# The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent/The Mind of Shakspere

THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE
THE MIND OF SHAKSPERE
I
IN a recent guide-book to Shakspere occur certain questions intended to promote critical faculty in the student. "What amount of time," asks the writer, examining A Midsummer Night's Dream, "is covered by the entire action, according to the direction given at the beginning of the play? Show by references the time-scheme which seems to you to be actually followed." The student is here expected to perceive a discrepancy. Then, continues the questioner, "Why did Shakspere allow this discrepancy to remain in the play?" Again, "Note cases of stichomythia, or dialogue in which each ​speech consists of a single line. Is it effective in each case, or does it seem artificial?" And finally, "For what different purposes, in this play, does Shakspere seem to use blank verse, five-accent rimed lines, four-accent rime, and prose?"
As we read these questions and others like them, beyond a doubt helpful toward a serious weighing of Shakspere's genius, they suggest perhaps a larger question which from time to time has troubled us all, and for which some of us have not heard the sufficient answer. They suggest the question of Shakspere's mind. They bid us ask once more, is his art the result of intention, or is there another explanation of it; and if there is another explanation, does this sort of catechism make allowance for it? In these familiar phases,—"why did Shakspere allow," "for what purpose does Shakspere seem to use,"—in this echo of the formulas ​most teachers unconsciously lean to, there is an implication which not a few lovers of poetry may care to challenge. Admitting that all the manifestations of genius are proper subjects for minute study, we may yet be fearful of the missteps of scholarship in the uncertain field of art; we may doubt whether any phrase which even slightly emphasizes the design and intention of the great poet's craft, does not follow as an unrecorded premise the critic's knowledge of his own rather than of Shakspere's mind.
For we cannot too often recall that this man's fame, moving up through heavens of misty or pedantic adoration, has obligingly modified itself to the scope of the beholding eye. Whatever rest his curse procured for his bones, we have made chameleon work of his reputation. We have thought of him with Ben Jonson as an improviser, or with Milton as ​fancy's child, or with Arnold as a solitary peak, lifting above us inscrutable, unscanned. Nothing in this tradition would prohibit one more guess at Shakspere's mind. Yet in the newest explanation there will be a few things in common with those that went before. From the beginning the world has felt the naturalness of this well-poised genuis; he never dwelt apart, starlike. No explanation will satisfy us which does not make Shakspere's mind a thing of nature—even a normal thing, in kind if not in degree. From the beginning the world has acknowledged the comprehensiveness of his imagination; at times so slight a barrier of visible art divides the life he saw from his representation of it, that life itself appears the medium of his thought. No explanation of his mind will satisfy us which does not make reasonable this godlike grasp upon experience. From ​the beginning also there has been an adverse opinion of Shakspere's craft; if we are to believe the extreme criticism of him, he never revised his work, he was sometimes careless of his grammar, he was sometimes all but indifferent to dramatic structure. Though the volume of his fame has more or less overwhelmed all fault-finding, no sincere attempt to explain his mind will neglect to bring even the rumor of his defects to a final account.
The desirable explanation, therefore, will answer the question of his naturalness, the question of his comprehensiveness, the question of his imperfections. The well-known attempts to understand this elusive intellect have, however, usually busied themselves with only one or two of these aspects. Such a partial solution is in Hartley Coleridge's beautiful sonnet:
"Like that Ark, Which in its sacred hold uplifted high, O'er the drowned hills, the human family, And stock reserved of every living kind, So in the compass of the single mind The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie That make all worlds. Great Poet, 'twas thy art To know thyself, and in thyself to be Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny, Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart Can make of man."
Helpful as the simile is, it illuminates only the comprehensiveness of Shakspere's mind; it ignores the shortcomings of his workmanship and the limitations of his thought; it is inconsistent with perhaps any theory of his apparently natural inspiration. True, all men observe, not the world outside, but themselves—since what they see is at best only their conception of what they see; with this interpretation Shakspere's art may be said to consist solely in his observation of himself. Yet this would be ​to spin too fine Coleridge's already subtle thought. His meaning is clear enough; he would stress Shakspere's independence of knowledge gained by experience; this most precious intellect was freighted once for all with the infinite fortunes and aspirations of the race, and—to exaggerate slightly—neither study nor thought nor travel nor age could add one little weight of knowledge. A mind so described is not the normal mind, as we know it, and in the description is no place for that flavor of contact, that smack of immediate experience, which is the first mark of Shaksperian thought.
Most of the criticism of our century, even of our own day, would explain Shakspere's comprehensiveness at the cost of his naturalness. German philosophy in the early years and German scholarship later have tried to establish a sort of standard of omniscience, against ​which the poet's faults if perceived at all are measured as lapses from his true self. From Germany, though he denied it, the elder Coleridge learned to deal with Shakspere as with a god, whose mind was of a higher order than ours, yet might with labor be dimly learned; whose clearest utterance hinted at divine plans not in our fate to conceive, but only to admire; whose occasional vacuities meant no more than that the god perchance was sleeping or on a journey. "A nature humanized," Coleridge pictures Shakspere, "a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness." Again, echoing the theme of his son's verses, he gives us this conception of a meditating, Coleridgean Shakspere—"The body and substance of his works came out of the depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation ​and reading, which was considerable, supplied him with the draperies of his figures." And again, "He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher."
No more significant but probably better known is that passage in which Hazlitt subtilizes about the mind of Shakspere, saying nothing new, perhaps, but setting an example in his phrase for the manner of question we noticed in the student's guide-book. "The striking peculiarity of Shakspere's mind," he says, "was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds, so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, ​intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought.… He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those that they knew, as those that they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves."
Through this rhapsody how shall we approach the man Shakspere with human faults of speech and conduct; or how shall we see the roots of his genius in any faculty that is ours?
This school of criticism might be called the philosophical adoration of Shakspere. In the soberer end of the nineteenth century we have had the scholarly adoration, a milder but no less devoted flame, as befits much telling of syllables and ​matching of texts. To make the account somewhat brief—those who have studied the matter know that the chief furnishings of Shakspere's lodgings and of his theatres must have been the shelves crowded with his sources. Where an earlier version is not forthcoming, as in Love's Labor's Lost, we yet live in hope; if it be not found, at least some thesis will prove that it has been mislaid. We are supposed to know also that Shakspere was a lawyer, a doctor, an experimental psychologist, a sociologist, an aristocrat, a democrat, a moralist, a cryptic preacher of esoteric religion. To be specific, we observe, for example, that in modern society rich and idle families when they degenerate have a trick of announcing their end in one of two ways; the latest descendant sometimes reverts to the original vulgarity and common sense of the peasant who founded the line and ​by dint of practice and the family fortune becomes an almost efficient, if uneconomic, hunter or sailor or farmer; or the latest descendant inherits grace of manner, the cumulative breeding of generations, but the exhausted stock bequeathes him nothing more, and he is at best a gentlemanly fool. This twofold degeneracy the student of society teaches us to observe,—and lo! Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. Or, to illustrate again, the old French poets had a definite type of lyric called the chanson d'aubade, or dawn song—the complement of the serenade, or evening song. A famous example of this type, the French scholar tells the French student, is "Hark! Hark! the lark," from Cymbeline. One other type of dawn song, the chanson d'aube, expressed the sorrow of two lovers who must leave each other's arms at daybreak. Among the marks of ​this type are the man's anxiety not to be found by his enemies, and the woman's reckless desire to detain him if only for a moment. He tells her that already the birds of dawn are singing; she answers that he hears the birds of a darkening twilight. And of this type of French lyric there is one perfect illustration, Juliet's cry to Romeo,
"Will you begone? It is not yet near day! It was the nightingale and not the lark."
So Shakspere is become a research scholar, poor man!
Or dare we dissent from all that this sort of criticism implies? Only two things actually known of Shakspere bear on this problem; for other aids to the understanding of his mind we should look not in books, but in life. We know that he was a man of action, a man infinitely busy with practical affairs, a man who ​produced several plays a year, and who could have no leisure. We know also that from the first he had a fluent gift of speech; he could say what he would, with the least possible impediment of language. But for the radical secret of his mind perhaps we should look in our own experience, if we would justify the hope that he was such a man as we are.
II
What, for instance, is the effect of his plays on us? For one thing, we understand them, as we could hardly do if they were the work of superhuman intelligence. What audience was ever puzzled by a Shakspere play? It is only the theories of his critics that perplex. Further, the plays seem to the audience to be miracles not of intellect but of observation. No doubt the poet was ​thoughtful; no doubt his mind brooded on life; but in his plays he gives the results of clear vision, not the results of clear thinking.
Might we not find a clue to the secret in the behavior and expression of children before they are instructed as to what they ought to think and say? Who of us cannot recall at least one of their disconcertingly apposite remarks? Their naive pronouncements share with great poetry the double effect of echo and surprise; we who hear have felt our way towards some such idea, yet when it confronts us we are startled. For highly conventionalized people, like Tennyson's spinster, children in their talkative moods are almost demoniacal,
"a-haxin ma hawkward questions, an saayin ondecent things."
But their youthful penetration is not solely a cause of embarrassment. ​Sometimes it shocks us to repentance for the unnatural state of mind into which we have grown. When Mr. Brocklehurst asked little Jane Eyre what she must do in order to avoid hell fire after death, she replied, "I must keep in good health, and not die." Why not, after all? We have been educated to a less natural answer. Sometimes this penetration is the very gift of prophecy. When young William Blake was to be apprenticed to a certain painter, the boy objected, saying that the man looked as if he were to be hanged. And the man later did come to be hanged.
This faculty in childhood, which we can all illustrate for ourselves, appears to be nothing more than accurate, natural observation—an almost animal power of sight such as a fine dog or horse would have—and spontaneous, unretarded expression. As we grow older, learning to ​consider our thoughts we become conventional—that is, we train ourselves to see only what we expect to see. And learning to consider our speech, we limit our vocabulary; for the effect of taking thought is to curtail, not extend, our supply of words. Because we are unsure of many a fine word, or because we are unsteady in its pronunciation, we ordinary grown folk will not use it; and we hesitate to write it, forsooth, because of the spelling. Yet what energetic child, before he has been to school, ever stops for a word? Will he not make one up as he needs it, and pronounce it as he can, and by the same guidance spell it—very much in the way of that reckless word-user, William Shakspere? As to that unspoiled power to see true, some vestiges of it we grown folk perceive when upon meeting a stranger or seeing a landscape we feel an instant reaction, ​an impulsive judgment which craves expression, but which we stifle because we did not expect it. And a few seconds later perhaps some unconsidering person says the very thing, and wins a prompt acclaim.
Is there not a hint of Shakspere in this? To be sure, he was no child, but a mature man, educated to some extent in the knowledge of his time, if not in the profundities of modern scholarship. His associates were probably better educated than he, and his daily conference with them must have subjected his thought to a thousand influences of wisdom which we shall never be able to trace specifically among his "sources." Yet with all this maturity, can we not imagine a grown person with whom for the most part expression has remained an instantaneous reflex of experience, who sees true habitually, as we less child-like folk do ​occasionally, and who speaks so spontaneously that he takes no account of his utterance? He never blotted a line, if we believe Ben Jonson; and even if we do not believe him, it is harder to prove that Shakspere's second thought is in any of the texts, than it is to conceive of his mind at its best as unspoiled by intention or reconsideration, like the mind of a child whose penetrating, unconscious criticism of life has not yet been ruined by blame or praise. With such a conception, the known facts of Shakspere's life cease to be puzzling. Hawthorne wondered that poetic genius could grow up in the small Stratford house, where there was no privacy. Probably Hawthorne's meditative genius could not have grown up there, but for Shakspere's mind there could be no happier school. At all times and places his mental process was normal; he needed no privacy for ​penurious inspiration, but in the very heart of noisy, roistering Southwark could reflect the life that crowded in upon him; and doubtless the lack of seclusion in his father's house fostered the gift. Indeed, privacy and leisure would probably have meant starvation for his art. The fortunate conditions for the development of his energy and his naturalness, were a crowded and stirring environment and the necessity of ceaseless labor. It is no miracle that in a few years filled with distractions he produced in such rapid succession so many plays; had he enjoyed an unstimulating quiet, perhaps only by a miracle would he have produced any plays at all.
Shakspere's energy, which we assume as the prime fact in his character, is too generally conceded to call for proof. In the details of his career from the imprudent marriage and the deer-stealing ​to the purchase of New Place and the return to Stratford, he was a man of action fully occupied with affairs. Professor Wallace's recent contributions to our knowledge of his life in London, set him still more clearly in this light. But his writing might teach us as much without the help of the biographers. Great energy, strong interest, whether a man be very happy or very angry, results in vividness of imagination and felicity of speech. Shakspere's writing further reminds us that it is too much to expect even him to live invariably in a tense, reacting frame of mind, wherein life is observed and created with infallible energy. Many a dull and self-conscious passage—if we may be forgiven for observing them!—is witness to his relaxed moments. Yet it would not be difficult to argue that his best work was done in his busiest years. That he mingled with ​other men in a companionable way, without much hint that he or they thought him more than a genial, frank comrade, is no paradox, but the inevitable consequence of his interest in life and his energy; nor should we wonder that his family remembered him in the death record as a gentleman, not as the world's greatest poet. His business was to live, not to write. That we have his plays now, means only that poetry is the most enduring reaction to life. He illustrates the usually forgotten truth that the greatest poets, normal and not too conscious of themselves, are men of action. Like Dante or Milton or Scott, he responded to life in other ways than through poetry—only he set so great value on the other ways and so little on the poetry that we are forced to think him the least conscious and most naive of artists.
​If his unconscious energy illuminates his vast accomplishment, it throws light as well upon his narrowest limitation. Since his genius at its typical moments reflected life in spontaneous, uncalculating speech, no wonder that his horizon was narrowly bounded by human birth and death. His thought attempted no other world, no other life, than this. His mind could not react happily on what could not be physically seen. Dante's imaginings or Milton's were therefore impossible to his temperament; indeed, the casual questions of any serious-minded contemporary of his as to a future existence were to him it seems strange and forbidding. In Hamlet and Measure for Measure, those dark adventures in the borderland of death, the practical wisdom of life is profound, but the brooding upon the hereafter is child-like, with a child's respect for angels ​and devils, and a more certain dread of ghosts and of being alone in the dark.
The other fact of Shakspere's equipment which needs no proof is his gift of language. Distinction must be made of course between his natural endowment and the felicitous word-play which he shared with his contemporaries. It was a languaged age. What Shakspere owed to Euphuism is known to all students of his style. The fashion of fine cadences helped him to many a much-commentaried line, sounding and shallow, like
"And peace proclaims olives of endless age,"
or taught him such a flawless stretch of song as satisfies us though we forget the allusion—
"And the imperial votaress passed on In maiden meditation fancy-free,"
or shorter phrases, now proverbial, like
"Sweets to the Sweet,"
"More sinned against than sinning."
In these felicities, however, Shakspere surpassed but little the other poets of his time, who improved their vocabulary and style, as we nowadays would do, by taking thought. Any one with an ordinary ear for word-music could effect some such happy combinations of sound. If he should occasionally miss the mark, so also did Shakspere; immediately before and after these quoted lines occur others far less happy. That he excelled at all in the practice of Euphuism, that he had a higher average of happy lines to his credit than others in that fashion, is proof only of his delight in language for its own sake—a delight that is common in some degree to all poets.
Even in the highly Euphuistic ​passages, however, with alliteration and balance and the other artifices of style, some magic word often lives with the Shaksperian vitality. Among the "w's" and the "l's" and the "k" sounds of the following most familiar lines, the verb which gives the picture has an eerie detonation, a charm that it never wore in any other employment—
"On such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea bank, and waft her love To come again to Carthage."
The distinction of Shakspere's language at its best is its extraordinary vitality. Words to most men are listless things, to be combined into stationary forms of thought or color. But in the Shaksperian word there is always a certain astonishment, a new approach, whether or not the word has been familiar before—
"In the dead vast and middle of the night."
"Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change."
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety."
Does not the secret of this imaginative speech lie in the poet's clearness of vision and in his immediateness and accuracy of expression? Such words cannot be found by careful search in one's vocabulary; they are found, if at all, in the thing contemplated, when the energy of the poet's nature provides—to take a liberty with his own phrase—that the firstlings of his sight shall be the firstlings of his speech. To a degree children have this spontaneous felicity, at least as long as they keep a naive approach to language. Until they are spoiled by self-consciousness they do not think the words—they see them, as ​something new and wonderful. Certain child-like ages, notably the Elizabethan, have rediscovered language, have toyed with it and manipulated it,—even distorted it; and Shakspere, the supreme child of a child-like age, when his interest was diverted from word-play to the spectacle of life, energized that life with unreflecting abandon into language curiously haphazard and uneven, but at its best a matchless symbol or incarnation of life itself.
III
The theory of Shakspere's mind which is here put forth seems to find two objections. The sonnets, which follow a contemporary fashion in a set literary form, can hardly be accounted for as the unconscious product of the naïve contemplation of life. And in the plays ​there seems to be constant though uneven evidence of design, and in the later plays especially the poet seems to speak as a philosopher, passing conscious verdicts upon life. It was this philosophical matter that led Coleridge and his school to see in Shakspere a profound nature.
This paper does not intend, of course, to announce the great dramatist as a sort of automaton, who had no sense of the quality or purport of his work. In the sonnets and the early plays Shakspere is artificially self-conscious. But he is the most uneven of great writers; even in his artificial moments he is capable of naïve utterance, of that penetrating truth which is his characteristic; on the other hand, in his noblest passages of this sort he sometimes indulges in palpable tricks of style or artifice of idea. Without raising the mooted questions of the sonnets, we can agree with those many ​critics who have found in them some of Shakspere's happiest phrases; whatever else they are, they are born of a nature in love with fine speech. If we study the style of the sonnets at all, however, it is only fair to reckon with the style of all of them—not simply to dwell upon the most felicitous, in the habit of the Shaksperian fanatics. At least, it is only fair to reckon with them all if we are to use them as indications of the poet's mind. The series has had its fame from a bare dozen of really splendid sonnets, much helped by the dramatic story which seems to be their background, and which may or may not be autobiography. It is hard not to think that the noblest of these poems are direct reflections of life; yet it does not follow that the whole story is. On the contrary, there are rather more sonnets of an artificiality so great as to raise the ​doubt whether the poet knew anything of love at all. Did the imagination that fashioned the Dark Lady, or uttered the terrible curse of lust, or the superb praise of friendship and of the "marriage of true minds," equally indulge in chop-logic? The examples are familiar. To choose one—
"If I love thee, my loss is my love's gain, And losing her, my friend hath found that loss; Both find each other, and I lose both twain, And both for my sake lay on me this cross. But here's the joy; my friend and I are one; Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone."
Or the whole of the following sonnet, with its amazing artifice—
"When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, For all the day they view things unrespected; But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee, And darkly bright are bright in dark directed. Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright, How would thy shadow's form form happy show ​To the clear day with thy much clearer light, When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so! How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made By looking on thee in the living day, When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay! All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me."
If this sort of writing indicates anything of the writer's mind, it tells us that he was practising the devices of style with great ingenuity. The human experience contained in the poem, however, is hardly what his admirers would like to call Shaksperian. Nor does it aid them greatly to say that here Shakspere was learning his craft. What craft? The use of language? Perhaps,—though he used language less and less often in this fashion. But how is this sort of hair-splitting a training for his knowledge of life? What is the connection between ​these lines and Hamlet's words with Horatio—
"Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?
"Horatio. Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.
"Hamlet. 'Tis e'en so: the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense."
Or if the sonnets and early plays of Shakspere were a training for his art, how comes it that even in the mature plays he slips into unfinished and undistinguished passages? It is usual to say that in the later work his thought overbalanced his speech, at times to the confusion of both; but it would be easier to suppose that throughout his life his moments of energetic vision alternated with very ordinary states of consciousness, and that he had little sense of the value of one condition over the other. The sonnets clearly echo older plots and ​older sonnet series. It is impossible to prove them autobiographical as a whole. Yet it is just as difficult to deny the similitude of personal experience in the great sonnets. Shakspere followed the sonnet fashion, as he followed other fashions, doing only what others had done, but doing it better, with more energy; and in the process he lights up unexpected and amazing areas of truth.
To say that in his later plays the thought overbalances the language, is to raise the main question as to whether Shakspere was a thinker at all. According to the theory of his mind here advanced, he was not. Except for his characteristic moments in which he flashes life into words, he is curiously conventional and timid. Though he followed the daring Marlowe and was the contemporary of Bacon, he never ventured out of the most conservative, even ​non-committal, attitudes toward religion and learning and the established professions. The endings of many of his plays and the initial circumstances of others, completely ignore the logic of the plot and of the characters; he is content that the scene should open and close upon artificial situations, but while the story is in motion he vitalizes it with his naïve energy. If he is the greatest of world-dramatists, is he not also the playwright who has taught least to posterity? He did with supreme excellence what had been done before him, but added practically nothing to the craft of the theatre; the modern dramatist goes to other men for technical instruction.
If Shakspere was a thinker, he must have accepted the conclusions of his own wisdom; if he did not know when he uttered wisdom, he was hardly a thinker. It is easier to take the latter conclusion, ​though the admiring school have implied that Shakspere knew his own profundity, but carried the secret to his grave. The difficulty with that explanation is that it makes Shakspere practically omniscient. The Baconian heresy and other attempts to explain him, have been attempts to explain the author that Coleridge and the Germans found in the plays. Foolish as is the doctrine that Bacon could write and produce these dramas and have the secret kept for two centuries, it is really wiser than the belief that Shakspere could have been consciously omniscient, and yet keep the secret to himself—nay, even write a great many shallow things to hide the fact.
To be sure, almost every phase of earthly life is glanced at in the plays. Yet this does not prove that Shakspere thought about any of them; he merely observed them. For example, the ​favorite memory of our first acquaintance with political economy is that question about what sort of society we would establish if cast upon a desert island. In The Tempest, when the King of Naples and his courtiers find themselves on what they think is a deserted island, they argue this very question. Says Gonzalo,
"Had I plantation of this very isle, my lord— •••••••I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; •••••••All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor; treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people."
​Now are we to believe that Shakspere here anticipates and pokes fun at the speculations of political economy, or that having this group of men upon a desert island he perceives the possibilities of the speculation, and puts into Gonzalo's mouth a translation of words used with another reference by Montaigne?
So with those curious coincidences which are strewn through the dramas. The poet has a trick—say some critics—of putting into the first words of the leading persons a clue to their characters. When Romeo says, "Is the day then so young," we are to see in him the embodiment of youth. It is easy enough to find marvels of this sort in Shakspere—perhaps in every poet. The themes of this same play of Romeo and Juliet may be said to be the conflict of Youth with Age—Age having forgotten what young love is like; and also the conflict of ​Love with Hate—Hate being expressed in the feud, which in turn is incarnate in Tybalt. It is easy enough for us to think of the story in these terms, but did Shakspere so think of it while writing it? and did he summarize the themes intentionally in a passage at the end of Act I? Capulet speaks first, doubtless representing Age—
"Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet, For you and I are past our dancing days: How long is't now since last yourself and I Were in a mask?
Second Capulet. By'r lady, thirty years.
Cap. What, man! 'tis not so much, 'tis not so much: 'Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio, Come pentecost as quickly as it will, Some five and twenty years: and then we masked.
Sec. Cap. 'Tis more, 'tis more: his son is elder, sir; His son is thirty.
Cap.Will you tell me that? His son was but a ward two years ago."
​Immediately Romeo speaks, representing Youth and Love—
"What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand Of yonder knight?
Serving-man. I know not, sir.
Rom. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear; Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand, And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."
Now enters Tybalt, who personifies the last theme, Hate—
"This, by his voice, should be a Montague. Fetch me my rapier, boy."
It makes all the difference whether we believe that Shakspere consciously inserted these designs or patterns in his work, or that they are there because they ​are in life, and the poet, reflecting life, mirrored more than he knew. The chanson d'aube and the aubade are in old French literature, but Shakspere never found them there; he found them, where the old French poets found them, in a dramatic situation of real life. Hamlet was the victim of heredity; the conflict of the vacillating mother and of the downright father was in him; yet Shakspere only perceived in life what we have perceived there also and have learned to call heredity. When Macbeth says that he has murdered sleep, and we trace through the play the remorseful sleeplessness which finally drives Lady Macbeth to suicide, we may call Shakspere a criminal psychologist if we choose, but he only observed what we have classified. He saw that we are such stuff as dreams are made of, but he probably would not have agreed with ​Bishop Berkeley. These designs in Shakspere are true and recognizable, but they are coincidences, like the Dipper in the heavens; we cannot think that a supreme intelligence marshalled planets and stars to illustrate a kitchen utensil.
IV
This view of Shakspere may seem to belittle him, as reducing his work to the improvisations of a child. The kingdom of heaven was once thought to be for aristocracy of intellect, and some of us think as much of the kingdom of poetry; but there is good authority for believing that they are both open to the imaginative, to those who can be unconscious of self as little children. Great intellect alone cannot force its way in, and it is the part of intelligence to recognize that fact. There is, of course, no reason ​why great intellect and great poetic faculty—the ability to reason and the ability to see and feel and speak—should not meet in the same person. They did so meet in Sophocles and in Euripides. But it seems that they did not so meet in Shakspere, and perhaps it is only a wilful praise of the poet of our own tongue that would call him, on the whole, the equal of the Greek dramatists.
If we make an intelligent distinction, however, between logical or analytical power and the poetic gift, then this theory of Shakspere's naïve mind is not without hope for a richer conception of the nature of poetry. Shakspere's critics have measured themselves in their measure of him. Milton, who prayed that his own lips might be touched with fire from off the sacred altar, beheld in the dramatist a secular, somewhat secondary, prophet of the same ineffable ​inspiration. Coleridge, philosopher and dreamer, never a man of action, saw in Shakspere a Prospero, a magician, controlling the ends of life by study and forethought. Arnold, the self-reliant, somewhat estranged servant of culture, expecting or desiring from men neither comprehension nor contact, imaged the poet in the unattainable, unguessed-at height. And if with another attitude we perceive in the mind of Shakspere only the most fortunate occurrence of qualities common to all men—only the eye to see, the heart to feel, the tongue to speak, and the absence of that overcaution which ceases to live when it stops to think—may it not be that our age, with all its sophistication, consciously aspires to the immediateness and the simplicity of life, and to that poetry which is not the accomplishment but the essence of life?