THE CONFESSIONS OF WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE. CHAPTER IV. SHAKSPEARE'S CONSCIOUSNESS OF GENIUS, AND OF THE worth of POSTHUMOUS FAME. THE man of genius who becomes an actor sacrifices the future to the present. His share of the after gains of immortality is willingly surrendered for a larger share of the fame that is mortal; his claims upon the interest and applause of posterity are forfeited to the intense delight of feeling that, during life, his being has more completely projected itself into the very being of those with whom, or among whom, he lives. The goal he aims at is within sight; the persons he desires to please or to instruct are ranged on either side; and the applause he seeks is their living shout, and not the echo " that doth applaud again." With him the glad success attends the high endeavour, and enjoyment supersedes hope. His payments are prompt-his claims instantly attended to. He is out of the reach of the satire of Voltaire, against the poet who had addressed an Epistle to Posterity. His letters are addressed to his contemporaries, and are delivered according to their direction. And when I use the words "his payments are prompt," it will be understood that I confine them strictly to the sense metaphorical. The actor is in the position I have described, whether successful in a pecuniary way or not. The most substantial part of his enjoyment is independent of the amount of his salary. It is more than doubtful, indeed, whether Mr. Hazlitt's supposition is not the correct one, that if the most admired actor on the London stage could be brought to confession on this point," he would acknowledge that all the applause he had received from brilliant and overflowing audiences' was nothing to the light-headed intoxication of unlooked-for success in a barn. In town, actors are criticised; in country places, they are wondered at or hooted at." But, to the latter, it is truly to be added that 'tis of little consequence which, so that the interval is not too long between. Contrast is the secret of the intensest enjoyments. "Hurried from fierce extremes, by contrast made more fierce," it is rags and a flock-bed which give their splendour to a plume of feathers and a throne. It is obvious besides, on other grounds, that the playhouse must be equally a school of humanity to the spectator, and a scene of present glory to the actor, whether in a palace or a common outhouse. Still the mirror is held up to nature, and the actor has his reward. Nihil humani a me alienum puto-nothing can be indifferent to him that affects any portion of humanity. Still smiles or tears are spread from face to face, and hearts beat high in unison, and applauses rush forth—and the shout of living fame is in his ear! But is this a reasonable substitute for what is called a love of fame? Fame, we shall be told, is -as that great poet has described it, whose works are a perpetual invocation before its altar. Shall we commit such injustice as to confound, by any analogy, the immediate and personal with the ideal and abstracted? Fame, so considered, can never be the recompense of the living, but reserves itself for the dead. It is the soul of a man of genius surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men-unperishing and imperishable. It is the sound, which the stream of high thoughts carried down to future ages makes as it flows," deep, distant, murmuring ever more, like the waters of the mighty ocean."-This I may admit, in the highest sense of that word, yet attempt to show, by his confessions, that in the case of Shakspeare the two feelings became strangely mingled, and acted and reacted on each other. Let us come to the question, then, whether Shakspeare, in the consciousness of his wonderful genius, built at all upon the hope of an immortal fame ? The question has been asked before, and very variously answered, and none have thought of appealing to the poet himself, except to those parts of his writings where his identity is sought in vain. It has been said, indeed, that there is not the slightest trace of any such feeling in all his writings-that no appearance is betrayed of anxiety for their fate, or of a desire to perfect them, or make them worthy of that immortality to which they were destined. And this indifference is accounted for from the very circumstance that Shakspeare was almost entirely a man of genius, or that in him this faculty bore sway over every other; that he was either not intimately conversant with the productions of the great writers who had gone before him, or at least was not indebted to them; that he revelled exclusively in the world of observation and of fancy; and that perhaps his mind was of too prolific and active a kind to dwell with intense and continued interest on the images of beauty or of grandeur presented to it by the genius of others. For, according to the eminent writer who has argued thus," the love of fame is a species of emulation; or, in other words, the love of admiration is in proportion to the admiration with which the works of the highest genius have inspired us, to the delight we have received from their habitual contemplation, and to our participation in the general enthusiasm with which they have been regarded by mankind." This may be, in part, very true, and yet lead to a false deduction. For we think that a writer may have all the intense consciousness of his own genius, and the love of fame as of its natural inheritance necessarily joined to it, without its being also necessary that the immortality previously won by others should be ever present to his mind, as it were the reward, the object, and the animating spring of his efforts. The "love of emulation" in a poet may be awakened, as I believe, not by the direct and gross admiration of, and desire of the homage won by, others; but it may in itself be the indirect and most pure homage which he pays to, and with which he would emulate, those external forms of truth and everlasting beauty, which he feels reflected in his own mind. The Greek poets illustrate this. In them this feeling of fame is intense. I may be contradicted here by the question, is there not the least possible expression of the desire of posthumous fame in their writings? True, but there is, on the other hand, the strongest feeling that they had within themselves the power of conferring fame on others: and this includes the consciousness, and the love, of their own fame, existing before they had it in their power to measure the long trail of glory they were destined to leave behind them, by any straining through the gloom of the ignorance and barbarism that had gone before. I could instance, indeed, some passages from the very earliest writings of Greece, in which the love of fame is expressed with a more immediate and personal reference, but yet most touchingly apart from any vanity of desire. What can possibly be more simple and deeply affecting than the noble and beautiful lines which Thucydides quotes in the third book of his history, in illustration of the usages of Delos? They are immediately opposed to Mr. Hazlitt's inference, that the love of fame must necessarily be associated with the knowledge of its existence; nor yet do they contradict the more ideal and abstracted definition of the sources of the passion, which I have preferred to attribute, as a more general rule, to the great Greek authors. They appear to me to occupy precisely that middle ground between the personal and present, the ideal and future, which will assist us in determining the question with reference to Shakspeare. They moderate the sublimity of fame by conceiving it possible during life; they humanize it, by associating with it emotions of thankfulness and gratitude; they test it, in a word, by a principle of sympathy with the feelings of others, which, personal as it is, is yet capable of the sublimest exaltation. They occur in the Homeric hymn to Apollo :— ἀλλ ̓ ἄγεθ', ἱλήκοι μὲν ̓Απόλλων Αρτέμιδι ξὺν, The charm of these lines* is extreme; and if the unwelcome researches of the commentators since the Greek historian are indeed to be received †, we should be glad that they could carry them further, and produce more productions of this Cynæthus of Chios, who writes with such truly Homeric simplicity. It was reserved for the Romans to common-place the love of fame, by indulging it purely in the vainest sense of their own existence, and with the commonest emulation of the glory of the Greeks. Here, indeed, as in every other thing, though they polished their own language and pitched their instruments with admirable skill, they could only poorly imitate the spirit of the more illustrious nation. It is with eloquent and characteristic truth that Mr. Walter Savage Landor accuses them of having always glared over their thin and We have supplied the last from the hymn itself; Thucydides does not quote it. † Ην δὲ ὁ Κύναιθος Χῖος ὅς καὶ τῶν ἐπιγραφομένων Ομήρου ποιημάτων τὸν εἰς ̓Απόλλωνα γεγραμμένον ὕμνον λέγεται πεποιηκέναι. Scholiast to Pindar. I cannot resist the opportunity which is afforded me by the mention of this admired name in connexion with the subject of Greek and Roman letters, to quote a passage in illustration of this superiority of the Greeks, from one of his " Imaginary Conversations," hitherto, I believe, privately circulated. I have been favoured with a sight of it by my friend Mr. Leigh Hunt, who sympathizes with Mr. Landor, Sept.-VOL. XLV. NO. CLXXVII. E flimsy gaberdines with "bright feathers from the wide-spread downs of Ionia and the richly-cultivated rocks of Attica." I may quit this part of the subject with a passage I have had called to my recollection from Hesiod, who, in lamenting its hard achievement and uncertain continuance, Φημη γαρ τε κακη πέλεται· κουφη μεν αειραι 'Ρεῖα μαλ', αργαλέη δε φέρειν, recognizes emphatically the existence of a desire for fame. It is clear, then, that the reasons which have been advanced in explanation of Shakspeare's having entertained no such feeling in his writings, fail in this analogy. It would have been better to have found out exactly the sentiments he entertained on the point, than to have speculated with endless ingenuity. Shakspeare confesses them distinctly more than once in the course of his sonnets. His feelings are extremely curious and interesting, and can be only perhaps justly appreciated by keeping in view what I have said respecting the tendencies of the personal triumphs of actors, and the exalted and ideal character of a true poet's worship of fame. But I reserve any further remark until because he enjoys, with that truly fine writer, the rare advantage of being, on matters of this sort, himself a Greek-that is, of entertaining them in a truly Greek spirit. Panteius and Polybius are speaking with Scipio; Panetius describes the condition of his country: "Our ancient institutions in part exist: we lost the rest when we lost the simplicity of our forefathers. Let it be our glory that we have resisted the most populous and wealthy nations, and that, having been conquered, we have been conquered by the most virtuous; that every one of our cities hath produced a greater number of illustrious men than all the remainder of the earth around us; that no man can anywhere enter his hall or portico, and see the countenances of his ancestors from their marble columels, without a commemorative and grateful sense of obligation to us; that neither his solemn feasts nor his cultivated fields are silent on it; that not the lamp which shows him the glad faces of his children, and prolongs his studies, and watches by his rest; that not the ceremonies whereby he hopes to avert the vengeance of the gods, nor the tenderer ones whereon are founded the affinities of domestic life, nor finally those which lead toward another, would have existed in his country, if Greece had not conveyed them. Bethink thee, Scipio, how little hath been done by any other nation to promote the moral dignity, or enlarge the social pleasures, of the human race. What parties ever met, in their most populous cities, for the enjoyment of liberal and speculative conversation? What Alcibiades, elated with war and glory, turned his youthful mind from general admiration, and from the cheers and caresses of coeval friends, to strengthen and purify it under the cold reproofs of the aged? What Aspasia led Philosophy to smile on Love, or taught Love to reverence Philosophy? These, as thou knowest, are not the safest guides for either sex to follow; yet in these were united the gravity and the graces of wisdom, never seen, never imagined, out of Athens. "I would not offend thee by comparing the genius of the Roman people with ours: the offence is removable, and in part removed already, by thy hand. The little of sound learning, the little of pure wit, that hath appeared in Rome from her foundation, hath been concentrated under thy roof; one tile would cover it. Have we not walked together, O Scipio! by starlight, on the shores of Surrentum and Baiæ, of Ischia and Caprea, and hath it not occurred to thee that the heavens themselves, both what we see of them and what lieth above our vision, are peopled with our heroes and heroines? The ocean, that roars so heavily in the ears of other men, hath for us its tuneful shells, its placid nymphs, and its beneficent ruler. The trees of the forest, the flowers, the plants, are passed indiscriminately elsewhere; they waken and warm our affections; they mingle with the objects of our worship; they breathe the spirit of our ancestors; they lived in our form; they spoke in our language; they suffered as our daughters may suffer; the deities revisit them with pity; and some (we think) dwell among them." I shall have placed the reader in distinct possession of the passages alluded to. Nothing can exceed the impressiveness with which he conveys at all times a consciousness of his own genius. On this score he has neither doubt nor fear. In one of those delicious effusions to his young friend which are to be found in the sonnets (I have already remarked upon them), and which in their exquisite sensibility and touching abandonment of manner always remind me of Catullus, (as indeed they bear a still more striking likeness to much of the poetry of that beautiful writer in the reception they have hitherto received, in the unaccountable construction unaccountable both in feeling and scholarship—which scholars have put upon them ;) he asks— "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate : Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and at the close exclaims with proud but unselfish consciousness- So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So in the following sonnet. † Again, with no idle vanity, but in the confidence of surpassing genius "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." The same feeling is expressed in the sixtieth, the sixty-third, the sixty-fifth, and other sonnets.§ In none of these, however, is the slightest personal association mingled with the consciousness of genius. When he suffers the idea of himself to intrude, it is by subduing within the range of a more touching unselfishness the feeling of the Homeric hymn I have quoted, where the poor blind poet desires to be remembered by the virgins of Delos "When that fell arrest Without all bail shall carry me away, My life hath in this line some interest, Which for memorial still with thee shall stay."|| This is merely the satisfaction of a private emotion. And so where he writes what he calls some poor rude lines," simply that "though they be outstripped by every pen," they should still be reserved" for my love, not for their rhyme." It is expressed variously, but always with the same submissive feeling. In the eighty-first sonnet he explicitly excepts the world from any share in these hopes of his sympathy and tenderness. Here is the detailed expression of his sentiments on the subject fof public fame. It is in this sonnet he has unburdened himself so clearly on that subject, that his words cannot be misunderstood. I shall lay them before the reader entire. *Sonnet 18. † Sonnet 19. § Sonnets 100, 101, 107. &c. &c. || Sonnet 74. Sonnet 55. Sonnet 32. |