The Sun.
London, England, 1866-04-17 00:00:00

to fortify himself, or the beauty of his pitted his Genius Poetic, and contrasted it with his
own Genius, against oblivion by a Poem ? Genius Dramatic—holding himself between the two
And taking this combination of sonnets, this poem, —bending in love, which is almost idolatry, before
as the 'fair child' of his Genius, will it not be the one, and, utterly against his conviction, yield-
found worthy of it? I have called it a poem, and ing in love to the other—is food for long astonish-
a poem complete I shall prove it to be. ment.
" Having his plays as proof of his capacity, we " Not Hamlet, unstable, between the slow move-
can well understand his meaning. ments of his awfully invoked moral purpose and the
"I take the first sixteen verses to be inductive to the incessant activity of his mental abstractions—not
poem. It is his own exhortation to his Poetic Genius to Anthony, all human, between his dominions, and
beget by marriage with a subject or verse—or, in his honour, and his love for the Egyptian, are more
poetic signification, with his muse—a true and faith- remarkable contemplations than the knowledge this
ful likeness of itself, which likeness will be found poem reveals to us of how the mind of Shakspere
in the poem. was tortured between his life-deep love of Poetry
" But how about the Woman ? and his helpless passionate fondness for the Drama.
" The ' lovely Boy' is the personification of Poe- , Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
try—the Woman the personification of the Drama! Which like two spirits do suggest me still ;
What but Poetry could Shakspere so seriously love ? The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill;
What but the Drama could he, against his reason, so
To win me soon to hell my female evil
passionately pursue? How but in its love for the Tempteth my better angel from my side,
Drama could Shakspere's Poetic Genius have been And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
false to him ? Wooing his purity with her foul pride
" And how is it that, by reading the, poem in this And whether that my angel be turned fiend
light, it not only becomes lucid throughout, but Suspect 1 may, yet not directly tell,
But being both from me, both to each friend
takes the shape of the finest Psychological Poem in
I guess one angel in another's hell.
our language, even to the last two discarded son- Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
nets, which become an apt and necessary ending. Till my bad angel fire my good one out'
" But [it may be objected] some of these As I have before stated, he has personified his
Sonnets ; had been written long before 1609, Poetic Genius in the form of Man, youthful, beauti-
the year in which they were published. True ; ful, and all-accomplished.
and so long had Shakspere contemplated this poem, " But, with doubtful attributes, the colouring of the
so long had the dramatist known and bitterly felt time, and in the form of Woman, he has personified
in what estimation the world held him. For all the the Drama. Thoroughly to unfold the thousand
appreciation his astounding merit had created—he beauties of this work of ideas, would require a long
knew the scarlet brand of Dramatist and Actor to be and complete analysis of nearly every line. More
upon him. The vulgar impurities of the stage real knowledge of Shakspere will be derived from
dragged even him, in the intellectual opinion of the it eventually than all the labours of his lovers have
world, to a kindred level. But why did he not, brought to light. Careful and most attentive study
cognisant as he was of all this, give his attention is required to read it, and only those of peculiar
to the composition of a Great Poem? minds will ever understand it. I doubt if in the
"The Puritans were bitter against the stage, and at once so abstruse,
world there is another poem
...,. ~....-___, ---- ..--,-, ,- K3L--1-..r.a, wlio IVW,U so beautiful, so delicate, or so difficult.
with a great and good object, and than whom Mil- "Completed in his forty-fifth year—his very prime
ton was not more spiritual, the knowledge of being .be left it as his masterpiece :so carefully veiling

under a material garb the faithful likeness of his
own Great Soul, that for nearly three centuries it
has passed before the eyes of curious men utterly
unobserved I conclude with a verse addressed to
the Genius of Poetry as it existed in him, and as it
may in others be existing now :
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit ;
Duty so great which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare in wanting words to show it ;
But that I hope some good conceit of thine,
In thy soul's thought all naked will bestow it ;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving •
To show me worthy of my sweet respect ;
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee ;
Till then, not show my head where thou niay'st
prove me.' "
[And so—with the sound of Shakspere's own words
ringing in our ears—we are left by Mr. Robert Giles
to meditate over the ingenuity, and, as it appears
to us also no less distinctly, the exquisite beauty
and self-evident reasonableness of his expansion
or adaptation of the German theory he himself has
frankly alluded to as having first indicated in 01
way satisfactorily (but, even then, when left to
but very dimly) the real inner hidden meaning of
these wonderful Sonnets. As affording an expla-
nation of a very lovely but (until now) inscrutable
t
enigma, this little essay of Mr. Robert Giles's
henceforth, as it appears to us, be most judiciously
prefixed to every new edition of the Sonnets that
may hereafter be published. For having merely
propounded his theory we feel almost under a Per-
sonal obligation to this true lover and most saga"
cious reader of Shakspere.]

classed with vicious and false writers must have
been most galling. As bad as the invective of the
Puritans, to a noble and excelling mind must have
been the familiarity of the vulgar. And the abbre-
viation of his name into ' Will' by unthinking
fools was as much an insult to Shakspere as it would
have been to Milton to have heard himself desig-
nated ' Jack' by. an illiterate cobbler. But Shak-
spere, knowing his blamelessness, found solace in
communing with his Friend--his only true Friend
—and that was his Genius.
Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon soy brow,
For what care I who calls me well or ill
So you o'ergreen my bad, my good allow.
You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shame and praises from your tongue,
None else to me nor I to none alive.
That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound Abysm I throw all care
Of others' voices, that my adders' ears
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense :
You are so strongly to my purpose wed
That all the world besides methinks are dead.'
No biography—though it chronicled him to 'the
daily lacing of his shoes— could yield us such a
knowledge of Shakspere as this one Poem. But let
us come to the Second Part. In the first fuur lines
we find him contrasting the opinion of his
own times regarding the Drama with the
estimation in which it was held of old by the Greeks,
and more than that we read in a sonnet a vindication
of his own originality.
In the old time black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty's name ;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame ;
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes aro raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seam
At such who mot born fair no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem.
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woo
That every tongue says beauty should look so.'
Shakspere—no copyist, no disciple of other men, but
a free and absolute master of his own art—is here
thinking with his own mind and unreserved judg-
ment. As an original mind, ho is on a level with
sophocles, and equally capable of furnishing a stan-
dard of dramatic excellence. His judgment tells him
that his dramas are good, great, and original. His
critics tell him that they are irregular, not after the
Greek models; infact, that they are bastard composi-
tions. Weighing his critics' condemnation against his
own right estimation of his works, he says :
In the old ago black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty's name ;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame.'
In. the construction of his plays Shakspere fol-
lowed the dictates of his own judgment; he pur-
posely discarded the ancient form of the drama,
and chose to be original. Had he pleased he could
have constructed his plots with as exact a regard to
the unities as the Greeks themselves. He wanted
greater space. The Greeks had their own ideas of
excellence. Shakspere, like all great masters,
had his. It was not from ignorance, but from abso-
lute choice that he so constructed his pieces. The
Greeks those narrowness of space and time, Shaks-
pere breadth and length. The Greeks, art.
Shakspere both art and nature. That his contem-
poraries did not understand him we can well
imagine. It is only now that his independence
and excellence are beginning to receive a proper
acknowledgment. He was not only in ad-
vance of his own time, but he is of ours also.
His plays could not be otherwise than pleasing
but they were not understood. It is only the other
was comprehended, and possi-
day that ' Hamlet '
bly the failure of its being appreciated in his own
day as a great masterpiece gave birth to the ninety-
third sonnet :
Then hate use when thou wilt, if Aver now,
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross, &c.'
Leaving the hundred and twenty-eighth sonnet,
which is a wonderfully written allusion to the Stage
and Actors, we will pause at sonnets cxxxv. and vt.,
the one in which Shakspere alludes to his familiar
title of The sonnets are good-humoured,
and probably were written after a dramatic success,
but there is still expressed in them a sense of to
what familiarity his vocation doomed him.
'‘ Wonderfully popular as a Dramatist we know
him to have been, but criticism, though it awarded
him many excellences, was against him as a Supreme
Artist. It was his own knowledge of his own great-
ness which struck out lines like these :
In so profound Abyssm I throw all care
Of others' voices, that my adders' ears
To flatterer and to critic stopped are.'
This feeling is obvious in many stanzas of the poem,
and a deep and bitter feeling it was too. The know-
ing that he had abandoned Poetry for the Drama, and
that his Poetic Genius was only truly represented ill
his dramas, caused him deep regret. He represents
his Genius, in the form of his Friend, as altogether in
the Woman's (the Drama's) power :
That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly,
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief—
A loss in love touches mo more nearly.'
But his consolation is, that in having his Genius the
Drama hath him (Shakspere) also :
'But here's the joy ; my friend and I aro ono,
Sweet flattery shows she loves but me alone.'
"The second part of the poem, after fully reveal-
ing in what manner he estimated and how tho-
roughly he loves the Drama, concludes with two
stanzas, leaving him still her Lover and her Ser-
vant.
" The poem was published in 1609, with an enig-
matical dedication to a Mr. W. 11. Those who
truly study this last poetic work of our foremost
man will easily understand that to none other than
himself could it have been dedicated. William and
Himself beyond all question are the two words
indicated by the initials.
" But the poem is the most valuable in our lan-
guage. There is nothing like it in literature. Upon
its composition Shakspere has expended the trea-
sures of his most intricate thought, all his best com-
mand of language. From beginning to end there
is not one purposeless word. It is at the same time
the delineation and celebration of his Poetic Genius,
and the revelation of his moral associations with
the Drama.
" The inconceivable skill with which he has de-