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MR. WHITE ON SHAKESPEARE AND SHERIDAN.

MR. RICHARD GRANT WHITE has lately finished two critical studies, which illustrate well two offices of the critic not often united in one person. He has reedited Shakespeare, with special reference to securing a sound text, and he has furnished an introduction to an edition of Sheridan, in which he gathers into a comprehensive statement the judgments which are to be pronounced upon that author. Both works imply the notion of discrimination, which is at the basis of criticism: but in one case the discrimination is exercised upon words and is justified by minute learning; in the other it is applied to works and character, and is excellent according to the degree of insight and justice in the judge.

It should not be inferred that insight is of no account in an editor of the text of Shakespeare, or fine scholarship unnecessary in an estimate of Sheridan, but in the equipment of a critic it is rare to find the analytic and the gener alizing powers equally well poised. The combination of the two adds to the strength of each. A life-time of devotion to a linguistic study of Shakespeare may qualify one to be a good judge of the evidence brought before him when he is to determine a disputed passage, but it will not necessarily give him that sudden clearness of vision by which the true reading flashes upon him with an invincible self-assertion. So a sympathetic power in the estimate of character and rank in literature is often made less conclusive by the lack of definite and accurate knowledge.

In undertaking a new Shakespeare Mr. White has shown the good sense

1 Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems. The text newly edited, with glossarial, historical, and explanatory notes, by RICHARD GRANT WHITE. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1883.

which is an excellent substitute for genius, if indeed it may not be confounded with it, in divining the needs of the great body of readers of Shakespeare. If anybody should claim to know what these want, Mr. White might speak with just confidence, for he has been identified with Shakespearean criticism ever since he came before the public as a man of letters, even though the greater volume of his published work has been in other subjects. So when he announces in his preface the plan of his edition, our sense of its aptness is confirmed by our confidence in his experience.

"This edition," he says, "of the works of Shakespeare has been prepared with a single eye to the wants of his readers. Its purpose is not to furnish material for critical study either of the Elizabethan dramatists or of the English language. It seeks rather to enable the reader of general intelligence to understand, and therefore to enjoy, what Shakespeare wrote as nearly as possible in the very way in which he would have understood it and enjoyed it if he had lived in London in the reign of Elizabeth. That done, as well as the editor was able to do it under the limiting conditions of his work, he has regarded his task as ended."

With this intention, Mr. White has given scrupulous care to the accuracy and intelligibility of the text, and after that has appended at the foot of the page the briefest possible explanation of obscure words and phrases, not hesitating to repeat the explanation when the obscurity is repeated; for he considers, sensibly enough, that no one is going to read his Shakespeare through in course,

2 The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. With an introduction by RICHARD GRANT WHITE. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1883.

and remember, moreover, every note of explanation against future need. "What the reader of Shakespeare," he adds, "the reader of common sense, common intelligence, common information, and common capacity of poetical thought (and to all others Shakespeare or any other great poet is and must ever remain an oracle uttered in an unknown tongue), what such a reader needs, and what, from observation, I am persuaded that he wishes, is to feel well assured that he has before him what Shakespeare wrote, as nearly as that may be ascertained, and to have the language and the construction of this text explained wherever the one is obsolete or the other obscure."

The interesting preface in which he lays down the several propositions of his work contains some suggestive illustrations of the special criticism which he has applied to the text, taken at hap-hazard. They might have been extended indefinitely, but they are enough to show the facility with which Mr. White handles his weapons of criticism. The truth is that Shakespearean criticism, at its best, is partly learning and partly worldly wisdom. It is not closet scholarship which is most effective, especially not that which has been confined to Shakespeare and cognate subjects, but a training in the schools which has been broadened by a more generous interest in affairs. Mr. White is all the better critic of Shakespeare for having written a Yankee's Letters to the London Spectator, and England Without and Within.

There is a contemptuous tone about his references to drier schools of criticism which is rather superfluous. The pedants awaken no enthusiasm, and readers of Shakespeare scarcely need to be set against them, while the painstaking if unimaginative commentators have other uses than to serve as butts for Mr. White's wit. His impatience carries him too far. It suits him to say that "

com

mentators at the best are rarely better than unnecessary nuisances," but an ingenious defense is requisite to excuse what follows: "They are so in this present case when they presume to do all the reader's thinking and appreciating for him, and thus deprive him of the highest pleasures and richest benefits that come of reading Shakespeare; and chiefly when in doing this they grope and fumble for a profound moral purpose in those plays, which is really to insist upon such a purpose in the Italian novelli and English chronicles which, always with the least possible trouble to himself, Shakespeare put into an actable shape." We are very ready to prefer Mr. White's edition, with its freedom from comment and its most reasonable presentation of the work of the great dramatist; but he must not ask us to believe in a Shakespeare who merely dramatized, with the dramatized, with the least possible trouble to himself, for stage purposes, the material which he found at hand. If he means that Shakespeare did not write his plays in order to reform his countrymen and elevate the stage, we have no objec tion to agreeing with him; but if he means that the difference between the plays and the chronicles is only a matter of literary arrangement, he fails to account for the oblivion of the chronicles and novelli, and the immortality of the plays. It is precisely the moral content of the plays which constitutes the breath of life inspired by the poet. Otherwise they too would long ago have been

carcasses.

Something of this reactionary regard of Shakespeare touches Mr. White's work elsewhere. He gives an admirably succinct and clear narative of the facts of Shakespeare's life as they have come out from the crucible of historical criticism. He dismisses conjectures, and gives himself no trouble about internal evidences. There is no objection to that view. We are very glad to get so scientific a résumé of Shakespearean

biography. But Mr. White is less scientific when he proceeds to draw inferences affecting Shakespeare's character from this imperfect array of facts. Because, in the nature of things, more written evidence is found of his monetary transactions than of his relations with parents, wife, children, and friends, Mr. White wishes us to regard Shakespeare as a skinflint. We object to any verdict drawn from such insufficient testimony; and if we rule out his plays and poems when we are trying to construct a Shakespeare, the paucity of the material left forbids us to make anything better than a clay figure, which crumbles at the touch, without the aid of any such thrusts as Mr. White seems disposed to give. In our judgment Mr. White has been driven into a somewhat violent temper respecting Shakespeare's personality by the illogical and presumptuous attitude of other critics.

How reasonable and just he can be in a general survey of poor human nature appears in the portrait which he has drawn of Sheridan. The introduction which he prefixes to Sheridan's dramatic works is a model of its kind. Without waste of words, yet with an agreeable fluency, he tells in forty pages all that the reader needs to know about Sheridan and his literary career, and places the two dramas on which Sheridan's fame rests in their proper rank. There is a fine satisfaction in reading so complete a piece of literary workmanship. Mr. White's familiarity with his subject has not made him ambitious to find out something new, or say something before unsaid; but he has written out of a full mind, with a just sense of what an introduction should be, as distinct from a critical review or a biographical article in an encyclopædia.

Perhaps it was a reluctance to see great human nature accused of meanness which made us a little indignant at Mr. White's treatment of Shakespeare. Is it a cheerful alacrity to admit the

community of wit and wickedness which commends to us the easy grace with which Mr. White draws the lines in the portrait of the scampish Sheridan? He sketches the youthful follies of his hero with a quick sense of their prophetic value, and draws the last scene of his life with a power which is not marred by too much pity.

"From Harrow," he says of the young Sheridan, "he went to Bristol for a short time; and there his soul lusted for a pair of boots, articles of dress which in those days were expensive. He had neither money nor credit; but he resolved to get the boots. He therefore ordered from two boot-makers two pairs of the same pattern, which were to be delivered at different hours on the day of his departure. When the first pair was delivered he declared that the heel of one of them hurt him, and requested the boot-maker to stretch it and return it the next morning. The man departed, leaving the other boot with Sheridan. When the second pair appeared, the same fault was found with the boot for the opposite foot, and the same instructions were given and acquiesced in as a matter of course; and the ingenious young Jeremy Diddler, with a pair of boots thus obtained, mounted his horse and rode out of Bristol, leav ing a pair of human victims to whistle for their money the next morning. This young scamp became the Right Honorable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and in his maturer years he did not fail to fulfill the promise of his boyhood. Few men do disappoint reasonable expectation founded upon their youthful exhibition of morality." And here is the closing picture :

"Sheridan's face had for a long time become an index of his mode of life and his character. Nature had given him a fine, mobile, expressive countenance, of which splendid dark eyes were a notable feature. These retained their light and their life; but the rest of his

face became gross, heavy, and discolored. In the contemporary caricatures of Gilray, Sheridan's is an oft-recurring figure; and there we see him with gaping, pendulous lips, and cheeks and nose bloated and pimpled. At last his stomach grew tired of performing its functions only in a waistcoat" (he had replied, when told that his excesses would destroy the coat of his stomach, "Well, then, my stomach must digest in its waistcoat "), "in fact, refused to perform them at all, and he lay stricken with disease and poverty. Friends helped him, although in a very moderate way; but he was past all help, and erelong he died. The consequences of his evil habits pursued him, even in his last extremity. A bailiff, by a trick worthy of his intended prisoner, obtained entrance into his sick-chamber, arrested him on his death-bed, and would have carried off the feeble, bloated body of the expiring wit and orator to a spunging-house, had not his physician declared that the removal would be immediately mortal, and threatened the officer with the consequences. To the boldness of his medical attendant Sheridan owed it that he died out of prison, and in a semblance of peace. But the sad melodrama was not to end even here, and his very funeral was distinguished by an incident of, let us hope, unique atrocity of retribution. As he lay in his coffin, at the house of a kinsman whither his remains had been removed, soon to be followed by a crowd of distinguished mourners, a stranger dressed in deep mourning entered the house, and requested to have a last look, at his departed friend, to obtain which, he said, he had made a long journey. His respectable appearance, his mourning garments, and his apparent grief caused him to be led into the room where the closed coffin was lying. The lid was raised, and the stranger gazed for some moments upon the still, uncovered face; then fumbling in his pocket,

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he produced a bailiff's wand, with which he touched the forehead, and announced that he arrested the corpse in the king's name for a debt of five hundred pounds. When this shocking event was announced to the elegant company assembled in another room, there was a hurried and horror-stricken consultation. Mr. Canning took Lord Sidmouth aside, and they, agreeing to discharge the debt, each gave to the officer a check for two hundred and fifty pounds, which he accepted and went off, leaving the bailiff-hunted corpse to be borne in pomp to Westminster Abbey; for in that grand, solemn mausoleum Sheridan at last found rest. Such an assembly of men of rank and mark as attended his funeral, and honored in death him whom they neither trusted nor respected living, is rarely seen."

In his estimate of Sheridan's literary genius, Mr. White notes the absence of sentiment and humor, and declares that the lack of these qualities condemns him to a secondary place. As a writer, no doubt he does fail of commanding the affection of readers; but we suspect that the genuine wit of his two plays not the wit merely of dialogue, but the wit of situations - renders them more effective as stage performances than many which have a warmer current of human life and more pervasive humor. Yet the judgment which Mr. White pronounces, in an admirably comprehensive sentence, is just and final:

"Sheridan's was a brilliant, shallow intellect, a shifty, selfish nature; his one great quality, his one great element of success as a dramatist, as an orator and as a man, was mastery of effect. His tact was exquisitely nice and fine. He knew how to say and how to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way. This was the sum of him; there was no more. Without wisdom, without any real insight into the human heart, without imagination, with a flimsy semblance of fancy, entirely devoid of

true poetic feeling, even of the humblest order, incapable of philosophic reflection, never rising morally above the satirizing of the fashionable vices and follies of his day, to him the doors of the great theatre of human life were firmly closed. His mind flitted lightly over the surface of society, now casting a reflection of himself upon it, now making it sparkle and ripple with a touch of his flashing wing. He was a surface man, and the name of the two

chief agents in the plot of his principal comedy is so suitable to him as well as to their characters, that the choice of it would seem to have been instinctive and intuitive. He united the qualities of his Charles and Joseph Surface: having the wit, the charming manner, the careless good-nature of the one, with at least a capacity of the selfishness, the duplicity, and the crafty design, but without the mischief and the malice, of the other."

LODGE'S WEBSTER.1

WHEN Mr. Lodge published his memoir of his great-grandfather, George Cabot, it was thought best by Miss Dodge (Gail Hamilton) to write a great many columns in successive numbers of a New York newspaper, in order to point out that the book did not deserve a moment's attention. Many people, as she justly remarked, had already forgotten who George Cabot was. Miss Dodge undoubtedly knows her own circle better than we; and some of her friends may already have forgotten who Daniel Webster was. This is, however, an argument which works both ways. We once knew a young Irish damsel, who, on being urged to study arithmetic, declined the proposition, on the apparently irrelevant ground that arithmetic was a subject of which she knew nothing whatever. It is supposed to be one object of history to redeem eminent names from the risk of oblivion, and it is well worth while to do this in the case of Daniel Webster, although it cannot quite be said of the present work, as was said by Mr. George Bancroft in respect to the Life of George Cabot, that it is the most valuable contribution made to American history for many years.

The American Statesmen series considered as a whole might almost merit Mr. Bancroft's strong phrase of praise, if we include in historical art the quality of popularization as well as that of research. Taken together, they present the history of the United States in its clearest and simplest form, and are to Bancroft and Hildreth as Plutarch's Lives to Thucydides. They are fresh, lucid, accurate, judicial, condensed. Mr. Morse's John Quincy Adams still stands at the head of the series; it is the only one of which it can positively be said that it is difficult to lay it down; but the present volume is by no means the least good, and it is to be remembered that its theme offers greater difficulties, in some respects, than any other yet handled by Mr. Morse's authors. For one thing, it comes nearer to the pres ent time and touches more living prejudices; and it is also a drawback that it has none of those episodes of foreign diplomatic life which impart some variety to the other volumes. Its value has to be secured by a more careful and continuous analysis of intellectual work; nevertheless the interest is sustained, and it is undoubtedly from this book that the rising generation will mainly

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