Comick Wit degenerating into clenches [i.e. puns], his Serious Swelling into Bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit Subject for his Wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the Poets,

"Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi
[As towers the cypress o'er the pliant shrub].

These words may sound to us at first rather patronising; in a degree they are, for Dryden's own ways, dramatic and other, were not Shakspeare's. But Dryden could hardly help getting to the root of the matter somehow. For, like the Ben Jonson of forty years earlier, he was the first critic of his day. And when he says that Shakspeare is always great when some great occasion is presented to him, and that he rose just in proportion as he had a "fit subject for his wit,” he is indeed and in truth "touching the thing with the needle's point." He proclaims the real secret of Shakspeare's growth in genius, as in art; he proclaims not less his growth as a wise and good man; and in this criticism is comprised also the explanation of Shakspeare's weakness, as of his strength. It only needs guarding (in my judgment) by this addition, that the fit subjects came to him, not wholly by chance, but that they more and more attracted him as he himself grew in moral seriousness. If a genius had it in him to rise to a great theme, how could

he help rising to such as Hamlet, Macbeth, or that strange but most profound drama-technically a comedy, but in its colouring throughout tragic— Measure for Measure. Suffering, and the transfiguration of all noble suffering into victory; goodness defeated but never humiliated; the littleness of man always made to bring into light, not shadow, the real greatness of man-it is in the " strength of that meat" that we rise up fortified from the study of these mighty works.

THE THREE STAGES OF SHAK

SPEARE'S ART

III

AUTUMN

(1605-1612)

THE veil that seems to hang over the personality of Shakspeare, a veil that we have so often mourned and sought in vain to pierce, is not wholly due to the scantiness of our information from without, to the absence of any contemporary accounts of him and his fortunes (although mention of him is singularly abundant), and to the lack of any "Boswell" in any shape whatever. It is due also obviously to the fact that (putting on one side a few narrative and lyric poems) he was a dramatist, and as such wrote, never in his own person but always as some one else. We are apt to forget that in the instance of so many dear and loved authors of our country we know them from themselves, quite as much as

we know them from their Boswells. We know Pope and Swift from their writings. They admit us to their tastes, their fancies, their prejudices, their philosophy, their weaknesses. We know them there, and the stories of Martha Blount or Stella hardly add to our vital knowledge of them. For it is not "chatter" about these that establishes our completer view of the man. Even the novelist, who like his brother dramatist is always presenting his characters and not himself to our criticism, now and again relapses into himself, and by his own criticism upon the creations of his fancy permits us to form a really valuable judgment of himself, his ideals and standards, his likes and dislikes. But the dramatist can never step apart from the characters he draws to survey them and tell us what he thinks. If a character passes under such review, it can only be at the hands of yet another character (not the author) in the same drama.

And so it comes about that, of all our supreme writers, Shakspeare is in a way the most a stranger to us. Even if we feel convinced in our own minds from such-and-such a character or situation that Shakspeare must have thought soand-so; that his religion, his philosophy of life, his political bias, must have lain in this or that direction, the answer is ever at hand: “Oh, not at all, it is his character who speaks, not the man Shakspeare; his treatment of men and things is in accordance with the exigencies of

the particular fable that he treats. He throws himself, marvel of protean change that he was, into any form, into any mood."

I hope I have thus far shown, to those who have honoured me by their presence here, that I am not in these lectures broaching any new theory, or supporting any old one, as to how we can evolve Shakspeare out of his works. I have absolutely no sympathy with those who would point to this passage, or to that play, and cry, "Here, or here, is the veritable Shakspeare." My method, so far as it can be called one, is (I hope) a different and a safer one-to try to add to our knowledge of the poet by noticing changes in those respects that are independent of the "characterisation" in the plays-the writer's own changes in style, in subject, and lastly in tone, which is more particularly our present topic. And this can only be done by considering the aspect of groups of plays taken together. We have dwelt upon Shakspeare's relations to various fashions of his day-how he began by being under their dominion, and then gradually subjected them to himself, as he advanced in firmness of step and clearness of purpose. And if we are justified in any inferences we have drawn, we are not, I think, without just a new gleam of light upon the nature and character of the writer, though we have not referred to any one saying of his, or moral apophthegm, as certainly conveying his Own