BOOKS.

MR. GEORGE WYNDHAM ON SHAKESPEARE'S POEMS.*

WE have no hesitation in describing Mr. George Wyndham's introduction as a masterly piece of criticism. There are things in it with which we do not wholly agree, and also things which we do not feel sure can be finally sustained at the bar of literature, but that is no great matter. What separate his introduction from so much of the work that is called literary criticism are his intimate first-hand knowledge of Elizabethan poetry and prose, and his wide and comprehen- sive literary sympathy. Critics of Shakespeare too often fail either from only knowing Shakespeare's plays and poems, alone and in isolation from the great ccrrpuspoeticunt Elizabethanense of which they are a part, or else because, though they know the literature of " Eliza and our James," they are mere pedantic dryasdusts, and have not that feeling for poetic literature, that instinctive sense of what poetry really means and is, which ought to belong to every interpreter of poetry. Mr. Wyndham falls into neither of these errors. He knows his Shakespeare, but he knows also his Peele and his Greene, his Marlowe and his Chapman, his Ben Jonson and his Webster, his Massinger and his Ford. Again, while he is able to " cap " verses with the best of the literal critics and pedants of the Shakespearian origins, he knows that poetry- is poetry, and that those who best understand it are those who • The Poems of Shakespeare. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by ,George Wyndham. London: Idahoan and 0o. [10d. 6d.1

can feel that the poem's heart still beats against its side. Thus while we read Mr. Wyndham's introduction we realise that he is able to give enough, and yet not too much, importance to the discoveries of those painstaking and laborious pergolas who have pieced together all the allusions to Shakespeare and his work scattered up and down the writings of his contem- poraries. These allusions have a value, but that value can only be precisely and usefully estimated by one who has read them in their context, and who has not merely seen them desiccated in a Shakespearian handbook or lexicon.

Mr. Wyndham's chief contribution to the Sonnet controversy

seems at first sight a very simple one, yet it is one which is constantly ignored. He insists that the sonnets are poems, and must be considered first and always as poems. Many

critics talk and write as if they were a series of biographical memoranda kindly placed at their disposal by the poet. Mr. Wyndham realises that though the poet in the course of his inspiration may have swept into them a thousand details of his emotional biography, a thousand sparkles from the flashing wheel of his passions, and his feelings, and all the subtle, metaphysical ideas that for a time ruled his intellect, they are still rather works of art than notes to serve for a biography. The present writer is not scholar enough to know whether the dates and " understood

relations " will allow his theory, but he cannot help fancying that Love's Labour's Lost is the real key to the sonnets. That is at any rate a sonnet-play. Half the verses go into the sonnet form, and all the chief characters burst into sonnets at the

smallest emotional provocation. But behind the sonneteer- ing comes the human voice which tells us that all this high-wrought emotion, all this word-spinning or even idea- spinniig, all this amorous metaphysic, is unreal and fantastic, —that, in fact, it is literature, not life. And Shakespeare could tell the world this with all the better force and grace because he had been a sonneteer himself. He knew so well that " the song is to the singer, and comes back most to him," that it expresses his emotions, his feelings, his thoughts, and his Platonics, and not the actual facts of life. Something or somebody may have suggested that his young and handsome and noble—or for the purposes of poetry, at any rate,

handsome and noble—friend ought to marry. Into that mould how easy for a poet full of passion—we use the word

in its true sense, and not merely as indicating the passion of love

—and quivering with the ideas that kindle at a touch, to pour a stream of gold. Again, there is some slight suggestion of jealousy and a rival, and in an instant the poet is passing the bounds of space and time to say whatever is absolute and eternal and illuminating on love and friendship, death and

desire, sorrow and remorse. The mould was nothing,—a clay thing soon broken and forgotten. The poet's gold was every- thing, came from a different region, and merely used the clay

an instant to shape the shining, and henceforth immortal, image. Shakespeare's sonnets were, in fact, about as auto- biographical as Pope's " Ode to an Unfortunate Lady." You cannot say exactly that there was no " peg," no mould, but it was of infinitesimal importance. But, as we have said, all this seems to us to be writ large in Love's Labour's Lost.

But we must not keep our readers any longer from coming closer to Mr. Wyndham's excellent criticism. We cannot conceive the true view of the sonnets being put better than in the following passage,—a passage which also contains a most sound and well-conceived declaration as to Shakespeare's two long poems :— " Shakespeare's Poems are detached by the perfection of his art from both the personal experience which supplied their matter and the artistic environment which suggested their rough- hewn form. Were they newly discovere,l, you could tell, of course, that they were written in England, and about the end of the Sixteenth Century : just as you can tell a Flemish from an Italian, a. Fourteenth from a Sixteenth Century picture; and every unprejudiced critic has said of the Sonnets that they express Shakespeare's own feelings in his own person.' That is true. But it is equally true, and it is vastly more important, that the Sonnets are not an Autobiography. In this Sonnet or that you feel the throb of great passions shaking behind the perfect verse; here and there you listen to a sigh as of a world awaking to its weariness. Yet the movement and sound are elemental : they steal on your senses like a whisper trembling through summer-leaves, and in their vastness are removed by far from the suffocation of any one man's tragedy. The writer of the Sonnets has felt more, and thought more, than the writer of the Venus and the Lucrece ; but he remains a poet—not a Rousseau, not a Metaphysician—and his chief concern is still to worship Beauty in the imagery and music of his verse. It is. indeed, strange to find how much of thought, imagery, and rhythm is common to Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets, for the two works could hardly belong by their themes to classes of poetry more widely distinct—(the first is a late Renaissance imitation of late

Classical Mythology ; the second a sequence of intimate occasional verses)—nor could they differ more obviously from other poems in the same classes. Many such imitations and sequences of sonnets

were written by Shakespeare's contemporaries, but among them all there is not one poem that in the least resembles Venus and Adonis, and there are but few sonnets that remind you, even faintly, of Shakespeare's. And just such distinctions isolate The Rape of Lucrece. By its theme, as a romantic story in rhyme, it has nothing in common with its two companions from Shake- speare's hand ; but it is lonelier than they, having indeed no fellow in Elizabethan poetry and not many in English literature. Leaving ballads on one side, you may count the romantic stories in English rhyme, that can by courtesy be called literature, upon the fingers of one hand. There are but two arches in the bridge by which Keats and Chaucer communicate across the centuries, and Shakespeare's Lucrece stands for the solitary pier. Yet, distinct as they are from each other in character, these three things by Shakespeare are closely united in form by a degree of lyrical excellence in their imagery and rhythm which severs them from kindred competitors : they are the first examples of the highest qualities in Elizabethan lyrical verse. No poet of that day ever doubted that ' poesie dealeth with Ketholon, that is to say with the universall consideration,' or that of every language in Europe their own could best yeeld the sweet slyding fit for a verse.' But in these three you find the highest expression of this theory and this practice alike : a sense of the mystery of Beauty profound as Plato's, with such a golden cadence as no other singer has been able to sustain."

Criticism as sound and searching as that is really worth writing. What Mr. Wyndham has to say about the " Lucrece" and Chaucer is as true and yet as original as what he

states when he tells us that Shakespeare's sonnets are not an autobiography. There are a great many other things which we should like to touch on in Mr. Wynd- ham's introduction ; but if we did we should fill a whole number of the Spectator. One only can we find space for. We desire to call special attention to the admirable piece of metrical criticism at the end of the introduction. It shows that Mr. Wyndham really understands the genius of our metrical system. His remark as to the two streams—the rhymed and the accentual—which combined in the Eliza- bethans are as new as they are illuminating. Most interesting is the quotation from the poem called "Scottish Field," by which it is illustrated. Mr. Wyndham's detailed criticism of the respective parts played by assonance, alliteration, and emphasis in the first sonnet is also worthy of note. It shows how entirely he has escaped the tyranny of the false notion that English poetry is to be controlled and pat in order by the laborious gentlemen who hammer out their iambs, trochees, and dactyls on their study tables.

We have only two minute points of difference with Mr. Wyndham. We think that, like so many critics before him, he exaggerates the squalor of the Elizabethan theatres. We -would ask him to look at the passage in Coryat's Crudities in which that humorous foot-traveller compares the poverty of the Venetian playhouses with the richness of those in London.

Next, we cannot agree with Mr. Wyndham in what he says about Mr. Carter's contribution to the controversy over the religious views of the Shakespeare family. It seems to us .that Mr. Carter has completely proved that Shakespeare's father was not a Roman Catholic, but instead got into diffi- culties as a town Magistrate because of his Puritanic leanings.

We think nothing of Mr. Wyndham's point that if John Shakespeare had been a Puritan he would not have applied for a grant of arms. In later times, at any rate, some of the most rigid Puritans were Armigeri. Again, Milton, though a Puritan, did not abhor the stage, but only its " fat pollutions."

These, however, are minor matters. The fact remains that all who love our Elizabethan literature will find a very garden of delight in Mr. Wyndham's scholarly introduction.