The Sun.
London, England, 1865-04-10 00:00:00

LITERATURE

Cardinal Wiseman's Posthumous Work.
William Shakespeare. By His Eminence Cardinal
Wiseman. One Vol., pp. 80. Hurst and
Blackett.

An affecting legacy to England—for it is really
nothing less—is this apparently incomplete, but,
in truth (in its effect at least) this exquisitely
finished product of the intellect of Cardinal Wise-
man—his tribute to the genius of Shakspere. Having,
now, this thin octavo in our hands, we may feel at
last that the Tercentenary of Shakspere's Birth has
not after all passed by without some fitting celebra-
tion. Fragment though the book before us
nominally is, it is still, as we have intimated,
in its present shape, appreciable by us, one
and all, as a whole. It is recognisable, we would
say, in its entirety, in very despite of its seeming in-
completeness. And our meaning when so speaking
may here be made plain, upon the instant, by the very
simplest of illustrations. Fragment though the
work is, it is not to be judged, as scholiasts have it,
ex pede Rerculem. It is not a torso. Neither is it,
for that matter, truncated. Reverting to the
notion of a torso, it is the very reverse of that : for
it is the intermediate portion of the work, so to
speak, that is here alone wanting to us. We have
the beginning and the end of this Memorial—each
completely finished. It is the central portion that
is alone missing. It is as if the Memorial designed
in honour of Shakspere by the late Cardinal had
been Columnar in its character—the middle portion
of the shaft being alone a-wanting. The solid,
massive, nobly-proportioned Pediment is here.
Here, too, is the ornate Capital with which the
Artist's hand designed to crown it—this Memorial
to Shakspere—a Capital finished, even to the
minutest touch of the chisel, through all the minuter
tracery of its intricate and highly elaborated deco-
rations. And where the outlines of the shaft.—
ascending from the pediment, descending from the
capital—are seen to be broken off abruptly—leaving
only a gap between, we can recognise upon the
instant, by a mere glance of the eye, how those
missing outlines would have been continued,
judging of the work before us, as a work of art, by
the simple necessities of proportion. The produc-
tion, such as it is, appears in some sort, we would
repeat, as a distinct bequest from Cardinal Wise-
man to England—to his Eminence's fellow-
countrymen, the People of England. His fellow-
countrymen, we say, advisedly. For, born though
he was in Spain, of Irish parents, he was intensely,
nevertheless, in the very grail of his nature,
if not in the very essence of his social sym-
pathies, an Englishman. Of this the present volume
affords of itself conclusive attestation, None but an
Englishman at heart, none but an earnest, cordial,
patriotic, loyal Englishman could so have thought, and
felt, and written. Actually written, in point of fact,
by the Cardinal's own hand, it istrue, the book was
not. It was dictated by him during his last illness.
It is essentially, therefore, a Discourse, an Oration
—this Lecture that was to have leen delivered by
word of mouth (and to have been listened to) upon
an appointed day at the Royalilnstitution. Death,
unhappily, decided otherwise, however, and the
Lecture—the central portion merely of which
the dying Cardinal had neither strength nor
care to dictate—appears thus for the first
time in print as a posthumous publication.
It was the result of a kindly promise made by
his Eminence several months back, to the effect that
he would (in compliance with an urgent request
that he should do so) contribute—towards the cele-
bration of the Tercentenary of Shakspere's birth—a
tribute to his genius, in the form of a Lecture, at the
Royal Institution. To reduce such a subject to the
compass of a Lecture, as the Cardinal says himself,
seems little better than " a literal paradox." Here
indeed was to be an Iliad in a nut-shell ! The sub-
ject matter of such a Lecture as the one proposed
being, as his eminence takes occasion to remark
(p. 9) in no way extravagantly, " without per-
haps an exception, the most difficult literary theme
in English Letters." Yet, bewildering though
that theme is in itself, by reason at once of its
magnitude and its complexity—it has been here
descanted upon by Cardinal Wiseman lumi-
nously, eloquently, exquisitely—in a manner
worthy of it—with a refined, subtle, and most
comprehensive appreciation. The exordium of
this Discourse or Lecture upon the Genius of
William Shakspere, is in itself eminently beautiful.
Raphael laying down for the last time his palette,
" still moist with the brilliant colours which
he had spread upon his unfinished masterpiece,"
leaves the hinted limning of his own beautiful
lineaments to be discerned, alone, here and there,
in his own paintings, among the disciples in
an ancient school, or among the guards at a
sepulchre Michelangelo, "on casting down that
massive chisel that no one after him was worthy or
able to wield," himself alone enables posterity to
recognise the dim shadowing forth of the rugged
grandeur of his own wonderful countenance, in some
unfinished Satyr, or in the sublime image of his
Moses ! Mozart, on closing his last incompleted
score and laying himself down to pass from the
regions of earthly to those of heavenly music,
which none had so closely approached as he,
leaves no strains worthy to mourn his loss be-
yond those of his own marvellous Requiem,
for the first time chanted at his own inter-
ment ! And so, in like manner, quoth the Cardinal
—when the pen dropped from the hand of Shake-
pere, the world, powerless itself to describe his
marvellous characteristics, is constrained to draw
from his own works the sole adequate record of his
genius and nature. Phrases of his own—phrases
applied by him to others—are alone, in other
words, worthy
of defining himself I " The
poet's eye
in
afinephrenzy rolling"—for example.
Or—as we ourselves would hint—" A brow
where every god had seemed to set his seal to
give the world assurance of a man !" As to
the so-called record of the actual Life of Shakspere,
that depicts for us this matchless genius almost ex-
clusively, as the Cardinal reminds us (p. 6) " as the
worthy burgess or the thrifty merchant." It tells
us, very precisely, how much he paid for a certain
homestead in Stratford-upon-Avon—" the simple
autograph of his name being now worth all the sums
he thus expended !" What, we are asked here im-
pressively—What possibly can have become of the
manuscript folios in Shakspere's own handwriting—
or of the books upon books annotated or merely
marked by his pencil what time he may have
been drawing from among their leaves the
themes of his wonderful dramas ? Manu-
scripts and books—that must both have been
in existence at one time ! " What vandalism,"
asks the Cardinal, " destroyed the first or dis-
persed the second of those valuable treasures ? "
Turning back, however, to Shakspere's own writ-
ings, witha view to discover, there-from, some glim-
mering notion of what Shakspere was himself,
Cardinal Wiseman defines the task of thus piecing out
the Poet's own (either unconscious or half-conscious)
self-delineations, as resembling " the hopeless
labours of one who, from the fragments of a tease-
lated pavement should try to draw the elegant and
exquisitely tinted figure which once it bore." Ex-
tenuating his faithful fulfilment of his promise, even
after the collapse of the Tercentenary Movement, he
says, at once, as wisely as sententiously—" a task
undertaken becomes a duty unfulfilled." Speaking
deprecatingly of the fact that the office devolving upon
himself had not rather devolved upon one of those
pre-eminently distinguished as Students of Shak-
spere—" those who have consumed their lives in
the study of him, not page by page but line
by line, who have pressed his sweet fruits
between their lips till they have absorbed
all their lusciousness" —he puts forth what he
acknowledges to be an apparently paradoxical and
yet what is in truth, after all, a really valid reason
why he is in some measure exceptionally qualified to
pronounce a candid and unbiassed opinion in
regard to the Genius and Writings of Shakspere.
This reason being that he had never, during the
whole of his life, seen Shakspere acted I That
he knew him only "on his flat page, as he