The delight in similitudes went naturally with this extravagant craze for uncommon expression: the fancy was solicited, and when solicitation failed, was tortured to satisfy the reigning fashion. They ransacked for comparisons the heavens above, the earth beneath, the waters under the earth, and the historical and mythical generations of earth's inhabitants. The wit of those days viewed the whole world as so much figurative material; he knew it as a painter knows his box of colours, or an enthusiastic botanist the flora of his own parish. That was the sort of fermentation likely to produce great masters of words. To call a spade a spade is a most benumbing and stifling maxim to literary genius: an Elizabethan would not have called a spade a spade if he could possibly have found anything else to call it. The Elizabethan literature would not have been the rich field that it is had a wretched host of Dean Alfords been in the ascendant, with their miserable notions about idiomatic purity and Queen's English. The number of words used by Shakespeare is said to be 15,000; and the prodigious magnitude of this number is usually brought out by comparing it with Milton's number, which is 8000.1 We might say to him as Katherine said to Wolsey :-- and add that his verbal establishment was upon an unparalleled scale. To some extent, indeed, it would seem that those hosts of 1 Shakespeare's use of technical terms and phrases deserves special notice, as having created quite a department of literature. Several volumes have been written, dwelling upon all phraseology that belongs, whether exclusively or not, to special trades, occupations, or professions; each contending for some one occupation that Shakespeare must have engaged in before he could have been able to use its technicalities with such abundance and discrimination. The phraseology of law, medicine, surgery, chemistry, war, navigation, music, field-sports, black-art-the phraseology of each of these was used by Shakespeare, it is argued, with the intelligence of an experienced proficient. We have also special treatises on his acquaintance with botany, entomology, and ornithology. When each of several volumes contends for a different occupation as the occupation of Shakespeare's youth or early manhood, and each argues on the same fundamental principle with equal conclusiveness, they refute each other and discredit their common principle. The principle underlying all these arguments is, that a man cannot use the phraseology of an occupation without having practised that occupation. It is reduced to an absurdity by the latest work in the department, Mr Blades's Shakspere and Typography,' in which it is cleverly argued from Shakespeare's use of printing technicalities that he must have been a printer. The fact is that Shakespeare's contemporaries as well as himself ransacked all trades and professions for striking phrases. Legal terms were in particular request, and it was not necessary for Shakespeare to study, much less to practise law, in order to acquire them: they abounded in the general literature of the period, servants were too officious; obtruding their services in such jostling numbers as to embarrass operations. It would appear as if, when Shakespeare sat in the heat of composition, every word in the sentence just penned overwhelmed him with its associations; so perfectly were his intellectual forces mobilised, and so fresh and eager were they for employment. And besides these officious troops of words, he had in his service troops of images no less officious, no less ready to appear upon the slightest hint. Upon the slightest hint that they were wanted, they came flashing in with lightning excitement from all quarters; from pages of poems, histories, and even compendiums, from echoes of the stage, from all regions of earth and sky that he had seen or realised in thought. M. Taine lays most stress upon the copiousness of Shakespeare's imagery. "It is a series of paintings which is unfolded in his mind. He does not seek them, they come of themselves; they crowd within him, covering his arguments; they dim with their brightness the pure light of logic. He does not labour to explain or prove; picture on picture, image on image, he is for ever copying the strange and splendid visions which are engendered one within another, and are heaped up within him." Now I am not prepared to admit that Shakespeare's argumentative faculty was thus overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of imagery. If the dramatist's mind had been thus overpoweringly pictorial, he would have been too much carried away by the imagination of the splendid portents, the blazing meteors, and feverish earthquakes, that prefigured Glendower's birth, to be capable of meeting it with Hotspur's rejoinder, conceived on the soundest principles of inductive philosophy; the fascination of the fiery heaven and shaking earth would have prevented him from seeing that the same things might have happened if Glendower's mother's cat had but kittened though himself had never been born. That is a typical instance of logical faculty rising superior to the engrossing force of imagination. Apart, however, from that, I am of opinion that M. Taine exaggerates the pictorial side of Shakespeare's genius. It doubtless affords a very plausible explanation of Shakespeare's mixed metaphors to say that they were produced by the press and crush of thronging images; as his liberties with grammatical usage arose from over-abundance and strong pressure of words. But there is reason to believe that Shakespeare, like every other great verbal artist, took more delight in words than in forms and colours, as a painter takes more delight in forms and colours than in words: and that he was tempted both to mixed metaphors and to violations of grammatical usage by a desire for fresh and startling combinations of words. This thirst of his ear for new conjunctions overpowered every other consideration. When he was importuned by several images at once, he knocked two or three of them forcibly together; but I believe that the temptation to do so came chiefly from his delight in the new marriage of words thus consummated. It is The Indeed, we spread a radical misconception of the poet's art, of the means whereby he gains his hold upon our sensibilities, when we lay M. Taine's stress upon the genesis of his imagery. not the pictures of form and colour that are the principal ingredients in the poet's charm: they complete the spell, but are not the essence of it. What takes us captive is the gathering up of ideas in new groups under new bands of words; our senses are ravished by new combinations of words in a poem as by fresh harmonies in an oratorio. In a new combination of words, of course, we are affected by much beyond the mere sound, though that, doubtless, is a large element to many minds. words appeal to us by multitudinous associations, awake slumbering echoes in many different chambers of our being: the charm of the new encounter is that it rouses and locks together many memories never before united. Several people in the Elizabethan age, or indeed in any other age, could have led us through "a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which conceal you and close your path, which delight and dazzle your eyes by the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their bloom." Spenser comes very much nearer this description than Shakespeare, to my mind: to me it conveys not the remotest approach to the peculiar effect of Shakespeare. Simple and easy as the operation seems, the power of fresh and effective word-combination is one of the rarest of gifts: it is indispensable to a great poet; and part of Shakespeare's main distinction among great poets is the possession of this power in an incomparable degree. Something in the effect of his combinations upon us is due, no doubt, to change in the usage of words: many words whose conjunction raised no surprise in an Elizabethan, have since wandered away from each other and gathered other associations about them, so that their reunion in our minds is like the reunion of youthful friends in old age. The words lay near each other then, and had little variety of idea to bring into collision: now, in this later stage of their existence, they have lived long apart, they surprise us by their mutual recognition, and they bring many memories into shifting indefinite comparison, indefinably charming collision. In reading Shakespeare's predecessors, we often meet with what appear to have been the suggestions or seeds of passages in his plays; and the comparison of the suggestion with its development gives a most vivid notion of the amplitude and rapidity of growth in Shakespeare's mind. So abundant and mobile were words and images in that soil, so warm its generating force, that a seed fallen there at once germinated and shot up with the utmost facility of assimilation into a complete organism. Take a simple case. When Gaveston, in Marlowe's "Edward II.," returns from banishment, and is recognised as the king's favourite, he is besieged by a host of hunters for patronage. Among the rest is a traveller, at whom Gaveston looks for a moment, and then says "Let me see thou wouldst do well to wait at my trencher and tell me lies at dinner-time; and as I like your discoursing, I'll have you." Shakespeare seems to have been tickled with this deliberate utilisation of the traveller, for he makes the Bastard in "King John," when he has obtained royal favour, take delight in the prospect of the same entertainment. But in Shakespeare's mind the idea ripens into a complete picture of well-fed satisfaction, condescension, obsequiousness, and rambling after-dinner talk ("King John,” i. I, 190). : III. CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY. The most general reader is impressed by the width of Shakespeare's range through varied effects of strength, pathos, and humour and minute methodical reading brings an increase of admiration. It must not, however, be supposed that Shakespeare's poetry embraces all the qualities to be found in all other poetsthat every effect producible by poetry on the human spirit finds its most conspicuous exemplification in his plays. He fills us with wonder, with submissive awe, with heroic energy; he runs us through the gamut of tears and laughter, smiling and sadness: no mortal man has struck so many different notes; yet with all his marvellous versatility, he had his own individual touch, and he left an inexhaustible variety of notes to be sounded. Shakespeare was a man of wonderful range; but his plays are not a measure of the effects that lie within the compass of poetic language. The might that Shakespeare excels in expressing is not the might of slow and regular agencies, but the might of swift and confounding agencies. His power is figured in the boast of Prospero "To the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak The awful energies that he sets in motion move with lightning swiftness and overpowering suddenness: the sublime influence does not soar and sail above us; it comes about our senses, flashing and crackling, dazzling and confounding, like Jove's own bolt. His words pass over us like the burst and ear-deafening voice of the oracle over Cleomenes, surprising the hearer into nothingness; or flame before our amazed eyes like the sight-outrunning activity of Ariel on board the king's ship in the tempest. Milton's sublimity has not the same life, the same magic energy: it is statelier and less intimate: the effect is not so sudden and overwhelming. There is an excitement akin to madness in the swiftly concentrated energy of some of Shakespeare's occasional bursts. Lear's curses are quivering with compressed force "All the stored vengeances of heaven fall On her ungrateful top! Strike her young bones, And again— "Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air Hang fated o'er men's faults light on thy daughters!" There is a similar half-maddening excitement compressed, as it were, with strong hand, but trembling on the verge of frantic explosion, in Lucrece's invocation of Night "O comfort-killing Night, image of hell! Claudio's anticipation of the horrors of death ("Measure for "Macb. There's comfort yet; they are assailable: Lady Macb. What's to be done? Macb. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond |