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POEMS AND SONNETS
Our idolatry of Shakespeare (not to say our admiration) ceases with
his plays. In his other productions he was a mere author, though not
a common author. It was only by representing others, that he became
himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of
Cleopatra; but in his own person, he appeared to be always waiting
for the prompter's cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he
seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic. The
licence of an assumed character was necessary to restore his genius
to the privileges of nature, and to give him courage to break
through the tyranny of fashion, the trammels of custom. In his
plays, he was 'as broad and casing as the general air'; in his
poems, on the contrary, he appears to be 'cooped, and cabined in' by
all the technicalities of art, by all the petty intricacies of
thought and language, which poetry had learned from the
controversial jargon of the schools, where words had been made a
substitute for things. There was, if we mistake not, something of
modesty, and a painful sense of personal propriety at the bottom of
this. Shakespeare's imagination, by identifying itself with the
strongest characters in the most trying circumstances, grappled at
once with nature, and trampled the littleness of art under his feet:
the rapid changes of situation, the wide range of the universe, gave
him life and spirit, and afforded full scope to his genius; but
returned into his closet again, and having assumed the badge of his
profession, he could only labour in his vocation, and conform
himself to existing models. The thoughts, the passions, the words
which the poet's pen, 'glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven', lent to others, shook off the fetters of pedantry and
affectation; while his own thoughts and feelings, standing by
themselves, were seized upon as lawful prey, and tortured to death
according to the established rules and practice of the day. In a
word, we do not like Shakespeare's poems, because we like his plays:
the one, in all their excellences, are just the reverse of the
other. It has been the fashion of late to cry up our author's poems,
as equal to his plays: this is the desperate cant of modern
criticism. We would ask, was there the slightest comparison between
Shakespeare, and either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets? Not any.-
-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,
up-hill work. The poet is perpetually singling 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. The images, which are often
striking, are generally applied to things which they are the least
like: so that they do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon
it, like splendid patchwork, or remain quite distinct from it, like
detached substances, painted and varnished over. A beautiful thought
is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it. The speakers
are like persons who have both leisure and inclination to make
riddles on their own situation, and to twist and turn every object
or incident into acrostics and anagrams. Everything is spun out into
allegory; and a digression is always preferred to the main story.
Sentiment is built up upon plays of words; the hero or heroine
feels, not from the impulse of passion, but from the force of
dialectics. There is besides, a strange attempt to substitute the
language of painting for that of poetry, to make us SEE their
feelings in the faces of the persons; and again, consistently with
this, in the description of the picture in TARQUIN AND LUCRECE,
those circumstances are chiefly insisted on, which it would be
impossible to convey except by words. The invocation to Opportunity
in the TARQUIN AND LUCRECE is full of thoughts and images, but at
the same time it is overloaded by them. The concluding stanza
expresses all our objections to this kind of poetry:
Oh! idle words, servants to shallow fools;
Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators;
Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools;
Debate when leisure serves with dull debaters;
To trembling clients be their mediators:
For me I force not argument a straw,
Since that my case is past all help of law.
The description of the horse in VENUS AND ADONIS has been
particularly admired, and not without reason:
Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eyes, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.
Now this inventory of perfections shows great knowledge of the
horse; and is good matter-of-fact poetry. Let the reader but compare
it with a speech in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM where Theseus
describes his hounds--
And their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew--
and he will perceive at once what we mean by the difference between
Shakespeare's own poetry, and that of his plays. We prefer the
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