Part 24 (1/2)

It is astonis.h.i.+ng to see how Shakespeare noted the smallest and most fragile things, and found the most poetic expression for them without any sacrifice of truth to Nature.

Juliet is 'the sweetest flower of all the field.' Laertes says to Ophelia:

For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour Hold it a fas.h.i.+on and a toy in blood, A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a moment.

The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their b.u.t.tons be disclosed; And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are most imminent.

(_Hamlet._)

Hamlet soliloquizes:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seems to me all the uses of this world.

Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.

Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the play.

He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural phenomena around it.

There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet's brief dream, when all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together.

He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet

In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)

What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in _Macbeth_! And in _Lear_, as Jacobi says:

What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and there a lightning flash from G.o.d--a flash of Providence, rending the clouds.

One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry, especially in Shakespeare.

With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained before. We can trace the steps by which Greece pa.s.sed from mythical to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the h.e.l.lenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and illuminated all and everything.

Hense says[5];

The personification is plastic when aeschylus calls the heights the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did not, and could not, exist in antiquity.

The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his feelings, the more he can see in Nature.

Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors, new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination.

The motive of amorous pa.s.sion, for instance, was a very divining-rod in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations between Nature and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between the gay spring time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged like 'the Thracian blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty shepherdess drawing all Nature under the spell of her charms; Akontios (Kallimachos) had declared that if trees felt the pangs and longings of love, they would lose their leaves; all such ideas, modern in their way, had been expressed in antiquity.

This is Shakespeare's treatment of them:

How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!

What old December's bareness everywhere!

And yet this time removed was summer time, The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ...

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee.

And thou away the very birds are mute, Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near, (Sonnet 97.)