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and brazen presence of mind with which he glosses over his vices. Humour involves a surprise of mood as wit involves a surprise of words and Falstaff's way of taking things is certainly very different from what the ordinary way of the world leads us to expect. Sir John, too, is a wit as well as a besotted voluptuary and a willing butt for the wit of others. His ridicule of Bardolph's nose is incomparable. Down in Gloucestershire we see him watching Shallow and Slender with observant eye, and contemptuously noting their peculiarities with a view to future capital. "I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms, or two actions, and a' shall laugh without intervallums."

V. THE INTER-ACTION OF HIS CHARACTERS.

A writer may have the power of expressing many varieties of passion, may have a profound sense of beauty, a quick sense of the ludicrous, and a perfect knowledge of character, and yet fail in the dramatist's most essential faculty—the power of representing one character in active influence upon another. The dramatist has to deal not with still life or with tranquil exposition: he must bring impassioned men and women face to face, and show how their words operate upon one another to comfort, to cajole, to convince, to soothe, and to inflame. The problem ever before the mind of the dramatist is, in mathematical language, to estimate the effect of a given expression on a given character in a given state of feeling. Then this effect reacts, and the reaction reacts, and other influences come in and join in the complicated process of action and reaction, so that the ability to hold your shifting data unconfused, to solve problem after problem with unerring judgment, and to keep all your results within the just limits of dramatic effect, is one of the rarest of human gifts. This is dramatic genius. Shakespeare's swiftness of intellect, fine emotional dis

crimination, and unfailing self-command, were tasked to the utmost in the representation of this reciprocal action. In his three greatest triumphs in the exhibition of what Bacon calls "working" a man—the instigation of Othello's jealousy by Iago ("Othello," iii. 3), the puffing up of Ajax's pride by Ulysses ("Troilus and Cressida," ii. 3), and the wooing of Anne by Richard III. ("Richard III.," i. 2) -the influence can hardly be said to be reciprocal: the agent stands with immovable self-possession, only keeping himself on the alert to follow up with all his dexterity the effect produced by each stroke. A similar remark may be made concerning the half-wilful torture of Juliet by her Nurse ("Romeo and Juliet," iii. 2), or the gradual agitation of Posthumus by the lies of the villain Iachimo ("Cymbeline," ii. 4), or the annoyance and final discomfiture of the Chief-Justice by the imperturbable Falstaff (" 2 Henry IV." i. 2). So, too, in the swaying of the passions of the "mutable rank-scented" Roman mob in "Coriolanus" and "Julius Cæsar," there is not much reaction: the dramatist has set himself to represent the fluctuations of an excitable crowd under the power of adroit oratory, the orator himself in each case persevering steadily in his objects. Shakespeare did not shrink from the infinitely more difficult task of making both parties to a dialogue exert a powerful influence on each other. Of this there are memorable examples in the opening acts of " Macbeth," and in several scenes of "Coriolanus" and "Julius Cæsar." The quarrel between Brutus and Cassius ("Julius Cæsar," iv. 3), and the interview of Coriolanus with his mother, his wife, and his son ("Coriolanus," v. 3), are managed with consummate knowledge of the heart, and unerring grasp of imagination upon its slightest and most shifting fluctuations. One would not venture to say that Shakespeare's power of identifying himself with his characters, and wonderful swiftness in passing from one personality to another, increased after the time when he composed "Richard III.," and delineated the scenes between Margaret and the objects of her hatred: but certainly he increased in the masterly ease of his transi

But

tions. The greatest monument of his dramatic subtlety is the tragedy of "Antony and Cleopatra." With all its noble bursts of passion and occasional splendour of description, this play has not perhaps the massive breadth of feeling and overpowering interest of the four great tragedies, "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Lear," and "Othello;" but it is greater even than "Macbeth" and "Othello" in the range of its mastery over the fluctuations of profound passion it is the greatest of Shakespeare's plays in the dramatist's greatest faculty. The conflict of motives in "Hamlet" is an achievement of genius that must always be regarded with wonder and reverence; but, to my mind, "Antony and Cleopatra" is the dramatist's masterpiece. One may have less interest in the final end of the subtle changes wrought in the hero and heroine: but in the pursuit and certain grasp of those changes, Shakespeare's dramatic genius appears at its supreme height.

Schlegel quotes with approbation a saying of Lessing's regarding Shakespeare's exhibition of the gradual progress of passion from its first origin. "He gives," says Lessing, "a living picture of all the slight and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which it makes every other passion subservient to itself, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions." This incautious hyperbole tends to confuse the boundaries between the drama and the novel or epic of manners. The remark is more applicable to the novels of George Eliot, or to the "Troilus and Cressida" of Chaucer, than to the plays of Shakespeare. The slight and stealthy growth of passion is wholly unsuited for the stage. In the drama, life is condensed and concentrated; the pulses of life and the energies of growth are quickened. Passions spring up with more than tropical rapidity. The mutual love of Romeo and Juliet, the misanthropy of Timon, the ambition of Macbeth, Hamlet's thirst for revenge, Lear's fatal hatred of Cordelia, Othello's jealousy-are all passions of sudden growth. Iago's artifices are subtle but swift and instantaneously

effectual: Othello's pang at his first stab (iii. 3, 35) is not less sharp than the heart's wound of young Romeo by the first shaft from Juliet's eyes. The dramatist is very well aware that the first suggestion commonly works more slowly he makes Iago say—

:

"Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons,
Which at the first are scarce found to distaste,

But with a little act upon the blood

Burn like the mines of sulphur."

But his poison must work swiftly; inflammatory insinuations must be accumulated and compressed so as to force the passion at once into a blaze: before an hour is over, Iago exclaims in agony―

"Not poppy, nor mandragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday."

Hamlet's action is tempered by subsequent reflections, but his desire for revenge attains its utmost vehemence at the first supernatural solicitation: he at once passionately vows to wipe from his memory every record but the ghost's commandment. Macbeth does not proceed instantly to murder Duncan; but the confirmation of part of the promise of the witches immediately raises the terrible suggestion

"Whose horrid image doth unfix his hair

And make his seated heart knock at his ribs,
Against the use of nature."

The great stages of the growth of passion are indicated in Shakespeare's dramas with all the power of his genius, but the development proceeds with fiery vehemence. Slight and stealthy development belongs to the domain of the novelist.

VI. THE TRANQUILLISING CLOSE OF HIS TRAgedies.

I have already drawn attention (p. 380) to the presence of Destiny or Fortune as an impelling or thwarting influ

ence in Shakespeare's dramas. In all his tragedies the influence of this mighty World-power on the concerns of men is more or less suggested. Romeo takes refuge in death from its persecutions: "O, here," he cries at the tomb of Juliet

"O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest,

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh."

Before the battle of Philippi, when even Cassius begins partly to credit things that do presage, Brutus, who in the end prefers leaping into the pit to tarrying till he is pushed, is resolute to hold out while any hope remains :—

"Arming himself with patience

To stay the providence of some high powers
That govern us below."

Macbeth at first is disposed to commit himself to the control of Chance :

"If Chance will have me king, why Chance may crown me, Without my stir.”

And his wife sees the hand of Fate in the half-fulfilled predictions of the witches and the entrance of Duncan under her battlements. The bastard Edmund ridicules the excellent foppery of the world in making guilty of our disasters the sun, moon, and stars; but later in the play old Kent can find no other satisfactory way of accounting for the cruelty of Goneril and Regan, and the kindness of Cordelia :

"It is the stars,

The stars above us, govern our conditions."

Othello exclaims of the supposed treachery of Desde

mona :

"'Tis destiny unshunnable as death."

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