STYLE.

The wordstyleis often used in a sense equally appropriate to all the forms of Art,—a sense having reference to some peculiar mode of conception or execution; as the Saxon, the Norman, the Romanesque style of architecture, or the style of Titian, of Raphael, of Rembrandt, of Turner, in painting. In this sense, it includes the whole general character or distinctive impression of any given workmanship in Art, and so is applicable to the Drama; as when we speak of a writer's tragic or comic style, or of such and such dramas as being in too operatic a style. The peculiarities of Shakespeare's style in this sense have been involved in the foregoing sections; so that I shall have no occasion to speak further of them in this general survey of the Poet's Art. The more restrained and ordinary meaning of the word looks merely to an author's use of language; that is, his choice and arrangement of words, the structure of his sentences, and the cast and texture of his imagery; all, in short, that enters into his diction, or his manner of conveying his particular thoughts. This is the matter now to be considered. The subject, however, is a very wide one,and naturally draws into a multitude of details; so that I can hardly do more than touch upon a few leading points, lest the discussion should quite overgrow the limits I have prescribed myself.

On a careful inspection of Shakespeare's poetry, it becomes evident that none of the epithets commonly used in regard to style, such asplain, simple, neat, ornate, elegant, florid, figurative, severe, copious, sententious, can be rightly applied to him, at least not as characteristic of him. His style is all of them by turns, and much more besides; but no one of the traits signified by those terms is so continuous or prominent as to render the term in any sort fairly discriminative or descriptive of his diction.

Under this head, then, I am to remark, first, that Shakespeare's language is as far as possible from being of a constant and uniform grain. His style seems to have been always in a sort of fluid and formative state. Except in two or three of his earliest plays, there is indeed a certain common basis, for which we have no word butShakespearian, running through his several periods of writing; but upon this basis more or less of change is continually supervening. So that he has various distinct styles, corresponding to his different stages of ripeness in his work. These variations, to be sure, are nowise abrupt: the transition from one to another is gradual and insensible, proceeding by growth, not by leaps: but still, after an interval of six or seven years, the difference becomes clearly marked. It will suffice for my purpose to speak of them all under the threefold distinction of earlier, middle, and later styles. And I probably cannot do better than to takeKing Richard the Second, As You Like It, andCoriolanus, as representing, severally, those three divisions.

Shakespeare began by imitating the prevailing theatrical style of the time. He wrote in much the same way as those before and about him did, till by experience and practice he found out a better way of his own. It is even doubtful whether his first imitations surpassed his models. InTitusAndronicus, the First Part ofKing Henry the Sixth, andThe Comedy of Errors, if there be any thing of the right Shakespearian idiom, it is so overlaid by what he had caught from others as to be hardly discoverable. Accordingly those pieces seem to me little better than worthless, save as specimens of his apprentice-work. InThe Two Gentlemen of Verona, also,Loves Labour's Lost, andThe Taming of the Shrew, imitation has decidedly the upper hand; though in these plays, especially the latter, we have clear prognostics of the forthcoming dramatic divinity. From thence onward his style kept growing less imitative and more idiomatic till not the least taste or relish of the former remained. So that in this respect his course was in fact just what might be expected from a thoroughly modest, teachable, receptive, and at the same time most living, active, and aspiring mind,—a mind full indeed of native boldness, but yet restrained by judgment and good sense from the crudeness and temerity of self-will and eccentric impulse, and not trusting to its own strength till it had better reasons for doing so than the promptings of vanity and egotism.

It is to this process of imitation that the Poet's faults of style are to be mainly ascribed; though in the end it was no doubt in a great measure the source of his excellences also. For, taking his works in the order of their production, we can perceive very clearly that his faults of style kept disappearing as he became more and more himself. He advanced in the path of improvement by slow tentative methods, and was evidently careful not to deviate from what was before him till he saw unmistakably how he could do better. As he was thus "most severe in fashion and collection of himself"; so he worked in just the true way for disciplining and regulating his genius into power; and so in due time he had a good right to be "as clear and confident as Jove."

Shakespeare's faults of style, especially in his earlier plays,are neither few nor small. Among these are to be reckoned, of course, his frequent quibbles and plays upon words, his verbal conceits and affectations, his equivoques and clinches. Many of these are palpable sins against manliness; not a few of them are decidedly puerile; the results of an epidemic of trifling and of fanciful prettiness. Some critics, it is true, have strained a point, if not several points, in defence of them; but it seems to me that a fair-minded criticism has no way but to set them down as plain blemishes and disfigurements. And our right, nay, our duty to call them such is fully approved in that the Poet himself seasonably outgrew and forsook them; a comparison of his earlier and later plays thus showing that his manlier taste discarded them. They were however nowise characteristic of him: they were the fashion of the day, and were common to all the dramatic writers of the time. Nor were they by any means confined to the walks of the Drama: many men of the highest character and position both in Church and State were more or less infected with them.

It is not likely indeed that Shakespeare at first regarded these things as faults, or that he adopted them reluctantly in compliance with the popular bent, and as needful to success. In his youth he doubtless used them in good faith, and even sought for them as traits of excellence; for he himself shared to the fullest extent in the redundancy of mental life which distinguished the age, and which naturally loves to sport itself in such quirks of thought and speech. But it is manifest that he was not long in growing to distaste them, notwithstanding that he still continued occasionally to practise them. For, even inThe Merchant of Venice, which I reckon among the last in his earlier or the first in his middle style, we find him censuring the thing while indulging it:

"O, dear discretion, how his words are suited!The fool hath planted in his memoryAn army of good words; and I do knowA many fools, that stand in better place,Garnish'd like him, that for a tricksy wordDefy the matter."

In the case here censured, however, the thing, though a vice in itself, is no offence to good taste, and may even be justly noted as a stroke of dramatic virtue, because it is rightly characteristic of the person using it: which only makes the reproof the more pointed as aimed at the habit, then but too common in the high places of learning, of so twisting language into puns and conceits, that one could hardly come at the sense. But I can admit no such plea, when, inKing Richard the Second, the dying Gaunt goes to punning on his name:

"Old Gaunt indeed; and gaunt in being old:Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast;And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt?For sleeping England long time have I watch'd;Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt:The pleasure that some fathers feed uponIs my strict fast,—I mean my children's looks;And therein fasting, hast thou made me gaunt:Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave,Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones."

This, notwithstanding it is defended by so sound a critic as Schlegel, seems to me a decided blot; I cannot accept it as right either in itself or on the score of dramatic fitness. Many like instances occur inRomeo and Juliet, King John, and other plays of that period; instances which I cannot help regarding not only as breaches of good taste in the speakers, but as plain faults of style in the Poet himself: the blame of them indeed properly rests with him, not with the persons; for they are out of keeping with the sentiments of the occasion, and jar on the feelings which the surrounding matter inspires; that is, they are sins against dramatic propriety, as well as against honest manliness of style: so that, however the pressure of the age may account for them, it must not be taken as excusing them; and the best we can say on this point is, that in hisfaults of style the Poet went with the custom and fashion of his time, while in his virtues he went quite above and beyond the time.

Near akin to these are other faults of still graver import. In his earlier plays, the Poet's style is often, not to say generally, at least in the more serious parts, rather rhetorical than rightly dramatic. The persons often lay themselves out in what may not unfairly be called speech-making. Their use of language is highly self-conscious, and abounds in marks of elaborateness, as if their mind were more intent on the figure they are making than on what they are talking about: so that the right colloquial tone is lost in a certain ambitious, oratorical, got-up manner of speech; and we feel a want of that plain, native, spontaneous talk wherein heart and tongue keep touch and time together: in short, they speak rather as authors having an audience in view than as men and women moved by the real passions and interests of life.

The reason of all this I take to be, that the Poet himself was at that time highly self-conscious in his use of language. His art was then too young to lose itself in the enthusiasm of Truth and Nature; and, as remarked before, he seems to have felt no little pleasure in the tokens of his own skill. Thus, in his earlier plays, written before he had fully found himself, the arts and motives of authorship are but too apparent: he was then, I should say, somewhat in the humour of flirting with the Muses and Graces; which, because it lacks the modesty and delicacy of genuine passion, therefore naturally runs into that excess of manner and style which is commonly called "fine writing." And it is a very note-worthy point, that when he studies most for effect, then it is that we find him least effective. But here too, as in the matter mentioned before, his fault was clearly the result of imitation, not of character. Accordingly, in the earnestness of his work, he gradually outgrew it. In the plays of his later period, the fault disappears entirely; there is not a vestige of it left: in fact, this fault ismainly revealed to us by the higher standard of judgment which his later plays supply. Here all is straightforward, genuine, natural, with no rhetorical trickeries or fineries whatever; and among all modern writers his style stands quite alone in the solid purity, directness, and inward virtue of that perfect art which not only conceals itself from others, but is even a secret unto itself; or at least is too intent on something else to be listening to the music of its own voice. For so his highest style was when, in the maturity of his power, he left the style to take care of itself, and therefore had it perfectly subordinated to his matter and thought: in other words, he always writes best when most unconscious of it, being so possessed with his theme as to take no thought of himself.

We have somewhat the same order and course of things in Burke, who may be not unfitly described as the Shakespeare of political philosophy. His treatiseOn the Sublime and Beautifulwas, though in a good sense, mainly the fruit of literary ambition. There he rather sought for something to say because he wanted to speak, than spoke because he had something he wanted to say. And so he is not properly himself in that work, but only a studious, correct, and tasteful writer. When thoroughly roused and kindled in the work of defending, intrenching, and illustrating the Constitution of his country as the sacred guardian of liberty and order, he became quite another man; then it was that all the powers of his great mind were taught and inspired to act in concert and unity. As Wordsworth says of him,—

"This is no trifler, no short-flighted wit,No stammerer of a minute, painfullyDeliver'd. No! the Orator hath yok'dThe Hours, like young Aurora, to his car:Thrice-welcome Presence! how can patience e'erGrow weary of attending on a trackThat kindles with such glory!"

The mere ambitions of authorship are not enough to makegood authors; and what Burke needed was something to lift him far above them. And when he came to grapple with the high practical questions and living interests of mankind, here he was too full of his matter, and too earnest in his cause, to observe how finely he was working; and because he was captivated by his theme, not by the figure he made in handling it, therefore he earned a prerogative place among the sons of light.

The distinction I have been remarking between Shakespeare's rhetorical and dramatic use of language, or, as I before termed it, his imitative and idiomatic style, may be better understood on comparing some brief specimens of his earlier and later workmanship. As an instance of the former, take a part of York's speech to the King, inKing Richard the Second, ii. 1:

"I am the last of noble Edward's sons,Of whom thy father, Prince of Wales, was first:In war was never lion rag'd more fierce,In peace was never gentle lamb more mild,Than was that young and princely gentleman.His face thou hast, for even so look'd he,Accomplish'd with the number of thy hours;But when he frown'd, it was against the French,And not against his friends: his noble handDid win what he did spend, and not spend thatWhich his triumphant father's hand had won:His hands were guilty of no kindred's blood,But bloody with the enemies of his kin."

No one, I think, can help feeling that this is the style of a man rather aiming at finely-turned phrases than deeply in earnest with the matter in hand; more the language of brilliant rhetoric than of impassioned thought. At all events, there is to my taste an air of falsetto about it; it seems more like the image of a painted than of a living passion. Be this as it may, the Poet's own riper style quite discredits it; though I have to confess that, but for his teachings, we might not so well have known of any thing better. Now contrast with the foregoing one of thehero's speeches inCoriolanus, iii. 2, where his mother urges him to play the demagogue, and practise smiles for the gaining of votes:

"Away, my disposition, and possess meSome harlot's spirit! my throat of war be turn'd—Which quirèd with my drum—into a pipeSmall as an eunuch's, or the virgin voiceThat babies lulls asleep! the smiles of knavesTent in my cheeks; and school-boys' tears take upThe glasses of my sight! a beggar's tongueMake motion through my lips; and my arm'd knees,Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like hisThat hath receiv'd an alms!—I will not do't;Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth,And by my body's action teach my mindA most inherent baseness."

Perhaps the Poet's different styles might be still better exemplified in passages of pathos; but here I must rest with merely referring, for instance, to York's speech inKing Richard the Second, beginning, "As in a theatre the eyes of men," and the passage inMacbethwhere Macduff first learns of the slaughter of his wife and children. Both are indeed very noble in their way; but I think no reader of disciplined taste can fail to see the vast superiority of the latter, and that this is owing not so much to any difference of character in the speakers as to a far higher stage of art in the Poet. I must add that the rhetorical or speech-making style appears more or less in all the plays of his first period: we find something of it even in such high specimens asThe Merchant of VeniceandKing Henry the Fourth.

I have spoken of the fault in question as specially marking themore seriousparts of the Poet's earlier plays. The more comic portions of the same plays are much less open to any such reproof. The Poet's style in comedy from the first ran closer to nature, and had much more of freedom, simplicity, and heartiness in its goings. The reason of this difference seems to be, that the lessons of nature in sportare more quickly learnt than those of nature in her graver moods. The child plays, the man works. And there needs a ripe soul of manhood, with much discipline besides, before a man warms into his work with the free gust and spirit of play.

In what more I have to say under this head, I shall spare further reference to the Poet's faults of imitation, and speak only of his characteristic or idiomatic traits of style.

In regard to Shakespeare's choice of words there probably need not much be said. Here the point I shall first consider is the relative proportion of Saxon and Latin words in his writing.—Students somewhat curious in this behalf have found his words of Latin derivation to average about forty per cent. This, I believe, does not greatly differ from the average used by the most select and accomplished writers of that age. I suspect that Hooker has a somewhat larger proportion of Latin words, but am not sure of it.—The English had already grown to be a learned tongue; and, which is far better, the learned portion of it had got thoroughly diffused and domesticated in the popular mind: for centuries the Saxon and Latin elements had been in process of blending and fusing together, so as to work smoothly and even lovingly side by side in the same thought; common people using both with the same easy and unstudied naturalness. Therewithal the language was then in just its freshest state of maturity; flexible to all the turns of philosophical and poetical discourse; full of vital sap and flavour; its cheeks plump and rosy, its step light and graceful, with health: pedants and grammarians had not starched and ironed it into self-conscious dignity and primness: it had not learnt the vice of putting on literary airs, and of practising before a looking-glass. Our translation of the Bible is enough of itself to prove all this, even if we had no other monuments of the fact. And the Elizabethan English was a right joyous and jolly tongue also, as became the heart of brave, honest, merry oldEngland; yet it was earnest and candid withal, and had in no sort caught the French disease of vanity and persiflage: it was all alive, too, with virgin sensibility and imaginative delicacy; to say nothing of how Spenser found or made it as melodious and musical as Apollo's lute.

Shakespeare has many passages, some of them running to considerable length, made up almost wholly of Saxon words. Again, he has not a few wherein the Latin largely shares. Yet I can hardly see that in either case any thing of vigour and spirit is lost. On the other hand, I can often see a decided increase of strength and grasp resulting in part from a judicious mixing and placing of the two elements. I cite a few passages in illustration; the first two being fromKing Lear, the third fromAntony and Cleopatra:

"Mine enemy's dog,Though he had bit me, should have stood that nightAgainst my fire; and wast thou fain, poor father,To hovel thee with swine, and rogues forlorn,In short and musty straw?""We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,And ask of thee forgivness: so we'll live,And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laughAt gilded butterflies, and hear poor roguesTalk of Court news; and we'll talk with them too,—Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out;—And take upon 's the mystery of things,As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,That ebb and flow by th' Moon.""HenceforthThe white hand of a lady fever thee,Shake thou to look on't. Get thee back to Cæsar,Tell him thy entertainment: look thou sayHe makes me angry with him; for he seemsProud and disdainful, harping on what I am,Not what he knew I was: he makes me angry;And at this time most easy 'tis to do't,When my good stars, that were my former guides,Have empty left their orbs, and shot their firesInto th' abysm of Hell."

"Mine enemy's dog,Though he had bit me, should have stood that nightAgainst my fire; and wast thou fain, poor father,To hovel thee with swine, and rogues forlorn,In short and musty straw?"

"We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,And ask of thee forgivness: so we'll live,And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laughAt gilded butterflies, and hear poor roguesTalk of Court news; and we'll talk with them too,—Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out;—And take upon 's the mystery of things,As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,That ebb and flow by th' Moon."

"HenceforthThe white hand of a lady fever thee,Shake thou to look on't. Get thee back to Cæsar,Tell him thy entertainment: look thou sayHe makes me angry with him; for he seemsProud and disdainful, harping on what I am,Not what he knew I was: he makes me angry;And at this time most easy 'tis to do't,When my good stars, that were my former guides,Have empty left their orbs, and shot their firesInto th' abysm of Hell."

With these collate the following fromTroilus and CressidaandKing Lear, where, for aught I can see, the interweaving of Saxon and Latin words proceeds with just as much ease and happiness as the almost pure Saxon of the foregoing:

"How could communities,Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,The primogenity and due of birth,Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,But by degree, stand in authentic place?Take but degree away, untune that string,And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meetsIn mere oppugnancy: the bounded watersShould lift their bosoms higher than the shores,And make a sop of all this solid globe:Strength should be lord of imbecility,And the rude son should strike his father dead:Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong—Between whose endless jar justice resides—Should lose their names, and so should justice too.Then every thing includes itself in powerPower into will, will into appetite;And appetite, an universal wolf,So doubly seconded with will and power,Must make perforce an universal prey,And last eat up himself.""Tremble, thou wretch,That hast within thee undivulgèd crimes,Unwhipp'd of justice: hide thee, thou bloody hand;Thou perjur'd, and thou simular of virtue,That art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake,That under covert and convenient seemingHast practis'd on man's life: close pent-up guilts,Rive your concealing continents, and cryThese dreadful summoners grace."

"Tremble, thou wretch,That hast within thee undivulgèd crimes,Unwhipp'd of justice: hide thee, thou bloody hand;Thou perjur'd, and thou simular of virtue,That art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake,That under covert and convenient seemingHast practis'd on man's life: close pent-up guilts,Rive your concealing continents, and cryThese dreadful summoners grace."

Observe what a sense of muscularity this usage carries, not only in the foregoing, but also in various shorter instances:

"Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose.""This my hand will ratherThe multitudinous sea incarnardine.""What is it then to me, if impious War—Array'd in flames, like to the Prince of Fiends—Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell featsEnlink'd to waste and desolation?""And other devils, that suggest by treasons,Do botch and bungle up damnation."

"Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose."

"This my hand will ratherThe multitudinous sea incarnardine."

"What is it then to me, if impious War—Array'd in flames, like to the Prince of Fiends—Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell featsEnlink'd to waste and desolation?"

"And other devils, that suggest by treasons,Do botch and bungle up damnation."

It should be noted, further, that Shakespeare has many palpable Latinisms, some of them very choice too; that is, words of Latin origin used quite out of their popular English sense; such as,—"Th'extravagantanderringspirit hies to his confine,"—"Upon mysecurehour thy uncle stole,"—"Rank corruption, mining all within,infectsunseen,"—and, "Toexpostulatewhat majesty should be, what duty is." And sometimes, not having the fear of poetical, or rather of unpoetical precisians and martinets before his eyes, he did not even scruple to naturalize words for his own use from foreign springs, such asexsufflicateandderacinate; or to coin a word, whenever the concurring reasons of sense and verse invited it; as infedary, intrinse, intrinsicate, insisture, and various others.

As to the sources from which Shakespeare drew his choice and use of words, the most material point seems to be, that he certainly did not go to books or scholars, or to those who made language a special object of study. Yet he knew right well that this was often done; for he ridicules it deliriously inLove's Labour's Lost, when Sir Nathaniel the Curate says of Constable Dull, "He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished"; and again, still better, when it is said of the learned Curate and Holofernes the School-master, "They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps";—"They have lived long in the alms-basket of words." Shakespeare did not learn his language in this way: he went right into familiar, everyday speech for his words; caught them fresh, and beating with life, from the lips of common people and intelligent men of the world, farmers, mechanics, tradesmen, and housekeepers, who used language purely as a medium, not as an object, of thought; and of professional men, as they spoke when conversing with practical things, and stirred by the motives and feelings of actual life; that is, when, however they might think as wise men do, they spoke as common people do.

Hence we find him using the special terms of the street, the farm, the garden, the shop, the kitchen, the pantry, the wine-vault, the forecastle, the counting-room, the exchange, the bower, of hunting, falconry, angling, war, and even the technical terms of the Law, of Medicine, and Divinity, all as they actually lived on the tongues of men, and just as life had steeped its sense and spirit into them. This it is, in great part, that has made him so high and so wide an authority in verbal definition: as he took the meaning of words at first hand, and so preserved them with all their native sap and juice still in them; so lexicography uses him as its best guide. Hence, too, the prodigious compass, variety, limberness, and ever-refreshing raciness of his diction: no familiarity can suck the verdure out of it: the perennial dews of nature are incorporated in its texture: so that no words but his own can fitly describe it; as when he says of Cleopatra, "Other women cloy the appetites they feed; but she makes hungry where most she satisfies." Yet there is very seldom any smack of vulgarity in his language, save when the right delineation of character orders it so: words, that are nothing but vulgar as used by vulgar minds, are somehow in his use washed clean of their vulgarity; for there was a cunning alchemy in his touch that could instantly transmute the basest materials into "somethingrich and strange." In this respect, Mr. White justly applies to him what Laertes says of his sister:

"Thought and affliction, passion, Hell itself,She turns to favour and to prettiness."

The Poet's arrangement of words is often very peculiar, and sometimes such as to render his meaning rather obscure; not obscure, perhaps, to his contemporaries, whose apprehension was less fettered by grammatical rules; but so to us, because our wits are more tied up from nimbleness with notions of literal correctness, and with habits of mind contracted from long intercourse with parsing writers. I mean that Shakespeare often sorts and places his words in what seems to us an arbitrary manner, throwing them out, so to speak, almost at random. Here is a small instance: "At our more consider'd time, we'll read, answer, and think upon this business." Of course,our more consider'd timemeans, when we have taken time for further consideration. So too when the King suddenly resolves on sending Hamlet to England, and on having him there put to death; fearing a popular tumult, because Hamlet is loved by the multitude, he says, "To bear all smooth and even, this sudden sending him away must seem deliberate pause"; that is, a thing that we have paused and deliberated upon. Here it would seem that the Poet, so he got the several elements of thought and the corresponding parts of expression drawn in together, cared little for the precise form and order of the latter, trusting that the hearer or reader would mentally shape and place them so as to fit the sense. But the meaning is not always so easy to come at as in these two cases. InMacbeth, v. 4, when others are surmising and forecasting the issue of the war, Macduff says, "Let our just censures attend the true event, and put we on industrious soldiership." He wants to have the present time all spent in doing the work, not in speculating of the issue; and his meaning is, Let us not try to judge how things are going, till the actual result enables us to judgerightly; or, Let our judgments wait till the issue is known,that so they may bejust. In this case, the ideas signified byjudgment, waiting, result, known, andjustwere all to be expressed together, and the answering parts of language are disposed in the handiest order for metre and brevity; while the relations which those parts bear to each other in the speaker's thought are to be gathered from the subject and drift of the foregoing dialogue.

As this is at times a rather troublesome feature in the Poet's style, I will add a few more instances. Thus in the same play: "This castle hath a pleasant seat: the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses"; that is, the airsweetensour sensesinto gentleness, ormakesthem gentle, by its purity and pleasantness. Again: "Ere humane statute purg'd the gentle weal"; which means, ere humane lawsmadethe commonwealth gentle by cleansing it from the wrongs and pollutions of barbarism. So too inKing Henry the Fifth, when the conspiring lords find their plot detected, and hear the doom of death pronounced upon them by the King, one of them says, "And God be thankèd for prevention; which I in sufferance heartily will rejoice;" meaning, that he is thankful their murderous purpose is defeated, though it be by their death; and that he will heartily rejoice for such defeat, even while suffering the pains it involves. Again, inKing Henry the Fourth, when Hotspur is burning to cross swords with Prince Henry in the forthcoming battle:

"And, fellows, soldiers, friends,Better consider what you have to do,Than I, that have not well the gift of tongue,Can lift your blood up with persuasion."

That is, you can better kindle your spirits to the work by thinking with yourselves what is to be done, than my small power of speech can heat your courage up for the fight by any attempts at persuasion. The well-known words of Juliet—"That runaway's eyes may wink"—come under the same class of cases; and how hard such forms of language sometimes are to understand, may be judged from the interminable discussion occasioned by that famous passage. And it must be confessed, I think, that in several cases of this kind perspicuity is not a little sacrificed to metrical convenience and verbal dispatch. But Shakespeare wrote with the stage in view, not the closet; and he doubtless calculated a good deal on the help of the actor's looks, tones, and gestures, in rendering his meaning intelligible.

As regards the other points in Shakespeare's arrangement of words, I have little more to say than that here again his practice has nothing bookish or formal about it, but draws right into life and the living speech of men. He has no settled rules, no favourite order. In this respect, as in others, language was in his hands as limber as water at the fountain. He found it full of vital flexibility, and he left it so; nay, rather made it more so. As he did not learn his craft in the little narrow world of school rhetoricians, where all goes by the cut-and-dry method, and men are taught to "laugh by precept only, and shed tears by rule," but from the spontaneous rhetoric of the great and common world; so we find him varying the order of his words with the unconscious ease of perfect freedom, and moulding his language into an endless diversity of shapes. Perhaps I cannot better express his style in this behalf than by saying that he pitches right into the matter, instead of walking or wording round it; not looking at all to the gracefulness of his attitudes or the regularity of his motions, but driving straight ahead at directness, compactness, perspicuity, and force; caring little for the grammar of his speech, so it convey his sense; and taking no thought about the facility or even possibility of parsing, but only to get the soul of his purpose into a right working body. Thus inCymbeline, iii. 2, where the hard-beset Imogen is first beguiled into the hope of meeting her husband at Milford Haven:

"Then, true Pisanio,—Who long'st, like me, to see thy lord; who long'st,—O, let me bate,—but not like me;—yet long'st,—But in a fainter kind;—O, not like me,For mine's beyond beyond;—say, and speak thick,—Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearingTo th' smothering of the sense,—how far it isTo this same blessèd Milford: and, by th' way,Tell me how Wales was made so happy asT' inherit such a haven: but, first of all,How we may steal from hence; and for the gapThat we shall make in time, from our hence-going,And our return, t' excuse:—but, first, how get hence:Why should excuse be born or e'er begot?We'll talk of that hereafter."

What a chaos of verbal confusion have we here, until we penetrate to the soul of the heroine! and then what a pavilion of life and beauty this soul organizes that chaos into! How ignorant the glorious creature is of grammar; yet how subtile and sinewy of discourse! How incorrect her placing of words, yet how transfigured with grace of feeling and intelligence! Just think into what a nice trim garden of elocution a priest of the correct and classical church, like Pope, would have dressed this free outpouring of the speaker's heart. No doubt the language would be faultlessly regular; you might analyze and parse itcurrente lingua; but how lifeless and odourless the whole thing! how all the soul of nature, which now throbs so eloquently in it, would have been dried and crimped out of it! The workmanship, in short, to borrow an illustration from Schlegel, would have been like the mimic gardens of children; who, eager to see the work of their hands, break off twigs and flowers, and stick them in the ground; which done, the childish gardener struts proudly up and down his showy beds.

Perhaps the Poet's autocratic overshooting of grammar and rhetoric is still better instanced in the same play, v. 3, where Posthumus relates the doings of old Belarius and the Princes in a certain lane. On being asked, "Where was this lane?" he replies:

"Close by the battle, ditch'd, and wall'd with turf;Which gave advantage to an ancient soldier,—An honest one, I warrant; who deserv'dSo long a breeding as his white beard came to,In doing this for 's country: athwart the lane,He, with two striplings,—lads more like to runThe country base than to commit such slaughter;With faces fit for masks, or rather fairerThan those for preservation cas'd or shame,—Made good the passage; cried to those that fled,Our Britain's harts die flying, not our men."

And so on to the end of the speech; which is all, from first to last, as glorious in conception and imagery as it is reckless of rhetorical form.

I am next to say somewhat touching the Poet's sentence-building, this being a matter that rhetoricians make much of; though in this, also, I must in the outset acquit him of any practical respect for the rulings of courts rhetorical. For here, again, he has no set fashion, no preferred pattern, no oft-recurring form; nothing at all stereotyped or modish; but just ranges at large in all the unchartered freedom and versatility of the English colloquial idiom. You may find in him sentences of every possible construction; but, except in his early plays, you can hardly say that he took to any one mould of structure more than another. So that his most peculiar feature here is absence of peculiarity. Thought dominates absolutely the whole material of expression, working it, shaping it, out-and-out, as clay in the potter's hands; which has no character but what it receives from the occasion and purpose of the user. As the Poet cares for nothing but to "suit the action to the word, the word to the action," so his word takes on forms as various as the action of his persons; nay, more; is pliant to all their moods and tenses of thought, passion, feeling, and volition. Thus, in the structure of his sentences, as in other things, his language is strictly physiognomic of his matter, the speaking exterior of the inward life; whichlife is indeed the one sole organizing principle of it. Accordingly he has specimens of the most pithy, piercing, sententious brevity; specimens with all the ample and rich magnificence of ordered pomp; specimens of terse, restrained, yet rhythmical, and finely-modulated vigour; specimens of the most copious and varied choral harmony; specimens of the most quiet, simple, and pure-flowing melody; now a full burst of the many-voiced lordly organ, now the softest and mellowest notes of the flute. Not only these, but all the intermediate, and ever so many surrounding varieties of structure are met with in his omniformity of sentence-building. In short, the leaves of a forest are hardly more varied in figure and make than Shakespeare's sentences; so that if these were all sorted into rhetorical classes, and named, it would "dizzy the arithmetic of memory" to run through their names.

The only divisions on this score that I shall attempt to speak of are those called the Period and the Loose Sentence. Everybody knows, I presume, that in a periodic sentence, when rightly fashioned, the sense is not completed till you reach the close; so that the whole has to be formed in thought before any part is set down. The beginning forecasts the end, the end remembers the beginning, and all the intermediate parts are framed with an eye to both beginning and end. And the nearer it comes to a regular circle, the better it is held to be. This style of writing, then, may be not unfitly said to go on wheels. It is naturally rolling and high-sounding, or at least may easily be made so, and therefore is apt to be in favour with geniuses of a swelling, oratorical, and elocutionary order. Besides, it is a style easily imitated, and so is not unfavourable to autorial equality. On the other hand, the Loose Sentence begins without any apparent thought of how it is to end, and proceeds with as little apparent thought of how it began: the sense may stand complete many times before it gets through: it runs on seemingly at random,winding at its "own sweet will," though the path it holds is much nearer a straight line than a circle; and it stops, not where the starting foresaw, but where the matter so carries it. Thus it is a sort of lingual straggler, if you please, and may be said to wander with little or no conscience of the rhetorical toilet.

Shakespeare has many periodic sentences: at first he seems to have rather affected that structure: in the more serious parts of the plays written in his earlier style it is so common as to be almost characteristic of them. But, on the whole, he evidently much preferred writing in straight lines to writing in circles; and this preference grew stronger as he ripened in his art; so that in his later workmanship the periodic construction becomes decidedly rare: and the reason of his so preferring the linear to the circular structure seems to have been, not only because the former is the more natural and spontaneous way of speaking, but also because it offers far more scope for the proper freedom and variety of English colloquial speech. He has numberless sentences of exquisite beauty of structure; many indeed of the circular kind, but far more of the linear; and the beauty of the latter is purer and higher than that of the former, because it is much more unconscious and unsought, and comes along of its own accord in the undivided quest of something else: for, say what you will, the true law in this matter is just that so well stated by Professor Shairp in the passage before quoted in a note on page 138: "No one ever became really beautiful by aiming at beauty. Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself." And so it was with Shakespeare in all respects,—I mean Shakespeare the master, not Shakespeare the apprentice,—and in none more so than in the matter of style.

Before quitting this branch of the theme, I will add a few illustrations. And I will begin with two specimens of the circular structure; the first being from the night-scene inThe Merchant of Venice, v. I:

"For do but note a wild and wanton herd,Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,Fetching mad bounds, bellowing, and neighing loud,Which is the hot condition of their blood;If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,Or any air of music touch their ears,You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze,By the sweet power of music."

The next is from one of Westmoreland's speeches in the Second Part ofKing Henry the Fourth, iv. 1:

"You, Lord Archbishop,—Whose See is by a civil peace maintain'd;Whose beard the silver hand of peace hath touch'd;Whose learning and good letters peace hath tutor'd;Whose white investments figure innocence,The dove and very blessèd spirit of peace,—Wherefore do you so ill translate yourselfOut of the speech of peace, that bears such grace,Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of war?"

Now for some specimens in the linear style. The first is from the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda,The Tempest, iii. 1:

"I do not knowOne of my sex; no woman's face remember,Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seenMore that I may call men, than you, good friend,And my dear father: how features are abroad,I'm skilless of; but, by my modesty,—The jewel in my dower,—I would not wishAny companion in the world but you;Nor can imagination form a shape,Besides yourself, to like of."

The next is from the speech of Cominius to the people on proposing the hero for Consul, inCoriolanus, ii. 2:

"At sixteen years,When Tarquin made a head for Rome, he foughtBeyond the mark of others: our then Dictator,Whom with all praise I point at, saw him fight,When with his Amazonian chin he droveThe bristled lips before him: he bestridAn o'erpress'd Roman, and i' the Consul's viewSlew three opposers: Tarquin's self he met,And struck him on his knee: in that day's feats,When he might act the woman in the scene,He prov'd best man i' the field, and for his meedWas brow-bound with the oak."

The following is from the history of Posthumus given by one of the Gentlemen inCymbeline, i. 1:

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