passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven
  and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation,
  about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl
  and the breath of lilies, I should call it languor, but as I am* I
  must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the
  brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a
  happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement, and pain no
  unbearable power.[9] Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any
  alertness of countenance as they pass by me. They seem rather like
  figures on a Greek vase--a man and two women whom no one but myself
  could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness,
  and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the
  mind.[10]

    * Especially as I have a black eye.

'This is the only happiness'--the sentence will surprise no one who has
even dipped into Keats's letters. It expresses a settled conviction.
Happiness, he feels, belongs only to childhood and early youth. A young
man thinks he can keep it, but a little experience shows him he must do
without it. The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is fatal to
it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because it is to realise the
sorrow of the world and to feel the burden of the mystery. 'Health and
spirits,' he says, 'can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man.'[11]
Shelley might be speaking. 'To see an entirely disinterested girl quite
happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It
depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary.
Women must want Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and so may
we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of
crime.'[12] These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his
qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply
a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect
with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such
'dreaming' poets as himself) to men of action.

In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several
recently written poems, and among them the ballad _La Belle Dame Sans
Merci_. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say,
'Here is the record of my love and my despair,' for on this one subject
he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the
copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):

  She took me to her elfin grot,
    And there she wept and sighed full sore,
  And there I shut her wild wild eyes
    With kisses four.

'Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the
headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said "score"
without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the
Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that
both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece
quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three
and a half apiece--a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my
side.' This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best
poems, but I dare say the author of _Hamlet_ made such jests about it.
Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were
probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not
published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.

I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in different ways
Keats's insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more
decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe
that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success
in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of 'nonsense,'
rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and
worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing 'three
witty people, all distinct in their excellence'; and he goes on:

  I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his
  excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a
  negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see
  him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear
  the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel,
  the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.

C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and
still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered
the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much
out of the tune of Falstaff: 'C, they say, is not his mother's true
child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to
sell.'[13]

In the second passage Keats is describing one of his friends:

  Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he
  has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening
  one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the
  mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus
  is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of
  the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not
  pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you
  turn the point, still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a
  truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a
  Godwin Methodist.[14]

These lines illustrate the instinctive feeling of Keats that it is
essential to the growth of the poetic mind to preserve its natural
receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it.
They illustrate also his dislike of the fixed theories held and preached
by some members of his circle. We shall have to consider later the
meaning of his occasional outbreaks against 'thought,' 'knowledge,'
'philosophy.' It is important not to be misled by them, and not to
forget the frequent expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and
must strive to gain is this very 'knowledge' and 'philosophy.' Here I
will only observe that his polemics against them, though coloured by his
temperament, coincide to a large extent with Wordsworth's dislike of 'a
reasoning self-sufficing thing,' his depreciation of mere
book-knowledge, and his praise of a wise passiveness. And, further, what
he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is the 'Methodism,'
the stubborn argument, and the habit of bringing to the argument and
maintaining throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his own
thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his
brother--men willing to probe with him any serious idea--but not to
Dilke. It is clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident
assertions and negations of Shelley and his other Godwinian friends and
acquaintances. Probably from his ignorance of theories he felt at a
disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not dismiss their theories
as something of no interest to a poet. He thought about them, convinced
himself that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself philosophises
in criticising them. The following passage, from a letter to George and
Georgiana Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his writings to
a theory of the world, a theology as he jestingly calls it; and although
it is long, I make no apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he
says, Robertson's _History of America_ and Voltaire's _Siècle de Louis
XIV._, and he observes that, though the two civilisations described are
so different, the case of the great body of the people is equally
lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:

  The whole appears to resolve into this--that man is originally a poor
  forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the
  forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other.
  If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts, at
  each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of
  annoyances--he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars
  above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us
  is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom-appearing
  Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness
  carried to an extreme, but what must it end in? Death--and who could
  in such a case bear with death? The whole troubles of life, which are
  now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for
  the last days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would
  leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all
  believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will
  not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to
  itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in
  winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight
  of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa--whirlpools
  and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may
  arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as
  far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For
  instance, suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful
  morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It
  cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native
  to the world as itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the
  worldly elements will prey upon his nature.

  The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and
  superstitious is 'a vale of tears,' from which we are to be redeemed
  by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven. What
  a little circumscribed straitened notion! Call the world if you please
  'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world
  (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it
  to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of
  showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say
  '_Soul-making_'--Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence.[15] There
  may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they
  are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is
  personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know
  and they see and they are pure; in short they are God. How then are
  souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have
  identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each
  one's individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like
  this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a
  grander system of salvation than the Christian religion--or rather it
  is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand
  materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These
  three materials are the _Intelligence_, the _human heart_ (as
  distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or elemental
  space suited for the proper action of _Mind_ and _Heart_ on each other
  for the purpose of forming the _Soul_ or _Intelligence destined to
  possess the sense of Identity_. I can scarcely express what I but
  dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the
  more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will
  call the _world_ a School instituted for the purpose of teaching
  little children to read. I will call the _human heart_ the horn-book
  read in that School. And I will call the _Child able to read_, the
  _Soul_ made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how
  necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence
  and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a
  thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the
  Mind's Bible, it is the mind's experience, it is the text from which
  the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives
  of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does God make
  individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own
  essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation
  which does not offend our reason and humanity.[16]

Surely, when Keats's education is considered, this, with all its
crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find
anything written at the same age by another poet of the time which shows
more openness of mind, more knowledge of human nature, or more original
power of thought.

About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description of A, B, and C, he
received what he recognised at once for his death-warrant. He had yet
fourteen months to endure, but at this point the development of his mind
was arrested. During the three preceding years it had been very rapid,
and is easy to trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in
spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided difference between
the Keats of the earlier letters and the Keats of the later. The tour in
Scotland in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient accuracy as
a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is the youth who had written the
_Sonnet on first_ _looking into Chapman's Homer_, and _Sleep and
Poetry_, and who was writing _Endymion_. He is thoughtful, often grave,
sometimes despondent; but he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of
the joy and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied the sense of
poetic power. He is the poet who looked, we are told, as though he had
been gazing on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose face
worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields about Hampstead; who is
described watching with rapture the billowing of the wind through the
trees and over meadow-grasses and corn, and looking sometimes like a
young eagle and sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the
forest depths. This is the Keats who wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy
for ever'; who found 'the Religion of Joy' in the monuments of the Greek
spirit, in sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere handbooks
of mythology; who never ceased, he said, to wonder at all that incarnate
delight, and would point out to Severn how essentially modern, how
imperishable, the Greek spirit is--a joy for ever.

Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware, and we find him becoming
more and more aware, that joy is not the only word. He had not read for
nothing Wordsworth's great Ode, and _Tintern Abbey_, and the
_Excursion_. We know it from _Endymion_, and the letter about the
'burden of the mystery' was written before the tour in Scotland. But
after this we feel a more decided change, doubtless hastened by outward
events. The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews of _Endymion_
appeared--reviews not less inexcusable because we understand their
origin. Then came his brother's death. A few weeks later he met Miss
Brawne. Henceforth his youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid
feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are connected, I think,
solely with his passion. His brother's death deepened his sympathies.
The reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him nothing but
good. He rated them at their true value, but they gave him a salutary
shock. They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the
weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt's verse and his own. Through them he
saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into
self-worship by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He
kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He
became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and
rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns
against his old self harshly. Some of his friends, he says, think he has
lost his old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He speaks
slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the human heart is something
finer,--not its dreams, but its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as
intent as ever,--more intent; but the glory he would see walks in a
fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and learn. He is young, he
says, writing at random, straining his eyes at particles of light in the
midst of a great darkness. He knows at times the 'agony' of ignorance.
In one year he writes six or seven of the best poems in the language,
but he is little satisfied. 'Thus far,' he says, 'I have a consciousness
of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase.' Two
months later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, 'I am afraid I
shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.' And so it was.

It is important to remember this change in Keats in considering his
ideas about poetry; but we have first to look at them in a more general
way. Many of the most interesting occur in detached remarks or
aphorisms, and these I must pass by. The others I intended at first to
deal with in connection with Shelley's view of poetry; and, although
that plan proved to be too large for a single lecture, I do not wish
altogether to abandon it, because in the extracts which I have been
reading the difference between the minds of the two poets has already
appeared, and because it re-appears both in their poetic practice and in
their opinions about their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it
might be thought unlikely that these opinions would show also a marked
resemblance. For Keats, it may be said, was of all the great poets then
alive the one least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that
'revolutionary' atmosphere of which I spoke in a previous lecture. He
did not concern himself, we may be told, with the progress of humanity,
or with Manchester Massacres or risings in Naples. He cared nothing for
theories, abstractions, or ideals. He worshipped Beauty, not Liberty;
and the beauty he worshipped was not 'intellectual,' but visible,
audible, tangible. 'O for a life of sensations,' he cried, 'rather than
of thoughts.' He was an artist, intent upon fashioning his material
until the outward sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful.
In all this he was at the opposite pole to Shelley; and he himself felt
it. He refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might keep his own
unfettered scope; and he never speaks of Shelley cordially. He told him,
too, that he might be more of an artist and load every rift of his
subject with ore; and that, while many people regard the purpose of a
work as the God, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist must serve
Mammon. And his practice, like his opinions, proves that, both in his
strength and his limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.

In such a plea there would certainly be much truth; and yet it is not
_the_ truth, for it ignores other truths which must somehow be combined
with it. There are great differences between the two poets, but then in
Keats himself there are contending strains. Along with the differences,
too, we find very close affinities. And these affinities with Shelley
also show that Keats was deeply influenced by the spirit of his time.
Let me illustrate these statements.

The poet who cried, 'O for a life of sensations,' was consoled, as his
life withered away, by the remembrance that he 'had loved the principle
of beauty in all things.' And this is not a chance expression; it
repeats, for instance, a phrase used two years before, 'the mighty
abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things.' If Shelley had used this
language, it would be taken to prove his love of abstractions. How does
it differ from the language of the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_?[17]

Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness between _Alastor_
and _Endymion_, each the first poem of any length in which the writer's
genius decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a young poet;
of a dream in which his ideal appears in human form, and he knows the
rapture of union with it; of the passion thus enkindled, and the search
for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer to read _Endymion_ simply
as we read _Isabella_; but the question here is not of our preferences.
If we examine the poem without regard to them, we shall be unable to
doubt that to some extent the story symbolises or allegorises this
pursuit of the principle of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of
the causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not in himself the
experience required by parts of his design, and hence in them he had to
write from mere imagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a flagrant
degree the defect felt here and there in _Prometheus Unbound_. If we
wish to read it as the author meant it, we must ask for the significance
of the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear that not all of
them are intended to have this further significance, and we are
perplexed by the question where, and how far, we are to look for it.[18]

Take, again, some of the most famous of the lyrical poems. Is it true
that Keats was untroubled by that sense of contrast between ideal and
real which haunted Shelley and was so characteristic of the time? So far
is this from being the case that a critic might more plausibly object to
his monotonous insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known
lyrics of the two poets are the stanzas _To a Skylark_ and the _Ode to a
Nightingale_. Well, if we summarise prosaically the subject of the one
poem we have summarised that of the other. 'Our human life is all unrest
and sorrow, an oscillation between longing and satiety, a looking before
and after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot attain, and that
leaves us dissatisfied by everything attainable. And we die, and do not
understand death. But the bird is beyond this division and dissonance;
it attains the ideal;

  Das Unzulängliche,
  Hier wird's Ereigniss.'

This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre, tone, atmosphere,
they are far apart; the 'idea' is identical. And what else is the idea
of the _Ode_ _on a Grecian Urn_, where a moment, arrested in its
ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the change and decay of
reality? And what else is the idea of the playful lines _To
Fancy_,--Fancy who brings together the joys which in life are parted by
distances of time and place, and who holds in sure possession what life
wins only to lose? Even a poem so pictorial and narrative and free from
symbolism as the _The Eve of St. Agnes_ rests on the same feeling. The
contrast, so exquisitely imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the
storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy enmity of the world
outside Madeline's chamber, and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy
bliss within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired the _Ode to a
Nightingale_.

It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would be easy, too, to show
that Keats was far from indifferent to the 'progress of humanity.' He
conceived it in his own way, but it is as much the theme of _Hyperion_
as of _Prometheus Unbound_. We are concerned however here not with the
interpretation of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and especially
with certain real or apparent inconsistencies in it. For in the letters
he now praises 'sensation' and decries thought or knowledge, and now
cries out for 'knowledge' as his greatest need; in one place declares
that an artist must have self-concentration, perhaps selfishness, and in
others insists that what he desires is to be of use to his fellow-men.
We shall gain light on these matters and on his relation to Shelley if I
try to reduce his general view to a precise and prosaic form.

That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is a 'principle'; it is One.
All things beautiful manifest it, and so far therefore are one and the
same. This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in many crucial
passages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The goddess
Cynthia in _Endymion_ is the Principle of Beauty. In this story she is
also identified with the Moon. Accordingly the hero, gazing at the moon,
declares that in all that he ever loved he loved _her_:

                      thou wast the deep glen--
  Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen--
  The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun;
  Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won;
  Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed--
  My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:--
  Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
  O what a wild and harmonised tune
  My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

When he says this he does not yet understand that the Moon and his
strange visitant are one; he thinks they are rivals. So later, when he
loves the Indian maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself
therefore false to his goddess, he is in error; for she is only his
goddess veiled, the shaded half of the moon.

Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends differ. Indeed, the one
Beauty is infinitely various. But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to
fall into two main classes. On the one hand there is the kind of beauty
that comes easily and is all sweetness and pleasure. In receiving it we
seem to suppress nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely
sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it speaks to sense and
delights us. It is 'luxury.' But the other kind is won through thought,
and also through pain. And this second and more difficult kind is also
the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the Principle. That it is won
through pain is doubly true. First, because the poet cannot reach it
unless he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which disturb his
enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter beauty, and may even seem to lead
him away from beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain union with his
goddess only by leaving the green hill-sides where he met her first, and
by wandering unhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth and
under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of other lovers, and to help
them undertakes tasks which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia.
Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a maiden devoted to sorrow,
and gains his goddess just when he thinks he has resigned her. The
highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet's pain; and, in the
second place, it has pain in itself, or at least appears in objects that
are painful. In his early poem _Sleep and Poetry_ Keats asks himself the
question,

  And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

And he answers:

  Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
  Where I may find the agonies, the strife
  Of human hearts.

He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He never became equal to
it, but the idea was realised to some extent in _Isabella_ and _Lamia_
and _Hyperion_. The first two of these are tales of passion, 'agony,'
and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a story of 'strife.'

Such, in its bare outline, is Keats's habitual view of poetry. What,
then, are the points where, in spite of its evident resemblance to
Shelley's, we feel a marked difference? The most important seem to be
two. In the first place Keats lays far the heavier stress on the idea
that beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is
to be found in Shelley, but (as we saw in another lecture) it is not
congenial to him; it appears almost incidentally and is stated
half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only
manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested most fully, we find,
I believe, no trace. And this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of
Shelley's mind was to regard suffering and conflict with mere distress
and horror as something senseless and purely evil, and to look on the
world as naturally a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an
inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this world of woe his
Intellectual Beauty does not really belong; it appears there only in
flashes; its true home is a place where no contradictions, not even
reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of Keats is much more
concrete. He has no belief either in this natural paradise or in
'Godwinian perfectibility.' Pain and conflict have a meaning to him.
Without them souls could not be made; and the business of the world, he
conjectures, is the making of souls. They are not therefore simply
obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this world it manifests
itself most fully in and through them. For 'scenery is fine, but human
nature is finer';[19] and the passions and actions of man are finer than
his enjoyments and dreams. In the same way, the conflict in _Hyperion_
is not one between light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as in
_Prometheus Unbound_. The Titans must yield to the Olympians because, in
a word, they are less beautiful, and

                 'tis the eternal law
  That first in beauty should be first in might.

But the Titans, though less beautiful, _are_ beautiful; it is one and
the same 'principle' that manifests itself in them and more fully in
their victors. Their defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but
the completion of their own being. This, it seems probable, the hero in
_Hyperion_ would have come to recognise, so that the poem, at least so
far as he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation born of
strife.

Man is 'finer,' Keats says, and the Titans must submit because they are
less 'beautiful.' The second point of difference between him and
Shelley lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with Shelley has many
names, and one of them is beauty, but we hardly feel it to be the name
nearest to his heart. The spirit of his worship is rather

               that sustaining Love
  Which, through the web of being blindly wove
  By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
  Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
  The fire for which all thirst;

and 'love' is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the term must be
used, than 'beauty.' But the ideal for Keats is always and emphatically
beauty or the 'principle of beauty.' When he sets the agonies and
strifes of human hearts above a painless or luxurious loveliness, it is
because they are the more beautiful. He would not have said that the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_ is superior to _King Lear_ in beauty, but
inferior to it in some other respect; it is inferior in _beauty_ to
_King Lear_. Let art only be 'intense' enough, let the poet only look
hard enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain in his object
is seen truly as the vesture of great passion and action, and all
'disagreeables' will 'evaporate,' and nothing will remain but
beauty.[20] Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the
great poet's power of vision, he is still content when he can feel that
a poem of his has intensity, has (as he says of _Lamia_) 'that sort of
fire in it that must take hold of people some way.'[21] And an earlier
and inferior poem, _Isabella_, may show his mind. The mere subject is
exceedingly painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the painful
incidents and details; but the poem can hardly be called painful at all;
for the final impression is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as
the final impression left by the blissful story of _St. Agnes' Eve_. And
this is most characteristic of Keats. If the word beauty is used in his
sense, and not in the common contracted sense, we may truly say that he
was, and must have remained, more than any other poet of his time, a
worshipper of Beauty.

When, then--to come to his apparent inconsistencies--he exalts sensation
and decries thought or knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty.
The word 'sensation,' as a comparison of passages would readily show,
has not in his letters its usual meaning. It stands for _poetic_
sensation, and, indeed, for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name
for _all_ poetic or imaginative experience; and the contents of the
speech of Oceanus are, in kind, just as much 'sensation' as the eating
of nectarines (which may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I
repeat, to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes in the earlier
letters we find Keats false to his better mind. Knowing that the more
difficult beauty is the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so
entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that he rebels against
everything that would disturb its magic or trouble his 'exquisite sense
of the luxurious.' And then he is tempted to see in thought only that
vexatious questioning that 'spoils the singing of the nightingale,' and
to forget that it is necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of
beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew that there was something
wilful and weak about them; and they gradually disappear. On the whole,
the gist of his attitude to 'thought' or 'philosophy' may be stated as
follows.

He was far from being indifferent to truth, or from considering it
unimportant for poetry. In an early letter, when he criticises a poem of
Wordsworth's, he ventures to say that 'if Wordsworth had thought a
little deeper at that moment he would not have written it,' and that 'it
is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after
truth.'[22] He writes of a passage in _Endymion_: 'The whole thing
must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a
thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that, when I wrote it, it
was the regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.'[23] And many
passages show his conviction that for his progress towards this truth
'thought,' 'knowledge,' 'philosophy,' are indispensable;[24] that he
must submit to the toil and the solitude that they involve, just as he
must undergo the pains of sympathy; that 'there is but one way for him,'
and that this one 'road lies through application, study, and
thought.'[25] On the other hand he had, in the first place, as we saw, a
strong feeling that a man, and especially a poet, must not be in a hurry
to arrive at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box of his
supposed results, but must be content with half-knowledge, and capable
of 'living in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason.' And, in the second place, a poet, he
felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasonings which do not
also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also beauty; and in
so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are _mere_ thoughts
and reasonings, they are no more than a means, though a necessary means,
to an end, which end is beauty,--that beauty which is also truth. This
alone is the poet's end, and therefore his law. 'With a great poet the
sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather
obliterates all consideration.'[26] Thought, knowledge, philosophy, if
they fall short of this, are nothing but a 'road' to his goal. They
bring matter for him to mould to his purpose of beauty; but he must not
allow them to impose _their_ purpose on him, or to ask that it shall
appear in his product. These statements formulate Keats's position more
than he formulates it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He
was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or because, while
his mind had much general power, he was, more than Wordsworth or
Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.[27]

We can now deal more briefly with another apparent inconsistency. Keats
says again and again that the poet must not live for himself, but must
feel for others and try to help them; that 'there is no worthy pursuit
but the idea of doing some good for the world'; that he is ambitious to
do some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes to Shelley about the
_Cenci_: 'There is only one part of it I am judge of--the poetry and
dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon.
A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An
artist must serve Mammon; he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness,
perhaps.'[28] These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember
the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to
Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic
purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than
any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious too to criticise the
irritability of a man condemned to death; and in any case these sentences
are perfectly consistent with Keats's expressed desire to do good. The
poet is to do good; yes, but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of
doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not to obtrude it in his
poetry, or to show that he has a design upon us.[29] To make beauty is
_his_ philanthropy. He will not succeed in it best by making what is only
in part beauty,--something like the _Excursion_, half poem and half
lecture. He must be unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish; by
refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of helping by the
desire to help in another way. This is the drift of Keats's thought. If
we remember what he means by 'beauty' and 'poet,' and how he
distinguishes the poet from the 'dreamer,'[30] we shall think it sound
doctrine.

Keats was by nature both dreamer and poet, and his ambition was to
become poet pure and simple. There was, in a further sense, a double
strain in his nature. He had in him the poetic temper of his time, the
ever-present sense of an infinite, the tendency to think of this as an
ideal perfection manifesting itself in reality, and yet surpassing
reality, and so capable of being contrasted with it. He was allied here
especially to Wordsworth and to Shelley, by the former of whom he was
greatly influenced. But there was also in him another tendency; and
this, it would seem, was strengthening at the expense of the first, and
would in time have dominated it. It was perhaps the deeper and more
individual. It may be called the Shakespearean strain, and it works
against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real, or to
magnify differences of grade into oppositions of kind. Keats had the
impulse to interest himself in everything he saw or heard of, to be
curious about a thing, accept it, identify himself with it, without
first asking whether it is better or worse than another, or how far it
is from the ideal principle. It is this impulse that speaks in the
words, 'If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence
and pick about the gravel';[31] and in the words, 'When she comes into a
room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess';
and in the feeling that she is fine, though Bishop Hooker is finer. It
too is the source of his complaint that he has no personal identity, and
of his description of the poetical character; 'It has no self; it is
everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto,
be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has
as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the
virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from
its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for
the bright one, because they both end in speculation.[32] A poet is the
most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity. He
is continually in, for, and filling some other body.'[33] That is not a
description of Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley; neither does it apply
very fully to Keats; but it describes something at least of the spirit
of Shakespeare.

Now this spirit, it is obvious, tends in poetry, I do not say to a
realistic, but to what may be called a concrete method of treatment; to
the vivid presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in preference
to the expression of unembodied thoughts and feelings. The atmosphere of
Wordsworth's age, as we have seen, was not, on the whole, favourable to
it, and in various degrees it failed in strength, or it suffered, in all
the greater poets. Scott had it in splendid abundance and vigour; but
he had too little of the idealism or the metaphysical imagination which
was common to those poets, and which Shakespeare united with his
universal comprehension; nor was he, like Shakespeare and like some of
them, a master of magic in language. But Keats had that magic in fuller
measure, perhaps, than any of our poets since Milton; and, sharing the
idealism of Wordsworth and Shelley, he possessed also wider sympathies,
and, if not a more plastic or pictorial imagination than the latter, at
least a greater freedom from the attraction of theoretic ideas. To what
results might not this combination have led if his life had been as long
as Wordsworth's or even as Byron's? It would be more than hazardous, I
think, to say that he was the most highly endowed of all our poets in
the nineteenth century, but he might well have written its greatest long
poems.

1905.

  NOTE

I have pointed out certain marked resemblances between _Alastor_ and
_Endymion_, and it would be easy to extend the list. These resemblances
are largely due to similarities in the minds of the two poets, and to
the action of a common influence on both. But I believe that, in
addition, Keats was affected by the reading of _Alastor_, which appeared
in 1816, while his own poem was begun in the spring of 1817.

The common influence to which I refer was that of Wordsworth, and
especially of the _Excursion_, published in 1814. There is a quotation,
or rather a misquotation, from it in the Preface to _Alastor_. The
_Excursion_ is concerned in part with the danger of inactive and
unsympathetic solitude; and this, treated of course in Shelley's own
way, is the subject of _Alastor_, which also contains phrases
reminiscent of Wordsworth's poem. Its Preface too reminds one
immediately of the _Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peele Castle_; of
the main idea, and of the lines,

  Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,
  Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind.

As for Keats, the reader of his letters knows how much he was occupied
in 1817 and 1818 with thoughts due to the reading of Wordsworth, and how
great, though qualified, was his admiration of the _Excursion_. These
thoughts concerned chiefly the poetic nature, its tendency to 'dream,'
and the necessity that it should go beyond itself and feel for the
sorrows of others. They may have been suggested _only_ by Wordsworth;
but we must remember that _Alastor_ had been published, and that Keats
would naturally read it. In comparing that poem with _Endymion_ I am
obliged to repeat remarks already made in the lecture.

_Alastor_, composed under the influence described, tells of the fate of
a young poet, who is 'pure and tender-hearted,' but who, in his search
for communion with the ideal influences of nature and of knowledge,
keeps aloof from sympathies with his kind. 'So long as it is possible
for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured,
he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed.' But a time comes when he
thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence like himself. His ideal
requirements are embodied in the form of a being who appears to him in a
dream, and to whom he is united in passionate love. But his
'self-centred seclusion' now avenges itself. The 'spirit of sweet human
love' vanishes as he wakes, and he wanders over the earth, vainly
seeking the 'prototype' of the vision until he dies.

In _Endymion_ the story of a dream-vision, of rapturous union with it,
and of the consequent pursuit of it, re-appears, though the beginning
and the end are different. The hero, before the coming of the vision,
has of course a poetic soul, but he is not self-secluded, or inactive,
or fragile, or philosophic; and his pursuit of the goddess leads not to
extinction but to immortal union with her. It does lead, however, to
adventures of which the main idea evidently is that the poetic soul can
only reach complete union with the ideal (which union is immortality) by
wandering in a world which seems to deprive him of it; by trying to
mitigate the woes of others instead of seeking the ideal for himself;
and by giving himself up to love for what seems to be a mere woman, but
is found to be the goddess herself. It seems almost beyond doubt that
the story of Cynthia and Endymion would not have taken this shape but
for _Alastor_.

The reader will find this impression confirmed if he compares the
descriptions in _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, Book I., of the dreamer's
feelings on awakening from his dream, of the disenchantment that has
fallen on the landscape, and of his 'eager' pursuit of the lost vision.
Everything is, in one sense, different, for the two poets differ
greatly, and Keats, of course, was writing without any conscious
recollection of the passage in _Alastor_; but the conception is the
same.[34]

Consider, again, the passage (near the beginning of _Endymion_, Book
III.) quoted on p. 230 of the lecture. The hero is addressing the moon;
and he says, to put it baldly, that from his boyhood everything that was
beautiful to him was associated with his love of the moon's beauty. The
passage continues thus:

  On some bright essence could I lean, and lull
  Myself to immortality: I prest
  Nature's soft pillow in a wakeful rest.
  But, gentle Orb! there came a nearer bliss--
  My strange love came--Felicity's abyss!
  She came, and thou didst fade, and fade away.

In spite of the dissimilarities, surely the 'wakeful rest' here
corresponds to the condition of the poet in _Alastor_ prior to the
dream. 'So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards
objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and
self-possessed'; but when his 'strange love' comes these objects, like
the objects of Endymion's earlier desires, no longer suffice him.

There is, however, further evidence, indeed positive proof, of the
effect of _Alastor_, and especially of its Preface, on Keats's mind. In
the revised version of _Hyperion_, Book I., the dreamer in the Temple
wonders why he has been preserved from death. The Prophetess tells him
the reason (I italicise certain words):

  'None can usurp this height,' returned that shade,
  'But those to whom the _miseries of the world_
  Are misery, and will not let them rest.
  _All else_ who find a haven in the world,
  Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
  If by a chance into this fane they come,
  Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.'
  'Are there not thousands in the world,' said I,
  Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,
  'Who _love their fellows_ even to the death,
  Who feel the giant agony of the world,
  And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
  Labour for mortal good?'

If the reader compares with this the following passage from the Preface
to _Alastor_, and if he observes the words I have italicised in it, he
will hardly doubt that some unconscious recollection of the Preface was
at work in Keats's mind. Shelley is distinguishing the self-centred
seclusion of his poet from that of common selfish souls:

'The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's
self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible
passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the
luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by
awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to
a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its
dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their
delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no
generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge,
duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and
cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their
kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief;
these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish,
because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead.
They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the
world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to
exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through
the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when
the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. _All else_,
selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who
constitute, together with their own, the lasting _misery_ and loneliness
_of the world_. Those who _love not their fellow-beings_, live
unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.'[35]

I have still a passage to refer to. Let the reader turn to the quotation
on p. 236 from Keats's reply to Shelley's letter of invitation to his
home in Italy; and let him ask himself why Keats puts the word
"self-concentration" in inverted commas. He is not referring to anything
in Shelley's letter, and he is not in the habit in the letters of using
inverted commas except to mark a quotation. Without doubt, I think, he
is referring from memory to the Preface to _Alastor_ and the phrase
'self-centred seclusion.' He has come to feel that this self-centred
seclusion is _right_ for a poet like himself, and that the direct
pursuit of philanthropy in poetry (which he supposes Shelley to
advocate) is wrong. But this is another proof how much he had been
influenced by Shelley's poem; and it is perhaps not too rash to
conjecture that his consciousness of this influence was one reason why
he had earlier refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might 'have
his own unfettered scope.'[36]

If it seems to anyone that these conclusions are derogatory to Keats,
either as a man or a poet, I can only say that I differ from him
entirely. But I will add that there seems to me some reason to
conjecture that Shelley had read the _Ode to a Nightingale_ before he
wrote the stanzas _To a Skylark_.

FOOTNOTES:

  [1] The Letters (except those to Miss Brawne, and a few others) have
    been edited by Colvin, and (without exception) by Forman (pub. Gowans
    & Gray). I refer to them by their numbers, followed by the initial of
    the editor's name. Both editions reproduce peculiarities of
    punctuation, etc.; but for my present purpose these are usually
    without interest, and I have consulted the convenience of the reader
    in making changes.

  [2] Keats himself, it is strange to think, was born in the same year
    as Carlyle.

  [3] These passions were in his last two years overclouded at times,
    but they remained to the end. When, in the bitterness of his soul, he
    begged Severn to put on his tombstone no name, but only 'Here lies
    one whose name was writ in water,' he was thinking not merely of the
    reviewers who had robbed him of fame in his short life, but also of
    those unwritten poems, of which 'the faint conceptions' in happier
    days used to 'bring the blood into his forehead.'

  [4] LII, C., LV, F. The quotations above are from XIV, XVI, C., XV,
    XVII, XVIII, F. The verses are a parody of Wordsworth's lines, 'The
    cock is crowing.'

  [5] LXI, C., LXVI, F.

  [6] LVI, C., LXI, F.

  [7] LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. Mr. Hooker, I may remark, would not have
    thanked Keats for his bishopric.

  [8] From the letter last quoted. See also CXVI, CXVIII, CXIX, C.,
    CXXXVII, CXXXIV, CXXXV, F.

  [9] 'Pain had no sting and pleasure's wreath no flower.'

  [10] XCII, C., CVI, F.

  [11] XIX, C., XXI, F.

  [12] LIV, C., LIX, F.

  [13] CXXXI, C., CLII, F.

  [14] CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F. The word 'turn' in the last sentence but
    two seems to be doubtful. Mr. Colvin reads 'have.'

  [15] Keats's use of the word is suggested, probably, by Milton's
    'pure intelligence of heaven.'

  [16] XCII, C., CVI, F.

  [17] CLXVI, F., LXXIII, C., LXXXI, F. In XLI, C., XLIV, F., occurs a
    passage ending with the words, 'they are able to "_consecrate
    whate'er they look upon_."' Is not this a quotation from the _Hymn_:

      Spirit of BEAUTY that dost consecrate
      With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon?

    If so, and if my memory serves me, this is the only quotation from
    Shelley's poetry in the letters of Keats. The _Hymn_ had been
    published in Hunt's _Examiner_, Jan., 1817.

  [18] The first critic, I believe, who seriously attempted to
    investigate Keats's mind, and the ideas that were trying to take
    shape in some of his poems, was F. M. Owen, whose _John Keats, a
    Study_ (1880) never attracted in her too brief life-time the
    attention it deserved. Mr. Bridges's treatment of these ideas is
    masterly. To what is said above may be added that, although Keats was
    dissatisfied with _Endymion_ even before he had finished it, he did
    not at any time criticise it on the ground that it tried to put too
    much meaning into the myth. On _Alastor_ and _Endymion_ see further
    the Note appended to this lecture.

  [19] A notable (but not isolated) remark, seeing that the poetic
    genius of Keats showed itself soonest and perhaps most completely in
    the rendering of Nature.

  [20] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.

  [21] CXVI, C., CXXXVII, F.

  [22] XIX, C., XXI, F.

  [23] XXXII, C., XXXIV, F.

  [24] He contemplates even the study of metaphysics, LI, C., LIV, F.

  [25] L, C., LIII, F.

  [26] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.

  [27] Cf. in addition to the letters already referred to, the obscure
    letter to Bailey, XXII, C., XXIV, F., which, however, is early, and
    not quite in agreement with later thoughts. I should observe perhaps
    that if Keats's position, as formulated above, is accepted, the
    question still remains whether a truth which is also beauty, or a
    beauty which is also truth, can be found by man; and, if so, whether
    it can, in strictness, be called by either of those names.

  [28] CLV, C., CCVI, F. See on these sentences the Note at the end of
    the lecture.

  [29] An expression used in reference to Wordsworth, XXXIV, C., XXXVI,
    F.

  [30] I have not space to dwell on this distinction, but I must warn
    the reader that he will probably misunderstand the important passage
    in the revised _Hyperion_, 161 ff., unless he consults Mr. de
    Sélincourt's edition.

  [31] XXII, C., XXV, F.

  [32] That is, in 'half-knowledge,' 'doubts,' 'mysteries' (see p.
    235), while the philosopher is sometimes supposed by Keats to have a
    reasoned certainty about everything. It is curious to reflect that
    great metaphysicians, like Spinoza and Hegel, are often accused of
    the un-moral impartiality which Keats attributes to the poet.

  [33] LXXVI, C., LXXX, F.

  [34] The ultimate origin of the dream-passage in both poems may well
    be Adam's dream in _Paradise Lost_, Book viii.:

      She disappear'd, and left me dark: I waked
      To find her, or for ever to deplore
      Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.

    Keats alludes to this in XXII, C., XXIV, F.

  [35] It is tempting to conjecture with Mr. Forman that the full-stop
    before the last sentence is a misprint, and that we should read 'the
    world,--those who,' etc., so that the last two clauses would be
    relative clauses co-ordinate with 'who love not their fellow-beings.'
    Not to speak of the run of the sentences, this conjecture is tempting
    because of the comma after 'fellow-beings,' and because the paragraph
    is followed by the quotation ('those' should be 'they'),

                          The good die first,
      And those whose hearts are dry as summer's dust
      Burn to the socket.

    The good who die first correspond with the 'pure and tender-hearted'
    who perish and, as we naturally suppose, perish young, like the poet
    in _Alastor_. But, as the last sentence stands, these, as well as the
    torpid, live to old age. It is hard to believe that Shelley meant
    this; but as he was in England when _Alastor_ was printed, he
    probably revised the proofs, and it is perhaps easier to suppose that
    he wrote what is printed than that he passed unobserved the serious
    misprint supposed by Mr. Forman.

  [36] XVIII, C., XX, F.

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF[1]

Of the two persons principally concerned in the rejection of Falstaff,
Henry, both as Prince and as King, has received, on the whole, full
justice from readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been
in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare's famous characters.
All of them, in passing from the mind of their creator into other minds,
suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony through the
disproportionate attention bestowed on some one feature, or to lose
their uniqueness by being conventionalised into types already familiar.
But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself. The original character
is to be found alive in the two parts of _Henry IV._, dead in _Henry
V._, and nowhere else. But not very long after these plays were
composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very
entertaining piece called _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. Perhaps his
company wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as one would rather
believe, the tradition may be true that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with
the Falstaff scenes of _Henry IV._, expressed a wish to see the hero of
them again, and to see him in love. Now it was no more possible for
Shakespeare to show his own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two
into five. But he could write in haste--the tradition says, in a
fortnight--a comedy or farce differing from all his other plays in this,
that its scene is laid in English middle-class life, and that it is
prosaic almost to the end. And among the characters he could introduce a
disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and could call them
Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. And he could represent this knight
assailing, for financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in the
event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked,
mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is
horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself
could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the _Two Noble Kinsmen_. But it
no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that
parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the
_Merry Wives_ is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky
Sharp the dupe of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served the least of
these tricks he would have had his brains taken out and buttered, and
have given them to a dog for a New Year's gift. I quote the words of the
impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him and gave to him a few
sentences worthy of Falstaff himself. But they are only a few--one side
of a sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet critics have
solemnly debated at what period in his life Sir John endured the gibes
of Master Ford, and whether we should put this comedy between the two
parts of _Henry IV._, or between the second of them and _Henry V._ And
the Falstaff of the general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible
conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the Falstaff of the mere
play-goer is certainly much more like the impostor than the true man.

The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and
is insisted on in almost all competent estimates of the character of
Falstaff. I do not propose to attempt a full account either of this
character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall connect the remarks I
have to make on them with a question which does not appear to have been
satisfactorily discussed--the question of the rejection of Falstaff by
the Prince on his accession to the throne. What do we feel, and what are
we meant to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what does our
feeling imply as to the characters of Falstaff and the new King?

  1.

Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire, engaged in borrowing a
thousand pounds from Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding
helter-skelter from London, brings him the great news that the old King
is as dead as nail in door, and that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir
John, in wild excitement, taking any man's horses, rushes to London; and
he carries Shallow with him, for he longs to reward all his friends. We
find him standing with his companions just outside Westminster Abbey, in
the crowd that is waiting for the King to come out after his coronation.
He himself is stained with travel, and has had no time to spend any of
the thousand pounds in buying new liveries for his men. But what of
that? This poor show only proves his earnestness of affection, his
devotion, how he could not deliberate or remember or have patience to
shift himself, but rode day and night, thought of nothing else but to
see Henry, and put all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were
nothing else to be done but to see him. And now he stands sweating with
desire to see him, and repeating and repeating this one desire of his
heart--'to see him.' The moment comes. There is a shout within the Abbey
like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour of trumpets, and the doors
open and the procession streams out.

  FAL. God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!

  PIST. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!

  FAL. God save thee, my sweet boy!

  KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.

  CH. JUST. Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you speak?

  FAL. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!

  KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.
  How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
  I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
  So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
  But being awaked I do despise my dream.
  Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
  Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
  For thee thrice wider than for other men.
  Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
  Presume not that I am the thing I was;
  For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
  That I have turn'd away my former self;
  So will I those that kept me company.
  When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
  Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
  The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
  Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
  As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
  Not to come near our person by ten mile.
  For competence of life I will allow you,
  That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
  And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
  We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
  Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
  To see perform'd the tenour of our word.
  Set on.

The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff and his friends remain.
He shows no resentment. He comforts himself, or tries to comfort
himself--first, with the thought that he has Shallow's thousand pounds,
and then, more seriously, I believe, with another thought. The King, he
sees, must look thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private
when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes of his friends. But
even as he speaks, the Chief Justice, accompanied by Prince John,
returns, and gives the order to his officers:

  Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;
  Take all his company along with him.

Falstaff breaks out, 'My lord, my lord,' but he is cut short and hurried
away; and after a few words between the Prince and the Chief Justice the
scene closes, and with it the drama.

What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our
feelings about Falstaff. If we have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff
scenes of the two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old
reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward, but a cruel and
dangerous ruffian, I suppose we enjoy his discomfiture and consider that
the King has behaved magnificently. But if we _have_ keenly enjoyed the
Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed them as Shakespeare surely meant
them to be enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us solely or
even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we feel, I think, during the
King's speech, a good deal of pain and some resentment; and when,
without any further offence on Sir John's part, the Chief Justice
returns and sends him to prison, we stare in astonishment. These, I
believe, are, in greater or less degree, the feelings of most of those
who really enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not). Nor are
these feelings diminished when we remember the end of the whole story,
as we find it in _Henry V._, where we learn that Falstaff quickly died,
and, according to the testimony of persons not very sentimental, died of
a broken heart.[2] Suppose this merely to mean that he sank under the
shame of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but the words of
Mrs. Quickly, 'The king has killed his heart'; of Nym, 'The king hath
run bad humours on the knight; that's the even of it'; of Pistol,

       Nym, thou hast spoke the right,
  His heart is fracted and corroborate,

assuredly point to something more than wounded pride; they point to
wounded affection, and remind us of Falstaff's own answer to Prince
Hal's question, 'Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?' 'A thousand
pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth a million: thou owest me thy
love.'

Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though
undoubtedly striking, leaves an impression so unpleasant? I will venture
to put aside without discussion the idea that he meant us throughout the
two plays to regard Falstaff with disgust or indignation, so that we
naturally feel nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies
that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare with which it is idle
to argue. And there is another and a much more ingenious suggestion
which must equally be rejected as impossible. According to it, Falstaff,
having listened to the King's speech, did not seriously hope to be sent
for by him in private; he fully realised the situation at once, and was
only making game of Shallow; and in his immediate turn upon Shallow when
the King goes out, 'Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,' we are
meant to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that we end the
play with the delightful feeling that, while Henry has done the right
thing, Falstaff, in his outward overthrow, has still proved himself
inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a critic who understands
Falstaff, and in the suggestion itself shows that he understands him.[3]
But it provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and could not
account for, that which follows the short conversation with Shallow.
Falstaff's dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove
beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as
a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount.

Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise admissible, would
still leave our problem only partly solved. For what troubles us is not
only the disappointment of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry. It was
inevitable that on his accession he should separate himself from Sir
John, and we wish nothing else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should
have a competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly improbable
case of his reforming himself. And if Henry could not trust himself
within ten miles of so fascinating a companion, by all means let him be
banished that distance: we do not complain. These arrangements would not
have prevented a satisfactory ending: the King could have communicated
his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in a private
interview rich in humour and merely touched with pathos. But Shakespeare
has so contrived matters that Henry could not send a private warning to
Falstaff even if he wished to, and in their public meeting Falstaff is
made to behave in so infatuated and outrageous a manner that great
sternness on the King's part was unavoidable. And the curious thing is
that Shakespeare did not stop here. If this had been all we should have
felt pain for Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against Henry. But
two things we do resent. Why, when this painful incident seems to be
over, should the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison? Can
this possibly be meant for an act of private vengeance on the part of
the Chief Justice, unknown to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare
would have shown at once that the King disapproved and cancelled it. It
must have been the King's own act. This is one thing we resent; the
other is the King's sermon. He had a right to turn away his former
self, and his old companions with it, but he had no right to talk all of
a sudden like a clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and
insincere to speak of them as his 'misleaders,' as though in the days of
Eastcheap and Gadshill he had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen
his former self, and we know that it was nothing of the kind. He had
shown himself, for all his follies, a very strong and independent young
man, deliberately amusing himself among men over whom he had just as
much ascendency as he chose to exert. Nay, he amused himself not only
among them, but at their expense. In his first soliloquy--and first
soliloquies are usually significant--he declares that he associates with
them in order that, when at some future time he shows his true
character, he may be the more wondered at for his previous aberrations.
You may think he deceives himself here; you may believe that he
frequented Sir John's company out of delight in it and not merely with
this cold-blooded design; but at any rate he _thought_ the design was
his one motive. And, that being so, two results follow. He ought in
honour long ago to have given Sir John clearly to understand that they
must say good-bye on the day of his accession. And, having neglected to
do this, he ought not to have lectured him as his misleader. It was not
only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably like an attempt
to buy the praise of the respectable at the cost of honour and truth.
And it succeeded. Henry _always_ succeeded.

You will see what I am suggesting, for the moment, as a solution of our
problem. I am suggesting that our fault lies not in our resentment at
Henry's conduct, but in our surprise at it; that if we had read his
character truly in the light that Shakespeare gave us, we should have
been prepared for a display both of hardness and of policy at this point
in his career, And although this suggestion does not suffice to solve
the problem before us, I am convinced that in itself it is true. Nor is
it rendered at all improbable by the fact that Shakespeare has made
Henry, on the whole, a fine and very attractive character, and that here
he makes no one express any disapprobation of the treatment of Falstaff.
For in similar cases Shakespeare is constantly misunderstood. His
readers expect him to mark in some distinct way his approval or
disapproval of that which he represents; and hence where _they_
disapprove and _he_ says nothing, they fancy that he does _not_
disapprove, and they blame his indifference, like Dr. Johnson, or at the
least are puzzled. But the truth is that he shows the fact and leaves
the judgment to them. And again, when he makes us like a character we
expect the character to have no faults that are not expressly pointed
out, and when other faults appear we either ignore them or try to
explain them away. This is one of our methods of conventionalising
Shakespeare. We want the world's population to be neatly divided into
sheep and goats, and we want an angel by us to say, 'Look, that is a
goat and this is a sheep,' and we try to turn Shakespeare into this
angel. His impartiality makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear to see
him, like the sun, lighting up everything and judging nothing. And this
is perhaps especially the case in his historical plays, where we are
always trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us that Richard II.
was unworthy to be king, and we at once conclude that he thought
Bolingbroke's usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely, what under
the conditions was bound to exist, an inextricable tangle of right and
unright. Or, Bolingbroke being evidently wronged, we suppose
Bolingbroke's statements to be true, and are quite surprised when, after
attaining his end through them, he mentions casually on his death-bed
that they were lies. Shakespeare makes us admire Hotspur heartily; and
accordingly, when we see Hotspur discussing with others how large his
particular slice of his mother-country is to be, we either fail to
recognise the monstrosity of the proceeding, or, recognising it, we
complain that Shakespeare is inconsistent. Prince John breaks a
tottering rebellion by practising a detestable fraud on the rebels. We
are against the rebels, and have heard high praise of Prince John, but
we cannot help seeing that his fraud is detestable; so we say
indignantly to Shakespeare, 'Why, you told us he was a sheep'; whereas,
in fact, if we had used our eyes we should have known beforehand that he
was the brave, determined, loyal, cold-blooded, pitiless, unscrupulous
son of a usurper whose throne was in danger.

To come, then, to Henry. Both as prince and as king he is deservedly a
favourite, and particularly so with English readers, being, as he is,
perhaps the most distinctively English of all Shakespeare's men. In
_Henry V._ he is treated as a national hero. In this play he has lost
much of the wit which in him seems to have depended on contact with
Falstaff, but he has also laid aside the most serious faults of his
youth. He inspires in a high degree fear, enthusiasm, and affection;
thanks to his beautiful modesty he has the charm which is lacking to
another mighty warrior, Coriolanus; his youthful escapades have given
him an understanding of simple folk, and sympathy with them; he is the
author of the saying, 'There is some soul of goodness in things evil';
and he is much more obviously religious than most of Shakespeare's
heroes. Having these and other fine qualities, and being without certain
dangerous tendencies which mark the tragic heroes, he is, perhaps, the
most _efficient_ character drawn by Shakespeare, unless Ulysses, in
_Troilus and Cressida_, is his equal. And so he has been described as
Shakespeare's ideal man of action; nay, it has even been declared that
here for once Shakespeare plainly disclosed his own ethical creed, and
showed us his ideal, not simply of a man of action, but of a man.

But Henry is neither of these. The poet who drew Hamlet and Othello can
never have thought that even the ideal man of action would lack that
light upon the brow which at once transfigures them and marks their
doom. It is as easy to believe that, because the lunatic, the lover, and
the poet are not far apart, Shakespeare would have chosen never to have
loved and sung. Even poor Timon, the most inefficient of the tragic
heroes, has something in him that Henry never shows. Nor is it merely
that his nature is limited: if we follow Shakespeare and look closely at
Henry, we shall discover with the many fine traits a few less pleasing.
Henry IV. describes him as the noble image of his own youth; and, for
all his superiority to his father, he is still his father's son, the son
of the man whom Hotspur called a 'vile politician.' Henry's religion,
for example, is genuine, it is rooted in his modesty; but it is also
superstitious--an attempt to buy off supernatural vengeance for
Richard's blood; and it is also in part political, like his father's
projected crusade. Just as he went to war chiefly because, as his father
told him, it was the way to keep factious nobles quiet and unite the
nation, so when he adjures the Archbishop to satisfy him as to his right
to the French throne, he knows very well that the Archbishop _wants_ the
war, because it will defer and perhaps prevent what he considers the
spoliation of the Church. This same strain of policy is what Shakespeare
marks in the first soliloquy in _Henry IV._, where the prince describes
his riotous life as a mere scheme to win him glory later. It implies
that readiness to use other people as means to his own ends which is a
conspicuous feature in his father; and it reminds us of his father's
plan of keeping himself out of the people's sight while Richard was
making himself cheap by his incessant public appearances. And if I am
not mistaken there is a further likeness. Henry is kindly and pleasant
to every one as Prince, to every one deserving as King; and he is so not
merely out of policy: but there is no sign in him of a strong affection
for any one, such an affection as we recognise at a glance in Hamlet and
Horatio, Brutus and Cassius, and many more. We do not find this in
_Henry V._, not even in the noble address to Lord Scroop, and in _Henry
IV._ we find, I think, a liking for Falstaff and Poins, but no more:
there is no more than a liking, for instance, in his soliloquy over the
supposed corpse of his fat friend, and he never speaks of Falstaff to
Poins with any affection. The truth is, that the members of the family
of Henry IV. have love for one another, but they cannot spare love for
any one outside their family, which stands firmly united, defending its
royal position against attack and instinctively isolating itself from
outside influence.

Thus I would suggest that Henry's conduct in his rejection of Falstaff
is in perfect keeping with his character on its unpleasant side as well
as on its finer; and that, so far as Henry is concerned, we ought not to
feel surprise at it. And on this view we may even explain the strange
incident of the Chief Justice being sent back to order Falstaff to
prison (for there is no sign of any such uncertainty in the text as
might suggest an interpolation by the players). Remembering his father's
words about Henry, 'Being incensed, he's flint,' and remembering in
_Henry V._ his ruthlessness about killing the prisoners when he is
incensed, we may imagine that, after he had left Falstaff and was no
longer influenced by the face of his old companion, he gave way to anger
at the indecent familiarity which had provoked a compromising scene on
the most ceremonial of occasions and in the presence alike of court and
crowd, and that he sent the Chief Justice back to take vengeance. And
this is consistent with the fact that in the next play we find Falstaff
shortly afterwards not only freed from prison, but unmolested in his old
haunt in Eastcheap, well within ten miles of Henry's person. His anger
had soon passed, and he knew that the requisite effect had been produced
both on Falstaff and on the world.

But all this, however true, will not solve our problem. It seems, on the
contrary, to increase its difficulty. For the natural conclusion is that
Shakespeare _intended_ us to feel resentment against Henry. And yet that
cannot be, for it implies that he meant the play to end disagreeably;
and no one who understands Shakespeare at all will consider that
supposition for a moment credible. No; he must have meant the play to
end pleasantly, although he made Henry's action consistent. And hence it
follows that he must have intended our sympathy with Falstaff to be so
far weakened when the rejection-scene arrives that his discomfiture
should be satisfactory to us; that we should enjoy this sudden reverse
of enormous hopes (a thing always ludicrous if sympathy is absent); that
we should approve the moral judgment that falls on him; and so should
pass lightly over that disclosure of unpleasant traits in the King's
character which Shakespeare was too true an artist to suppress. Thus our
pain and resentment, if we feel them, are wrong, in the sense that they
do not answer to the dramatist's intention. But it does not follow that
they are wrong in a further sense. They may be right, because the
dramatist has missed what he aimed at. And this, though the dramatist
was Shakespeare, is what I would suggest. In the Falstaff scenes he
overshot his mark. He created so extraordinary a being, and fixed him so
firmly on his intellectual throne, that when he sought to dethrone him
he could not. The moment comes when we are to look at Falstaff in a
serious light, and the comic hero is to figure as a baffled schemer; but
we cannot make the required change, either in our attitude or in our
sympathies. We wish Henry a glorious reign and much joy of his crew of
hypocritical politicians, lay and clerical; but our hearts go with
Falstaff to the Fleet, or, if necessary, to Arthur's bosom or
wheresomever he is.[4]

In the remainder of the lecture I will try to make this view clear. And
to that end we must go back to the Falstaff of the body of the two
plays, the immortal Falstaff, a character almost purely humorous, and
therefore no subject for moral judgments. I can but draw an outline, and
in describing one aspect of this character must be content to hold
another in reserve.

  2.

Up to a certain point Falstaff is ludicrous in the same way as many
other figures, his distinction lying, so far, chiefly in the mere
abundance of ludicrous traits. _Why_ we should laugh at a man with a
huge belly and corresponding appetites; at the inconveniences he suffers
on a hot day, or in playing the footpad, or when he falls down and there
are no levers at hand to lift him up again; at the incongruity of his
unwieldy bulk and the nimbleness of his spirit, the infirmities of his
age and his youthful lightness of heart; at the enormity of his lies and
wiles, and the suddenness of their exposure and frustration; at the
contrast between his reputation and his real character, seen most
absurdly when, at the mere mention of his name, a redoubted rebel
surrenders to him--_why_, I say, we should laugh at these and many such
things, this is no place to inquire; but unquestionably we do. Here we
have them poured out in endless profusion and with that air of careless
ease which is so fascinating in Shakespeare; and with the enjoyment of
them I believe many readers stop. But while they are quite essential to
the character, there is in it much more. For these things by themselves
do not explain why, beside laughing at Falstaff, we are made happy by
him and laugh _with_ him. He is not, like Parolles, a mere _object_ of
mirth.

The main reason why he makes us so happy and puts us so entirely at our
ease is that he himself is happy and entirely at his ease. 'Happy' is
too weak a word; he is in bliss, and we share his glory. Enjoyment--no
fitful pleasure crossing a dull life, nor any vacant convulsive
mirth--but a rich deep-toned chuckling enjoyment circulates continually
through all his being. If you ask _what_ he enjoys, no doubt the answer
is, in the first place, eating and drinking, taking his ease at his inn,
and the company of other merry souls. Compared with these things, what
we count the graver interests of life are nothing to him. But then,
while we are under his spell, it is impossible to consider these graver
interests; gravity is to us, as to him, inferior to gravy; and what he
does enjoy he enjoys with such a luscious and good-humoured zest that we
sympathise and he makes us happy. And if any one objected, we should
answer with Sir Toby Belch, 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,
there shall be no more cakes and ale?'

But this, again, is far from all. Falstaff's ease and enjoyment are not
simply those of the happy man of appetite;[5] they are those of the
humorist, and the humorist of genius. Instead of being comic to you and
serious to himself, he is more ludicrous to himself than to you; and he
makes himself out more ludicrous than he is, in order that he and
others may laugh. Prince Hal never made such sport of Falstaff's person
as he himself did. It is _he_ who says that his skin hangs about him
like an old lady's loose gown, and that he walks before his page like a
sow that hath o'erwhelmed all her litter but one. And he jests at
himself when he is alone just as much as when others are by. It is the
same with his appetites. The direct enjoyment they bring him is scarcely
so great as the enjoyment of laughing at this enjoyment; and for all his
addiction to sack you never see him for an instant with a brain dulled
by it, or a temper turned solemn, silly, quarrelsome, or pious. The
virtue it instils into him, of filling his brain with nimble, fiery, and
delectable shapes--this, and his humorous attitude towards it, free him,
in a manner, from slavery to it; and it is this freedom, and no secret
longing for better things (those who attribute such a longing to him are
far astray), that makes his enjoyment contagious and prevents our
sympathy with it from being disturbed.

The bliss of freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff. His
humour is not directed only or chiefly against obvious absurdities; he
is the enemy of everything that would interfere with his ease, and
therefore of anything serious, and especially of everything respectable
and moral. For these things impose limits and obligations, and make us
the subjects of old father antic the law, and the categorical
imperative, and our station and its duties, and conscience, and
reputation, and other people's opinions, and all sorts of nuisances. I
say he is therefore their enemy; but I do him wrong; to say that he is
their enemy implies that he regards them as serious and recognises their
power, when in truth he refuses to recognise them at all. They are to
him absurd; and to reduce a thing _ad absurdum_ is to reduce it to
nothing and to walk about free and rejoicing. This is what Falstaff
does with all the would-be serious things of life, sometimes only by his
words, sometimes by his actions too. He will make truth appear absurd by
solemn statements, which he utters with perfect gravity and which he
expects nobody to believe; and honour, by demonstrating that it cannot
set a leg, and that neither the living nor the dead can possess it; and
law, by evading all the attacks of its highest representative and almost
forcing him to laugh at his own defeat; and patriotism, by filling his
pockets with the bribes offered by competent soldiers who want to escape
service, while he takes in their stead the halt and maimed and the
gaol-birds; and duty, by showing how he labours in his vocation--of
thieving; and courage, alike by mocking at his own capture of Colvile
and gravely claiming to have killed Hotspur; and war, by offering the
Prince his bottle of sack when he is asked for a sword; and religion, by
amusing himself with remorse at odd times when he has nothing else to
do; and the fear of death, by maintaining perfectly untouched, in the
face of imminent peril and even while he _feels_ the fear of death, the
very same power of dissolving it in persiflage that he shows when he
sits at ease in his inn. These are the wonderful achievements which he
performs, not with the sourness of a cynic, but with the gaiety of a
boy. And, therefore, we praise him, we laud him, for he offends none but
the virtuous, and denies that life is real or life is earnest, and
delivers us from the oppression of such nightmares, and lifts us into
the atmosphere of perfect freedom.

No one in the play understands Falstaff fully, any more than Hamlet was
understood by the persons round him. They are both men of genius. Mrs.
Quickly and Bardolph are his slaves, but they know not why. 'Well, fare
thee well,' says the hostess whom he has pillaged and forgiven; 'I have
known thee these twenty-nine years, come peas-cod time, but an honester
and truer-hearted man--well, fare thee well.' Poins and the Prince
delight in him; they get him into corners for the pleasure of seeing him
escape in ways they cannot imagine; but they often take him much too
seriously. Poins, for instance, rarely sees, the Prince does not always
see, and moralising critics never see, that when Falstaff speaks ill of
a companion behind his back, or writes to the Prince that Poins spreads
it abroad that the Prince is to marry his sister, he knows quite well
that what he says will be repeated, or rather, perhaps, is absolutely
indifferent whether it be repeated or not, being certain that it can
only give him an opportunity for humour. It is the same with his lying,
and almost the same with his cowardice, the two main vices laid to his
charge even by sympathisers. Falstaff is neither a liar nor a coward in
the usual sense, like the typical cowardly boaster of comedy. He tells
his lies either for their own humour, or on purpose to get himself into
a difficulty. He rarely expects to be believed, perhaps never. He
abandons a statement or contradicts it the moment it is made. There is
scarcely more intent in his lying than in the humorous exaggerations
which he pours out in soliloquy just as much as when others are by.
Poins and the Prince understand this in part. You see them waiting
eagerly to convict him, not that they may really put him to shame, but
in order to enjoy the greater lie that will swallow up the less. But
their sense of humour lags behind his. Even the Prince seems to accept
as half-serious that remorse of his which passes so suddenly into glee
at the idea of taking a purse, and his request to his friend to bestride
him if he should see him down in the battle. Bestride Falstaff! 'Hence!
Wilt thou lift up Olympus?'

Again, the attack of the Prince and Poins on Falstaff and the other
thieves on Gadshill is contrived, we know, with a view to the
incomprehensible lies it will induce him to tell. But when, more than
rising to the occasion, he turns two men in buckram into four, and then
seven, and then nine, and then eleven, almost in a breath, I believe
they partly misunderstand his intention, and too many of his critics
misunderstand it altogether. Shakespeare was not writing a mere farce.
It is preposterous to suppose that a man of Falstaff's intelligence
would utter these gross, palpable, open lies with the serious intention
to deceive, or forget that, if it was too dark for him to see his own
hand, he could hardly see that the three misbegotten knaves were wearing
Kendal green. No doubt, if he _had_ been believed, he would have been
hugely tickled at it, but he no more expected to be believed than when
he claimed to have killed Hotspur. Yet he is supposed to be serious even
then. Such interpretations would destroy the poet's whole conception;
and of those who adopt them one might ask this out of some twenty
similar questions:--When Falstaff, in the men in buckram scene, begins
by calling twice at short intervals for sack, and then a little later
calls for more and says, 'I am a rogue if I drunk to-day,' and the
Prince answers, 'O villain, thy lips are scarce wiped since thou
drunk'st last,' do they think that _that_ lie was meant to deceive? And
if not, why do they take it for granted that the others were? I suppose
they consider that Falstaff was in earnest when, wanting to get
twenty-two yards of satin on trust from Master Dombledon the
silk-mercer, he offered Bardolph as security; or when he said to the
Chief Justice about Mrs. Quickly, who accused him of breaking his
promise to marry her, 'My lord, this is a poor mad soul, and she says up
and down the town that her eldest son is like you'; or when he explained
his enormous bulk by exclaiming, 'A plague of sighing and grief! It
blows a man up like a bladder'; or when he accounted for his voice
being cracked by declaring that he had 'lost it with singing of
anthems'; or even when he sold his soul on Good-Friday to the devil for
a cup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg. Falstaff's lies about Hotspur
and the men in buckram do not essentially differ from these statements.
There is nothing serious in any of them except the refusal to take
anything seriously.

This is also the explanation of Falstaff's cowardice, a subject on which
I should say nothing if Maurice Morgann's essay,[6] now more than a
century old, were better known. That Falstaff sometimes behaves in what
we should generally call a cowardly way is certain; but that does not
show that he was a coward; and if the word means a person who feels
painful fear in the presence of danger, and yields to that fear in spite
of his better feelings and convictions, then assuredly Falstaff was no
coward. The stock bully and boaster of comedy is one, but not Falstaff.
It is perfectly clear in the first place that, though he had
unfortunately a reputation for stabbing and caring not what mischief he
did if his weapon were out, he had not a reputation for cowardice.
Shallow remembered him five-and-fifty years ago breaking Scogan's head
at the court-gate when he was a crack not thus high; and Shallow knew
him later a good back-swordsman. Then we lose sight of him till about
twenty years after, when his association with Bardolph began; and that
association implies that by the time he was thirty-five or forty he had
sunk into the mode of life we witness in the plays. Yet, even as we see
him there, he remains a person of consideration in the army. Twelve
captains hurry about London searching for him. He is present at the
Council of War in the King's tent at Shrewsbury, where the only other
persons are the King, the two princes, a nobleman and Sir Walter Blunt.
The messenger who brings the false report of the battle to
Northumberland mentions, as one of the important incidents, the death of
Sir John Falstaff. Colvile, expressly described as a famous rebel,
surrenders to him as soon as he hears his name. And if his own wish that
his name were not so terrible to the enemy, and his own boast of his
European reputation, are not evidence of the first rank, they must not
be entirely ignored in presence of these other facts. What do these
facts mean? Does Shakespeare put them all in with no purpose at all, or
in defiance of his own intentions? It is not credible.

And when, in the second place, we look at Falstaff's actions, what do we
find? He boldly confronted Colvile, he was quite ready to fight with
him, however pleased that Colvile, like a kind fellow, gave himself
away. When he saw Henry and Hotspur fighting, Falstaff, instead of
making off in a panic, stayed to take his chance if Hotspur should be
the victor. He _led_ his hundred and fifty ragamuffins where they were
peppered, he did not _send_ them. To draw upon Pistol and force him
downstairs and wound him in the shoulder was no great feat, perhaps, but
the stock coward would have shrunk from it. When the Sheriff came to the
inn to arrest him for an offence whose penalty was death, Falstaff, who
was hidden behind the arras, did not stand there quaking for fear, he
immediately fell asleep and snored. When he stood in the battle
reflecting on what would happen if the weight of his paunch should be
increased by that of a bullet, he cannot have been in a tremor of craven
fear. He _never_ shows such fear; and surely the man who, in danger of
his life, and with no one by to hear him, meditates thus: 'I like not
such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life: which if I can
save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked-for, and there's an end,' is not
what we commonly call a coward.

'Well,' it will be answered, 'but he ran away on Gadshill; and when
Douglas attacked him he fell down and shammed dead.' Yes, I am thankful
to say, he did. For of course he did not want to be dead. He wanted to
live and be merry. And as he had reduced the idea of honour _ad
absurdum_, had scarcely any self-respect, and only a respect for
reputation as a means of life, naturally he avoided death when he could
do so without a ruinous loss of reputation, and (observe) with the
satisfaction of playing a colossal practical joke. For _that_ after all
was his first object. If his one thought had been to avoid death he
would not have faced Douglas at all, but would have run away as fast as
his legs could carry him; and unless Douglas had been one of those
exceptional Scotchmen who have no sense of humour, he would never have
thought of pursuing so ridiculous an object as Falstaff running. So
that, as Mr. Swinburne remarks, Poins is right when he thus
distinguishes Falstaff from his companions in robbery: 'For two of them,
I know them to be as true-bred cowards as ever turned back; and for the
third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I'll forswear arms.' And
the event justifies this distinction. For it is exactly thus that,
according to the original stage-direction, Falstaff behaves when Henry
and Poins attack him and the others. The rest run away at once;
Falstaff, here as afterwards with Douglas, fights for a blow or two,
but, finding himself deserted and outmatched, runs away also. Of course.
He saw no reason to stay. _Any_ man who had risen superior to all
serious motives would have run away. But it does not follow that he
would run from mere fear, or be, in the ordinary sense, a coward.[7]

  3.

The main source, then, of our sympathetic delight in Falstaff is his
humorous superiority to everything serious, and the freedom of soul
enjoyed in it. But, of course, this is not the whole of his character.
Shakespeare knew well enough that perfect freedom is not to be gained in
this manner; we are ourselves aware of it even while we are sympathising
with Falstaff; and as soon as we regard him seriously it becomes
obvious. His freedom is limited in two main ways. For one thing he
cannot rid himself entirely of respect for all that he professes to
ridicule. He shows a certain pride in his rank: unlike the Prince, he is
haughty to the drawers, who call him a proud Jack. He is not really
quite indifferent to reputation. When the Chief Justice bids him pay his
debt to Mrs. Quickly for his reputation's sake, I think he feels a
twinge, though to be sure he proceeds to pay her by borrowing from her.
He is also stung by any thoroughly serious imputation on his courage,
and winces at the recollection of his running away on Gadshill; he knows
that his behaviour there certainly looked cowardly, and perhaps he
remembers that he would not have behaved so once. It is, further, very
significant that, for all his dissolute talk, he has never yet allowed
the Prince and Poins to _see_ him as they saw him afterwards with Doll
Tearsheet; not, of course, that he has any moral shame in the matter,
but he knows that in such a situation he, in his old age, must appear
contemptible--not a humorist but a mere object of mirth. And, finally,
he has affection in him--affection, I think, for Poins and Bardolph, and
certainly for the Prince; and that is a thing which he cannot jest out
of existence. Hence, as the effect of his rejection shows, he is not
really invulnerable. And then, in the second place, since he is in the
flesh, his godlike freedom has consequences and conditions;
consequences, for there is something painfully wrong with his great toe;
conditions, for he cannot eat and drink for ever without money, and his
purse suffers from consumption, a disease for which he can find no
remedy.[8] As the Chief Justice tells him, his means are very slender
and his waste great; and his answer, 'I would it were otherwise; I would
my means were greater and my waist slenderer,' though worth much money,
brings none in. And so he is driven to evil deeds; not only to cheating
his tailor like a gentleman, but to fleecing Justice Shallow, and to
highway robbery, and to cruel depredations on the poor woman whose
affection he has secured. All this is perfectly consistent with the
other side of his character, but by itself it makes an ugly picture.

Yes, it makes an ugly picture when you look at it seriously. But then,
surely, so long as the humorous atmosphere is preserved and the humorous
attitude maintained, you do not look at it so. You no more regard
Falstaff's misdeeds morally than you do the much more atrocious misdeeds
of Punch or Reynard the Fox. You do not exactly ignore them, but you
attend only to their comic aspect. This is the very spirit of comedy,
and certainly of Shakespeare's comic world, which is one of
make-believe, not merely as his tragic world is, but in a further
sense--a world in which gross improbabilities are accepted with a smile,
and many things are welcomed as merely laughable which, regarded
gravely, would excite anger and disgust. The intervention of a serious
spirit breaks up such a world, and would destroy our pleasure in
Falstaff's company. Accordingly through the greater part of these dramas
Shakespeare carefully confines this spirit to the scenes of war and
policy, and dismisses it entirely in the humorous parts. Hence, if
_Henry IV._ had been a comedy like _Twelfth Night_, I am sure that he
would no more have ended it with the painful disgrace of Falstaff than
he ended _Twelfth Night_ by disgracing Sir Toby Belch.[9]

But _Henry IV._ was to be in the main a historical play, and its chief
hero Prince Henry. In the course of it his greater and finer qualities
were to be gradually revealed, and it was to end with beautiful scenes
of reconciliation and affection between his father and him, and a final
emergence of the wild Prince as a just, wise, stern, and glorious King.
Hence, no doubt, it seemed to Shakespeare that Falstaff at last must be
disgraced, and must therefore appear no longer as the invincible
humorist, but as an object of ridicule and even of aversion. And
probably also his poet's insight showed him that Henry, as he conceived
him, _would_ behave harshly to Falstaff in order to impress the world,
especially when his mind had been wrought to a high pitch by the scene
with his dying father and the impression of his own solemn consecration
to great duties.

This conception was a natural and a fine one; and if the execution was
not an entire success, it is yet full of interest. Shakespeare's purpose
being to work a gradual change in our feelings towards Falstaff, and to
tinge the humorous atmosphere more and more deeply with seriousness, we
see him carrying out this purpose in the Second Part of _Henry IV._ Here
he separates the Prince from Falstaff as much as he can, thus
withdrawing him from Falstaff's influence, and weakening in our minds
the connection between the two. In the First Part we constantly see them
together; in the Second (it is a remarkable fact) only once before the
rejection. Further, in the scenes where Henry appears apart from
Falstaff, we watch him growing more and more grave, and awakening more
and more poetic interest; while Falstaff, though his humour scarcely
flags to the end, exhibits more and more of his seamy side. This is
nowhere turned to the full light in Part I.; but in Part II. we see him
as the heartless destroyer of Mrs. Quickly, as a ruffian seriously
defying the Chief Justice because his position as an officer on service
gives him power to do wrong, as the pike preparing to snap up the poor
old dace Shallow, and (this is the one scene where Henry and he meet) as
the worn-out lecher, not laughing at his servitude to the flesh but sunk
in it. Finally, immediately before the rejection, the world where he is
king is exposed in all its sordid criminality when we find Mrs. Quickly
and Doll arrested for being concerned in the death of one man, if not
more, beaten to death by their bullies; and the dangerousness of
Falstaff is emphasised in his last words as he hurries from Shallow's
house to London, words at first touched with humour but at bottom only
too seriously meant: 'Let us take any man's horses; the laws of England
are at my commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends, and
woe unto my Lord Chief Justice.' His dismissal to the Fleet by the Chief
Justice is the dramatic vengeance for that threat.

Yet all these excellent devices fail. They cause us momentary
embarrassment at times when repellent traits in Falstaff's character are
disclosed; but they fail to change our attitude of humour into one of
seriousness, and our sympathy into repulsion. And they were bound to
fail, because Shakespeare shrank from adding to them the one device
which would have ensured success. If, as the Second Part of _Henry IV._
advanced, he had clouded over Falstaff's humour so heavily that the man
of genius turned into the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_, we should have
witnessed his rejection without a pang. This Shakespeare was too much
of an artist to do--though even in this way he did something--and
without this device he could not succeed. As I said, in the creation of
Falstaff he overreached himself. He was caught up on the wind of his own
genius, and carried so far that he could not descend to earth at the
selected spot. It is not a misfortune that happens to many authors, nor
is it one we can regret, for it costs us but a trifling inconvenience in
one scene, while we owe to it perhaps the greatest comic character in
literature. For it is in this character, and not in the judgment he
brings upon Falstaff's head, that Shakespeare asserts his supremacy. To
show that Falstaff's freedom of soul was in part illusory, and that the
realities of life refused to be conjured away by his humour--this was
what we might expect from Shakespeare's unfailing sanity, but it was
surely no achievement beyond the power of lesser men. The achievement
was Falstaff himself, and the conception of that freedom of soul, a
freedom illusory only in part, and attainable only by a mind which had
received from Shakespeare's own the inexplicable touch of infinity which
he bestowed on Hamlet and Macbeth and Cleopatra, but denied to Henry the
Fifth.

1902.

  NOTE

For the benefit of readers unacquainted with Morgann's Essay I reproduce
here, with additions, some remarks omitted from the lecture for want of
time. 'Maurice Morgann, Esq. the ingenious writer of this work,
descended from an antient and respectable family in Wales; he filled the
office of under Secretary of State to the late Marquis of Lansdown,
during his first administration; and was afterwards Secretary to the
Embassy for ratifying the peace with America, in 1783. He died at his
house in Knightsbridge, in the seventy-seventh year of his age, on the
28th March, 1802' (Preface to the edition of 1825). He was a remarkable
and original man, who seems to have written a good deal, but, beyond
this essay and some pamphlets on public affairs, all or nearly all
anonymous, he published nothing, and at his death he left orders that
all his papers should be destroyed. The _Essay on the Dramatic Character
of Sir John Falstaff_ was first published in 1777. It arose out of a
conversation in which Morgann expressed his belief that Shakespeare
never meant Falstaff for a coward. He was challenged to explain and
support in print what was considered an extraordinary paradox, and his
essay bears on its title-page the quotation, 'I am not John of Gaunt,
your grandfather: but yet no coward, Hal'--one of Falstaff's few serious
sentences. But Morgann did not confine himself to the question of
Falstaff's cowardice; he analysed the whole character, and incidentally
touched on many points in Shakespearean criticism. 'The reader,' he
observes, 'will not need to be told that this inquiry will resolve
itself of course into a critique on the genius, the arts, and the
conduct, of Shakespeare: for what is Falstaff, what Lear, what Hamlet,
or Othello, but different modifications of Shakespeare's thought? It is
true that this inquiry is narrowed almost to a single point; but general
criticism is as uninstructive as it is easy: Shakespeare deserves to be
considered in detail;--a task hitherto unattempted.'

The last words are significant. Morgann was conscious that he was
striking out a new line. The Eighteenth Century critics had done much
for Shakespeare in the way of scholarship; some of them had praised him
well and blamed him well; but they had done little to interpret the
process of his imagination from within. This was what Morgann attempted.
His attitude towards Shakespeare is that of Goethe, Coleridge, Lamb,
Hazlitt. The dangers of his method might be illustrated from the Essay,
but in his hands it yielded most valuable results. And though he did not
attempt the eloquence of some of his successors, but wrote like a
cultivated ironical man of the world, he wrote delightfully; so that in
all respects his Essay, which has long been out of print, deserves to be
republished and better known. [It was republished in Mr. Nichol Smith's
excellent _Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_, 1903; and, in
1912, by itself, with an introduction by W. A. Gill.]

Readers of Boswell (under the year 1783) will remember that Morgann, who
once met Johnson, favoured his biographer with two most characteristic
anecdotes. Boswell also records Johnson's judgment of Morgann's Essay,
which, says Mr. Swinburne, elicited from him 'as good a jest and as bad
a criticism as might have been expected.' Johnson, we are told, being
asked his opinion of the Essay, answered: 'Why, Sir, we shall have the
man come forth again; and as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he
may prove Iago to be a very good character.' The following passage from
Morgann's _Essay_ (p. 66 of the 1825 edition, p. 248 of Mr. Nichol
Smith's book) gives, I presume, his opinion of Johnson. Having referred
to Warburton, he adds: 'Another has since undertaken the custody of our
author, whom he seems to consider as a sort of wild Proteus or madman,
and accordingly knocks him down with the butt-end of his critical staff,
as often as he exceeds that line of sober discretion, which this learned
Editor appears to have chalked out for him: yet is this Editor,
notwithstanding, "a man, take him for all in all," very highly
respectable for his genius and his learning.'

FOOTNOTES:

  [1] In this lecture and the three that follow it I have mentioned the
    authors my obligations to whom I was conscious of in writing or have
    discovered since; but other debts must doubtless remain, which from
    forgetfulness I am unable to acknowledge.

  [2] See on this and other points Swinburne, _A Study of Shakespeare_,
    p. 106 ff.

  [3] Rötscher, _Shakespeare in seinen höchsten Charaktergebilden_,
    1864.

  [4] That from the beginning Shakespeare intended Henry's accession to
    be Falstaff's catastrophe is clear from the fact that, when the two
    characters first appear, Falstaff is made to betray at once the hopes
    with which he looks forward to Henry's reign. See the First Part of
    _Henry IV._, Act I., Scene ii.

  [5] Cf. Hazlitt, _Characters of Shakespear's Plays_.

  [6] See Note at end of lecture.

  [7] It is to be regretted, however, that in carrying his guts away so
    nimbly he 'roared for mercy'; for I fear we have no ground for
    rejecting Henry's statement to that effect, and I do not see my way
    to adopt the suggestion (I forget whose it is) that Falstaff spoke
    the truth when he swore that he knew Henry and Poins as well as he
    that made them.

  [8] Panurge too was 'naturally subject to a kind of disease which at
    that time they called lack of money'; it was a 'flux in his purse'
    (Rabelais, Book II., chapters xvi., xvii.).

  [9] I seem to remember that, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare did
    disgrace Sir Toby--by marrying him to Maria!

SHAKESPEARE'S _ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_

SHAKESPEARE'S _ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_[1]

Coleridge's one page of general criticism on _Antony and Cleopatra_
contains some notable remarks. 'Of all Shakespeare's historical plays,'
he writes, '_Antony and Cleopatra_ is by far the most wonderful. There
is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there
are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so
much--perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is
greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained
throughout.' In a later sentence he refers to the play as 'this
astonishing drama.' In another he describes the style: '_feliciter
audax_ is the motto for its style comparatively with that of
Shakespeare's other works.' And he translates this motto in the phrase
'happy valiancy of style.'

Coleridge's assertion that in _Antony and Cleopatra_ Shakespeare
followed history more minutely than in any other play might well be
disputed; and his statement about the style of this drama requires some
qualification in view of the results of later criticism as to the order
of Shakespeare's works. The style is less individual than he imagined.
On the whole it is common to the six or seven dramas subsequent to
_Macbeth_, though in _Antony and Cleopatra_, probably the earliest of
them, its development is not yet complete. And we must add that this
style has certain special defects, unmentioned by Coleridge, as well as
the quality which he points out in it. But it is true that here that
quality is almost continuously present; and in the phrase by which he
describes it, as in his other phrases, he has signalised once for all
some of the most salient features of the drama.

It is curious to notice, for example, alike in books and in
conversation, how often the first epithets used in reference to _Antony
and Cleopatra_ are 'wonderful' and 'astonishing.' And the main source of
the feeling thus expressed seems to be the 'angelic strength' or 'fiery
force' of which Coleridge wrote. The first of these two phrases is, I
think, the more entirely happy. Except perhaps towards the close, one is
not so conscious of fiery force as in certain other tragedies; but one
is astonished at the apparent ease with which extraordinary effects are
produced, the ease, if I may paraphrase Coleridge, of an angel moving
with a wave of the hand that heavy matter which men find so intractable.
We feel this sovereign ease in contemplating Shakespeare's picture of
the world--a vast canvas, crowded with figures, glowing with colour and
a superb animation, reminding one spectator of Paul Veronese and another
of Rubens. We feel it again when we observe (as we can even without
consulting Plutarch) the nature of the material; how bulky it was, and,
in some respects, how undramatic; and how the artist, though he could
not treat history like legend or fiction, seems to push whole masses
aside, and to shift and refashion the remainder, almost with the air of
an architect playing (at times rather carelessly) with a child's bricks.

Something similar is felt even in the portrait of Cleopatra. Marvellous
as it is, the drawing of it suggests not so much the passionate
concentration or fiery force of _Macbeth_, as that sense of effortless
and exultant mastery which we feel in the portraits of Mercutio and
Falstaff. And surely it is a total mistake to find in this portrait any
trace of the distempered mood which disturbs our pleasure in _Troilus
and Cressida_. If the sonnets about the dark lady were, as need not be
doubted, in some degree autobiographical, Shakespeare may well have used
his personal experience both when he drew Cressida and when he drew
Cleopatra. And, if he did, the story in the later play was the nearer to
his own; for Antony might well have said what Troilus could never say,

  When my love swears that she is made of truth,
  I do believe her, though I know she lies.

But in the later play, not only is the poet's vision unclouded, but his
whole nature, emotional as well as intellectual, is free. The subject no
more embitters or seduces him than the ambition of Macbeth. So that here
too we feel the angelic strength of which Coleridge speaks. If we
quarrelled with the phrase at all, it would be because we fancied we
could trace in Shakespeare's attitude something of the irony of
superiority; and this may not altogether suit our conception of an
angel.

I have still another sentence to quote from Coleridge: 'The highest
praise, or rather form of praise, of this play which I can offer in my
own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether
the "Antony and Cleopatra" is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power
in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of "Macbeth,"
"Lear," "Hamlet," and "Othello."' Now, unless the clause here about the
'giant power' may be taken to restrict the rivalry to the quality of
angelic strength, Coleridge's doubt seems to show a lapse in critical
judgment. To regard this tragedy as a rival of the famous four, whether
on the stage or in the study, is surely an error. The world certainly
has not so regarded it; and, though the world's reasons for its verdicts
on works of art may be worth little, its mere verdict is worth much.
Here, it seems to me, that verdict must be accepted. One may notice
that, in calling _Antony and Cleopatra_ wonderful or astonishing, we
appear to be thinking first of the artist and his activity, while in the
case of the four famous tragedies it is the product of this activity,
the thing presented, that first engrosses us. I know that I am stating
this difference too sharply, but I believe that it is often felt; and,
if this is so, the fact is significant. It implies that, although
_Antony and Cleopatra_ may be for us as wonderful an achievement as the
greatest of Shakespeare's plays, it has not an equal value. Besides, in
the attempt to rank it with them there is involved something more, and
more important, than an error in valuation. There is a failure to
discriminate the peculiar marks of _Antony and Cleopatra_ itself, marks
which, whether or no it be the equal of the earlier tragedies, make it
decidedly different. If I speak first of some of these differences it is
because they thus contribute to the individuality of the play, and
because they seem often not to be distinctly apprehended in criticism.

  1.

Why, let us begin by asking, is _Antony and Cleopatra_, though so
wonderful an achievement, a play rarely acted? For a tragedy, it is not
painful. Though unfit for children, it cannot be called indecent; some
slight omissions, and such a flattening of the heroine's part as might
confidently be expected, would leave it perfectly presentable. It is, no
doubt, in the third and fourth Acts, very defective in construction.
Even on the Elizabethan stage, where scene followed scene without a
pause, this must have been felt; and in our theatres it would be felt
much more. There, in fact, these two and forty scenes could not possibly
be acted as they stand. But defective construction would not distress
the bulk of an audience, if the matter presented were that of _Hamlet_
or _Othello_, of _Lear_ or _Macbeth_. The matter, then, must lack
something which is present in those tragedies; and it is mainly owing to
this difference in substance that _Antony and Cleopatra_ has never
attained their popularity either on the stage or off it.

Most of Shakespeare's tragedies are dramatic, in a special sense of the
word as well as in its general sense, from beginning to end. The story
is not merely exciting and impressive from the movement of conflicting
forces towards a terrible issue, but from time to time there come
situations and events which, even apart from their bearing on this
issue, appeal most powerfully to the dramatic feelings--scenes of action
or passion which agitate the audience with alarm, horror, painful
expectation, or absorbing sympathies and antipathies. Think of the
street fights in _Romeo and Juliet_, the killing of Mercutio and Tybalt,
the rapture of the lovers, and their despair when Romeo is banished.
Think of the ghost-scenes in the first Act of _Hamlet_, the passion of
the early soliloquies, the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, the
play-scene, the sparing of the King at prayer, the killing of Polonius.
Is not _Hamlet_, if you choose so to regard it, the best melodrama in
the world? Think at your leisure of _Othello_, _Lear_, and _Macbeth_
from the same point of view; but consider here and now even the two
tragedies which, as dealing with Roman history, are companions of
_Antony and Cleopatra_. Recall in _Julius Cæsar_ the first suggestion of
the murder, the preparation for it in a 'tempest dropping fire,' the
murder itself, the speech of Antony over the corpse, and the tumult of
the furious crowd; in _Coriolanus_ the bloody battles on the stage, the
scene in which the hero attains the consulship, the scene of rage in
which he is banished. And remember that in each of these seven tragedies
the matter referred to is contained in the first three Acts.

In the first three Acts of our play what is there resembling this?
Almost nothing. People converse, discuss, accuse one another, excuse
themselves, mock, describe, drink together, arrange a marriage, meet and
part; but they do not kill, do not even tremble or weep. We see hardly
one violent movement; until the battle of Actium is over we witness
scarcely any vehement passion; and that battle, as it is a naval action,
we do not see. Even later, Enobarbus, when he dies, simply dies; he does
not kill himself.[2] We hear wonderful talk; but it is not talk, like
that of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, or that of Othello and Iago, at which
we hold our breath. The scenes that we remember first are those that
portray Cleopatra; Cleopatra coquetting, tormenting, beguiling her lover
to stay; Cleopatra left with her women and longing for him; Cleopatra
receiving the news of his marriage; Cleopatra questioning the messenger
about Octavia's personal appearance. But this is to say that the scenes
we remember first are the least indispensable to the plot. One at least
is not essential to it at all. And this, the astonishing scene where she
storms at the messenger, strikes him, and draws her dagger on him, is
the one passage in the first half of the drama that contains either an
explosion of passion or an exciting bodily action. Nor is this all. The
first half of the play, though it forebodes tragedy, is not decisively
tragic in tone. Certainly the Cleopatra scenes are not so. We read
them, and we should witness them, in delighted wonder and even with
amusement. The only scene that can vie with them, that of the revel on
Pompey's ship, though full of menace, is in great part humorous.
Enobarbus, in this part of the play, is always humorous. Even later,
when the tragic tone is deepening, the whipping of Thyreus, in spite of
Antony's rage, moves mirth. A play of which all this can truly be said
may well be as masterly as _Othello_ or _Macbeth_, and more delightful;
but, in the greater part of its course, it cannot possibly excite the
same emotions. It makes no attempt to do so; and to regard it as though
it made this attempt is to miss its specific character and the intention
of its author.

That character depends only in part on Shakespeare's fidelity to his
historical authority, a fidelity which, I may remark, is often greatly
exaggerated. For Shakespeare did not merely present the story of ten
years as though it occupied perhaps one fifth of that time, nor did he
merely invent freely, but in critical places he effected startling
changes in the order and combination of events. Still it may be said
that, dealing with a history so famous, he could not well make the first
half of his play very exciting, moving, or tragic. And this is true so
far as mere situations and events are concerned. But, if he had chosen,
he might easily have heightened the tone and tension in another way. He
might have made the story of Antony's attempt to break his bondage, and
the story of his relapse, extremely exciting, by portraying with all his
force the severity of the struggle and the magnitude of the fatal step.

And the structure of the play might seem at first to suggest this
intention. At the opening, Antony is shown almost in the beginning of
his infatuation; for Cleopatra is not sure of her power over him, exerts
all her fascination to detain him, and plays the part of the innocent
victim who has yielded to passion and must now expect to be deserted by
her seducer. Alarmed and ashamed at the news of the results of his
inaction, he rouses himself, tears himself away, and speeds to Italy.
His very coming is enough to frighten Pompey into peace. He reconciles
himself with Octavius, and, by his marriage with the good and beautiful
Octavia, seems to have knit a bond of lasting amity with her brother,
and to have guarded himself against the passion that threatened him with
ruin. At this point his power, the world's peace, and his own peace,
appear to be secured; his fortune has mounted to its apex. But soon
(very much sooner than in Plutarch's story) comes the downward turn or
counter-stroke. New causes of offence arise between the brothers-in-law.
To remove them Octavia leaves her husband in Athens and hurries to Rome.
Immediately Antony returns to Cleopatra and, surrendering himself at
once and wholly to her enchantment is quickly driven to his doom.

Now Shakespeare, I say, with his matchless power of depicting an inward
struggle, might have made this story, even where it could not furnish
him with thrilling incidents, the source of powerful tragic emotions;
and, in doing so, he would have departed from his authority merely in
his conception of the hero's character. But he does no such thing till
the catastrophe is near. Antony breaks away from Cleopatra without any
strenuous conflict. No serious doubt of his return is permitted to
agitate us. We are almost assured of it through the impression made on
us by Octavius, through occasional glimpses into Antony's mind, through
the absence of any doubt in Enobarbus, through scenes in Alexandria
which display Cleopatra and display her irresistible. And, finally, the
downward turn itself, the fatal step of Antony's return, is shown
without the slightest emphasis. Nay, it is not shown, it is only
reported; and not a line portrays any inward struggle preceding it. On
this side also, then, the drama makes no attempt to rival the other
tragedies; and it was essential to its own peculiar character and its
most transcendent effects that this attempt should not be made, but that
Antony's passion should be represented as a force which he could hardly
even desire to resist. By the very scheme of the work, therefore, tragic
impressions of any great volume or depth were reserved for the last
stage of the conflict; while the main interest, down to the battle of
Actium, was directed to matters exceedingly interesting and even, in the
wider sense, dramatic, but not overtly either terrible or piteous: on
the one hand, to the political aspect of the story; on the other, to the
personal causes which helped to make the issue inevitable.

  2.

The political situation and its development are simple. The story is
taken up almost where it was left, years before, in _Julius Cæsar_.
There Brutus and Cassius, to prevent the rule of one man, assassinate
Cæsar. Their purpose is condemned to failure, not merely because they
make mistakes, but because that political necessity which Napoleon
identified with destiny requires the rule of one man. They spill Cæsar's
blood, but his spirit walks abroad and turns their swords against their
own breasts; and the world is left divided among three men, his friends
and his heir. Here _Antony and Cleopatra_ takes up the tale; and its
business, from this point of view, is to show the reduction of these
three to one. That Lepidus will not be this one was clear already in
_Julius Cæsar_; it must be Octavius or Antony. Both ambitious, they are
also men of such opposite tempers that they would scarcely long agree
even if they wished to, and even if destiny were not stronger than they.
As it is, one of them has fixed his eyes on the end, sacrifices
everything for it, uses everything as a means to it. The other, though
far the greater soldier and worshipped by his followers, has no such
singleness of aim; nor yet is power, however desirable to him, the most