Chapter II (2)

It should on the other hand be noted that the finest touch in the comic scenes, if not the finest in the whole portrait of Falstaff, is apparently an afterthought, a touch added on revision of the original design. In the first scene of the second act Mrs. Quickly's remark that "he'll yield the crow a pudding one of these days" is common to both versions of the play; but the six words following are only to be found in the revised edition; and these six words the very pirates could hardly have passed over or struck out. They are not such as can drop from the text of a poet unperceived by the very dullest and horniest of human eyes. "The king has killed his heart." Here is the point in Falstaff's nature so strangely overlooked by the man of all men who we should have said must be the first to seize and to appreciate it. It is as grievous as it is inexplicable that the Shakespeare of France--the most infinite in compassion, in "conscience and tender heart," of all great poets in all ages and all nations of the world--should have missed the deep tenderness of this supreme and subtlest touch in the work of the greatest among his fellows. Again, with anything but "damnable" iteration, does Shakespeare revert to it before the close of this very scene. Even Pistol and Nym can see that what now ails their old master is no such ailment as in his prosperous days was but too liable to "play the rogue with his great toe." "The king hath run bad humours on the knight": "his heart is fracted, and corroborate." And it is not thus merely through the eclipse of that brief mirage, that fair prospect "of Africa, and golden joys," in view of which he was ready to "take any man's horses." This it is that distinguishes Falstaff from Panurge; that lifts him at least to the moral level of Sancho Panza. I cannot but be reluctant to set the verdict of my own judgment against that of Victor Hugo's; I need none to remind me what and who he is whose judgment I for once oppose, and what and who am I that I should oppose it; that he is he, and I am but myself; yet against his classification of Falstaff, against his definition of Shakespeare's unapproached and unapproachable masterpiece in the school of comic art and humouristic nature, I must and do with all my soul and strength protest. The admirable phrase of "swine-centaur" (_centaure du porc_) is as inapplicable to Falstaff as it is appropriate to Panurge. Not the third person but the first in date of that divine and human trinity of humourists whose names make radiant for ever the Century of their new-born glory--not Shakespeare but Rabelais is responsible for the creation or the discovery of such a type as this. "_Suum cuique_ is our Roman justice"; the gradation from Panurge to Falstaff is not downward but upward; though it be Victor Hugo's very self who asserts the contrary. {108} Singular as may seem the collocation of the epithet "moral" with the name "Falstaff," I venture to maintain my thesis; that in point of feeling, and therefore of possible moral elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho is unquestionably the superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge is bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus; the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alike at one point;

Myself,
And this great belly, first of deities;

(in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were a first faint prelude of the great proclamation to come--the hymn of praise and thanksgiving for the coronation day of King Gaster; whose laureate, we know, was as lovingly familiar with the Polyphemus of Euripides as Shakespeare with his own Pantagruel.) In Sancho we come upon a creature capable of love--but not of such love as kills or helps to kill, such love as may end or even as may seem to end in anything like heartbreak. "And now abideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, these three; but the greatest of these is Shakespeare."

I would fain score yet another point in the fat knight's favour; "I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff." Rabelais, evangelist and prophet of the Resurrection of the Flesh (so long entombed, ignored, repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so many generations and ages of Galilean preachers and Pharisaic schoolmen)--Rabelais was content to paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality--human at least, if also bestial; in its frank and rude reaction against the half brainless and wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the one hand, and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally--to smite them hip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mock sun or marshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassing on every side the doubly dark ages--the ages of monarchy and theocracy, the ages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore, it was unnecessary and it might have seemed inconsequent to attribute other gifts or functions than are proper to such intelligence as may accompany the appetites of an animal. That most irreverend father in God, Friar John, belongs to a higher class in the moral order of being; and he much rather than his fellow-voyager and penitent is properly comparable with Falstaff. It is impossible to connect the notion of rebuke with the sins of Panurge. The actual lust and gluttony, the imaginary cowardice of Falstaff, have been gravely and sharply rebuked by critical morality; we have just noted a too recent and too eminent example of this; but what mortal ever dreamed of casting these qualities in the teeth of his supposed counterpart? The difference is as vast between Falstaff on the field of battle and Panurge on the storm-tossed deck as between Falstaff and Hotspur, Panurge and Friar John. No man could show cooler and steadier nerve than is displayed in either case--by the lay as well as the clerical namesake of the fourth evangelist. If ever fruitless but endless care was shown to prevent misunderstanding, it was shown in the pains taken by Shakespeare to obviate the misconstruction which would impute to Falstaff the quality of a Parolles or a Bobadil, a Bessus or a Moron. The delightful encounter between the jester and the bear in the crowning interlude of _La Princesse d'Elide_ shows once more, I may remark, that Moliere had sat at the feet of Rabelais as delightedly as Shakespeare before him. Such rapturous inebriety or Olympian incontinence of humour only fires the blood of the graver and less exuberant humourist when his lips are still warm and wet from the well- spring of the _Dive Bouteille_.

It is needless to do over again the work which was done, and well done, a hundred years since, by the writer whose able essay in vindication and exposition of the genuine character of Falstaff elicited from Dr. Johnson as good a jest and as bad a criticism as might have been expected. His argument is too thoroughly carried out at all points and fortified on all hands to require or even to admit of corroboration; and the attempt to appropriate any share of the lasting credit which is his due would be nothing less than a disingenuous impertinence. I may here however notice that in the very first scene of this trilogy which introduces us to the ever dear and honoured presence of Sir John, his creator has put into the mouth of a witness no friendlier or more candid than Ned Poins the distinction between two as true-bred cowards as ever turned back and one who will fight no longer than he sees reason. In this nutshell lies the whole kernel of the matter; the sweet, sound, ripe, toothsome, wholesome kernel of Falstaff's character and humour. He will fight as well as his princely patron, and, like the prince, as long as he sees reason; but neither Hal nor Jack has ever felt any touch of desire to pluck that "mere scutcheon" honour "from the pale-faced moon." Harry Percy is as it were the true Sir Bedivere, the last of all Arthurian knights; Henry V. is the first as certainly as he is the noblest of those equally daring and calculating statesmen-warriors whose two most terrible, most perfect, and most famous types are Louis XI. and Caesar Borgia. Gain, "commodity," the principle of self-interest which never but in word and in jest could become the principle of action with Faulconbridge,--himself already far more "a man of this world" than a Launcelot or a Hotspur,--is as evidently the mainspring of Henry's enterprise and life as of the contract between King Philip and King John. The supple and shameless egotism of the churchmen on whose political sophistries he relies for external support is needed rather to varnish his project than to reassure his conscience. Like Frederic the Great before his first Silesian war, the future conqueror of Agincourt has practically made up his mind before he seeks to find as good reason or as plausible excuse as were likewise to suffice the future conqueror of Rosbach. In a word, Henry is doubtless not the man, as old Auchindrane expresses it in the noble and strangely neglected tragedy which bears solitary but sufficient witness to the actual dramatic faculty of Sir Walter Scott's genius, to do the devil's work without his wages; but neither is he, on the like unprofitable terms, by any manner of means the man to do God's. No completer incarnation could be shown us of the militant Englishman--_Anglais pur sang_; but it is not only, as some have seemed to think, with the highest, the purest, the noblest quality of English character that his just and far-seeing creator has endowed him. The godlike equity of Shakespeare's judgment, his implacable and impeccable righteousness of instinct and of insight, was too deeply ingrained in the very core of his genius to be perverted by any provincial or pseudo-patriotic prepossessions; his patriotism was too national to be provincial. Assuredly no poet ever had more than he: not even the king of men and poets who fought at Marathon and sang of Salamis: much less had any or has any one of our own, from Milton on to Campbell and from Campbell even to Tennyson. In the mightiest chorus of _King Henry V_. we hear the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet that was yet to sound over the battle of the Baltic, and again in our later day over a sea-fight of Shakespeare's own, more splendid and heart-cheering in its calamity than that other and all others in their triumph; a war-song and a sea-song divine and deep as death or as the sea, making thrice more glorious at once the glorious three names of England, of Grenville, and of Tennyson for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifference not AEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very self was more alien or more free than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang, the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in the great historic chord of his lyre. "He is very English, too English, even," says the Master on whom his enemies alone--assuredly not his most loving, most reverent, and most thankful disciples--might possibly and plausibly retort that he was "very French, too French, even"; but he certainly was not "too English" to see and cleave to the main fact, the radical and central truth, of personal or national character, of typical history or tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade, in either or in any way to falsify it. From king to king, from cardinal to cardinal, from the earliest in date of subject to the latest of his histories, we find the same thread running, the same link of honourable and righteous judgment, of equitable and careful equanimity, connecting and combining play with play in an unbroken and infrangible chain of evidence to the singleness of the poet's eye, the identity of the workman's hand, which could do justice and would do no more than justice, alike to Henry and to Wolsey, to Pandulph and to John. His typical English hero or historic protagonist is a man of their type who founded and built up the empire of England in India; a hero after the future pattern of Hastings and of Clive; not less daringly sagacious and not more delicately scrupulous, not less indomitable or more impeccable than they. A type by no means immaculate, a creature not at all too bright and good for English nature's daily food in times of mercantile or military enterprise; no whit more if no whit less excellent and radiant than reality. _Amica Britannia, sed magis amica veritas_. The master poet of England--all Englishmen may reasonably and honourably be proud of it--has not two weights and two measures for friend and foe. This palpable and patent fact, as his only and worthy French translator has well remarked, would of itself suffice to exonerate his memory from the imputation of having perpetrated in its evil entirety _The First Part of King Henry VI_.

There is, in my opinion, somewhat more of internal evidence than I have ever seen adduced in support of the tradition current from an early date as to the origin of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_; a tradition which assigns to Queen Elizabeth the same office of midwife with regard to this comedy as was discharged by Elwood with reference to _Paradise Regained_. Nothing could so naturally or satisfactorily explain its existence as the expression of a desire to see "Falstaff in love," which must have been nothing less than the equivalent of a command to produce him under the disguise of such a transfiguration on the boards. The task of presenting him so shorn of his beams, so much less than archangel (of comedy) ruined, and the excess of (humorous) glory obscured, would hardly, we cannot but think and feel, have spontaneously suggested itself to Shakespeare as a natural or eligible aim for the fresh exercise of his comic genius. To exhibit Falstaff as throughout the whole course of five acts a credulous and baffled dupe, one "easier to be played on than a pipe," was not really to reproduce him at all. The genuine Falstaff could no more have played such a part than the genuine Petruchio could have filled such an one as was assigned him by Fletcher in the luckless hour when that misguided poet undertook to continue the subject and to correct the moral of the next comedy in our catalogue of Shakespeare's. _The Tamer Tamed_ is hardly less consistent or acceptable as a sequel to the _Taming of the Shrew_ than the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ as a supplement to _King Henry IV_.: and no conceivable comparison could more forcibly convey, how broad and deep is the gulf of incongruity which divides them.

The plea for once suggested by the author in the way of excuse or extenuation for this incompatibility of Falstaff with Falstaff--for the violation of character goes far beyond mere inconsistency or the natural ebb and flow of even the brightest wits and most vigorous intellects--will commend itself more readily to the moralist than to the humanist; in other words, to the preacher rather than to the thinker, the sophist rather than the artist. Here only does Shakespeare show that he feels the necessity of condescending to such evasion or such apology as is implied in the explanation of Falstaff's incredible credulity by a reference to "the guiltiness of his mind" and the admission, so gratifying to all minds more moral than his own, that "wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment." It is the best excuse that can be made; but can we imagine the genuine, the pristine Falstaff reduced to the proffer of such an excuse in serious good earnest?

In the original version of this comedy there was not a note of poetry from end to end; as it then appeared, it might be said to hold the same place on the roll of Shakespeare's plays as is occupied by _Bartholomew Fair_ on the roll of Ben Jonson's. From this point of view it is curious to contrast the purely farcical masterpieces of the town-bred schoolboy and the country lad. There is a certain faint air of the fields, the river, and the park, even in the rough sketch of Shakespeare's farce--wholly prosaic as it is, and in no point suggestive of any unlikelihood in the report which represents it as the composition or rather as the improvisation of a fortnight. We know at once that he must have stroked the fallow greyhound that was outrun on "Cotsall"; that he must--and perhaps once or twice at least too often--have played truant (some readers, boys past or present, might wish for association's sake it could actually have been Datchet-wards) from under the shadow of good Sir Hugh's probably not over formidable though "threatening twigs of birch," at all risks of being "preeches" on his return, in fulfilment of the direful menace held out to that young namesake of his over whose innocence Mrs. Quickly was so creditably vigilant. On the other hand, no student of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely and precociously familiar the big stalwart Westminster boy, Camden's favoured and grateful pupil, must have made himself with the rankest haunts and most unsavoury recesses of that ribald waterside and Smithfield life which he lived to reproduce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable fidelity to details from which Hogarth might have shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in classic learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater or more willing diligence in school hours than he must have lavished on other than scholastic studies in the streets. The humour of his huge photographic group of divers "humours" is undeniably and incomparably richer, broader, fuller of invention and variety, than any that Shakespeare's lighter work can show; all the five acts of the latter comedy can hardly serve as counterpoise, in weight and wealth of comic effect, to the single scene in which Zeal-of-the-Land defines the moral and theological boundaries of action and intention which distinguish the innocent if not laudable desire to eat pig from the venial though not mortal sin of longing to eat pig in the thick of the profane Fair, which may rather be termed a foul than a fair. Taken from that point of view which looks only to force and freedom and range of humorous effect, Jonson's play is to his friend's as London is to Windsor; but in more senses than one it is to Shakespeare's as the Thames at London Bridge is to the Thames at Eton: the atmosphere of Smithfield is not more different from the atmosphere of the playing-fields; and some, too delicate of nose or squeamish of stomach, may prefer Cuckoo Weir to Shoreditch. But undoubtedly the phantoms of Shallow and Mrs. Quickly which put in (so to speak) a nominal reappearance in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ are comparatively as poor and thin if set over against the full rich outlines of Rabbi Busy and Dame Purecraft as these again are at all points alike inferior to the real Shallow and the genuine Quickly of _King Henry IV_. It is true that Jonson's humour has sometimes less in common with Shakespeare's than with the humour of Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle. For all his admiration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardly once or twice burnt but so much as a stray pinch of fugitive incense on the altar of Cloacina; the only Venus acknowledged and adored by those three latter humourists. If not always constant with the constancy of Milton to the service of Urania, he never turns into a dirtier byway or back alley than the beaten path trodden occasionally by most of his kind which leads them on a passing errand of no unnatural devotion to the shrine of Venus Pandemos.

When, however, we turn from the raw rough sketch to the enriched and ennobled version of the present play we find it in this its better shape more properly comparable with another and a nobler work of Jonson's--with that magnificent comedy, the first avowed and included among his collection by its author, which according to all tradition first owed its appearance and success to the critical good sense and generous good offices of Shakespeare. Neither my duly unqualified love for the greater poet nor my duly qualified regard for the less can alter my sense that their mutual relations are in this one case inverted; that _Every Man in his Humour_ is altogether a better comedy and a work of higher art than the _Merry Wives of Windsor_. Kitely is to Ford almost what Arnolphe is to Sganarelle. (As according to the learned Metaphraste "Filio non potest praeferri nisi filius," even so can no one but Moliere be preferred or likened to Moliere.) Without actually touching like Arnolphe on the hidden springs of tragedy, the jealous husband in Jonson's play is only kept from trenching on the higher and forbidden grounds of passion by the potent will and the consummate self-command of the great master who called him up in perfect likeness to the life. Another or a deeper tone, another or a stronger touch, in the last two admirable scenes with his cashier and his wife, when his hot smouldering suspicion at length catches fire and breaks out in agony of anger, would have removed him altogether beyond the legitimate pale of comedy. As it is, the self-control of the artist is as thorough as his grasp and mastery of his subject are triumphant and complete.

It would seem as though on revision of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ Shakespeare had found himself unwilling or rather perhaps unable to leave a single work of his hand without one touch or breath on it of beauty or of poetry. The sole fitting element of harmonious relief or variety in such a case could of course be found only in an interlude of pure fancy; any touch of graver or deeper emotion would simply have untuned and deranged the whole scheme of composition. A lesser poet might have been powerless to resist the temptation or suggestion of sentiment that he should give to the little loves of Anne Page and Fenton a touch of pathetic or emotional interest; but "opulent as Shakespeare was, and of his opulence prodigal" (to borrow a phrase from Coleridge), he knew better than to patch with purple or embroider with seed-pearl the hem of this homespun little piece of comic drugget. The match between cloth of gold and cloth of frieze could hardly have borne any good issue in this instance. Instead therefore of following the lead of Terence's or the hint of Jonson's example, and exalting the accent of his comedy to the full-mouthed pitch of a Chremes or a Kitely, he strikes out some forty and odd lines of rather coarse and commonplace doggrel about brokers, proctors, lousy fox-eyed serjeants, blue and red noses, and so forth, to make room for the bright light interlude of fairyland child's-play which might not unfittingly have found place even within the moon-charmed circle of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. Even in that all heavenly poem there are hardly to be found lines of more sweet and radiant simplicity than here.

The refined instinct, artistic judgment, and consummate taste of Shakespeare were perhaps never so wonderfully shown as in his recast of another man's work--a man of real if rough genius for comedy--which we get in the _Taming of the Shrew_. Only the collation of scene with scene, then of speech with speech, then of line with line, will show how much may be borrowed from a stranger's material and how much may be added to it by the same stroke of a single hand. All the force and humour alike of character and situation belong to Shakespeare's eclipsed and forlorn precursor; he has added nothing; he has tempered and enriched everything. That the luckless author of the first sketch is like to remain a man as nameless as the deed of the witches in _Macbeth_, unless some chance or caprice of accident should suddenly flash favouring light on his now impersonal and indiscoverable individuality, seems clear enough when we take into account the double and final disproof of his imaginary identity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce has put forward with such unanswerable certitude. He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiarist from that poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look so grossly out of place in the homely setting of his usual style that they seem transmuted from real to sham. On the other hand, he is of all the Pre- Shakespeareans known to us incomparably the truest, the richest, the most powerful and original humourist; one indeed without a second on that ground, for "the rest are nowhere." Now Marlowe, it need scarcely be once again reiterated, was as certainly one of the least and worst among jesters as he was one of the best and greatest among poets. There can therefore be no serious question of his partnership in a play wherein the comic achievement is excellent and the poetic attempts are execrable throughout.

The recast of it in which a greater than Berni has deigned to play the part of that poet towards a lesser than Bojardo shows tact and delicacy perhaps without a parallel in literature. No chance of improvement is missed, while nothing of value is dropped or thrown away. {125} There is just now and then a momentary return perceptible to the skipping metre and fantastic manner of the first period, which may have been unconsciously suggested by the nature of the task in hand--a task of itself implying or suggesting some new study of old models; but the main style of the play in all its weightier parts is as distinctly proper to the second period, as clear an evidence of inner and spiritual affinity (with actual tabulation of dates, were such a thing as feasible as it is impossible, I must repeat that the argument would here be--what it is now--in no wise concerned), as is the handling of character throughout; but most especially the subtle force, the impeccable and careful instinct, the masculine delicacy of touch, by which the somewhat ruffianly temperament of the original Ferando is at once refined and invigorated through its transmutation into the hearty and humorous manliness of Petruchio's.

It is observable that those few and faint traces which we have noticed in this play of a faded archaic style trying as it were to resume a mockery of revirescence are not wholly even if mainly confined to the underplot which a suggestion or surmise of Mr. Collier's long since assigned to Haughton, author of _Englishmen for my Money, or A Woman will have her Will_: a spirited, vigorous, and remarkably regular comedy of intrigue, full of rough and ready incident, bright boisterous humour, honest lively provinciality and gay high-handed Philistinism. To take no account of this attribution would be to show myself as shamelessly as shamefully deficient in that respect and gratitude which all genuine and thankful students will always be as ready to offer as all thankless and insolent sciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the venerable scholar who since I was first engaged on these notes has added yet another obligation to the many under which he had already laid all younger and lesser labourers in the same field of study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled and enriched of his great historical work on our early stage. It might seem something of an unintended impertinence to add that such recognition of his theory no more implies a blind acceptance of it--whatever such acceptance on my part might be worth--than the expression of such gratitude and respect could reasonably be supposed to imply an equally blind confidence in the authority or the value of that version of Shakespeare's text which has been the means of exposing a name so long and so justly honoured, not merely to the natural and rational inquisition of rival students, but to the rancorous and ribald obloquy of thankless and frontless pretenders.

Here perhaps as well as anywhere else I may find a proper place to intercalate the little word I have to say in partial redemption of my pledge to take in due time some notice at more or less length, of the only two among the plays doubtfully ascribed to Shakespeare which in my eyes seem to bear any credible or conceivable traces of his touch. Of these two I must give the lesser amount of space and attention to that one which in itself is incomparably the more worthy of discussion, admiration, and regard. The reason of this lies in the very excellence which has attracted to it the notice of such competent judges and the suffrage of such eminent names as would make the task of elaborate commentary and analytic examination something more than superfluous on my part; whereas the other has never been and will never be assigned to Shakespeare by any critical student whose verdict is worth a minute's consideration or the marketable value of a straw. Nevertheless it is on other grounds worth notice; and such notice, to be itself of any value, must of necessity be elaborate and minute. The critical analysis of _King Edward III_. I have therefore relegated to its proper place in an appendix; while I reserve a corner of my text, at once out of admiration for the play itself and out of reverence for the names and authority of some who have given their verdict in its behalf, for a rough and rapid word or two on _Arden of Feversham_.

It is with equally inexpressible surprise that I find Mr. Collier accepting as Shakespeare's any part of _A Warning for Fair Women_, and rejecting without compromise or hesitation the belief or theory which would assign to the youth of Shakespeare the incomparably nobler tragic poem in question. {129} His first ascription to Shakespeare of _A Warning for Fair Women_ is couched in terms far more dubious and diffident than such as he afterwards adopts. It "might," he says, "be given to Shakespeare on grounds far more plausible" (on what, except possibly those of date, I cannot imagine) "than those applicable to _Arden of Feversham_." He then proceeds to cite some detached lines and passages of undeniable beauty and vigour, containing equally undeniable coincidences of language, illustration, and expression with "passages in Shakespeare's undisputed plays." From these he passes on to indicate a "resemblance" which "is not merely verbal," and to extract whole speeches which "are Shakespearean in a much better sense"; adding in a surely too trenchant fashion, "Here we say, _aut Shakespeare aut diabolus_." I must confess, with all esteem for the critic and all admiration for the brief scene cited, that I cannot say, Shakespeare.

There are spirits of another sort from whom we naturally expect such assumptions and inferences as start from the vantage ground of a few separate or separable passages, and clear at a flying leap the empty space intervening which divides them from the goal of evidence as to authorship. Such a spirit was that of the late Mr. Simpson, to whose wealth of misused learning and fertility of misapplied conjecture I have already paid all due tribute; but who must have had beyond all other sane men--most assuredly, beyond all other fairly competent critics--the gift bestowed on him by a malignant fairy of mistaking assumption for argument and possibility for proof. He was the very Columbus of mare's nests; to the discovery of them, though they lay far beyond the pillars of Hercules, he would apply all shifts and all resources possible to an ultra-Baconian process of unphilosophical induction. On the devoted head of Shakespeare--who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur--he would have piled a load of rubbish, among which the crude and vigorous old tragedy under discussion shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert. His "School of Shakspere," though not an academy to be often of necessity perambulated by the most peripatetic student of Shakespeare, will remain as a monument of critical or uncritical industry, a storehouse of curious if not of precious relics, and a warning for other than fair women--or fair scholars--to remember where "it is written that the shoemaker should meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter with his nets."

To me the difference appears immeasurable between the reasons for admitting the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship in the case of _Arden of Feversham_, and the pretexts for imagining the probability of his partnership in _A Warning for Fair Women_. There is a practically infinite distinction between the evidence suggested by verbal or even more than verbal resemblance of detached line to line or selected passage to passage, and the proof supplied by the general harmony and spiritual similarity of a whole poem, on comparison of it as a whole with the known works of the hypothetical author. This proof, at all events, we surely do not get from consideration in this light of the plea put forward in behalf of _A Warning for Fair Women_. This proof, I cannot but think, we are very much nearer getting from contemplation under the same light of the claim producible for _Arden of Feversham_.

_A Warning for Fair Women_ is unquestionably in its way a noticeable and valuable "piece of work," as Sly might have defined it. It is perhaps the best example anywhere extant of a merely realistic tragedy--of realism pure and simple applied to the service of the highest of the arts. Very rarely does it rise for a very brief interval to the height of tragic or poetic style, however simple and homely. The epilogue affixed to _Arden of Feversham_ asks pardon of the "gentlemen" composing its audience for "this naked tragedy," on the plea that "simple truth is gracious enough" without needless ornament or bedizenment of "glozing stuff." Far more appropriate would such an apology have been as in this case was at least superfluous, if appended by way of epilogue to _A Warning for Fair Women_. That is indeed a naked tragedy; nine-tenths of it are in no wise beyond the reach of an able, industrious, and practised reporter, commissioned by the proprietors of the journal on whose staff he might be engaged to throw into the force of scenic dialogue his transcript of the evidence in a popular and exciting case of adultery and murder. The one figure on the stage of this author which stands out sharply defined in our recollection against a background of undistinguished shadows is the figure of the adulterer and murderer. This most discreditable of Browns has a distinct and brawny outline of his own, a gait and accent as of a genuine and recognisable man, who might have put to some better profit his shifty spirit of enterprise, his genuine capacity of affection, his burly ingenuity and hardihood. His minor confidants and accomplices, Mrs. Drury and her Trusty Roger, are mere commonplace profiles of malefactors: but it is in the contrast between the portraits of their two criminal heroines that the vast gulf of difference between the capacities of the two poets yawns patent to the sense of all readers. Anne Sanders and Alice Arden stand as far beyond comparison apart as might a portrait by any average academician and a portrait by Watts or Millais. Once only, in the simple and noble scene cited by the over-generous partiality of Mr. Collier, does the widow and murderess of Sanders rise to the tragic height of the situation and the dramatic level of the part so unfalteringly sustained from first to last by the wife and the murderess of Arden.

There is the self-same relative difference between the two subordinate groups of innocent or guilty characters. That is an excellent and effective touch of realism, where Brown comes across his victim's little boy playing truant in the street with a small schoolfellow; but in _Arden of Feversham_ the number of touches as telling and as striking as this one is practically numberless. They also show a far stronger and keener faculty of poetic if not of dramatic imagination. The casual encounter of little Sanders with the yet red-handed murderer of his father is not comparable for depth and subtlety of effect with the scene in which Arden's friend Franklin, riding with him to Raynham Down, breaks off his "pretty tale" of a perjured wife, overpowered by a "fighting at his heart," at the moment when they come close upon the ambushed assassins in Alice Arden's pay. But the internal evidence in this case, as I have already intimated, does not hinge upon the proof or the suggestion offered by any single passage or by any number of single passages. The first and last evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the evidence of character. A good deal might be said on the score of style in favour of its attribution to a poet of the first order, writing at a time when there were but two such poets writing for the stage; but even this is here a point of merely secondary importance. It need only be noted in passing that if the problem be reduced to a question between the authorship of Shakespeare and the authorship of Marlowe there is no need and no room for further argument. The whole style of treatment from end to end is about as like the method of Marlowe as the method of Balzac is like the method of Dumas. There could be no alternative in that case; so that the actual alternative before us is simple enough: Either this play is the young Shakespeare's first tragic masterpiece, or there was a writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the stage who excelled him as a tragic dramatist not less--to say the very least--than he was excelled by Marlowe as a narrative and tragic poet.

If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe accepted (a point which I regret my inability to verify), the former of these alternatives--or if at least we assume it for argument's sake in passing--we may easily strengthen our position by adducing as further evidence in its favour the author's thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of the prose narrative on which his tragedy is founded. But, it may be objected, we find the same fidelity to a similar text in the case of _A Warning for Fair Women_. And here again starts up the primal and radical difference between the two works: it starts up and will not be overlooked. Equal fidelity to the narrative text we do undoubtedly find in either case; the same fidelity we assuredly do not find. The one is a typical example of prosaic realism, the other of poetic reality. Light from darkness or truth from falsehood is not more infallibly discernible. The fidelity in the one case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the fidelity of a reporter to his notes. The fidelity in the other case is exactly the fidelity of Shakespeare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch. It is a fidelity which admits--I had almost written, which requires--the fullest play of the highest imagination. No more than the most realistic of reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or even admissible detail; but the indefinable quality which it adds to the lowest as to the highest of these is (as Lamb says of passion) "the all in all in poetry." Turning again for illustration to one of the highest names in imaginative literature--a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly inscribed on the register of the realistic school, {137} we may say that the difference on this point is not the difference between Balzac and Dumas, but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us take by way of example the character next in importance to that of the heroine--the character of her paramour. A viler figure was never sketched by Balzac; a viler figure was seldom drawn by Thackeray. But as with Balzac, so with the author of this play, the masterful will combining with the masterly art of the creator who fashions out of the worst kind of human clay the breathing likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and so pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all sense of such abhorrence and repulsion as would prove the work which excited them no high or even true work of art. Even the wonderful touch of dastardly brutality and pitiful self-pity with which Mosbie at once receives and repels the condolence of his mistress on his wound--

_Alice_.--Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills my heart.

_Mosbie_.--_Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour_.--

even this does not make unendurable the scenic representation of what in actual life would be unendurable for any man to witness. Such an exhibition of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite increases rather our wondering pity for its victim than our wondering sense of her degradation. And this is a kind of triumph which only such an artist as Shakespeare in poetry or as Balzac in prose can achieve.

Alice Arden, if she be indeed a daughter of Shakespeare's, is the eldest born of that group to which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong by right of weird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of Glamis and the governor of Tharsus, it need hardly be said, are both of them creations of a much later date--if not of the very latest discernible or definable stage in the art of Shakespeare. Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, the wife of Arden is much less of a born criminal than these. To her, at once the agent and the patient of her crime, the victim and the instrument of sacrifice and blood-offering to Venus Libitina, goddess of love and death,--to her, even in the deepest pit of her deliberate wickedness, remorse is natural and redemption conceivable. Like the Phaedra of Racine, and herein so nobly unlike the Phaedra of Euripides, she is capable of the deepest and bitterest penitence,--incapable of dying with a hideous and homicidal falsehood on her long polluted lips. Her latest breath is not a lie but a prayer.

Considering, then, in conclusion, the various and marvellous gifts displayed for the first time on our stage by the great poet, the great dramatist, the strong and subtle searcher of hearts, the just and merciful judge and painter of human passions, who gave this tragedy to the new-born literature of our drama; taking into account the really wonderful skill, the absoluteness of intuition and inspiration, with which every stroke is put in that touches off character or tones down effect, even in the sketching and grouping of such minor figures as the ruffianly hireling Black Will, the passionate artist without pity or conscience, {141} and above all the "unimitated, inimitable" study of Michael, in whom even physical fear becomes tragic, and cowardice itself no ludicrous infirmity but rather a terrible passion; I cannot but finally take heart to say, even in the absence of all external or traditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardonable merely nor permissible, but simply logical and reasonable, to set down this poem, a young man's work on the face of it, as the possible work of no man's youthful hand but Shakespeare's.

No similar question is raised, no parallel problem stated, in the case of any one other among the plays now or ever ascribed on grounds more or less dubious to that same indubitable hand. This hand I do not recognise even in the _Yorkshire Tragedy_, full as it is to overflowing of fierce animal power, and hot as with the furious breath of some caged wild beast. Heywood, who as the most realistic and in some sense prosaic dramatist of his time has been credited (though but in a modestly tentative and suggestive fashion) with its authorship, was as incapable of writing it as Chapman of writing the Shakespearean parts of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ or Fletcher of writing the scenes of Wolsey's fall and Katherine's death in _King Henry VIII_. To the only editor of Shakespeare responsible for the two earlier of the three suggestions here set aside, they may be forgiven on the score of insufficient scholarship and want of critical training; but on what ground the third suggestion can be excused in the case of men who should have a better right than most others to speak with some show of authority on a point of higher criticism, I must confess myself utterly at a loss to imagine. In the _Yorkshire Tragedy_ the submissive devotion of its miserable heroine to her maddened husband is merely doglike,--though not even, in the exquisitely true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess, "most passionately patient." There is no likeness in this poor trampled figure to "one of Shakespeare's women": Griselda was no ideal of his. To find its parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look to lesser great men than Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, a too exclusively masculine poet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her--or one such figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as she is even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, is less of a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is Robert Davenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired by Washington Irving; another is the heroine of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-comedy, labelled to _How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_, which in its central situation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt's beautiful _Legend of Florence_; while Decker has revived, in one of our sweetest and most graceful examples of dramatic romance, the original incarnation of that somewhat pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more Russian century of painful European progress out of night and winter could only be made credible, acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled genius of Chaucer and Boccaccio.

For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this lurid little play beats _A Warning for Fair Women_ fairly out of the field. It is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable for pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its raging rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for disgust; it consumes our very sense of repulsion as with fire. But such power as this, though a rare and a great gift, is not the right quality for a dramatist; it is not the fit property of a poet. Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and Marston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or less plausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of them left us anything so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones. I cannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it. "'Tis a very excellent piece of work"; may we never exactly look upon its like again!

I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearly probable, that the author of _Arden of Feversham_ might be one with the author of the famous additional scenes to _The Spanish Tragedy_, and that either both of these "pieces of work" or neither must be Shakespeare's. I still adhere to Coleridge's verdict, which indeed must be that of all judges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are

Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine:

to the effect that those magnificent passages, wellnigh overcharged at every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic truth, are no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Jonson's: though hardly perhaps more unlike the typical manner of his adult and matured style than is the general tone of _The Case is Altered_, his one surviving comedy of that earlier period in which we know from Henslowe that the stout-hearted and long struggling young playwright went through so much theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same rough harness with other now more or less notable workmen then drudging under the manager's dull narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare shelter. But this unlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his former and his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believe him capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and so indescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in a descent from the "fine madness" of "old Jeronymo" to the flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety of _Catiline_ and _Sejanus_.--I cannot but think, too, that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes to Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of all Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and more trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to "the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus."

We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a far other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's ripest harvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enter the "flowery square" made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure and perfect comedy "beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind" of all happiest and most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one brook to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep us out of Paradise. In the garden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed _All's Well that Ends Well_, we are hardly distant from Eden itself

About a young dove's flutter from a wood.

The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the few subjects chosen by Shakespeare--as so many were taken by Fletcher--which are less fit, we may venture to think, for dramatic than for narrative treatment. He has here again shown all possible delicacy of instinct in handling a matter which unluckily it was not possible to handle on the stage with absolute and positive delicacy of feeling or expression. Dr. Johnson--in my humble opinion, with some justice; though his verdict has been disputed on the score of undeserved austerity--"could not reconcile his heart to Bertram"; and I, unworthy as I may be to second or support on the score of morality the finding of so great a moralist, cannot reconcile my instincts to Helena. Parolles is even better than Bobadil, as Bobadil is even better than Bessus; and Lafeu is one of the very best old men in all the range of comic art. But the whole charm and beauty of the play, the quality which raises it to the rank of its fellows by making it loveable as well as admirable, we find only in the "sweet, serene, skylike" sanctity and attraction of adorable old age, made more than ever near and dear to us in the incomparable figure of the old Countess of Roussillon. At the close of the play, Fletcher would inevitably have married her to Lafeu--or rather possibly, to the King.

At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral, or under the rising dawn of the four fixed stars which compose our Northern Cross among the constellations of dramatic romance hung high in the highest air of poetry, we may well pause for very dread of our own delight, lest unawares we break into mere babble of childish rapture and infantile thanksgiving for such light vouchsafed even to our "settentrional vedovo sito" that even at their first dawn out of the depths

Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle.

Beyond these again we see a second group arising, the supreme starry trinity of the _Winter's Tale_, the _Tempest_, and _Cymbeline_: and beyond these the divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternal night. These seven lamps of the romantic drama have in them--if I may strain the similitude a little further yet--more of lyric light than could fitly be lent to feed the fire or the sunshine of the worlds of pure tragedy or comedy. There is more play, more vibration as it were, in the splendours of their spheres. Only in the heaven of Shakespeare's making can we pass and repass at pleasure from the sunny to the stormy lights, from the glory of _Cymbeline_ to the glory of _Othello_.