XIV CONVALESCENCE-TRANSFORMATION- THE last, wildest words of this bitter outbreak had been spoken. The dark cloud had burst and the skies were slowly clearing. It seems as though the blackest of his griefs had been lightened in the utterance, and now that the steady crescendo had burst into its most furious forte, he breathed more freely again. He had said his say; Timon had called for the extinction of humanity by plague, sexual disease, slaughter, and suicide. The powers of cursing could go no farther. Shakespeare has shouted himself hoarse and his fury is spent. The fever is over and convalescence has set in. The darkened sun shines out once more, and the gloomy sky shines blue again. How and why! Who shall say? In all the obscurity of Shakespeare's life-history, nowhere do we feel our ignorance of his personal experiences more acutely than here. Some have sought an explanation in the resignation which comes with advancing years, and of which we certainly catch glimpses in his latest works. But Shakespeare neither was, nor felt himself, old at forty-five; and the word resignation is meaningless in connection with this marvellous softening of his long exasperated mood. It is more than a mere reconciliation; it is a revival of that free and lambent imagination which has lain so long in what seemed to be its death-swoon. There is no play of fancy in resignation. Once more he finds life worth living, the earth beautiful, enchantingly, fantastically attractive, and those who dwell upon it worthy of his love. In the purely external circumstances no change has occurred. The political outlook in England is the same, and it is not likely that he would be greatly stirred by events such as the assassination of Henry IV. of France in 1610 and the consequent expulsion of the Jesuits from Great Britain. Details-like the decree forbidding English Catholics (Recusants) from coming within ten miles of the Court, and James's removal of his mother's bones and their pompous re-interment in Westminster Abbey-could have little effect upon Shakespeare. What has personally befallen him that has had such power to re-attune his spirit and lead it back from discord to the old melody and harmony? Surely we are now brought face to face with one of the decisive crises of his life. Let us anticipate the works yet to be written-Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In this last splendid period of his life's glowing September, his dramatic activity, bearing about it the clear transparent atmosphere of early autumn, is more richly varied now than it has ever been. What figures occupy the most prominent place in the poet's sumptuous harvest-home but the young, womanly forms of Marina, Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda. These girlish and forsaken creatures are lost and found again, suffer grievous wrongs, and are in no case cherished as they deserve; but their charm, purity, and nobility of nature triumph over everything. They must have had their prototypes or type. A new world has opened out to Shakespeare, but it would be profitless to spend much time on more or less probable conjectures concerning how and by whom it was revealed. We will, therefore, only lightly touch upon the possibility that Shakespeare, after and during the violent crisis of his loathing for humanity, was gradually reconciled to life by some young and womanly nobility of soul, and by all the poetry which surrounds it and follows in its train. All these youthful women are akin, and are sharply separated from the heroines of his former plays. They are half-real, halfimaginary. The charm of youth and fantastic romance shines round them like a halo; the foulness of life has no power to defile them. They are self-reliant without being endowed with the buoyant spirit of his earlier adventurous maidens, and they are gentle without being overshadowed by the pathetic mournfulness of his sacrificial victims. Not one comes to a tragic end, and not one ever utters a jest, but all are holy in the poet's eyes. The situations of Marina and Perdita are very similar; both are castaways, apparently fatherless and motherless, left solitary amidst dangerous or pitiable circumstances. Imogen is suspected and her life threatened, like Marina's, and although she is suspected and sentenced to death by her nearest and dearest, her strength never falters, and even her love for her unworthy husband is unimpaired. Miranda is deprived of her rank and condemned to the solitude of a desert island, but is sheltered even there by a father's watchful care. There is indeed a half-fatherly tenderness in the delineation of Miranda, and the conception of the native charm of a young girl as a wonderful mystery of nature. Neither Molière's Agnes nor Shakespeare's Miranda have ever looked upon the face of a young man before they meet the one they love, but Agnes possesses only the artificially-preserved ignorance and innocence sappear like dew before the sun of love. To Shakespeare, appears like a being from another world, an ideal of pure al womanhood and maidenly passion, before which he almost s in worship. Let us glance back at Shakespeare's gallery of women. There are the viragoes of his youth, bloodthirsty women like ra, guilty and powerful ones like Margaret of Anjou, and Lady Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan; there are feeble women ane in Richard III., and shrews like Katharine and Adriana, n we seem to detect a reminiscence of the wife at Stratford. en we have the passionately loving, like Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Venus, Titania, Helena in All's Well that Ends Well, and, above all, Juliet. There are the charmingly witty and often frolicsome young girls, like Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost, Portia in the Merchant of Venice, Beatrice, Viola, and Rosalind. Then the simply-minded, deeply-feeling, silent natures, with an element of tragedy about them, pre-ordained to destructionOphelia, Desdemona, Cordelia. After these come the merely sensual types of his bitter mood-Cleopatra and Cressida. And now, lastly, the young girl, drawn with the ripened man's rapture over her youth, and a certain passion of admiration.1 She had been lost to him, as Marina to her father Pericles, and Perdita to her father Leontes. He feels for her the same fatherly tenderness which his last incarnation, the magician Prospero, feels for his daughter Miranda. He had taken a greater burden of life upon himself in the past than he well could bear, and he now lays its heaviest portion aside. No more tragedies! No more historical dramas! No more of the horrors of realism! In their stead a fantastic reflection of life, with all the changes and chances of fairy-tale and legend! A framework of fanciful poetry woven around the charming seriousness of the youthful woman and the serious charm of the young girl. It works like a vision from another world, an enchantment set in surroundings as dream-like as itself. A ship in the open sea off Mitylene; a strange, delightful, ocean-encircled Bohemia; a lonely, magically-protected island; a Britain, where kings of the Roman period and Italians of the sixteenth century meet young princes who dwell in woodland caves and have never seen the face of woman. 1 In Mrs. Jameson's charming old book, Shakespeare's Female Characters, she has grouped his women in an arbitrary manner. Disregarding all chronological sequence, she divides twenty-three characters into four groups:-1. Characters of Intellect. 2. Characters of Passion and Imagination. 3. Characters of the Affections. 4. Historical characters. Heine characterises forty-five feminine figures in his Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen, but the last twenty-one are only distinguished by a few quotations, and he makes no attempt at any deeper interpretation, historical or psychological. Thus he gradually returns to those brighter moods of his youth from which the fairy dances of the Midsummer Night's Dream had evolved, or that unknown Forest of Arden in which cypresses grew and lions prowled, and happy youth and mirthful maidenhood carelessly roamed. Only the spirit of frolic has departed, while free play is given to a fancy unhampered by the laws of reality, and much earnest discernment lies behind the untrammelled sport of imagination. He waves the magician's wand and reality vanishes, now, as formerly. But the light heart has grown sorrowful, and its mirth is no more than a faint smile.' He offers the daydreams of a lonely spirit now, rich but evanescent visions, occupying in all a period of from four to five years. Then Prospero buries his magic wand a fathom deep in the earth for ever. XV PERICLES-COLLABORATION WITH WILKINS AND ROWLEY-SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE SEVENFOLD darkness surrounds Shakespeare's productions in that transition period during which morbid distrust was giving way to the brighter view of life we find in his later plays. We possess a brief series of plays: Timon of Athens and Pericles, which are plainly only partially his work, and Henry VIII. and The Two Noble Kinsmen, of which we may confidently assert that Shakespeare had nothing to do with them beyond the insertion of single important speeches and the addition of a few valuable touches. He had not adapted other men's work since his novitiate, neither had he blended his own intellectual produce with alien and inferior efforts. What is the reason of such an association suddenly and repeatedly occurring now? I will state my view of the matter without any circumlocution or criticism of the opinion We noticed in Coriolanus that Shakespeare's changed attitude towards humanity had also affected his attitude towards his art. A certain carelessness of execution had made itself felt. His steadily increasing despair of finding any virtue or worth in the world, and the ever-growing resentment against the coarseness and thanklessness of men, were accompanied by his corresponding indifference and negligence as a dramatist. We have followed Shakespeare through his early struggles and youthful happiness to the great and serious epoch of his life, and through the anything but brief period of gloom to its crisis in the wild outburst of Timon of Athens; after which we recognised the first symptoms of convalescence. A perspective of not too profoundly serious nor realistic dramas has opened out before us, whose freely playing fantasy proves that Shakespeare is once more reconciled to life. It stands to reason that this reconciliation was not effected by any sudden change, and Shakespeare would not immediately return to the old striving after perfection in his profession-did not do so, in fact, until that very last work in which he laid aside his art for ever. We saw that he had strained too much at life, |