natural powers, unless accompanied by an ex- the originals as they are presented to us in the tensive acquaintance with books, have but a pages of history. very limited scope for their exercise. They So far as literary acquirements are concerned, go to a certain extent become exhausted-and we are disposed to regard Shakspeare, the difthen begin to reproduce. There are few who ference of the periods at which they existed behave not observed this with regard to our public speakers, more particularly during the Presidential canvass. A man of strong mind, but of small reading, will make one strong speech and this he will reproduce to the end of the chapter. There is no variety in him. He has gone to his farthest limit, and he can go no farther. He is disagreeably contrasted with the man of even inferior abilities, whose power of thought has been enlarged, and resources multiplied by reading. We do not believe that great creative powers ever existed, except in conjunction with an undying thirst for information, and we are sustained in this view by the history of all men of that description, of whom we have any knowledge. For this reason, if for no other, we should be disposed to think that Shakspeare was a great reader, and that he had acquired a very large stock of general information, not very profound, per, haps, but still sufficient for all his purposes. The inexhaustible fertility of his genius, plainly indicates a mind well supplied with such treasures, as books of popular information could afford. Had he not read largely, he would have run out, and fallen to reproducing, which we find that he never does. ing taken into consideration, as very much on a level with Sir Walter Scott. Neither of them had much Greek or Latin either, yet both had read a great deal, and reflected deeply on what they had read. They were both intimately acquainted with the history of their respective countries, and knew thoroughly the characteristics of their countrymen. Each was an epitome, in himself, of the national character; Shakspeare a type of John Bull in all his humors and extravagances; Scott the genuine representative of the Celt, his foibles and his virtues. They were in good sooth noble specimens of their respective races. The earlier commentators upon Shakspeare, appear to have adopted a method of investigation, with regard to this subject, very ill adapted to its elucidation. They laid down a theory, in the first instance, and then instead of enquiring for naked facts, employed themselves solely in the task of finding arguments to support it. They started upon the presumption that Shakspeare had no learning, and all their efforts were directed to sustain this position. They wasted an abundance of ingenuity in discovering facts that might controvert the indubitable evidence which his plays There is, however, we think, in the works of afford, of an acquaintance with the literature of Shakspeare themselves, ample evidence that he Italy, and the language of France. They ranhad read much, and studied profoundly. Few sacked whole libraries, to satisfy themselves that Englishmen, we venture to say even of this day, Cynthio's novels, and Plutarch's Lives had been though educated at Oxford or Cambridge, pos- translated before his day, and that Chapman's sess a more intimate knowledge of the history of version of the Iliad was at that time a very comtheir own country, than he did. Can any man, mon book. This learning and this labor appear who is familiar with the history of ancient Rome, to us to have been very badly applied. Shaksread his plays of Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, and peare might have read all these works in transAntony and Cleopatra, without being impress-lations, and still the fact would not have been ed with the belief that he was either inspi- more clear that he was without learning, or even red, or had studied the Roman history and deficient in education. He uses French, Italian character, with the most profound attention? and Latin words, with perfect correctness, and He breathes, indeed, the very spirit of the forum, whenever he finds occasion, so that prima facie, of the Senate House, and of the Campus Mar- and in the absence of better proof than the tius, such as the student inhales it from the page mere existence of the works which he is suppoof Livy. No where else can we find portrayed sed to have read, in translations, he must have so exactly in accordance with all we read of known something of them all. The probability is, them, the high spirit and arrogant bearing of that like many other men, he had learned them at Coriolanus, the towering ambition and acute school and partially forgotten them afterwards. genius of Cæsar, the deep and relentless craft of An exception however must be made with regard Cassius, the open and ingenuous patriotism of to the French language. In one of the acts of Brutus. the brutal sensuality of Antony, the pro- Henry V., there is a dialogue between Catherine foundly politic temper of Augustus, the unrivalled of France, afterwards queen of that monarch, fascination of Cleopatra. That Shakspeare had and her maid, in French, which nobody who did entered fully into the characters of all these, not well understand the language could have must, we think, be evident to any man who will written, and the conduct and humor of which take the trouble to compare the portraits with are so entirely Shaksperean, that the author caunot be mistaken. The very trick of playing That Shakspeare, if he had ever read Aristotle, upon words, to which Shakspeare was so much paid very little regard in general to his precepts, addicted, is indulged with an ease and a license, is very true; nor do we see that there existed that prove him to be perfectly at home. It is any reason why he should have done so, had he hardly worth while to enquire whether a man of been as familiar with them as he was with his a genius so ready, and a mind so inquisitive own writings. Aristotle was no poet himself, might not if he had thought proper, have made though there can be no dispute about his taste. himself, in a very short time, master of enough He never attempted, that we know, to write Italian to answer the purpose of reading the a drama according to the rules which he lays authors of that language; whether it is more down. Those rules are drawn from the great probable that he did so, or trusted to others Greek tragedians, Eschylus, Sophocles, and for such scraps as he occasionally introduces Euripides, and in order to estimate the prointo his dialogues. The facts stand upon the priety with which Shakspeare departed from record. Unless the source whence he deri- them, we must go back to these poets themselves. ved his French and Italian can be shown, it must They were all men of great genius, whose works be taken for granted that he knew something of have survived the wreck of time, and are still them. The only evidence that we have against his reckoned among the loftiest monuments of huknowledge, is the saying of Ben Jonson, which man intellect. What, let us ask, induced them we have already quoted. to observe, in the composition of their dramas, Another argument, and a very common one, those rules which have been collected by Aristoagainst the learning of Shakspeare, is the con- tle? Was it not because they discovered, that fusion which he frequently makes of customs, by following them strictly, they most successfully creeds and titles. To this it may be replied, that recommended their productions to an Athenian he probably but followed in the beaten track of audience? And had they believed, that by deothers who had preceded him, and that remarką- parting from them, they could have made their ble incongruities deformed the stage long after works more popular, would they not have done his day. We are told, for instance, that Garrick so? It appears to us unquestionable that they acted Macbeth in the uniform of a British Major would. They wrote, in other words, to please General, and that but little attention was paid to the people before whom their plays were to be the propriety of costume, until the days of the represented, and they adopted the method which Kembles. In none of Shakspeare's plays are they believed would most certainly ensure sucmore incongruities, or grosser, observable, than cess. By precisely such views, there is no reamay be found in the great work of Dante, son to doubt Shakspeare was governed, in prewhen the heathen mythology and the Catholic paring his dramas for the stage. He consulted, creed are mingled so singularly that it is almost as did the great Grecian dramatists, the taste of impossible to separate them. Yet Dante was the audience for whose amusement he was wripossessed of all the learning of his age, was the ting. He knew that London was not Athens, graduate of a renowned University, and wrote several prose works in Latin. Persons who argue in this manner, seem to forget the necessity under which every writer for the stage labors, of creating a stage effect, in order to make his productions popular with the mass. "They who live to please, must please to live." and that the taste of Englishmen was not identical with that of Athenians. He had as much right as they to establish a school of his own, for he had as much genius as they, and he had the same guide which had led them forward. The taste of the audience was, in both cases, the governing motive. HIS GENIUS. Sir Walter Scott tells us that when Lewis, the author of the Monk, was informed that the intro- We have often thought what a congenial task it duction of a black in one of his dramas, was consid- would be to a professed phrenologist, who should ered rather out of rule, he replied, in great disdain, be required to make a cast of Shakspeare's head, that he had introduced him for effect, and that if he judging of the organs from his writings. We had thought he could have produced a greater im- can easily conceive that it would be as nearly pression by making him blue, blue he should have perfect, as it is possible for the human head to been! Perhaps Shakspeare was governed by be. All the organs would appear, fully develsome such feeling as this, and we are disposed to oped, and in the most exact and admirable prothink that the necessity alluded to will account, in portions. Especially large must have been his a satisfactory manner, for much the larger num- ideality; that faculty which gives the poet his ber of incongruities and anomalies with which inspiration, and lifts him above the every-day he has been charged. scenes of life. Wonder would stand out in bold relief, for it is to this organ that we owe the terrible scenes in Macbeth, and the delightful ones in the Tempest. Music would have been found in its full proportions; for Shakspeare never has occasion to speak of "sweet sounds," that he does not show how keenly he relished them. Wit would have created almost a deformity, for what must have been the size of that organ, which gave life to Falstaff and Pistol? Combativeness reveals itself in the bold and emphatic language habitual with Macbeth; individuality, in the eminently dramatic taste, which led him to represent no two characters as exactly alike, among the hundreds whom he brought upon the stage. Destructiveness, that which gives edge to satire, stands revealed in every word spoken by Shylock, or Timon. It is, we suspect, in the perfect combination of all the qualities represented by the phrenological organs, in a very high state of excellence, that Shakspeare's great superiority over all poets, either before his day or since, will be found to exist. There have been single poets, in each particular department of excellence, who have equalled him, though none have ever excelled him in any; but we may look in vain for another, who combined them all as he did. Milton and Dante were bis equals in loftiness of thought; Dryden and Pope in keenness of satire; Homer in the power of animated description; the Greek tragedians in "horrible imaginings;" but Shakspeare has this advantage over all-that he was equal to the best of them, in the very points in which they most excelled. EN AVANT! When one year has, not long since, closed, and another commenced, we sometimes hear such gloomy forecastings of the future, as seem to indieate that those who make them dread to move forward in the course of time. What if one more year is fairly gone, and another commenced? What if the signs and the voices around already show the dawning of a new spring and the preface to a new summer? What if rude winter, the frosted link which bound this year to the last, is about to be broken, and we can begin to see, and hear, and feel, the distinctive seasons of a new year coming fairly over us to strew flowers, to pour full summer abroad, to perform all the successive acts of their drama in our life-theatre, to sing with their winds the wild and merry odes of Spring, the solemn marches of Summer, the calm requiems of Autumn, and then pass away, as all the seasons of other years have done, and leave us a twelve-month nearer to all the future fates of the human race? What of it? Lives there a soul in the broad land to-day, who would consent to march backwards 'instead of forwards, if the Power, to whom the chariot of Time belongs, should give a full consent? Or would there be one soul who would consent to pause just here amidst the cycles of the years, and agree that whatever is before him of good or of evil should continue to be as far before him forever as it now is? Probably not one. For all our elegies over departed days we would still press onward. We would see what lies lower down on the River of Time; not the past merely and tamely repeated, last gone by was, like its immediate predecessor, one of momentous events among the nations. Rome and Hungary, Garibaldi and Kossuth, have gloriously struggled to be free, and failing have fallen from the places of honour, but have fallen into the arms of the historic muse, to be by her crowned with the freshest laurels. And when, in future years, the day of the great social feast of free nations shall arrive, and all gates shall be opened, and viands for hungry souls shall be set out on thresholds free for all comers, and strangers In the knowledge of men, and of the springs of human action, it appears to us very certain, that he never had an equal. The position, says Johnson, in which he places a particular charac-but the fresh scenery on the shore. The year ter, may be impossible; yet we feel that were we in the situation described, we should speak and act precisely as he does. It is very certain that no English author is ever so frequently quoted, with reference to the common affairs of life. His sentences have, in a vast variety of instances, grown into proverbs. They have been drawn into common use, as household phrases pregnant with homely wisdom, until their very origin has been forgotten. There could be no stronger proof, that he speaks the language of nature; a language which all mankind can understand. known and unknown shall be led to hospitality, When he ascends above the level of common life, as in the latter part of Macbeth, there is a sublimity about his language which strikingly reminds us of the sacred volume, and we never close the book without saying, surely this man must have been inspired! and former foes shall converse in friendly words, and chains shall be knocked off from all captives, and all bickerings shall be composed, then as the men of ancient Rome ou such occasions bore about the images of Apollo, of Diana, of Hercules, of Neptune, and of Mercury, so there shall be suitable pulvinaria provided for Kossuth and Garibaldi, and they shall be borne about to feast rejoicing eyes in the same processions which bear images of the Wallaces, and the Tells, and the reasoning to think that heaven's gifts to man, of Dorias, and the Washingtons, of the world. Had able minds, were exhausted, that genius should there been magnetic wires on which to send from hereafter disappear from the earth as a lost Pleiad, heart to heart, across the Atlantic, impulses of or that the power of able minds to penetrate the invincible hope, we would have loved to waft secrets of nature has gone to its farthest bourne them such impulse in their dark days that are in the days past. Do we consent, that whatever past. And yet we cannot but feel, that in such revelations of beauty or of power science or gebosoms as theirs hope and courage are in them- nius shall hereafter make to man-whether it be selves indestructible, because the grounds of hope a new and grand science, or an image in marble are indestructible beneath the spanning arch of more beautiful than that of "the boy-god, the a righteous Heaven. The voice of hope, in such young dreamer by shady places, whose home is men and such nations, is not that of an arbitrary yet on earth, and to whom the oracle and the declainier to the winds, but of a prophet heaven-spheres are still unknown"—or new poetry which inspired, uttering that which is cut in letters of casts the shade on Shakspeare and Milton which adamant in the deep eternities of the natures of Shakspeare and Milton cast on Dante and Tassoearthly things, foretelling the necessary future or new perfections of human character, which asfrom the necessary past, and even when its present cend upon the scale to higher steps of purity, of pillars must fall, foretelling its future pillars, and wisdom, of magnanimity than the past has seenas Huss foretold Luther an hundred years before shall all remain forever unrevealed to us, that Luther, exclaiming with its expiring breath: we shall never see the morning-light of their "exoriare ex meis ossibus ultor!" The strug-rising, nor the splendour of their ascension? gling nations will yet struggle on. The fallen No-we would go onward. patriots will yet again arise, or others shall arise in their places. And noble deeds shall yet be done, and noble ends attained. Who is there who would not still march onward with time, to hail such men when they shall arise, to behold their deeds, their trials, and their triumphs, and to send them the cup of glory even from these distant lands? The coming year will show us things worthy of marching onward to see, even in the gardens, the fields and the forests. The shadow of Eden will again fall upon the gardens and the orchards, when the spring-time duly comes; and they will blow around; and their roses and their garlands will shew us colours which will awaken anew to their annual life the mystic memories of Eden There will also be new achievements of sci- which we all bring with us from the bosom of ence in the years to come, as there have been in the past ages. The forests will again dress the years which are past. Reason can prophe- themselves in the full flowing garments of their cy nothing more certainly, than that the progress green leaves; and begin again to feel with deep of scientific discovery, and of human mastery mysteries, and to look as if they had boasted of over elemental nature, is not yet at its stopping- the young Endymions who yet dream on their place. It must continue, unless the crust of the hill-tops; and to give forth in their low sounds earth be disorganized, or the laws of chemistry the echoes of the chase of the ancient Huntress repealed, or the stars stop in their courses. Divinity, yet sweeping with invisible retinue Things which now lie just ahead of the advan through their valleys. And men shall again walk eing foot of science, are with no more reason to be forth to labour or to meditate in the fields waving considered dreams and chimeras by us, than with the green and the yellow, the promise and things now just behind its step, ought to have the harvest of the bounty of God. We shall been considered visionary by those persons again enjoy those hours in the open air, in which to whom they lay just in advance. "Shoes of the soul makes the most rapid advances in its swiftness, seven league boots, and Fortunatus' career, and lives, amid the operations and the wishing caps, are banished even from the nurse-shows of nature, a life of hidden sympathies which ry; but an electro-magnetic steam fire-balloon, tell that it was made to spend its early years which will cleave the air like a thunderbolt, and here, and is fitted to be taught by scenery much go straight to its destination as the crow flies, is which it hungers and thirsts to know. an invention which many hope to see realized. And we might well wish to live on another before railways are quite worn to pieces."* year, even if it were only to see the manifold and Things have been overtaken in the course of hu- gorgeous pictures, which air and clouds and sunman progress which had been considered, and shine will draw in the sky above us-the flighty ought to have been considered, as wild before Madge-Wildfire face of an April day-the liltthey were realized, as this jovial fancy now seems. ing form and blooming face of May-the blazing But looking forward with the most sharply prac- sky and sun of the summer solstice-the distant tical eyes, it would be weak and almost guilty roar, and the dark, gathering terror, and the rush*Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1849. ing wind, and the crashing artillery of the storms of July evenings-the nights of August, when the unfallen Adam that the boon of love was first flash of the fire-fly almost presumes a rivalry given. There have been days in Paradise, and with that of the far-distant lightning-the calm such days again there must and will be, when serenity and the ruddy fruit of Autumn. Who the holiness of all heaven breathed around loving that lives on with any purity of soul can fail of hearts, and not one thought of disapprobation interest in the "rolling year?" And who could towards them entered the minds of the Pure Imwish to fly from it, either back to the bank of mortals who guarded their bowers. Such days Lethe, or away to the lands of Comus and of must be again. When man shall advance into Circe? the realms of the Immortals, he surely cannot leave behind that which was even here his closest kindred to the Immortals. There surely can lie between this world and that no river of Lethe, whose waters are to take from us that which most strongly assimilated us to the life on the other shore. Nor are these all. No. "Honoured be Woman! who sweetly discloses Then let us march onward!-bathing our souls anew with "origane and thyme," to rejoice in Without that light which comes from the soul the new birth of liberty on earth, to admire the of the God-appointed partner of man in this life, achievements of science, to walk in companionthe queen of his world of grace, the vision which ship with nature, to know, if God bless us so far, ever appears in the most individual and heart-the sterling worth of human affection, and to leap, felt of his dreams, and without the waving of all sandaled and ready, across to the pomps and her sceptre over both individual and social life, the mysteries of the world beyond. neither sculpture, nor poetry, nor the pomps of the summer clouds, could delight us. We should scarcely be capable of science itself. No arm could stay the re-flowing wave of barbarism, no boon could repay the loss even to the dreams of the muser in shady places. Spencer, the poet, wrote, as he says, "in the greener times of my youth," hymns in honour of earthly Beauty and earthly Love, which in after years, when sobered by age and calamities, he seems to have regretted; and he "resolved at least to amend, and by way of retracting, to reform them-making (instead of those two Hymns of earthly or natural love and beauty,) two others of heavenly and celestial." That doubt seems to have darkened his mind which so many others have felt, whether there is anything of eternal essence in the love of this life, whether the links, which bind us to other souls in this life, shall also bind us to them in the life to come. Shall we know and love there, as we know and love here? Or shall the light of that High World chase away, as an evil shadow, all that joy of life worthy of a better name than Romance, which we received from "the light of a dark eye in woman?" Many souls of the highest and purest have darkly mused and dreamed over that problem. And to many a soul, in default of a voice of solution speaking from eternity, the answer has burst up from its own rightly prophetic depths, assuring man of the guiltlessness, and of the consequent immortality, of even earthly love when it is pure. Had the woman Eve been created in her loveliness, and given to man only after he was expelled guilty from Paradise, there might have been such a doubt. But such was not the fact. It was to January, 1850. A LOVE CHAUNT. A sailor on the stream of time, I loosed my bark in life's young prime, A sailor on the stream of time, I daily dipped my oars in chime A sailor on the stream of life, A sailor on the stream of time, And all without a guide, While sailing on the stream of time, Another sailor on time's stream, Was all without a guide; Still sailing on the stream of time, B. |