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Neither Livy, nor Tacitus, nor Terence, nor Seneca, nor Pliny, nor Quintilian, is an adequate spokesman for the Imperial City. They write Latin; Cicero writes Roman. You will say that Cicero’s language is undeniably studied, but that Shakespeare’s is as undeniably natural and spontaneous; and that this is what is meant, when the Classics are accused of being mere artists of words.
At a time when the sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare’s sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and personal kind—a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, for what Bacon had was fancy, not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the mother of Drama.
I knew a young lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
The gillyflower is another flower frequently mentioned. This name has been applied to various flowers, but originally it belonged to the carnation, and was used for such in Shakespeare’s time. In the Roman de la Rose it is called the gillyflower-clove, thus definitely defining it.
However this might have been in Shakespeare’s time, the half-conscious, graphic power of the non-literary letter-writer of to-day is often so great that if all the letters written in English by non-literary people, especially letters written from abroad to friends at home in the year 1897, were collected, and the cream of them extracted and printed, the book would be the most precious literary production that the year has to show.
But Shakespeare’s wonderful work acted on the imagination of the child of eleven in an equally humorous way. “Shakespeare’s perfection,” he says in his memoirs, “not only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but it depressed me in turn with the feeling that I could never equal it howsoever long I might live.”
Plornish’s colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases of “Boots,” as in the speeches of Shakespeare’s mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.
The old-fashioned theory—the theory which obtained from Shakespeare’s time down to Scott’s and even down to Kingsley’s—that the facts of history could be manipulated for artistic purposes with the same freedom that the artist’s own inventions can be handled, gave the artist power to produce vital and flexible work at the expense of the historic conscience—a power which is being curtailed day by day.
But the greatest injustice that can be done to a great poet is to claim for him honours that do not belong to him. In his own line Tennyson is supreme, and this book makes it necessary to ask once more what that line is. Shakespeare’s stupendous fame has for centuries been the candle into which all the various coloured wings of later days have flown with more or less of disaster.
This is why, of all English poets, Shakespeare is the only one whom we do thoroughly know—unless perhaps we should except his two great contemporaries Webster and Marlowe. Steevens did not exaggerate when he said that all we know of Shakespeare’s outer life is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married, went to London, wrote plays, returned to Stratford, and died.
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