So I commend me from our house in grief; My woes are tedious, though my words are brief." Again the action languishes, and again Lucrece surrenders herself to her grief. The "Skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy" is one of the most elaborate passages of the poem, essentially cast in an undramatic mould. But this is but a prelude to the catastrophe, where, if we mistake not, a strength of passion is put forth which is worthy him who drew the terrible agonies of Lear: "Here with a sigh, as if her heart would break, She throws forth Tarquin's name: 'He, he,' she says, Untimely breathings, sick and short assays, She utters this: 'He, he, fair lords, 't is he, That guides this hand to give this wound to me."" Malone, in his concluding remarks upon the Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, says: "We should do Shakspeare injustice were we to try them by a comparison with more modern and polished productions, or with our present idea of poetical excellence." This was written in the year 1780-the period which rejoiced in the "polished productions" of Hayley and Miss Seward, and founded its "idea of poetical excellence" on some standard which, secure in its conventional forms, might depart as far as possible from simplicity and nature, to give us words without thought, arranged in verses without music. It would be injustice indeed to Shakspere to try the Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, by such a standard of "poetical excellence." But we have outlived that period. By way of apology for Shakspere, Malone adds, "that few authors rise much above the age in which they live." He further says, "the poems of Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, whatever opinion may be now entertained of them, were certainly much admired in Shakspeare's lifetime." This is consolatory. In Shakspere's lifetime there were a few men that the world has since thought somewhat qualified to establish an "idea of poetical excellence"-Spenser, Drayton, Jonson, Fletcher, Chapman, for example. These were not much valued in Malone's golden age of "more modern and polished productions;"-but let that pass. We are coming back to the opinions of this obsolete school; and we venture to think the majority of readers now will not require us to make an apology for Shakspere's poems. [From Dowden's “ Shakspere.” *] The Venus and Adonis is styled by its author, in the dedication to the Earl of Southampton, "the first heir of my invention." Gervinus believes that the poem may have been written before the poet left Stratford. Although possibly separated by a considerable interval from its companion. poem, The Rape of Lucrece (1594), the two may be regarded as essentially one in kind. The specialty of these poems as portions of Shakspere's art has perhaps not been sufficiently observed. † Each is an artistic study; and they form, as has been just observed, companion studies-one of female lust and boyish coldness, the other of male lust and womanly chastity. Coleridge noticed "the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst ;" but it can hardly be admitted that this aloofness of the poet's own feelings proceeds from a dramatic abandonment of self. The subjects of these two poems did not call and choose their poet; they did not possess him and compel him to render them into art. Rather the poet expressly made choice of the subjects, and deliberately set himself down before each to accomplish an exhaustive study. of it. Shakspere: a Critical Study of his Mind and Art, by Edward Dow den; Harper's ed. p. 43 fol. + Coleridge touches upon the fact, and it is noted by Lloyd. If the Venus and Adonis sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim be by Shakspere, it would seem that he had been trying various poetical exercises on this theme. And for a young writer of the Renascence, the subject of Shakspere's earliest poem was a splendid one-as voluptuous and unspiritual as that of a classical picture of Titian. It included. two figures containing inexhaustible pasture for the fleshly eye, and delicacies and dainties for the sensuous imagination of the Renascence-the enamoured Queen of Beauty, and the beautiful, disdainful boy. It afforded occasion for endless exercises and variations on the themes Beauty, Lust, and Death. In holding the subject before his imagination, Shakspere is perfectly cool and collected. He has made choice of the subject, and he is interested in doing his duty by it in the most thorough way a young poet can; but he remains unimpassioned-intent wholly upon getting down the right colours and lines upon his canvas. Observe his determination to put in accurately the details of each object; to omit nothing. Poor Wat, the hare, is described in a dozen stanzas. Another series of stanzas describes the stallion— all his points are enumerated : "Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long, This passage of poetry has been admired; but is it poetry or a paragraph from an advertisement of a horse-sale? It is part of Shakspere's study of an animal, and he does his work thoroughly. In like manner, he does not shrink from faithfully putting down each one of the amorous provocations and urgencies of Venus. The complete series of manœuvres must be detailed. In Lucrece the action is delayed and delayed, that every minute particular may be described, every minor incident recorded. In the newness of her suffering and shame, Lu crece finds time for an elaborate tirade appropriate to the theme "Night," another to that of "Time," another to that of "Opportunity." Each topic is exhausted. Then, studiously, a new incident is introduced, and its significance for the emotions is drained to the last drop in a new tirade. We nowhere else discover Shakspere so evidently engaged upon his work. Afterwards he puts a stress upon his verses to compel them to contain the hidden wealth of his thought and imagination. Here he displays at large such wealth as he possesses; he will have none of it half seen. The descriptions and declamations are undramatic, but they show us the materials laid out in detail from which dramatic poetry originates. Having drawn so carefully from models, the time comes when he can trust himself to draw from memory, and he possesses marvellous freedom of hand, because his previous studies have been so laborious. It was the same hand that drew the stallion in Venus and Adonis which afterwards drew with infallible touch, as though they were alive, the dogs of Theseus: "My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn, In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly."* * The comparison of these two passages is from Hazlitt, whose unfavourable criticism of Shakspere's poems expresses well one side of the truth. "The two poems of Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject-not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and, as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shows the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is laboured, uphill work. The poet is perpetually sin When these poems were written, Shakspere was cautiously feeling his way. Large, slow-growing natures, gifted with a sense of concrete fact and with humour, ordinarily possess no great self-confidence in youth. An idealist, like Milton, may resolve in early manhood that he will achieve a great epic poem, and in old age may turn into fact the ideas of his youth. An idealist, like Marlowe, may begin his career with a splendid youthful audacity, a stupendous Tamburlaine. A man of the kind to which Shakspere belonged, although very resolute, and determined, if possible, to succeed, requires the evidence of objective facts to give him self-confidence. His special virtue lies in a peculiarly pregnant and rich relation with the actual world, and such relation commonly establishes itself by a gradual process. Accordingly, instead of flinging abroad into the world while still a stripling some unprecedented creation, as Marlowe did, or as Victor Hugo did, and securing thereby the position of a leader of an insurgent school, Shakspere began, if not timidly, at least cautiously and tentatively. He undertakes work of any and every description, and tries and tests himself upon all. He is therefore a valued person in his theatrical company, ready to turn his hand to anything helpful— gling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them as if his mastery over them were doubted. . . . A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it. . . . There is, besides, a strange attempt to substitute the ianguage of painting for that of poetry, to make us see their feelings in the faces of the persons."-Characters of Shakspere's Plays (ed. 1818), pp. 348, 349. Coleridge's much more favor. able criticism will be found in Biographia Literaria (ed. 1847), vol. ii. ch. ii. The peculiarity of the poems last noticed in the extract from Hazlitt is ingeniously accounted for by Coleridge. "The great instinct which impelled the poet to the drama was secretly working in him, prompting him... to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look, and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players" (pp. 18, 19). |