CHAPTER VI SHAKESPEARE: SOME CHARACTERISTICS THAT Shakespeare had an extraordinary physique of unusual balance and health, there is little room for doubt. It is a common - place and well-recognised maxim, especially in these days, that the mind reacts on the body, and the body on the mind-if there is any difference between the two. The one cannot attain its maximum of efficiency without the other. This extraordinary sanity of Shakespeare's reveals itself everywhere in his works. There is no lopsidedness in him, one part of his intellect does not bulge out, and exhaust itself at the expense of the rest. He is not only good all round, but a good all round specialist. In other words, he excels in and adorns everything he touches. The majority of great thinkers and writers, usually excel in one direction alone, and they obtain not infrequently a recognition beyond their merits, due to this very cause. They work at, and develop some especial quality in their nature, until its very exaggeration and eccentricity attracts attention; and though they are never universal favourites, yet they have their following, limited no doubt, but still considerable from generation to generation; and strange to say this success is frequently not to be attributed to any excellence in their natures, but rather to some defect. Take, for instance, the case of Swift. For his success and popularity among a certain class, he was indebted to his unbridled and savage satire, unquestionably the result of an affected spleen, or of some it may have been intermittent, but still peculiar form of dementia. Carlyle owes his notoriety and popularity very largely to the fact that he was the fortunate, or unfortunate possessor as the case may be, of a dyspeptic and disordered stomach. De Quincey and Coleridge were both of them notoriously addicted to opium, and though by nature men of great gifts, yet some of the more lurid and startling passages in their works can undoubtedly be traced to its influence. Or again, look at Voltaire, and all that are of his household and lineage, the scorn and malice of their brains are by no means the children of corrective benevolence, but are rather to be attributed to some discord in their composition, the parent of jealousy and self-conceit. This cynical school of writers may have their attraction for a certain age, and a certain class, but they can hardly be very enduring or general favourites, from the fact that when the objects, circumstances, and people against whom the shafts of their satire are directed have disappeared, nothing but barren illnature remains visible. The only writers that have a chance of abiding immortally are those like Shakespeare himself, full of the milk of human kindness and geniality; such as Virgil among the ancients; Goethe and Schiller in Germany; Charles Dickens in England; and St Augustine, Pascal, and Fenelon among the theologians. There is no bitterness in Shakespeare; he is never malicious, and rarely cynical, though he sometimes indulges in a light-hearted and airy satire, as in Love's Labour's Lost. Now this extraordinary sanity of Shakespeare's, this healthiness of mind and body, was the parent and foster-mother of many subordinate virtues, which we purpose immediately to notice in detail. They are important, as they all contributed and had their share in making Shakespeare's creations as splendid as they are. They do not merely exist in the fancy and imagination of the writer, but are qualities that can be honestly attributed to Shakespeare himself, as they are apparent in all his utterances, and reveal themselves in almost every line that he penned. A perfectly sane and healthly nature is usually large-hearted and sympathetic, and Shakespeare's sympathy takes cognisance of, and envelops in a sort of huge and all-embracing loving-kindness, everything in the animate and inanimate creation. It is unnecessary to dilate upon his great powers as a painter of Nature. One quotation from his sonnets alone will suffice; comment on it is impossible, its eulogy is in itself. "Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, If Shakespeare could sympathise with Nature in one aspect so truly and deeply as that, he could do so in all, and he does it; as those who will take the pains to read him will discover for themselves. And so it is with every living thing, even the poor beetle is not beneath his recognition 'The sense of death is most in apprehension In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great He has been rightly called the "gentle Shakespeare"; he can be gentle to the weak as well as to the strong. Notwithstanding his own brilliant and powerful personality, he can sympathise with weakness even in a king. Towards the irresolute and sentimental, if saintly, Henry VI., banded about and perplexed by a set of turbulent and truculent nobles, and a mere child in the hands of his masterful and ambitious wife, Margaret of Anjou, he extends a sort of motherly pity and commiseration. Even "evil" itself comes in for a word of praise : "There is a soul of goodness in things evil.” Truly if: "He liveth best, who loveth best All things both great and small," then Shakespeare must have lived exceedingly well. But there is one omission for which it is difficult to forgive even Shakespeare. 'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis, 'tis true." He has never a good word for the dog. Whenever he mentions the word "dog," which he frequently does, he invariably uses it as a term either of opprobrium or reproach. This can only be accounted for by the fact either that Shakespeare never had a dog of his own, or if he did was unfortunate in its selection; or that the dogs in the days of Elizabeth were merely utilised for purposes of protection, or for the chase, and regarded as more or less akin to the wild beasts, and had not as yet been promoted to the society and companionship of man. It is true that there is the celebrated Launce and his dog Crab in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but Launce regards Crab rather as a compliment to his own oddities than as a friend, and does not give him a very good character. "I think my dog Crab, the sourest natured dog that lives." Universal and generalising minds, especially when gifted with great powers of imagination are usually in a hurry-eager and impatient. But this is not so with Shakespeare, his patience is infinite He will elaborate, if necessary, a person, a situation, or even a dress with great nicety and exactness. No one knew better than Shakespeare that a man does not attain the universal by abandoning the particular. Look with what fidelity and care he describes the stallion in Venus and Adonis, its appearance, its motion, its action. Or look with what delicacy, detail, and felicity he draws the portrait of Mab, the queen of the fairies. The quotation is so hackneyed that one is almost ashamed to reproduce it, but the reader must remember that this book is intended for the uninitiated and not for those learned in Shakespearian lore: Mer. O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep: Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs; The traces, of the smallest spider's web; The collars, of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film ; Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat, |