man whose prudence made him rich, whose affectionate nature made him loved almost to idolatry, and whose genius has been the wonder of the world, we are presented with plasticity in the abstract, an object not more interesting than a quarry of potter's clay.

Not

One of the most curious traits in Shakespeare's character is his worldly wisdom. I do not allude to what is called the wisdom of Shakespeare, as displayed in his maxims of morality and politics. I mean the commonplace virtue, rarely exhibited by men of genius, of prudently expending the material rewards of their toil. We are indebted to the antiquaries for the illustration of this. only have they shown us how he invested large savings in his native town, but by ransacking corporation records and other public archives they have discovered for us how firmly he looked after his property. We find him in 1604 prosecuting one Rogers who had bought malt from him and failed to pay. We find him in 1608 bringing an action against John Addenbroke for recovery of a small debt, and thereafter, on the flight of the debtor, proceeding against the security. In 1612 we find him conjoined in a petition to the Court of Chancery to compel certain sharers in the farming of the tithes to pay their just proportions of a common burden. In 1614 he took measures to resist the proposed enclosure of certain common lands which would have affected the value of his property. These little items are not without an interest: they are small in themselves, but they suggest a good deal. hardships of Shakespeare's early days, the misfortunes of his father, had taught him prudence: he was evidently a firm man of business, not to be imposed upon or cheated with impunity.

The

This combination of sure and firm-set prudence with heavenclimbing genius is the fundamental wonder in Shakespeare, the permanent marvel of his constitution. From whatever point we look at him, this wonder emerges. With all his capricious streamers of fancy, he does not gyrate off into aimless oddity and eccentricity. The torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of impassioned imagination is, in him, controlled by a temperance that pulls it back from the raving frenzy of incontinent riot. He is copiously inventive and original, but he does not vex, strain, and dislocate his faculty by striving after plots, characters, maxims, words, and images that had never before been seen in print, or heard upon the stage. Large, steadfast, clear-eyed sagacity and sanity are everywhere conspicuous in Shakespeare.

Readers of Shakespeare not familiar with the antecedent literature are naturally enough betrayed into thinking that he drew all his wise sentences about character, morality, and politics from his own experience and observation. Now this is the very thing that his sagacity kept him from attempting. He knew how poor a

show one man's experience can make, and he opened his mind freely to the accumulated experience of ages. There were abundant stores within his reach. The moral-plays were store-houses of proverbial philosophy: the common wisdom of many generations was harvested and preserved there as in granaries. The works of all our poets from Chaucer downwards were full of similar generalisations: they were studiously affected in the tales and plays of his immediate predecessors. To have neglected these accumulations, if it had been possible, would have been the reverse of wise: Shakespeare used them liberally. It is not to be supposed that he deliberately and in cold blood searched in these repositories for matter to fill up a dialogue; but his mind was full of them, and he took what came to him in the act of composition and what best suited his purposes, without troubling himself as to whether it was original or commonplace. And in like manner with his imagery. Before he began to write, nature had been ransacked and even a fabulous natural history invented in the craze for imagery. This, doubtless, gave an immense stimulus to the poet's original faculty, as the passion for moral and political saws gave to his powers of observation. But had Shakespeare resolved to use no weighty sentence and no figure of speech that had ever been used before, he would have been forfeiting all hope of success as a dramatist; deliberately taking up with the gleanings, the husks, and the crumbs. A play furnished only with recondite maxims and (far-fetched imagery would have been intolerably thin and meagre. One thing, however, was and is to be expected from dramatists having recourse to the great accumulated wealth of literature: we expect them to give a new application, and, above all, a new expression, to what they borrow. We give them liberty to take the seeds, but not to take the plant. This was what Shakespeare did. Now and then, perhaps, he carried off a whole plant, when he was in a hurry; but in nearly every case he took only the seed, the suggestion, and from it reared a plant far excelling the original stock. So incomparable was his genius for expression, that very rarely did he fail to improve what he appropriated. And therein lay his power and excellence not in that he added more than any other man to the immense stock of old-world wisdom, but in that he gave to what he adopted an expression so superlative that generalised observations centuries older than him have passed into common speech in his forms. His wisdom was the wisdom of sagacious choice and happy application: but his genius was his own.

If we wish to have a vivid impression of the superiority of Shakespeare's judgment, we cannot do better than compare his plays with tales on which they have been founded. He did not exhaust himself in trying to discover new situations; but going in

with victorious opulence of matter, took the best situations that occurred to him, from his own mind or from novels, poems, histories, or even from plays then upon the stage, and filled them out in a way that transcended all competition. When our dramatic antiquaries meet in Shakespeare with a story that they have not hitherto discovered in any previous writer, they pursue their inquiries with full confidence that they will some day stumble upon the original. And these discoveries, so far from hurting Shakespeare's reputation, are the most astonishing disclosures of his power. Not only does he enrich the story, and give an incomparable embodiment and expression to the characters, but he recasts the plot and the relations of the dramatis persona with large and clear judgment, so as to produce a more harmonious whole.

"Myriad-minded" has become a favourite epithet for Shakespeare: "myriad-mooded," if it did not sound so odd, might be more precisely descriptive of the dramatist's most essential endowment. One man becomes able to understand the mental habits of many other men if he passes through many changes of mood: if the world presents itself to him in many different lights according to his varying states of mind. A stolid, immobile man-or a man, however mobile, whose life was easy, unvaried, unexcited— could not be a dramatist of any considerable range: no power of imaginative genius can go far in constructing states of mind that have never fallen within the lines of its experience. But, indeed, active imaginative genius, combined with keen interest in human beings, must inevitably produce incessant variableness of mood: a man with these qualities in him must be constantly and incontinently changing his imaginary relations with the world his imagination will not allow him to be tranquil : moodiness, variableness, is the imperious law of his being. Shakespeare, in imagining the general mental attitude of crafty Bolingbroke, cynical Timon, melancholy Jacques, mad-headed Hotspur, or even dare - devil Richard, and unconscionable Falstaff, fell back upon more or less temporary attitudes of his own variable mind. There could not be a more monstrous mistake than to suppose the great dramatist to have been a calm man, who was never melancholy, and who sat comfortably in a study turning the world round for his amusement, and meditating quietly on the strange fellows that nature had formed in her time. He could not have understood so many of those strange fellows unless he had for however brief an interval passed through the experience of their moods. We know that Shakespeare lived a life of changeful circumstances. In his boyhood, his father's position underwent a gradual change in the eyes of the townspeople of Stratford; and in his youth he took an unusual step that also exposed him to various comments. In London he experienced the feelings of gradually making his way in

the world through various obstructions, and at all times he occupied a doubtful position, exposing him to great variety of treatment between the extremes of insult and admiration. He was brought into direct contact with men of all classes, and received with all the diversity of manner experienced by men whose position is not fixed by rigid convention. Now a man of active imagination and quick susceptibilities could not but have approached these changing circumstances in different moods; now melancholy, now defiant, sometimes eager, sometimes cool and indifferent, disposed sometimes to laugh at everything, and sometimes to cry at nothing. In the course of his varied life, he had, doubtless, a touch of the dissolute and reckless spirit of his favourite "Hal" -" of all humours that have showed themselves humours since the old days of goodman Adam; as well as of the grave, politic, and resolute spirit of Hal's father, Bolingbroke, or Hal himself when he became the heroic Harry the Fifth.

The amazing thing is to find all this variableness, without which dramatic insight is impossible, in combination with the fundamental steadiness, without which dramatic execution is impossible. All this variableness had, as it were, a centre-was an incessant movement above, below, and around a fixed centre of gravity. For all his presumable moodiness, Shakespeare would seem to have never composed but in one mood-the mood of dramatic impartiality. Nobody has been able to detect in his character any strong bias of opinions held dogmatically by himself. He would seem to have composed with intense concentration, setting himself with all the strength of his imagination to express the particular concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives that emerged from his story of love or revenge, and allowing himself to be swayed by no considerations except dramatic effect. Preachers sometimes essay to prove his religion and morality by choice excerpts, but they only prove that he put such sentiments into the mouths of his characters: he holds the mirror up to the irreligion and immorality of Edmund and Iago, and displays them with equal clearness and force. One of his characters explains away prophecy, another rationalises presentiments, a third declares that miracles are ceased, and that we can admit only natural means: yet ghosts walk in his dramas, men are haunted by evil forebodings, and calamities are heralded by monstrous portents. It is vain to look for consistent opinions where the dramatist's principle is to embody men of all shades with strict impartiality in their exact form and pressure.

The most amiable and one of the best attested features of Shakespeare's character, is the constancy of certain attachments. We may well suppose that, with an imagination ever ready to invest objects with attributes not their own, and sufficiently subtle

S

to find for Titania points of attraction in the head of an ass, Shakespeare had many passing loves and friendships. But he was capable also of constant attachment. The strongest evidence of this is found in his continued visits to his native place, and his final settlement there in the evening of his life. True, had we no other evidence of his intense affections, the fact of his retirement to Stratford might be otherwise interpreted: it might be said that he left London and its pleasant society because there his profession as an actor exposed him to indignities that his pride would not brook, and went to Stratford because there he was treated as a person of consequence. In support of this might be alleged the significant fact that in 1596 his father, probably at his instigation, applied for a grant of arms at the Heralds' College. We know from Shakespeare's sonnets that he felt keenly the inferiority and disgrace attaching to his profession; and it is not unlikely that he went back to the scenes of his boyhood with a certain feeling of relief from the scene of his humiliation. It is not perhaps to be denied that Shakespeare was glad to leave London, with all the attractions of wit-combats with Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, because he had not Big Ben's rough indifference to public opinion, and could not bear to be patronised for his genius by men that felt themselves above his profession. But while we acknowledge all this, we have still to account for the fact that his native town of Stratford was the chosen place of his retirement he might have invested his gains in some quarter where he was utterly unknown, but for the desire to be near the friends and the scenes of his youth. And we are entitled to put upon the fact its most natural construction, when we find that supported by the warmth of attachment expressed in his sonnets, and the recorded testimonies of the gentleness of his nature. "I loved the man," said Ben Jonson, "and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature."

II. HIS WORDS AND IMAGERY.

The art of putting things cleverly and playing upon words was never carried to a greater height than in the age of Elizabeth. The Elizabethans were conscious word-artists "engineers of

phrases," as Thomas Nash said. "To see this age!" cries the clown in "Twelfth Night," "a sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit; how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!" And this same clown was acting in delicious caricature of the age, when he fastidiously rejected the word "element "Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin, I might say 'element,' but the word is overdone."