Part 8 (1/2)

It might, perhaps, be said that there are three kinds of poetical temperament which have never yet been found equally combined in any one poet-not even in Shakespeare himself. There is the lyric temperament, as exemplified in writers like Sappho, Sh.e.l.ley, and others; there is the meditative temperament-sometimes speculative, but not always accompanied by metaphysical dreaming-as exemplified in Lucretius, Wordsworth, and others; and there is the dramatic temperament, as exemplified in Homer, aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In a certain sense the Iliad is the most dramatic poem in the world, for the dramatic picture lives undisturbed by lyrism or meditation. In aeschylus and Sophocles we find, besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the lyrical temperament, and a large amount of the meditative, but unaccompanied by metaphysical speculation. In Shakespeare we find, besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the meditative accompanied by an irresistible impulse towards metaphysical speculation, but, on the whole, a moderate endowment of the lyrical temperament, judging by the few occasions on which he exercised it. For fine as are such lyrics as ”Hark, hark, the lark,” ”Where the bee sucks,” &c., other poets have written lyrics as fine.

In a certain sense no man can be a pure and perfect dramatist. Every ego is a central sun found which the universe revolves, and it must needs a.s.sert itself. This is why on a previous occasion, when speaking of the way in which thoughts are interjected into drama by the Greek dramatists, we said that really and truly no man can paint another, but only himself, and what we call character-painting is at the best but a poor mixing of painter and painted-a third something between these two, just as what we call colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon organism.

Very likely this is putting the case too strongly. But be this as it may, it is impossible to open a play of Shakespeare's without being struck with the way in which the meditative side of Shakespeare's mind strove with and sometimes nearly strangled the dramatic. If this were confined to 'Hamlet,' where the play seems meant to revolve on a philosophical pivot, it would not be so remarkable. But so hindered with thoughts, reflections, meditations, and metaphysical speculations was Shakespeare that he tossed them indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories, regardless sometimes of the character who uttered them. With regard to metaphysical speculation, indeed, even when he was at work on the busiest scenes of his dramas, it would seem-as was said on the occasion before alluded to-that Shakespeare's instinct for actualizing and embodying in concrete form the dreams of the metaphysician often arose and baffled him. It would seem that when writing a comedy he could not help putting into the mouth of a man like Claudio those words which seem as if they ought to have been spoken by a metaphysician of the Hamlet type, beginning,

Ay, but to die and go we know not where.

It would seem that he could not help putting into the mouth of Macbeth those words which also seem as if they ought to have been spoken on the platform at Elsinore, beginning,

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.

And if it be said that Macbeth was a philosopher as well as a murderer, and might have thought these thoughts in the terrible strait in which he then was, surely nothing but this marvellous peculiarity of Shakespeare's temperament will explain his making Macbeth stop at Duncan's bedroom door, dagger in hand, to say,

Now o'er the one half world Nature seems dead, &c.

And again, though Prospero was very likely a philosopher too, even he steals from Hamlet's mouth such words of the metaphysician as these:-

We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

That this is one of Shakespeare's most striking characteristics will not be denied by any competent student of his works. Nor will any such student deny that, exquisite as his lyrics are, they are too few and too unimportant in subject-matter to set beside his supreme wealth of dramatic picture, and his wide vision as a thinker and a metaphysical dreamer.

Now on which of these sides of Shakespeare does Tennyson touch? Is it on the lyrical side? Shakespeare's fine lyrics are so few that they would be lost if set beside the marvellous wealth of Tennyson's lyrical work.

On one side only of Shakespeare's genius Tennyson touches, perhaps, more closely than any subsequent poet. As a metaphysician none comes so near Shakespeare as he who wrote these lines:-

And more, my son! for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, And pa.s.sed into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs Were strange not mine-and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self.

The gain of such large life as match'd with ours Were Sun to spark-unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.

Here, then, seems to be the truth of the matter: while Shakespeare had immense dramatic power, and immense meditative power with moderate lyric power, Tennyson had the lyric gift and the meditative gift without the dramatic. His poems are more full of reflections, meditations, and generalizations upon human life than any poet's since Shakespeare. But then the moment that Shakespeare descended from those heights whether his metaphysical imagination had borne him, he became, not a lyrist, as Tennyson became, but a dramatist. And this divides Shakespeare as far from Tennyson as it divides him from any other first-cla.s.s writer. We admirers of Tennyson must content ourselves with this thought, that, wonderful as it is for Shakespeare to have combined great metaphysical power with supreme power as a dramatist, it is scarcely less wonderful for Tennyson to have combined great metaphysical power with the power of a supreme lyrist. Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for a lyrical impulse such as Tennyson's to be found combined with a power of philosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some of his poems?

IV. CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI.

18301894.

I.

Although the n.o.ble poet and high-souled woman we have just lost had been ill and suffering from grievous pain for a long time, Death came at last with a soft hand which could but make him welcome. Since early in August, when she took to her bed, she was so extremely weak and otherwise ill that one scarcely expected her (at any time) to live more than a month or so, and for the last six weeks or thereabouts-say from the 15th of November-one expected her to die almost from day to day. My dear friend William Rossetti, who used to go to Torrington Square every afternoon, saw her on the afternoon of December 28th [1894]. He did not, he told me, much expect to find her alive in the afternoon of the 29th, and intended, therefore, to make his next call earlier. She died at half-past seven in the morning of the 29th, in the presence only of her faithful nurse Mrs. Read. It was through her sudden collapse that she missed at her side, when she pa.s.sed away, that brother whose whole life has been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection for the last of them was one of the few links that bound Christina's sympathy to the earth.

[Picture: Christina Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]

Her illness was of a most complicated kind: two years and a half ago she was operated on for cancer: functional malady of the heart, accompanied by dropsy in the left arm and hand, followed. Although on Friday the serious symptoms of her case became, as I have said, accentuated, she was throughout the day and night entirely conscious; and so peaceful and apparently so free from pain was she that neither the medical man nor the nurse supposed the end to be quite so near as it was. During all this time, up to the moment of actual dissolution, her lips seemed to be moving in prayer, but, of course, this with her was no uncommon sign: duty and prayer ordered her life. Her sufferings, I say, had been great, but they had been encountered by a fort.i.tude that was greater still.

Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example that our time has produced of the masterful power of man's spiritual nature when at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, as her brother Gabriel's life was the most notable example of the struggle of the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equally equipped. It is the conviction of one whose high privilege it was to know her in many a pa.s.sage of sorrow and trial that of all the poets who have lived and died within our time, Christina Rossetti must have had the n.o.blest soul.

A certain irritability of temper, which was, perhaps, natural to her, had, when I first became acquainted with her family (about 1872), been overcome, or at least greatly chastened, by religion (which with her was a pa.s.sion) and by a large acquaintance with grief, resulting in a long meditation over the mystery of pain. In wordly matters her generosity may be described as boundless; but perhaps it is not difficult for a poet to be generous in a worldly sense-to be free in parting with that which can be precious only to commonplace souls. What, however, is not so easy is for one holding such strong religious convictions as Christina Rossetti held to cherish such generous thoughts and feelings as were hers about those to whom her s.h.i.+bboleths meant nothing. This was what made her life so beautiful and such a blessing to all. The indurating effects of a selfish religiosity never withered her soul nor narrowed it. With her, indeed, religion was very love-

A largess universal like the sun.

It is always futile to make guesses as to what might have been the development of a poet's genius and character had the education of circ.u.mstances been different from what it was, and perhaps it is specially futile to guess what would have been the development under other circ.u.mstances of her, the poet of whom her friends used to speak with affection and reverence as ”Christina.”

On the death of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or as his friends used to call him Gabriel) in 1882, I gave that sketch of the family story which has formed the basis of most of the biographical notices of him and his family; it would, therefore, be superfluous to reiterate what I said and what is now matter of familiar knowledge. It may, however, be as well to remind the reader that, owing to the peculiar position in London of the father Gabriele Rossetti, the family were during childhood and partly during youth as much isolated from the outer English world as were the family between whom and themselves there were many points of resemblance-the Brontes. The two among them who were not in youth of a retiring disposition were he who afterwards became the most retiring of all, Gabriel, and Maria, the latter of whom was in one sense retiring, and in another expansive. In her dark brown, or, as some called them, black eyes, there would suddenly come up and s.h.i.+ne an enthusiasm, a capacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there must have gone an immensity of religious force. As to Gabriel, during a large portion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front that affined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The English strain in the family found expression in him, and in him alone. There was a something in the hearty ring of his voice that drew Englishmen to him as by a magnet.