is a poet whose face was never lit even with the candle-light of smiles; but Shakespeare, writer of tragedy, is our laughing poet. This plainly confounds our philosophy of poetry, since humor is not poetry; but he binds humor to his car as Achilles, Hector, and laughs at our upset philosophies, crying: ”This is my Lear, weep for him; this my Hamlet, break your hearts for him; this my Desdemona, grow tender for her woe,--but enough: this is my Rosalind and my Miranda, my Helena and Hermione, my Orlando and Ferdinand, my Ba.s.sanio and Leontes; laugh with them”--and you render swift obedience, saying, with Lord Boyet, in ”Love's Labor Lost,”
”O, I am stabbed with laughter!”
He is court jester, at whose quips the generations make merry. You can not be somber nor sober long with him, though he is deep as seas, and fathomless as air, and lonely as night, and sad betimes as autumn. He is not frivolous, but is joyous. The bounding streams, the singing trees, the leaping stags along the lake, the birds singing morning awake,--Shakespeare incorporates all these in himself. He is what may be named, in a spiritual sense, this world's animal delight in life.
There is a view of life sullen as November; and to be sympathetic with this mood is to ruin life and put out all its lights. Shakespeare's resiliency of spirit would teach us what a dispa.s.sionate study of our own nature would have taught us, that to succ.u.mb to this gloom is not natural; to feel the weight of burdens all the time would conduct to insanity or death; therefore has G.o.d made bountiful provision against such outcome in the lift of cloud and lightening of burden. We forget sleep is G.o.d's rest-hour for spirit; and, besides, we read in G.o.d's Book how, ”at eventide, it shall be light,” an expression at once of exquisite poetry and acute observation. Our lives are healthy when natural. The crude Byronic misanthropy, even though a.s.sumed, finds no favor in Shakespeare's eyes.
Shakespeare is this world's poet--a truth hinted at before, but now needing amplifying a trifle. There is in him this-worldliness, but not other-worldliness, his characters not seeming to the full to have a sense of the invisible world. He is love's poet. His lovers are imperishable because real. He is love's laureate. Yet are his loves of this world. True, there are spurts of flight, as of an eagle with broken wing, when, as in Hamlet, he faults this world and aspires skyward, yet does not lose sight of the earth, and, like the wounded eagle in ”Sohrab and Rustum,” lies at last
”A heap of fluttering feathers.”