Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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As Shakespeare in Measure for Measure has [182] refashioned, after a
nobler pattern, materials already at hand, so that the relics of
other men's poetry are incorporated into his perfect work, so traces
of the old "morality," that early form of dramatic composition which
had for its function the inculcating of some moral theme, survive in
it also, and give it a peculiar ethical interest. This ethical
interest, though it can escape no attentive reader, yet, in
accordance with that artistic law which demands the predominance of
form everywhere over the mere matter or subject handled, is not to be
wholly separated from the special circumstances, necessities,
embarrassments, of these particular dramatic persons. The old
"moralities" exemplified most often some rough-and-ready lesson.
Here the very intricacy and subtlety of the moral world itself, the
difficulty of seizing the true relations of so complex a material,
the difficulty of just judgment, of judgment that shall not be
unjust, are the lessons conveyed. Even in Whetstone's old story this
peculiar vein of moralising comes to the surface: even there, we
notice the tendency to dwell on mixed motives, the contending issues
of action, the presence of virtues and vices alike in unexpected
places, on "the hard choice of two evils," on the "imprisoning" of
men's "real intents." Measure for Measure is full of expressions
drawn from a profound experience of these casuistries, and that
ethical interest becomes predominant in it: it is no longer Promos
and [183] Cassandra, but Measure for Measure, its new name expressly
suggesting the subject of poetical justice. The action of the play,
like the action of life itself for the keener observer, develops in
us the conception of this poetical justice, and the yearning to
realise it, the true justice of which Angelo knows nothing, because
it lies for the most part beyond the limits of any acknowledged law.
The idea of justice involves the idea of rights. But at bottom
rights are equivalent to that which really is, to facts; and the
recognition of his rights therefore, the justice he requires of our
hands, or our thoughts, is the recognition of that which the person,
in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover
that which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice
is in its essence a finer knowledge through love.

'Tis very pregnant:
The jewel that we find we stoop and take it,
Because we see it; but what we do not see
We tread upon, and never think of it.

It is for this finer justice, a justice based on a more delicate
appreciation of the true conditions of men and things, a true respect
of persons in our estimate of actions, that the people in Measure for
Measure cry out as they pass before us; and as the poetry of this
play is full of the peculiarities of Shakespeare's poetry, so in its
ethics it is an epitome of Shakespeare's moral judgments. They are
the moral judgments of [184] an observer, of one who sits as a
spectator, and knows how the threads in the design before him hold
together under the surface: they are the judgments of the humourist
also, who follows with a half-amused but always pitiful sympathy, the
various ways of human disposition, and sees less distance than
ordinary men between what are called respectively great and little
things. It is not always that poetry can be the exponent of
morality; but it is this aspect of morals which it represents most
naturally, for this true justice is dependent on just those finer
appreciations which poetry cultivates in us the power of making,
those peculiar valuations of action and its effect which poetry
actually requires.

1874.

NOTES

176. *Fletcher, in the Bloody Brother, gives the rest of it.
Return.

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS

[185]

A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face.

THE English plays of Shakespeare needed but the completion of one
unimportant interval to possess the unity of a popular chronicle from
Richard the Second to Henry the Eighth, and possess, as they actually
stand, the unity of a common motive in the handling of the various
events and persons which they bring before us. Certain of his
historic dramas, not English, display Shakespeare's mastery in the
development of the heroic nature amid heroic circumstances; and had
he chosen, from English history, to deal with Coeur-de-Lion or Edward
the First, the innate quality of his subject would doubtless have
called into play something of that profound and sombre power which in
Julius Caesar and Macbeth has sounded the depths of mighty character.
True, on the whole, to fact, it is another side of kingship which he
has made prominent in his English histories. The irony [186] of
kingship--average human nature, flung with a wonderfully pathetic
effect into the vortex of great events; tragedy of everyday quality
heightened in degree only by the conspicuous scene which does but
make those who play their parts there conspicuously unfortunate; the
utterance of common humanity straight from the heart, but refined
like other common things for kingly uses by Shakespeare's unfailing
eloquence: such, unconsciously for the most part, though palpably
enough to the careful reader, is the conception under which
Shakespeare has arranged the lights and shadows of the story of the
English kings, emphasising merely the light and shadow inherent in
it, and keeping very close to the original authorities, not simply in
the general outline of these dramatic histories but sometimes in
their very expression. Certainly the history itself, as he found it
in Hall, Holinshed, and Stowe, those somewhat picturesque old
chroniclers who had themselves an eye for the dramatic "effects" of
human life, has much of this sentiment already about it. What he did
not find there was the natural prerogative--such justification, in
kingly, that is to say, in exceptional, qualities, of the exceptional
position, as makes it practicable in the result. It is no Henriade
he writes, and no history of the English people, but the sad fortunes
of some English kings as conspicuous examples of the ordinary human
condition. As in a children's [187] story, all princes are in
extremes. Delightful in the sunshine above the wall into which
chance lifts the flower for a season, they can but plead somewhat
more touchingly than others their everyday weakness in the storm.
Such is the motive that gives unity to these unequal and intermittent
contributions toward a slowly evolved dramatic chronicle, which it
would have taken many days to rehearse; a not distant story from real
life still well remembered in its general course, to which people
might listen now and again, as long as they cared, finding human
nature at least wherever their attention struck ground in it.

He begins with John, and allows indeed to the first of these English
kings a kind of greatness, making the development of the play centre
in the counteraction of his natural gifts--that something of heroic
force about him--by a madness which takes the shape of reckless
impiety, forced especially on men's attention by the terrible
circumstances of his end, in the delineation of which Shakespeare
triumphs, setting, with true poetic tact, this incident of the king's
death, in all the horror of a violent one, amid a scene delicately
suggestive of what is perennially peaceful and genial in the outward
world. Like the sensual humours of Falstaff in another play, the
presence of the bastard Faulconbridge, with his physical energy and
his unmistakable family likeness--"those limbs [188] which Sir Robert
never holp to make"* contributes to an almost coarse assertion of the
force of nature, of the somewhat ironic preponderance of nature and
circumstance over men's artificial arrangements, to, the recognition
of a certain potent natural aristocracy, which is far from being
always identical with that more formal, heraldic one. And what is a
coarse fact in the case of Faulconbridge becomes a motive of pathetic
appeal in the wan and babyish Arthur. The magic with which nature
models tiny and delicate children to the likeness of their rough
fathers is nowhere more justly expressed than in the words of King
Philip.--

Look here upon thy brother Geoffrey's face
These eyes, these brows were moulded out of his:
This little abstract doth contain that large
Which died in Geoffrey; and the hand of time
Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.

It was perhaps something of a boyish memory of the shocking end of
his father that had distorted the piety of Henry the Third into
superstitious terror. A frightened soul, himself touched with the
contrary sort of religious madness, doting on all that was alien from
his father's huge ferocity, on the genialities, the soft gilding, of
life, on the genuine interests of art and poetry, to be credited more
than any other person with the deep religious expression of [189]
Westminster Abbey, Henry the Third, picturesque though useless, but
certainly touching, might have furnished Shakespeare, had he filled
up this interval in his series, with precisely the kind of effect he
tends towards in his English plays. But he found it completer still
in the person and story of Richard the Second, a figure--"that sweet
lovely rose"--which haunts Shakespeare's mind, as it seems long to
have haunted the minds of the English people, as the most touching of
all examples of the irony of kingship.

Henry the Fourth--to look for a moment beyond our immediate subject,
in pursuit of Shakespeare's thought--is presented, of course, in
general outline, as an impersonation of "surviving force:" he has a
certain amount of kingcraft also, a real fitness for great
opportunity. But still true to his leading motive, Shakespeare, in
King Henry the Fourth, has left the high-water mark of his poetry in
the soliloquy which represents royalty longing vainly for the
toiler's sleep; while the popularity, the showy heroism, of Henry the
Fifth, is used to give emphatic point to the old earthy commonplace
about "wild oats." The wealth of homely humour in these plays, the
fun coming straight home to all the world, of Fluellen especially in
his unconscious interview with the king, the boisterous earthiness of
Falstaff and his companions, contribute to the same effect. The
keynote of [190] Shakespeare's treatment is indeed expressed by Henry
the Fifth himself, the greatest of Shakespeare's kings.--"Though I
speak it to you," he says incognito, under cover of night, to a
common soldier on the field, "I think the king is but a man, as I am:
the violet smells to him as it doth to me: all his senses have but
human conditions; and though his affections be higher mounted than
ours yet when they stoop they stoop with like wing." And, in truth,
the really kingly speeches which Shakespeare assigns to him, as to
other kings weak enough in all but speech, are but a kind of flowers,
worn for, and effective only as personal embellishment. They combine
to one result with the merely outward and ceremonial ornaments of
royalty, its pageantries, flaunting so naively, so credulously, in
Shakespeare, as in that old medieval time. And then, the force of
Hotspur is but transient youth, the common heat of youth, in him.
The character of Henry the Sixth again, roi faineant, with La
Pucelle* for his counterfoil, lay in the direct course of
Shakespeare's design: he has done much to fix the sentiment of the
"holy Henry." Richard the Third, touched, like John, with an effect
of real heroism, is spoiled like him by something of criminal
madness, and reaches his highest level of tragic expression [191]
when circumstances reduce him to terms of mere human nature.--

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

The Princes in the Tower recall to mind the lot of young Arthur:--

I'll go with thee,
And find the inheritance of this poor child,
His little kingdom of a forced grave.

And when Shakespeare comes to Henry the Eighth, it is not the
superficial though very English splendour of the king himself, but
the really potent and ascendant nature of the butcher's son on the
one hand, and Katharine's subdued reproduction of the sad fortunes of
Richard the Second on the other, that define his central interest.*

With a prescience of the Wars of the Roses, of which his errors were
the original cause, it is Richard who best exposes Shakespeare's own
constant sentiment concerning war, and especially that sort of
civil war which was then recent in English memories. The soul of
Shakespeare, certainly, was not wanting in a sense of the magnanimity
of warriors. The grandiose aspects of war, its magnificent
apparelling, he records [192] monumentally enough--the "dressing of
the lists," the lion's heart, its unfaltering haste thither in all
the freshness of youth and morning.--

Not sick although I have to do with death--
The sun doth gild our armour: Up, my Lords!--
I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,
Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury.

Only, with Shakespeare, the afterthought is immediate:--

They come like sacrifices in their trim.

--Will it never be to-day? I will trot to-morrow a mile, and my
way shall be paved with English faces.

This sentiment Richard reiterates very plaintively, in association
with the delicate sweetness of the English fields, still sweet and
fresh, like London and her other fair towns in that England of
Chaucer, for whose soil the exiled Bolingbroke is made to long so
dangerously, while Richard on his return from Ireland salutes it--

That pale, that white-fac'd shore,--
As a long-parted mother with her child.--
So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth!
And do thee favour with my royal hands.--

Then (of Bolingbroke)

Ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons
Shall ill become the flower of England's face;
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation, and bedew
My pastures' grass with faithful English blood.--

[193]

Why have they dared to march?--

asks York,

So many miles upon her peaceful bosom,
Frighting her pale-fac'd visages with war?--

waking, according to Richard,

Our peace, which in our country's cradle,
Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep:--

bedrenching "with crimson tempest"

The fresh green lap of fair king Richard's land:--

frighting "fair peace" from "our quiet confines," laying

The summer's dust with showers of blood,
Rained from the wounds of slaughter'd Englishmen:

bruising

Her flowerets with the armed hoofs
Of hostile paces.

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to note in this play a peculiar recoil
from the mere instruments of warfare, the contact of the "rude ribs,"
the "flint bosom," of Barkloughly Castle or Pomfret or

Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower:

the

Boisterous untun'd drums
With harsh-resounding trumpets' dreadful bray
And grating shock of wrathful iron arms.

It is as if the lax, soft beauty of the king took effect, at least by
contrast, on everything beside. One gracious prerogative, certainly,
Shakespeare's [194] English kings possess: they are a very eloquent
company, and Richard is the most sweet-tongued of them all. In no
other play perhaps is there such a flush of those gay, fresh,
variegated flowers of speech--colour and figure, not lightly attached
to, but fused into, the very phrase itself--which Shakespeare cannot
help dispensing to his characters, as in this "play of the Deposing
of King Richard the Second," an exquisite poet if he is nothing else,
from first to last, in light and gloom alike, able to see all things
poetically, to give a poetic turn to his conduct of them, and
refreshing with his golden language the tritest aspects of that
ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual
necessities of his destiny. What a garden of words! With him, blank
verse, infinitely graceful, deliberate, musical in inflexion, becomes
indeed a true "verse royal," that rhyming lapse, which to the
Shakespearian ear, at least in youth, came as the last touch of
refinement on it, being here doubly appropriate. His eloquence
blends with that fatal beauty, of which he was so frankly aware, so
amiable to his friends, to his wife, of the effects of which on the
people his enemies were so much afraid, on which Shakespeare himself
dwells so attentively as the "royal blood" comes and goes in the face
with his rapid changes of temper. As happens with sensitive natures,
it attunes him to a congruous suavity of manners, by which anger
itself became flattering: [195] it blends with his merely youthful
hopefulness and high spirits, his sympathetic love for gay people,
things, apparel--"his cote of gold and stone, valued at thirty
thousand marks," the novel Italian fashions he preferred, as also
with those real amiabilities that made people forget the darker
touches of his character, but never tire of the pathetic rehearsal of
his fall, the meekness of which would have seemed merely abject in a
less graceful performer.

Yet it is only fair to say that in the painstaking "revival" of King
Richard the Second, by the late Charles Kean, those who were very
young thirty years ago were afforded much more than Shakespeare's
play could ever have been before--the very person of the king based
on the stately old portrait in Westminster Abbey, "the earliest
extant contemporary likeness of any English sovereign," the grace,
the winning pathos, the sympathetic voice of the player, the tasteful
archaeology confronting vulgar modern London with a scenic
reproduction, for once really agreeable, of the London of Chaucer.
In the hands of Kean the play became like an exquisite performance on
the violin.

The long agony of one so gaily painted by nature's self, from his
"tragic abdication" till the hour in which he

Sluiced out his innocent soul thro' streams of blood,

was for playwrights a subject ready to hand, and [196] became early
the theme of a popular drama, of which some have fancied surviving
favourite fragments in the rhymed parts of Shakespeare's work.

The king Richard of Yngland
Was in his flowris then regnand:
But his flowris efter sone
Fadyt, and ware all undone:--

says the old chronicle. Strangely enough, Shakespeare supposes him
an over-confident believer in that divine right of kings, of which
people in Shakespeare's time were coming to hear so much; a general
right, sealed to him (so Richard is made to think) as an ineradicable
personal gift by the touch--stream rather, over head and breast and
shoulders--of the "holy oil" of his consecration at Westminster; not,
however, through some oversight, the genuine balm used at the
coronation of his successor, given, according to legend, by the
Blessed Virgin to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Richard himself found
that, it was said, among other forgotten treasures, at the crisis of
his changing fortunes, and vainly sought reconsecration therewith--
understood, wistfully, that it was reserved for his happier rival.
And yet his coronation, by the pageantry, the amplitude, the learned
care, of its order, so lengthy that the king, then only eleven years
of age, and fasting, as a communicant at the ceremony, was carried
away in a faint, fixed the type under which it has ever [197] since
continued. And nowhere is there so emphatic a reiteration as in
Richard the Second of the sentiment which those singular rites were
calculated to produce.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king,--

as supplementing another, almost supernatural, right.--"Edward's
seven sons," of whom Richard's father was one,

Were as seven phials of his sacred blood.

But this, too, in the hands of Shakespeare, becomes for him, like any
other of those fantastic, ineffectual, easily discredited, personal
graces, as capricious in its operation on men's wills as merely
physical beauty, kindling himself to eloquence indeed, but only
giving double pathos to insults which "barbarism itself" might have
pitied--the dust in his face, as he returns, through the streets of
London, a prisoner in the train of his victorious enemy.

How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face!

he cries, in that most poetic invention of the mirror scene, which
does but reinforce again that physical charm which all confessed.
The sense of "divine right" in kings is found to act not so much as a
secret of power over others, as of infatuation to themselves. And of
all those personal gifts the one which alone never altogether fails
him is just that royal utterance, his [198] appreciation of the
poetry of his own hapless lot, an eloquent self-pity, infecting
others in spite of themselves, till they too become irresistibly
eloquent about him.

In the Roman Pontifical, of which the order of Coronation is really
a part, there is no form for the inverse process, no rite of
"degradation," such as that by which an offending priest or bishop
may be deprived, if not of the essential quality of "orders," yet,
one by one, of its outward dignities. It is as if Shakespeare had
had in mind some such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical or
military ones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the
last touch of unkindness to the execution of its sentences, in the
scene where Richard "deposes" himself, as in some long, agonising
ceremony, reflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement of
intelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicity
of poetic invention, which puts these pages into a very select class,
with the finest "vermeil and ivory" work of Chatterton or Keats.

Fetch hither Richard that in common view
He may surrender!--

And Richard more than concurs: he throws himself into the part,
realises a type, falls gracefully as on the world's stage.--Why is he
sent for?

To do that office of thine own good will
Which tired majesty did make thee offer.--

Now mark me! how I will undo myself.

[199] "Hath Bolingbroke deposed thine intellect?" the Queen asks him,
on his way to the Tower:--

Hath Bolingbroke
Deposed thine intellect? hath he been in thy heart?

And in truth, but for that adventitious poetic gold, it would be only
"plume-plucked Richard."--

I find myself a traitor with the rest,
For I have given here my soul's consent
To undeck the pompous body of a king.

He is duly reminded, indeed, how

That which in mean men we entitle patience
Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.

Yet at least within the poetic bounds of Shakespeare's play, through
Shakespeare's bountiful gifts, his desire seems fulfilled.--

O! that I were as great
As is my grief.

And his grief becomes nothing less than a central expression of all
that in the revolutions of Fortune's wheel goes down in the world.

No! Shakespeare's kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men:
rather, little or quite ordinary humanity, thrust upon greatness,
with those pathetic results, the natural self-pity of the weak
heightened in them into irresistible appeal to others as the net
result of their royal prerogative. One after another, they seem to
lie composed in Shakespeare's embalming pages, with just that touch
of nature about them, [200] making the whole world akin, which has
infused into their tombs at Westminster a rare poetic grace. It is
that irony of kingship, the sense that it is in its happiness child's
play, in its sorrows, after all, but children's grief, which gives
its finer accent to all the changeful feeling of these wonderful
speeches:--the great meekness of the graceful, wild creature, tamed
at last.--

Give Richard leave to live till Richard die!

his somewhat abject fear of death, turning to acquiescence at moments
of extreme weariness:--

My large kingdom for a little grave!
A little little grave, an obscure grave!--

his religious appeal in the last reserve, with its bold reference to
the judgment of Pilate, as he thinks once more of his "anointing."

And as happens with children he attains contentment finally in the
merely passive recognition of superior strength, in the naturalness
of the result of the great battle as a matter of course, and
experiences something of the royal prerogative of poetry to obscure,
or at least to attune and soften men's griefs. As in some sweet
anthem of Handel, the sufferer, who put finger to the organ under the
utmost pressure of mental conflict, extracts a kind of peace at last
from the mere skill with which he sets his distress to music.--

Beshrew thee, Cousin, that didst lead me forth
Of that sweet way I was in to despair!

[201] "With Cain go wander through the shades of night!" cries the
new king to the gaoler Exton, dissimulating his share in the murder
he is thought to have suggested; and in truth there is something of
the murdered Abel about Shakespeare's Richard. The fact seems to be
that he died of "waste and a broken heart:" it was by way of proof
that his end had been a natural one that, stifling a real fear of the
face, the face of Richard, on men's minds, with the added pleading
now of all dead faces, Henry exposed the corpse to general view; and
Shakespeare, in bringing it on the stage, in the last scene of his
play, does but follow out the motive with which he has emphasised
Richard's physical beauty all through it--that "most beauteous inn,"
as the Queen says quaintly, meeting him on the way to death--
residence, then soon to be deserted, of that wayward, frenzied, but
withal so affectionate soul. Though the body did not go to
Westminster immediately, his tomb,

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