ROMEO AND JULIET.*

AMONG the gift-books of the winter season this noble volume deserves to be a prime favourite. A folio in size, it is beauti-

fully printed on hand-made paper, with rough edges. The text

is necessarily in double columns, as the eye could not otherwise readily follow the lines across pages of such width. The twelve illustrations, reproduced in photogravure by Messrs. Goupil and Co., will, in a book of this kind, attract the first attention. In artistic qualities high praise must be awarded to these drawings.

The choice of subjects is good ; the light and shade are ad- mirably managed ; there is ample power of execution, if not of imagination. We do not say that this high faculty is lacking altogether, for Mr. Dicksee is far from being an idealess artist ; but we submit with some diffidence that, with one or two ex- ceptions, these illustrations suggest nothing, reveal nothing. No new light is thrown by them on the drama, but as composi- tions they are spirited and beautiful. The frontispiece, which represents the last kiss and particg of the lovers before Romeo goes into banishment, is, perhaps, a little " stagey ;" but the fight between the Cap ulets and Mon tagues is well rendered, and nothing can be more effective than the illustration of the scene in which Mercutio is slain. The greatest prominence is, of course, given by Mr. Dicksee to "Juliet and her Romeo ;" but in one instance only are we satisfied with his conception of Juliet. It is in the illustration of the fourth scene in Act iv., when the Nurse brings the dress in which she is to be married to Paris, and she asks to be left to herself. The horror of the act she is about to commit is on her face as she makes the request, but there is a fixed look there also which shows bow resolved she is "To live an unstained wife to her sweet love." Romeo tempting the Apothecary affords another favourable specimen of Mr. Dicksee's skill. Perhaps it is as impossible to illustrate Shakespeare as it is to act Shake- speare so as to satisfy fully the lovers of the poet. There is always something wanting ; we ask both from artist and actor more than we can receive, and the deficiency is not due to their weakness, but to his superlative variety and strength.

The attractions of this volume are by no means solely

• Romeo and Juliet. With Twelve Illustrations by F. Dicksee, A.R.A. With an Introduction by Edward Do wden, LL.D. Loud.ot : Cassell and CO. 1834.

dependent on artist and printer. Professor Dowden is well- known as one of the best of living commentators on the poet, and his Introduction to Romeo and Juliet may boast a three- fold merit,—the literary history of the play tells the reader all that he need wish to know ; the criticism is eminently sane ; and the style of the essay is attractive. It may be said that in these days, and after the exhaustive labours of Mr. Furness, nothing new can be written about this play ; but in the writings of a great poet there is a perennial freshness, which time cannot wither nor criticism stale. We have followed Professor Dowden with interest through every line of his Introduction, and the reader who is unable to do so must be indifferent to the subject. The sources of the plot, and the various efforts made by poet or novelist to tell the story, are related with some minuteness.

There is in the first instance the narrative found among the Novelle of Masuccio Salernitarno, and printed at Naples in the fifteenth century. The tale is characterised as rude, and in some features almost savage :—

" Love is here in its might, and death in its terror ; but beauty has not come to lift the tale out of the melodramatic, and make it a symbol of what is most piteous and most august in human existence, —the strict bounds which life Bets to our purest and most ardent desires, and the boundlessness of those desires which choose rather to abandon this world than to be untrue to themselves."

This rough version of the tragedy was followed, sixty years later, by Da Porto's "prose poem," which, "in almost every essential, and in various details, agrees with Shakespeare's play." The most prominent difference between the plots is in the final scene. Romeo, according to the Italian writer, seeks his wife in the tomb, and, believing her to be dead, drinks poison. But while his arms are round her she returns to consciousness, and as Juliet's life revives Romeo's dies out. A few precious moments of converse follow ; but when her husband dies, Juliet, "deeply musing on her great misfortune and the death of her dear lover, resolving to live no longer, she drew in her breath, retained it a great while, and then, with a loud scream, fell dead upon her lover's body." Shakespeare did not found his tragedy upon Da Porto, nor yet upon the version of his successor, Bandello —which, however, he knew something of, through a French paraphrase done into English—but upon Arthur Brooke's English poem, published in 1562.

The tale, so rich in poetic incident, so full of high tragedy, was told in many forms before Shakespeare produced his masterpiece. Lope de Vega, his contemporary, the most prolific of poets—he is said to have written upwards of twenty-one million verses—tried his hand, not altogether unsuccessfully, on the story of Romeo and Juliet. Of his treatment of the subject an elaborate account is given by Professor Dowden, who observes that though Lope's drama keeps upon the mere surface of life as compared with Shakespeare's tragedy, it is not without a genuine charm. "It never flags for a moment ; its movement is bright as well as rapid ; the stage is always bustling with animated figures ; and there is poetry enough in it to lift the play above mere melodrama or spectacle." The drama, however, does not end tragically. Roselo, the banished Romeo of Vega, is present in the tomb when his wife awakes, and carries her off in disguise to a farm belonging to her father.

Thither the father comes, and is awe-struck at hearing the voice of his dead child. "That quick-witted young lady, hidden in an upper chamber, profits by the opportunity to lecture her father, as if from the spirit-world, on his cruelty, which, she declares, has caused her death ; nor does she end until the old man binds himself by a solemn vow to forgive her husband Roselo, and receive him as a son." And so, all difficulties overcome, the young couple. like the lovers in story-books, live happily ever afterwards.

Since Shakespeare's time, his immortal poem of love and death has been adapted or travestied by small poets and play- wrights. In 1772, the Frenchman, Dacis, brought upon the stage his Romeo et Juliette, in which he produces a mixture of Shakespeare and of Dante, linking, as Professor Dowden observes, the theme of the English dramatist with the story of Ugolino. An analysis of the plot is given in the Introduction, but it will suffice to say here, more briefly, that Romeo is asked

to plead the cause of Paris; that Juliette, full of tears and sorrows, resolves "to immolate herself to the State and to obey

her father ;" that Romeo's filial piety leads him to kill Juliette's brother, who is also his bosom friend; that Montaigu, bent on revenge, asks his son to strike a dagger into the breast of Capnlet's daughter, and aims at the extermination of the.whole Capnlet family. Juliette, hearing of this, thinks that by sacri- ficing herself she can brine peace to the two houses. At the tombs of the Montaigus and Capulets she drinks poison, and Romeo, who will not stay behind her, kills himself with the sword.

" In the closing scene it only remains for the implacable Montaigu to use his poignard with swift execution against his rival at the moment of the oath of peace; then to discover the body of Juliette, and pause an instant to gloat over her dying pangs ; in that same instant to perceive his slaughtered Romeo by her side, and to fall lifeless—the ruin of his vindictive passion—upon the body of his son."

The attempts, earlier or later, to tell the story which Shake- speare has told for all time, are mainly interesting when regarded as a foil to his exquisite work, which, like all great poetry, grows in beauty the oftener it is studied. It would seem as if nothing new could be said of this rapturous dream of young love ending in anguish and death. Like all high tragedy, there is a moral elevation in Romeo and Juliet which at once satisfies the intellect and the heart. Told as a realistic novelist would tell it, the story is infinitely painful, and its conclusion of questionable morality. A justification or tolerance of suicide by the novelist creates a feeling of revulsion. We feel this in Mr. Blackmore's half-poetical tale of Alice Lorraine ; we do not feel it in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Professor Dowden is aware of this moral contrariety, and explains it as follows. Whether his explanation is deemed satisfactory will depend, probably, upon the temperament of the reader :—

"The example of suicide, again, what of it ? Surely it is not right for young people to drink phials of poison which, if you had the strength of twenty men,' would dispatch you straight.' Surely a well-regulated understanding would advise a young widow to choose the cloister before the dagger. True ; and a very pretty moral. But, while acknowledging all this, may we not be permitted to maintain that a deeper moral lies in the mere presentation of the fact that for a human being to be charged with high passion of any kind is to forfeit the security of our lower life, and yet that such forfeiture may be justly accepted as the condition of an incalculable gain ? May we not bear in mind, also, that vindication of 'the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,' by Plato, in his Phoedrus ? 'The sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman The fourth and last kind of madness is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the recollection of the true beauty ; he would like to fly away, but he cannot ; he is like a bird, flattering, and looking upward, and careless of the world below ; and he- is therefore esteemed mad.' Not that our passionate young lovers of Verona are in any degree followers of the Platonic philosophy. They are man and maid, with the hot blood bating in their cheeks,' yet are they delicate and virgin souls,' such as Plato describes, in whom a divine madness after its kind awakens lyrical numbers.' And as to their rash self slaughter, why does this never offend our moral sense ? Why do we never criticise it in the spirit of a serious burgher called to assist upon an inquest, and pondering a verdict of felo de se ? Why, except that we become aware that the lives of the lovers move in a plane other than the plane of our every-day existence, and that their choice of love together with death, rather than of life lapsing back into the loveless round, is a type and emblem of all those heroic sacrifices for an ideal n hich prove that this earth of ours is not wholly a market or a counting-house ?"

True ; and if we read, of two young lovers brought up at the police-court for attempting to commit suicide because their course of love does not run smooth, we do not call to mind the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but say at once, and say justly, that they have acted foolishly and wickedly.

Much of Professor Dowden's criticism, while thoroughly com- petent, cannot be termed original. It is impossible that it should be. Poets, and critics too, have joined in rapturous praise of this exquisite love-drama, and unpoetical commenta- tors have sat like coroners on the bodies of the lovers. Can any new beauty be found, or any hitherto unnoted fault ? And yet the writer, being at once poetical and critical, takes up with great felicity the different dramatis personce, and his lively descrip- tions, if they do not suggest new ideas, present with admirable perspicacity the salient features of the play.

Perhaps enough has been said of this exquisite gift-book, worthy in every way of the immortal poem it holds between its covers. Unlike the Christmas ventures which are only books to look at, this volume has as strong a claim on the reader as on the lover of art. Even readers to whom every scene of the play is familiar will be glad to possess it in a form so artistic, and they who have only a playgoer's knowledge of the drama will be forced, with a copy so alluring before them, to study it more closely.