The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-09-09
SHAKESPEARE ON BEA UTY.


From the London Saturday RecSew.
The admiration that we render to the
genius of Shakespeare is not all consciously
paid. Perhaps it is, quite as often as not,
unconscious. As with great building, so
with great genius, wherever excellence or
curiosity in the parts is lost in the harmony
or perfectness of the whole, admiration il
unconsciously or tacitly expressed. In
Shakespeare, overpowered by his dramatic
force and completeness we often lose sight
of his reasoning ability and his analytical
acuteness. No man leaves behind him in
quantity so large an intellectual legacy as
Shakespeare left, especially when the quality
is rare and the variety great, without having
put on record incidentally many marks of the
detailed workings of his mind; and not only
of his special intellectual processes or
principles, but also of his tastes and sympa-
thies. But who can say much on these mat
ters respecting Shakespeare Who does not
feel himself to be better informed about the
likes and dislkes of Falstaff, Romeo, Othello,
or even Hamlet, than he is about the views
and sentiments of their originator? The
reason is that the genius of Shakespeare was
not only profoundly dramatic, but profoundly
faithful to dramatic requirement. An1 thus
he becomes individually lost; lost doubly,
in the completeness and the va
riety of his dramatic creations. But
though lost to surface study and
undiscriminating observation-lost in short,
to that hasty and unsatisfactory character
known as the general reader"-there is no
reason why he should not be found, if care
fully searched after. In other words, the
works of Shakespeare do actually contain
traces, more or less distinct. of what he
thought and felt on a great variety of sub
iects, and by setting these indications side
by side q united whole may be gained which
tells us q good deal about his mind and heart
L - Al W. -
to examine how he wrote, and to infer as
nearly as may be how he thought on the
subject of personal beauty.
We think it was Lord Chesterfield who
once described personal beauty as "a good
letter of introduction" Good looks GER
tainly do the work of such letters very well
in q great number of instances but the de-
scription will be felt to be mean, feeble, and
Inadequate. Shakespeare would not have
endured it for a moment. He might have
put it for dramatic purposes into the mouth
of calculating Iago a cynical Jaques
but it is the last thing that he himself would
have accepted as description of beauty, for
his thoughts ran altogether on another level
They may not win general acceptance Just
now. 1t is possible that they may incline
some readers to ask, as George III once asked
of Miss Burney lin confdence), "Was there
ever suoh stuff as great part of Shakes
peare ?" But they are, notwithstanding, on
level which no one would be the
worse for trying to reach once
more. Beauty, in his conception,
was, in the first place, one Of the great prime
gifts of life. He is continually given 10 rank
it among these. He classes it with
High birth, vigor OF bone, desert in service.
Love, friendship, charity,
with education, youth, honesty, worth
courage and wisdom. Like all of these, it is
to be regarded more as a trust than as a gift.
1t may be distigured and wasted, thing
which it is criminal to allow; or increased and
transmitted, which it is not q matter of
caprice, but duty. Whatever view may be
held about the Sonnets in general, no one
who knows we'll that exquisite and difficult
series of poems will have much doubt that
the reiterated injunctions to perpetuate the
great endowment of beauty by transmission,
which abound in the first twenty or thirty
sonnets, are something more than the express
sion of wish regarding a particular case,
and represented general and permanent per-
suasions.
Like other prime personal faculties or ac-
QUESTIONS, beauty is also, in Shakespeare's s
view, potent infuencer. 1t is sometimes
mysteriously powerful for evil.
Beauty is witch
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
1t ''provoketh thieves sooner than gold it
nate. On the other hand, it can and ought
to exercise a sovereignty for good-sove-
reignty, because it is itself hedged round
with kind of regal divinity.
Beauty's princely majesty is such,
Confounds the tongue and makes the senses rough.
If it drove Angelo into insane and reckless
villany, it more often ''reclaims the tyrant, >
and wins ''respect" and privilege 1t can
shame the purse proud into submission, and
it can annihilate time.
withered hermit, hve-score winters worn,
Might shake OFF fifty, looking iu her eye:
Beauty doth varnish age, as II newborn,
And gives the crutch the cradles infancy.
We have SO far spoken only of the rels-
tions and the influence of beauty. There is
no dramatic poet who writes so clearly, so
consistently within reasonable limits),
and so nobly as Shakespeare does
about its nature and quality.
Every now and then it suits him to
write ALPHABETICALLY, as when the servant
in IT0il1tS and CfesSidd calls, not beauty in
the abstract only, but the actual embodied
Helen, Gloves invisible soul" But Shake
speares s own thought and feeling about the
nature of beauty was exactly the opposite of
this. score of passages show that he habi-
tually conceived of it as kind of semi-corpo-
real essence, the soul or vital principle of
which is goodness. We do not care to inquire
how far this was due to the higher influences
of Euphuism, or to the mysticism of Italian
poets. For, like everything else that he
touched. he had made these thoughts essen
TALLY his own; and they had been removed by
him (though at this time of day they
may look almost too delicate for common
rse) out of the region of the transcen