"You see,mon cher," said Gérard in conclusion, "my position is just this: It appears to me that this person, whom I will not name, has been trifled with by Home and other so-called spiritualists to such an extent that his mind is really in danger. Now, although of course we are forbidden to have any dealings with such people, or to participate in any way in their infamous, foolish, and unholy practices, surely it would be the act of a Christian if a clear, healthy-minded man were to expose the fraud, and thus save to society a man of such transcendent ability as my friend. Moreover, should I determine to accept his mad invitation, I hardly think I could be said to participate in any of the scandalous and perhaps blasphemous rites he may have to perform to bring about the supposed result. What do you think of it, and what do you advise?"
His friend walked up and down the room for a few minutes, turning the matter over carefully in his mind, and then, coming up to where the Abbé lay lazily stretched upon a lounge, he said earnestly,
"Mon cherHenri, I am very glad you have asked me about this. It appears to me that your duty is quite clear. You perhaps have it in your power, as you yourself have seen, to save, not only, as you say, amind, but what I wish I could feel you prized more highly—a soul. You must accept the invitation."
The Abbé rose in delight at having found another man who, taking the responsibility off his shoulders, commanded him as a duty to indulge his ardent curiosity.
"But," continued the other in a solemn voice, "before accepting, you must do one thing."
The Abbé threw himself back on the lounge in disgust.
"Oh, pray, of course," he exclaimed petulantly. "I am quite aware of that."
"Not only pray, butfast, and that for seven days at least, my dear brother."
This was a very disagreeable view of the matter, but the Abbé was equal to the occasion. After a pause, during which he appeared absorbed in religious reflection, he rose, and taking his friend by the hand—
"You are right," said he, "as you always are. Although of course I know the evil spirit cannot harm anofficer of God's Holy Catholic church, even supposing, for the sake of argument, my poor friend can invoke Satan, yet if I am to do any good, if I am to save my friend from destruction, I must be armed with extraordinary grace, and this, as you truly divine, can only come by fasting."
The other wrung his hand warmly. "I knew you would see it in its proper light, my dear Henri," he said, "and now I will leave you to recover your peace of mind by religious meditation."
The Abbé smiled gravely, and let his friend depart. The following letter was the result of this edifying interview between the two divines:
"Mon cher Prince: No doubt you will feel very triumphant when you learn that my object in writing this letter is to accept your offer of presentation toSa Majesté; but I do not care whether you choose to consider this yielding to what is only in part whimsical curiosity a triumph or no. I will not write to you any cut-and-dried platitudes about good and evil, but I frankly assure you that one of the strongest reasons which induces me to go with you on this fool's errand is a belief that I can discover the absurdity and imposture, and cure you of a hallucination which is unworthy of you."Tout à vous,"Henri Gérard."
"Mon cher Prince: No doubt you will feel very triumphant when you learn that my object in writing this letter is to accept your offer of presentation toSa Majesté; but I do not care whether you choose to consider this yielding to what is only in part whimsical curiosity a triumph or no. I will not write to you any cut-and-dried platitudes about good and evil, but I frankly assure you that one of the strongest reasons which induces me to go with you on this fool's errand is a belief that I can discover the absurdity and imposture, and cure you of a hallucination which is unworthy of you.
"Tout à vous,"Henri Gérard."
For two days he received no reply to this letter, nor did he happen, in the interval, to meet the Prince in society, although he heard of him from De Frontignan and others; but on the third day the following note was brought to him:
"Mon cher ami: There is no question of triumph, any more than there is of deception. I will call for you this evening at half-past nine. You must remember your promise to trust yourself entirely to me."Cordialement à vous,"Pomerantseff."
"Mon cher ami: There is no question of triumph, any more than there is of deception. I will call for you this evening at half-past nine. You must remember your promise to trust yourself entirely to me.
"Cordialement à vous,"Pomerantseff."
So the matter was now arranged, and he, the Abbé Gérard, the renowned preacher of the celebrated —— church, was to meet that very night, by special appointment, at half-past nine, the Prince of Darkness; and this in January, in Paris—at the height of the season in the capital of civilization. As may be well imagined, during the remainder of that eventful day, until the hour of the Prince's arrival, the Abbé did not enjoy his customary placidity. A secretary of the Turkish embassy who called at four found him engaged in a violent discussion with one of the Rothschilds about the early Christians' belief in demons, as shown by Tertullian and others, while Lord Middlesex, who called at half-past five, found he had captured Faure, installed him at the piano, and was inducing him to hum snatches from "Don Juan." When his dinner hour arrived, having given orders to his valet to admit no one lest he should be discoverednotfasting, he hastily swallowed a few mouthfuls, fortified himself with a couple of glasses of Chartreuse verte, and lighting an enormous "imperial," awaited the coming of the messenger of Satan. At half-past nine o'clock precisely the Prince arrived. He was in full evening dress (but contrary to his usual custom, wearing no decoration or ribbon in his buttonhole), and his face was of a deadly pallor.
"Mon Dieu!" exclaimed the Abbé, "What is the matter with you,mon cher? You are looking very ill. We had better postpone our visit."
"No; it is nothing," replied the Prince gravely. "Let us be off without delay. In matters of this sort waiting is unbearable."
The Abbé rose, and rang the bell for his hat and cloak. The appearance of the Prince, his evident agitation, and his unfeigned impatience, which seemed to betoken terror, were far from reassuring, but the Abbé promptly quelled any misgivings he might have felt. Suddenly a thought struck him; a thought which certainlyhis brain would never have engendered had it been in its normal condition.
"Perhaps I had better change my dress, and goen pékin?" he inquired anxiously.
The ghost of a sarcastic smile flitted across the Prince's face, as he replied,
"No, certainly not. Yoursoutanewill be in every way acceptable. Come, let us be off."
The Abbé made a grimace, put on his hat, flung his cloak around his shoulders, and followed the Prince down stairs. He remarked with some surprise that the carriage awaiting them was not the Prince's.
"I have hired a carriage for the occasion," remarked Pomerantseff quietly, noticing Gerard's glance of surprise. "I am unwilling that my servants should suspect anything of this."
They entered the carriage, and the coachman, evidently instructed beforehand where to go, drove off without delay. The Prince immediately pulled down the blinds, and taking a silk pocket handkerchief from his pocket, began quietly to fold it lengthwise.
"I must blindfold you,mon cher," he remarked simply, as if announcing the most ordinary fact.
"Diable!" cried the Abbé, now becoming a little nervous. "This is very unpleasant! I believe you are the devil yourself."
"Remember your promise," said Pomerantseff, as he carefully covered his friend's eyes with the pocket handkerchief, and effectually precluded the possibility of his seeing anything until he should remove the bandage. After this nothing was said. The Abbé heard the Prince pull up the blind, open the window, and tell the coachman to drive faster. He endeavored to discover when they turned to the right, and when to the left, but in a few minutes got bewildered and gave it up in despair. At one time he felt certain they were crossing the river.
"I wish I had not come," he murmured to himself. "Of course the whole thing is folly, but it is a great trial to the nerves, and I shall probably be upset for many days."
On they drove; the time seemed interminable to the Abbé.
"Are we near our destination yet?" he inquired at last.
"Not very far off," replied the other, in what seemed to Gérard a most sepulchral tone of voice. At length, after a drive of perhaps half an hour, but which seemed to the Abbé double that time, Pomerantseff murmured in a low tone, and with a profound sigh which sounded almost like a sob, "Here we are," and at that moment the Abbé felt the carriage was turning, and heard the horses' hoofs clatter on what he imagined to be the stones of a courtyard. The carriage stopped. Pomerantseff opened the door himself, and assisted the blindfolded priest to alight.
"There are five steps," he said as he held the Abbé by the arm. "Take care."
The Abbé stumbled up the five steps. They had now entered a house, and Gérard imagined to himself it was probably some old hotel, like the Hôtel Pimodan, where Gautier, Beaudelaire, and others at one time were wont to assemble to disperse the cares of life in the fumes of opium. When they had proceeded a few yards, Pomerantseff warned him that they were about to ascend a staircase, and up many shallow steps they went, the Abbé regretting every instant more and more that he had allowed his vulgar curiosity to lead him into an adventure which could be productive of nothing but ridicule and shattered nerves. When at length they had reached the top of the stairs, the Prince guided him by the arm through what the Abbé imagined to be a hall, opened a door, closed and locked it after them, walked on again, opened another door, which he closed and locked likewise, and over which the Abbé heard him pull a heavy curtain. The Prince then took him again by the arm, advanced him a few steps, and said in a low whisper,"Remain quietly standing where you are, and do not attempt to remove the pocket handkerchief until you hear voices."
The Abbé folded his arms and stood motionless while he heard the Prince walk away a few yards. It was evident to the unfortunate priest that the room in which he stood was not dark, for although he could see nothing, owing to the pocket handkerchief, which had been bound most skilfully over his eyes, there was a sensation of being in strong light, and his cheeks and hands felt, as it were, illuminated. Suddenly a horrible sound sent a chill of terror through him—a gentle noise as of naked flesh touching the waxed floor—and before he could recover from the shock occasioned by the sound, the voices of many men, voices of men groaning or wailing in some hideous ecstasy, broke the stillness, crying—"Father of all sin and crime, Prince of all despair and anguish, come to us, we implore thee!"
The Abbé, wild with terror, tore off the pocket handkerchief. He found himself in a large, old-fashioned room, panelled up to the lofty ceiling with oak, and filled with great light, shed from innumerable tapers fitted into sconces on the wall—light which, though naturallysoft, was almost fierce by reason of its greatness, for it proceeded from at least two hundred tapers. He had then been after all right in his conjectures: he was evidently in a chamber of some one of the many old-fashioned hotels which are to be seen in the Ile St. Louis, and indeed in all the antiquated quarters of Paris. It was reassuring, at all events, to know one was not in Hades, and to feel tolerably certain that a sergeant de ville could not be many yards distant. All this passed into his comprehension like a flash of lightning, for hardly had the bandage left his eyes ere his whole attention was riveted upon a group before him.
Twelve men—Pomerantseff among the number—of all ages, from twenty-five to fifty-five, all dressed in evening dress, and all, so far as one could judge at such a moment, men of culture and refinement, knelt or rather lay nearly prone upon the floor, with hands linked. They were bowing forward and kissing the floor—which might account for the strange sound heard by Gérard—and their faces were illuminated with a light of hellish ecstasy—half distorted as if in pain, half smiling as if in triumph. The Abbé's eyes instinctively sought out the Prince. He was the last on the left hand side, and while his left hand grasped that of his neighbor, his right was sweeping nervously over the floor as if seeking to animate the boards. His face was more calm than those of the others, but of a deadly pallor, and the violet tints about the mouth and temples showed he was suffering from intense emotion. They were all, each one after his own fashion, praying aloud, or rather moaning, as they writhed in ecstatic adoration.
"Oh, Father of Evil, come to us!"
"Oh, Prince of Endless Desolation, who sitteth by the bed of suicides, we adore thee!"
"Oh, creator of eternal anguish! oh, king of cruel pleasures and famishing desires, we worship thee!"
"Come to us, with thy foot upon the hearts of widows, thy hair lucid with the slaughter of innocence, and thy brow wreathed with the chaplet of despair!"
The heart of the Abbé turned cold and sick as these beings, hardly human by reason of their great mental exaltation, swayed before him.
Suddenly—or rather the full conception of the fact was sudden, for the influence had been gradually stealing over him—he felt a terrible coldness, a coldness more piercing than any he had before experienced even in Russia; and with the coldness there came to him the certain knowledge of the presence of some new being in the room. Withdrawing his eyes from the semi-circle of men, who did not seem to be aware of his, the Abbé's, presence, and who ceased not in their blasphemies,he turned them slowly around, and as he did so they fell upon a newcomer, a thirteenth, who seemed to spring into existence from the air before his very eyes.
He was a young man of apparently twenty, very tall, with bright golden hair falling from his forehead like a girl's. He was dressed in evening dress, and his cheeks were flushed as if with wine or pleasure, but from his eyes there gleamed a look of inexpressible sadness, of intense despair. The group of men had evidently become aware of his presence at the same moment, for they all fell prone upon the floor adoring, and their words were now no longer words of invocation, but words of praise and worship. The Abbé was frozen with horror; there was no room in his breast for the lesser emotion of fear; indeed, the horror was so great and all-absorbing as to charm and hold him spellbound. He could not remove his eyes from the thirteenth, who stood before him calmly, with a faint smile playing over his intellectual and aristocratic face—a smile which only added to the intensity of the despair gleaming in his clear blue eyes. Gérard was struck first with the sadness, then with the beauty, and then with the intellectual vigor of that marvellous countenance. The expression was not unkind: haughtiness and pride could be read only in the high-bred features, short upper lip, and nobly moulded limbs; for the face betokened, save for the flush upon the cheeks, only great sadness. The eyes were fixed upon those of Gérard, and he felt their soft, subtle, intense light penetrate into every nook and cranny of his soul and being. This being simply stood and gazed upon the priest as the worshippers grew more wild, more blasphemous, more cruel. The Abbé could think of nothing but the face before him, and the great desolation that lay folded over it as a veil. He could think of no prayer, although he could remember there were prayers. Was this despair—the despair of a man drowning in sight of land—being shed into him from the sad blue eyes? Was it despair, or was it death? Ah, no; not death. Death was peaceful, and this was violent and lively. Was there no refuge, no mercy, no salvation anywhere? Perhaps, but he could not remember while those sad blue eyes still gazed upon him. He could not remember, and still he could not entirely forget. He felt that help would come to him if he sought it, and yet he could hardly tell how to seek it. Moreover, by degrees the blue eyes—it seemed as if their color, their great blueness, had some fearful power—began pouring into him a more hideous pleasure. It was the ecstasy of great pain, becoming a delight, the ecstasy of being beyond all hope and of being thus enabled to look with scorn upon the author of hope. The blue eyes still gazed sadly with a soft smile of despair upon him. Gérard knew that in another moment he would not sink, faint, or fall, but that he would—oh, much worse!—he would smile. At this very instant a name—a familiar name, and one which the infernal worshippers had made frequent use of, but which he had never remarked before—struck his ear; the name of Christ. Where had he heard it? He could not tell. It was the name of a young man; he could remember that, and nothing more. Again the name sounded—"Christ." There was another word like Christ which seemed at some time to have brought an idea first of great suffering and then of great peace. Aye, peace, but no pleasure. No delight like this shed from these marvellous blue eyes. Again the name sounded—"Christ."
Ah! the other word was cross (croix). He remembered now; along thing with a short thing across it.
Was it that as he thought of these things the charm of the blue eyes and their great sadness lessened in intensity? We dare not say, but as some faint conception of what a cross was flitted through the Abbé's brain, although he could think of no prayer,of no distinct use of this cross, he drew his right hand slowly up, and feebly made the sign across his breast.
The vision vanished.
The men adoring ceased their clamor, and lay crouched up against each other as if some strong electric power had been taken from them, and great weakness had succeeded. But for a moment; and then they rose trembling and with loosened hands, and stood for an instant feebly gazing at the Abbé, who felt faint and exhausted, and heeded them not. With extraordinary presence of mind, the Prince walked quickly up to him, pushed him out of the door by which they had entered, followed him, and locked the door behind them, thus precluding the possibility of being immediately pursued by the others. Once in the next room, the Abbé and Pomerantseff paused for an instant to recover breath, for the swiftness of their flight had exhausted them, worn out as they both were mentally and physically; but during this brief interval the Prince, who appeared to be retaining his presence of mind by a merely mechanical effort, carefully replaced over his friend's eyes the bandage which the Abbé held tightly grasped in his hand. Then he led him on, and it was not until the cold air struck them that they noticed they had left their hats behind.
"N'importe!" muttered Pomerantseff. "It would be dangerous to return"; and hurrying the Abbé into the carriage which awaited them, he bade the coachman speed them away "au grand galop!"
Not a word was spoken; the Abbé lay back as one in a swoon, and heeded nothing until he felt the carriage stop, and the Prince uncovered his eyes and told him he had reached home. He alighted in silence, and passed into his house without a word. How he reached his apartment he never knew, but the following morning found him raging with fever and delirious. When he had sufficiently recovered, after the lapse of a few days, to admit of his reading the numerous letters awaiting his attention, one was put into his hand which had been brought on the second night after the one of the memorableséance. It ran as follows:
"Jockey Club, January 26, 186-."Mon cher Abbé: I am afraid our little adventure was too much for you; in fact, I myself was very unwell all yesterday, and nothing but a Russian bath has pulled me together. I can hardly wonder at this, however, for I have never in my life been present at so powerful aséance, and you may comfort yourself with the reflection thatSon Altessehas never honored any one with his presence for so long a space of time before. Never fear about your illness; it is merely nervous exhaustion, and you will be well soon; but such evenings must not often be indulged in if you are not desirous of shortening your life. I shall hope to meet you at Mme. de Metternich's on Monday."Tout à vous,"Pomerantseff."
"Jockey Club, January 26, 186-.
"Mon cher Abbé: I am afraid our little adventure was too much for you; in fact, I myself was very unwell all yesterday, and nothing but a Russian bath has pulled me together. I can hardly wonder at this, however, for I have never in my life been present at so powerful aséance, and you may comfort yourself with the reflection thatSon Altessehas never honored any one with his presence for so long a space of time before. Never fear about your illness; it is merely nervous exhaustion, and you will be well soon; but such evenings must not often be indulged in if you are not desirous of shortening your life. I shall hope to meet you at Mme. de Metternich's on Monday.
"Tout à vous,"Pomerantseff."
Whether or no Gérard was sufficiently recovered to meet his friend at the Austrian embassy on the evening named, we do not know, nor does it concern us; but he is certainly enjoying excellent health now, and is no less charming than before his extraordinary adventure.
Such is the true story of a meeting with the devil in Paris not many years ago; a story true in every particular, as can be easily proved by a direct application to any of the persons concerned in it, for they are all living still. The key to the enigma we cannot find, for we certainly do not put faith in any of the theories of spiritualists; but that an apparition such as we have described did appear in the way and under the circumstances we have described, is a fact, and we must leave the satisfactory solution of the difficulty to more profound psychologists than ourselves.
Probably no play of Shakespeare's, probably no other play or poem of a high degree of merit, is so much neglected as "Troilus and Cressida" is. I have met intelligent readers of Shakespeare, who thought themselves unusually well acquainted with his writings, and who were so, who understood him and delighted in him, but who yet had never read "Troilus and Cressida." They had, in one way and another, got the notion that it is a very inferior play, and not worth reading, or at least not to be read until after they were tired of all the others—a time which had not yet come. There seems to be a slur cast upon this play; the reason of which is its very undramatic character, and the consequent non-appearance of its name in theatrical records. No one has heard of any actor's or actress's appearance, even in the last century, as one of the personages in "Troilus and Cressida." Its name has not been upon the playbills for generations, although even "Love's Labor's Lost" has once in a while been performed. Hence it is almost unknown, except to the thorough Shakespearian readers, who are very few; fewer now, in proportion to the largely increased leisurely and instructed classes, than they were two hundred years ago, much to the shame of our vaunted popular education and diffusion of knowledge. And yet this neglected drama is one of its author's great works; in one respect his greatest. "Troilus and Cressida" is Shakespeare's wisest play in the way of worldly wisdom. It is filled choke-full of sententious, and in most cases slightly satirical revelations of human nature, uttered with a felicity of phrase and an impressiveness of metaphor that make each one seem like a beam of light shot into the recesses of man's heart. Such are these:
In the reproof of chanceLies the true proof of men.The wound of peace is surety;Surety secure; but modest doubt is calledThe beacon of the wise.What is aught, but as 'tis valued?'Tis mad idolatryTo make the service greater than the god.A stirring dwarf we do allowance giveBefore a sleeping giant.'Tis certain greatness once fall'n out with fortuneMust fall out with men too; what the declin'd isHe shall as soon read in the eyes of othersAs feel in his own fall; for men, like butterflies,Show not their mealy wings but to the summer;And not a man, for being simply man,Hath any honor.
In the reproof of chanceLies the true proof of men.
The wound of peace is surety;Surety secure; but modest doubt is calledThe beacon of the wise.
What is aught, but as 'tis valued?
'Tis mad idolatryTo make the service greater than the god.
A stirring dwarf we do allowance giveBefore a sleeping giant.
'Tis certain greatness once fall'n out with fortuneMust fall out with men too; what the declin'd isHe shall as soon read in the eyes of othersAs feel in his own fall; for men, like butterflies,Show not their mealy wings but to the summer;And not a man, for being simply man,Hath any honor.
Besides passages like these, there are others of which the wisdom is inextricably interwoven with the occasion. One would think that the wealth of such a mine would be daily passing from mouth to mouth as the current coin of speech; and yet of all Shakespeare's acknowledged plays, there are only two, "The Comedy of Errors" and "The Winter's Tale," which do not furnish more to our store of familiar quotations than this play does, rich though it is with Shakespeare's ripest thought and most splendid utterance. And yet by a strange compensating chance, it furnishes the most often quoted line; a line which not one in a million of those that use it ever saw where Shakespeare wrote it, or if they had any brains behind their eyes, they would not use it as they do. For by another strange chance it happens that this line is entirely perverted from the meaning which Shakespeare gave it. As it is constantly quoted, it is not Shakespeare's. The line is:
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
This has come to be always quoted with the meaning implied in the following indication of emphasis: "Onetouch ofnaturemakes thewhole worldkin." Shakespeare wrote no such sentimental twaddle. Least of all did he write it in this play, in which his pen "pierces to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." The line which has been thus perverted into an exposition of sentimental brotherhood among all mankind, is on the contrary one of the most cynical utterances of an undisputable moral truth, disparaging to the nature of all mankind, that ever came from Shakespeare's pen. Achilles keeps himself aloof from his fellow Greeks, and takes no part in the war, sure that his fame for valor will be untarnished. Ulysses contrives to provoke him into a discussion, and tells him that his great deeds will be forgotten and his fame fade into mere shadow, and that some new man will take his place, unless he does something from time to time to keep his glory bright. For men forget the great thing that was done, in favor of the less that is done now.
For time is like a fashionable hostThat slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,And with his arms outstretched as he would fly,Grasps in the comer. Welcome ever smiles,And farewell goes out sighing. O let not virtue seekRemuneration for the thing it was;For beauty, wit,High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,Love, friendship, charity, are subjects allTo envious and calumniating time.
For time is like a fashionable hostThat slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,And with his arms outstretched as he would fly,Grasps in the comer. Welcome ever smiles,And farewell goes out sighing. O let not virtue seekRemuneration for the thing it was;For beauty, wit,High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,Love, friendship, charity, are subjects allTo envious and calumniating time.
And then he immediately adds that there is one point on which all men are alike, one touch of human nature which shows the kindred of all mankind—that they slight familiar merit and prefer trivial novelty. The next lines to those quoted above are:
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,That all with one consent praise new-born gauds.Though they are made and moulded of things past;And give to dust that is a little giltMore sand than gilt oe'rdusted.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,That all with one consent praise new-born gauds.Though they are made and moulded of things past;And give to dust that is a little giltMore sand than gilt oe'rdusted.
The meaning is too manifest to need or indeed to admit a word of comment, and it is brought out by this emphasis: "Onetouch of nature makes thewhole world kin"—that one touch of their common failing being an uneasy love of novelty. Was ever poet's or sage's meaning so perverted, so reversed! And yet it is hopeless to think of bringing about a change in the general use of this line and a cessation of its perversion to sentimental purposes, not to say an application of it as the scourge for which it was wrought; just as it is hopeless to think of changing by any demonstration of unfitness and unmeaningness a phrase in general use—the reason being that the mass of the users are utterly thoughtless and careless of the right or the wrong, the fitness or the unfitness, of the words that come from their mouths, except that they serve their purpose for the moment. That done, what care they? And what can we expect, when even the "Globe" edition of Shakespeare's works has upon its very title-page and its cover a globe with a band around it, on which is written this line in its perverted sense, that sense being illustrated, enforced, and deepened into the general mind by the union of the band-ends by clasped hands. I absolve, of course, the Cambridge editors of the guilt of this twaddling misuse of Shakespeare's line; it was a mere publisher's contrivance; but I am somewhat surprised that they should have even allowed it such sanction as it has from its appearance on the same title-page with their names.
The undramatic character of "Troilus and Cressida," which has been already mentioned, appears in its structure, its personages, and its purpose. We are little interested in the fate of its personages, not merely because we know what is to become of them, for that we know in almost any play which has an historical subject; but the play is constructed upon such a slight plot that it really has neither dramatic motive nor dramatic movement. The loves of "Troilus and Cressida" are of a kind which are interestingonly to the persons directly involved in them; Achilles's sulking is of even less interest; and the death of Hector affects us only like a newspaper announcement of the death of some distinguished person, so little is he really involved in the action of the drama. There is also a singular lack of that peculiar characteristic of Shakespeare's dramatic style, the marked distinction and nice discrimination of the individual traits, mental and moral, of the various personages. Ulysses is the real hero of the play; the chief, or at least the great purpose of which is the utterance of the Ulyssean view of life; and in this play Shakespeare is Ulysses, or Ulysses Shakespeare. In all his other plays Shakespeare so lost his personal consciousness in the individuality of his own creations that they think and feel as well as act like real men and women other than their creator, so that we cannot truly say of the thoughts and feelings which they express, that Shakespeare says thus or so; for it is not Shakespeare who speaks, but they with his lips. But in Ulysses, Shakespeare, acting upon a mere hint, filling up a mere traditionary outline, drew a man of mature years, of wide observation, of profoundest cogitative power, one who knew all the weakness and all the wiles of human nature, and who yet remained with blood unbittered and soul unsoured—a man who saw through all shams and fathomed all motives, and who yet was not scornful of his kind, not misanthropic, hardly cynical except in passing moods; and what other man was this than Shakespeare himself? What had he to do when he had passed forty years but to utter his own thoughts when he would find words for the lips of Ulysses? And thus it is that "Troilus and Cressida" is Shakespeare's wisest play. If we would know what Shakespeare thought of men and their motives after he reached maturity, we have but to read this drama; drama it is, but with what other character who shall say? For, like the world's pageant, it is neither tragedy nor comedy, but a tragi-comic history, in which the intrigues of amorous men and light-o'-loves and the brokerage of panders are mingled with the deliberations of sages and the strife and the death of heroes.
The thoughtful reader will observe that Ulysses pervades the serious parts of the play, which is all Ulyssean in its thought and language. And this is the reason or rather the fact of the play's lack of distinctive characterization. For Ulysses cannot speak all the time that he is on the stage; and therefore the other personages, such as may, speak Ulyssean, with, of course, such personal allusion and peculiar trick as a dramatist of Shakespeare's skill could not leave them without for difference. For example, no two men could be more unlike in character than Achilles and Ulysses, and yet the former, having asked the latter what he is reading, he, uttering his own thought, says as follows with the subsequent reply:
Ulyss.—A strange fellow hereWrites me: That man, how dearly ever parted,[9]How much in having, or without or in,Cannot make boast to have that which he hathNor feels not what he owes but by reflection,As when his virtues shining upon othersHeat them, and they retort that heat againTo the first giver.Achil.—This is not strange, Ulysses.The beauty that is borne here in the faceThe bearer knows not, but commends itselfTo others' eyes; nor doth the eye itself,That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed,Salutes each other with each other's form,For speculation turns not to itselfTill it hath travelled and is mirror'd thereWhere it may see itself. This is not strange at all.
Ulyss.—A strange fellow hereWrites me: That man, how dearly ever parted,[9]How much in having, or without or in,Cannot make boast to have that which he hathNor feels not what he owes but by reflection,As when his virtues shining upon othersHeat them, and they retort that heat againTo the first giver.
Achil.—This is not strange, Ulysses.The beauty that is borne here in the faceThe bearer knows not, but commends itselfTo others' eyes; nor doth the eye itself,That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed,Salutes each other with each other's form,For speculation turns not to itselfTill it hath travelled and is mirror'd thereWhere it may see itself. This is not strange at all.
Now these speeches are made of the same metal and coined in the same mint; and they both of them have the image and superscription of William Shakespeare. No words or thoughts could be more unsuited to that bold, bloody egoist, "the broad Achilles," than the reply he makes to Ulysses; but here Shakespeare was merely using the Greek champion as a lay figure to utter his own thoughts, whichare perfectly in character with the son of Autolycus. Ulysses thus flows over upon the whole serious part of the play. Agamemnon, Nestor, Æneus, and the rest all talk alike, and all like Ulysses. That Ulysses speaks for Shakespeare will, I think, be doubted by no reader who has reached the second reading of this play by the way which I have pointed out to him. And why, indeed, should Ulysses not speak for Shakespeare, or how could it be other than that he should? The man who had written "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," and "Macbeth," if he wished to find Ulysses, had only to turn his mind's eye inward; and thus we have in this drama Shakespeare's only piece of introspective work.
But there is another personage who gives character to this drama, and who is of a very different sort. Thersites sits with Caliban high among Shakespeare's minor triumphs. He was brought in to please the mob. He is the Fool of the piece, fulfilling the functions of Touchstone, and Launce, and Launcelot, and Costard. As the gravediggers were brought into "Hamlet" for the sake of the groundlings, so Thersites came into "Troilus and Cressida." As if that he might leave no form of human utterance ungilded by his genius, Shakespeare in Thersites has given us the apotheosis of blackguardism and billingsgate. Thersites is only a railing rascal. Some low creatures are mere bellies with no brain. Thersites is merely mouth, but this mouth has just enough coarse brain above it to know a wise man and a fool when he sees them. But the railings of this deformed slave are splendid. Thersites is almost as good as Falstaff. He is of course a far lower organization intellectually, and somewhat lower, perhaps, morally. He is coarser in every way; his humor, such as he has, is of the grossest kind; but still his blackguardism is the ideal of vituperation. He is far better than Apemantus in "Timon of Athens," for there is no hypocrisy in him, no egoism, and, comfortable trait in such a personage, no pretence of gentility. For good downright "sass" in its most splendid and aggressive form, there is in literature nothing equal to the speeches of Thersites.
"Troilus and Cressida" is also remarkable for its wide range of style, because of which it is a play of great interest to the student of Shakespeare, who here adapted his style to the character of the matter in hand. The lighter parts remind us of his earlier manner; the graver are altogether in his later. He did this unconsciously, or almost unconsciously, we may be sure. None the less, however, is the play therefore valuable in a critical point of view, but rather the more so. It is a standing and an undeniable warning to us not to lean too much upon any one special trait of style in estimating the time in Shakespeare's life at which a play was produced. Moreover it illustrates the natural course of style development, showing that it is not only gradual, but not by regular degrees; that is, that a writer does not pass at one period absolutely from one style to another, dropping his previous manner and taking on another, but that he will at one time unconsciously recur to his former manner or manners, and at a late period show traces of his early manner. Strata of his old fashion thrust themselves up through the newer formation. "Troilus and Cressida" is so remarkable in this respect that the chief of the absolute-period critics, the Rev. Mr. Fleay, has been obliged to invent a most extraordinary theory to account for it. His view is that there are three plots interwoven, each of which is distinct in manner of treatment, and, moreover, that each of these was composed at a different time from the other two. He would have us believe that the parts embodying the Troilus and Cressida story were written in Shakespeare's earliest period, those concerning Hector in his middle period, and the Ajax parts in the last. That these three storieswere interwoven is manifest; but they came naturally together in this Greek historical play—for it is that—and their interweaving was hardly to have been avoided; the manner of each is not distinct from that of the other, although there is, with likeness, a noticeable unlikeness; but the notion that therefore Shakespeare first wrote the Troilus and Cressida part as a play, and then years afterward added the Hector part, and again years afterward the Ajax and Ulysses part, seems to me only a monstrous contrivance of an honest and an able man in desperate straits to make his theory square with fact. As to detail upon this subject, I shall only notice one point. Tag-rhymes, or rhymed couplets ending a scene or a speech in blank verse or in prose, are regarded by the metre-critics (and justly within reason) as marks of an early date of composition. Now in "Troilus and Cressida" these abound. It contains more of them than any other play, except one or two of the very earliest. The important point, however, is that these rhymes appear no less in the Ulysses and Ajax scenes of the play than in the others—a sufficient warning against putting absolute trust in such evidence.
Among those few of Shakespeare's plays which are least often read is "All's Well that Ends Well." This one, however, is to the earnest student one of the most interesting of the thirty-seven which bear his name; not only because it contains some of his best and most thoughtful work, but because, being Shakespeare's all through, it is written in two distinct styles—styles so distinct that there can be no doubt that as it has come down to us it is the product of two distinct periods of his dramatic life, and those the most distant, the first and the last. Its singularity in this respect gives it a peculiar value to the student of Shakespeare's style and of his mental development. There is not an interweaving of styles as in "Troilus and Cressida"; the two are distinctly separable; and there is external historical evidence which supports the internal.
We have a record in Francis Meres's "Palladis Tamia" of a play by Shakespeare called "Love's Labor's Won"; and there is no reasonable doubt that that was the first name of "All's Well that Ends Well." As the "Palladis Tamia" was published in 1598, this play was produced before that year, and all the evidence, internal and external, goes to show that Shakespeare wrote it soon after "Love's Labor's Lost," and as a counterpart to that comedy. The difference of its style in various parts had been remarked upon in general terms; but I believe that this difference was first specially indicated in the following passage, which I cannot do better here than to quote from the introduction to my edition of the play published in 1857; and I do so with the greater freedom because the particular traits which it discriminated have been lately, in the present year, insisted upon by the Rev. Mr. Fleay, in his very useful and suggestive, but not altogether to be trusted "Shakespeare Manual," to which I have before referred.
"It is to be observed that passages of rhymed couplets, in which the thought is somewhat constrained and its expression limited by the form of the verse, are scattered freely through the play, and that these are found side by side with passages of blank verse in which the thought, on the contrary, so entirely dominates the form, and overloads and weighs it down, as to produce the impression that the poet, in writing them, was almost regardless of the graces of his art, and merely sought an expression of his ideas in the most compressed and elliptical form. The former trait is characteristic of his youthful style; the latter marks a certain period of his maturer years. Contracted words, which Shakespeare used more freely in his later than in his earlier works, abound; and in some passages words are used in an esoteric sense, which is distinctive of the poet's style about the timewhen 'Measure for Measure' was produced. Note, for instance, the use of 'succeed' in 'owe and succeed thy weakness,' in Act II., Sc. 4 of that play, and in 'succeed thy father in manners,' Act I., Sc. 1 of this. It is to be observed also that the advice given by the Countess to Bertram when he leaves Rousillon is so like that of Polonius to Laertes in a similar situation, that either the latter is an expansion of the former, or the former a reminiscence of the latter; and as the passage is written in the later style, the second supposition appears the more probable. Finally, it is worthy of remark that both the French officers who figure in this play as First Lord and Second Lord are somewhat strangely namedDumain, and that in 'Love's Labor's Lost' Dumain is also the name of that one of the three attendants and brothers in love of the King who has a post in the army; which, when taken in connection with other circumstances, is at least a hint of some relation between the two plays."
If the reader who has gone thoughtfully through the plays in the course which I have indicated will take up this one, he will find in the very first scene evidence and illustration of these views. It is almost entirely in prose, which itself shows the weight of Shakespeare's mature hand. The first blank verse is the speech of the Countess, in which she gives a mother's counsel to Bertram as he is setting out for the wars, as is pointed out above, and which is unmistakably of the "Hamlet" period. Then comes a speech by Helen beginning,
O were that all! I think not on my father:And these great tears grace his remembrance moreThan those I shed for him—
O were that all! I think not on my father:And these great tears grace his remembrance moreThan those I shed for him—
and ending with this charming passage, referring to the growth of her love for Bertram:
'Twas pretty, though a plague,To see him every hour; to sit and drawHis arched brows, his hawking eye, his curlsIn our heart's table; heart too capableOf every line and trick of his sweet favor:But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancyMust sanctify his reliques. Who comes here?
'Twas pretty, though a plague,To see him every hour; to sit and drawHis arched brows, his hawking eye, his curlsIn our heart's table; heart too capableOf every line and trick of his sweet favor:But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancyMust sanctify his reliques. Who comes here?
It is needless to say to the advanced student of Shakespeare's style that this is in his later manner. A little further on is Helen's speech to the detestable Parolles, beginning with the mutilated line, "Not my virginity yet," which is followed by some ten, in which she pours out in Euphuistic phrase her love for Bertram, saying that he has in her "a mother, and a mistress, and a friend, a counsellor, a traitress, and a dear"; and yet further,
His humble ambition, proud humility,His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,His faith, his sweet disaster, with a worldOf pretty, fond, adoptious ChristendomsThat blinking Cupid gossips.
His humble ambition, proud humility,His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,His faith, his sweet disaster, with a worldOf pretty, fond, adoptious ChristendomsThat blinking Cupid gossips.
This will remind the reader of Scott's Euphuist, Sir Piercie Shafton, who, if I remember aright, uses some of these very phrases, in which Shakespeare has beaten Lilly at his own weapons, and made his affected phraseology the vehicle of the touching utterance of real feeling. "Euphues" was published in 1580, when Shakespeare was only sixteen years old; and this passage, although it may have been written or perhaps altered later, was probably a part of the play as it was first produced. The scene ends with the following speech by Helen, which, for its peculiar characteristics, is worth quoting entire. The reader who will compare it with "Love's Labor's Lost" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" will have not a moment's doubt as to the time when it was written: