The Press. — London, England, 1855-09-22 00:00:00

910 ship. In the pages of none of the critics does he appear to more advantage that in Mr. Hallam's masculine estimate of his vast achievements. We are glad to see the rational tone of Mr. Bell's preliminary account of Shakspeare's life. Mr. Bell has recorded his obligations to Mr. J. 0. Halliwell, whose elaborate life of Shakspeare has been followed throughout. We have often thought that sufficient literary justice has not been done to Mr. Halliwell's research and scholarship. We may quote what Mr. Bell says on Mr. Halliwell's " Life of Shakspeare The vast amount of information collected into that work, the variety of documentary evidence by which its state ments are supported and illustrated, and the vast expendi ture of time and toil bestowed upon its production, render it altogether one of the most remarkable monuments of in. dustry and intelligence, concentrated on a single subject, in the whole range of biographical literature. That praise is scarcely exaggerated. It has sometimes struck us as singular how few have read the poems printed in this volume. The " Sonnets " appear to give us something of the subjectivity of Shakspeare. In his dramas it is difficult to say how much of himself he put into his characters. There is not in all his plays a more thoroughly realised character than his haughty Coriolanus; and that the same mind could imagine and paint the hard intellectual criminality of Lady Macbeth, the sorrows and madness of Lear, and the gentleness of the Rosalinds and Violas, is a marvel without literary parallel. Do the " Sonnets " cast any light upon the personal nature of the dramatist ? They do, we think, to some extent. They represent a sweet and fine spirit, and they record how long he could sustain an emotional state of mind. In their style there is the false taste of the age, and their rhetoric is decked with many quaint conceits, but we see in them no contortions. We think that they also illustrate what has been remarked of all genius, as distinguished from mere talent, that there is something of the feminine prin ciple in its nature. After perusing their utterances of sympathy, we can more readily understand the ease with which Shakapeare peopled his plays with his female characters. Here is one (the 71st) of the many sonnets which illustrate our remarks : No longer mourn for me when I am dead, Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell : Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe. 0, if (I say) you look upon this verse, When I perhaps compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse : But let your love even with my life decay; ( 4. Lest the wise world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone. Several more might be quoted of the same semi-feminine inspiration. Invention of types of character, and extraordinary closeness of portraiture, were, however, the master-resources of Shakspeare's genius. In the subjective utterance of personal emotion he has been equalled by some few dramatists. In his " Sonnets " we would expect more intensity and fire, when we recollect the vigour of his plays. In swelling pomp of language, and in the resonant music of the verse, they are deficient ; and in that respect they aro strik ingly different from the splendid power of the few sonnets which Milton has left us. Their specialty is chiefly seen in their pathos, which is genuine, though at times almost unmanly in its maundering tone. But we must remem ber that in that age a language of endearment was often used between men which would be quite ridiculous now-a-days. In our times the sexes have drawn marked boundaries between the language of affection appropriate to each. We have always thought the " Sonnets " underrated. We place more value upon them than Mr. Bell seems inclined to assign them, and we surmise that there is something more to be discovered of their literary history. In his introduction to them Mr. Bell ob serves : A conflict of hypotheses, intimately connected with the date of the sonnets, has been rab,e(l respecting the facts and persons to which they are supposed to refer. The whole interest of this controversy is derived Prom the as• Gumption that they relate to actual occurrences, and repro• THE PRESS. sent real emotions ; an assumption justified to some extent by the air of gravity and truthfulness that pervades them, but weakened, if not absolutely destroyed, by the want of agreement in the grounds on which it is maintained. Schlegel is of opinion that the sonnets reveal the early life of the poet, and contain the confessions of his youth. Coleridge believes that they express an actual passion, and that they were all addressed to a woman, a supposition which Mr. Hallam holds to be totally untenable. Chalmera is at considerable pains to prove that they were addressed to Queen Elizabeth, the allusion to the male sex being in tended to typify her majesty in her capacity as sovereign. Gildon and Sewell had a loose impression that the sonnets were amatory throughout, and written in praise of a mis tress. Tyrwhitt, Farmer, Steevens, Malone, and Drake maintain that upwards of a hundred were addressed to a man, but cannot agree as to the exact number, and differ still more widely as to the person who was the object of them. Mr. Armitage Brown, who has treated the subject more elaborately than his predecessors, arrives at the con clusion that they are not sonnets at all, and that they con sist of six distinct poems, five of which are addressed to a friend, and the sixth and last to a mistress. Seeing that these irreconcileable views are asserted with equal confi dence, and almost with equal success, a temperate judg ment would be less disposed to accept any of them than to reject them all. If the sonnets were so strongly imbued with the autobiographical element as their interpreters have assumed, the probability is that they would have spoken a more definite language. And he concludes his introduction thus : It can neither be proved nor denied that the sonnets reflect something of the life of Shakspeare. All poetry is autobiographical. But the particle of actual life out of which verse is wrought may be, and almost always is, wholly incommensurate to the emotion depicted, and remote from the forms into which it is ultimately shaped. We should remember, also, that poets draw upon two sources—experience and observation ; and who shall under take to separate the realities from the creations ? The argument that derives from the earnestness of these sonnets an evidence in favour of the autobiographical theory is the weakest of all. What phase of life or aspect of passion or suffering has not Shakspeare painted with equal truth and fervour? But Mr. Bell has there made scarcely suffi• cient allowance for the difference between what is " autobiographical " and " psycholo gical." A work may be full of interest of the latter kind, and yet have none of the former. The great mystery about Shakapeare is that we know comparatively little of his career. We cannot get at his subjectivity, and hence we read these sonnets with more curiosity, as they bring us nearer to the tone of his personal feeling. Of course it is obvious that they have no " autobiographical " revelations, but we think that they may be accepted as evidences of the mildness that belongs to natures of the grandest power. Though none better than he could paint the tempests of the soul, it is probable that his own spirit was like an ocean in a calm, serenely unfathomable. While the introduction to these poems is composed with adequate literary illustration, we think that Mr. Bell might have more spe cially annotated some of the sonnets. For example, the 142nd runs thus : Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate, Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving : 0, but with mine compare thou thine own state, And thou shalt find its merits not reproving ; Or if it do, not from those lips of thine, That have profaned their scarlet ornaments, And sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine ; Robbed others' beds revenues of their rents. Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lov'st those Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee : Root pity in thine heart, that when it grows, Thy pity may deserve to pitied be. If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide, By self•example mayst thou be denied I Now, this sonnet deserves consideration, as there is some doubt about the authorship of the exquisite song, " Take, oh ! take those lips away." The first stanza of that song, as printed here in "The Passionate Pilgrim," reads : Take, oh ! take those lips away That so sweetly were forsworn ; And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn ! But my kisses bring again Seals of love, though sealed in vain. Upon which Mr. Bell subjoins a note : The first verse of this song is in Measure for Measure, iv. 6, and both are in Beaumont and Fletcher's Rollo, Duke of Normandy, v. 2. The whole is attributed to Shakapeare, in an edition of his poems published in A 640. The evi dence of the authorship is not satisfactory. The source of the song may be traced to the fragment Ad Lydiam, ascribed to Cornelius Gallus.—See " Songs from the Dramatists," pp. N, 148. It would have been worth while to show the resemblance between Seals of love, though sealed in vain, of the song, and SATURDAY, That have profaned their scarlet ornaments, rind sealed false bonds o f love as oft as mine, in the sonnet. - - Large as is the Shaksperian library already, it would not, of course, be fair to expect that Mr. Bell could in this volume have produced any discoveries. But his volume will be par ticularly useful to those who are not ac quainted with the knowledge that is appro priate for these minor poems of Shakspeare. In the ordinary editions of the poet they have been left without sufficient notice, and general readers have certainly neglected them too much. " The Rape of Lucrece," though bor dering on what finical persons would call coarseness, has luscious force of language, and remarkably exhibits Shakspeare's opu lence of words, while its pictures bear a Rubens-like depth of colour. ,But for narrative poetry our language was not sufficiently for ward in that time, and it is most fortunate for the world and for his own fame that Shak speare pursued the drama in preference to epic models. As a whole, this volume is one of the best in this edition. As he advances, Mr. 801 l has shown increased powers of grappling with difficulties, and he has critically vindicated the title of "Annotated." We have com mented on it freely ; but we have always placed a high estimate on the intellectual versatility and varied resources displayed in its pages, and we felt pleasure in observing our opinion recently corroborated by the em phatic praise bestowed by the Edinburgh Review upon Mr. Bell's labours. Gertrude ; or, Family Pride. By Mrs. Trol lope. Three Vols. London : Hurst and Blackett. IN this novel Mrs. Trollope has been an in voluntary imitator of Cervantes. She has designed to represent as purely ridiculous one of those characters which from being behind their age are liable to have even their virtues misunderstood. The Baron Von Schwanberg is portrayed by Mrs. Trollope as a mere " pompous fool." He is a noble of the Aus trian empire, and has immense estates in Hungary, where he resides in feudal state, surrounded by a contented tenantry, scarcely dreaming of any greatness superior to his own. His " mouomanical pride" is the theme of the book : this quality is evidently greatly exagge• rated—as, for example, in all that concerns his daughter's marriage and the Almanach de Gotha—but, allowing for the caricature rarely absent from such fictitious creations, the cha racter is sustained with great fidelity. The wonder is, that so sharp a woman as Mrs. Trollope never perceived that this personage, whom she labours with might and main to render laughable, is, in fact, the real hero of the narrative. He is the only honest person in the whole book, and the only one in whose fortunes we feel the slightest interest. His daughter, the young baroness, is an artful, wicked baggage; her lover, Rubert Odenthal, is a mean-spirited prig ; Madame Odenthal is a hypocrite ; and the other personages are in different degrees either contemptible or odious. Goethe has an observation in "Faust," of which he was not a little proud, that we are acted on by our own creations. It seems possible to carry aesthetic philosophy much further. The creations of artist or poet may be unintelligible to himself. He may draw forms from life for which he has little feeling, and marvel at their producing au effect far above his own conceptions. This is espe cially the case when the talent of an intellect is above its feeling, and great quickness of observation is dissociated from elevation of sentiment. Mrs. Trollope, from her sense of truth in character, has portrayed the Baron with general consistency, but without under standing the worth and genuine nobility of those qualities which are allied to his family pride, and perhaps inseparable from it. Mark, for example, the credulity, arising from his innate truth and honour, which renders him the easy victim of transparent deception; the liberality which induces him to • undertake liabilities beyond the compass of his means ; the indignation with which he receives a pro posal that his tenants shall be called on to anticipate their payments; and the boundless 4 111