*

youth. But the same play that contains Autolycus contains the grave and noble figure of Hermione. From its elevation and calm Shakspere's heart can pass into the simple merriment of rustic festivity; he can enjoy the open-mouthed happiness of country clowns; he is delighted by the gay defiance of order and honesty which Autolycus, most charming of rogues, professes; he is . touched and exquisitely thrilled by the pure and vivid joy of Perdita among her flowers. Now that Shakspere is most a householder, he enters most into the pleasures of truantship. And in like manner it is when he is most grave that he can smile most brightly, most tenderly. But one kind of laughter Shakspere at this time found detestable-the laughter of an Antonio or a Sebastian, barren and forced laughter of narrow heads and irreverent and loveless hearts. The sly knavery of Autolycus has nothing in it that is criminal; heaven is his accomplice. "If I had a mind to be honest, I see Fortune would not suffer me; she drops booties in my mouth." Whether Schiller's Franz Moor made many robbers may be doubtful. But certainly no person of spirit can read A Winter's Tale without feeling a dishonest and delightful itching of the fingers, an interest not wholly virtuous in his neighbor's bleaching-green, and an impatience to be off for once on an adventure of roving and roguing with Autolycus.

* Readers of Mr. Browning's "Fifine at the Fair" will associate an esoteric sense with the word "householder," and will remember his admirably bright and vigorous study of the causes of our love of truantship in the opening sections of that poem.

CHAPTER VIII.

SHAKSPERE'S LAST PLAYS.

In these chapters we have been chiefly concerned with observing the growth of Shakspere's mind and art. The essential prerequisite of such a study was a scheme of the chronological succession of Shakspere's plays which could be accepted as trustworthy in the main. But for such a study it is fortunately not necessary that we should in every case determine how play followed play. It would for many reasons be important and interesting to ascertain the date at which each work of Shakspere came into existence; but as a fact this has not been accomplished, and we may safely say that it never will be accomplished. To understand in all essentials the history of Shakspere's character and Shakspere's art, we have obtained what is absolutely necessary when we have made out the succession, not of Shakspere's plays, but of Shakspere's chief visions of truth, his most intense moments of inspiration, his greater discoveries about human life.

In the history of every artist and of every man there are periods of quickened existence, when spiritual discovery is made without an effort, and attainment becomes easy and almost involuntary. One does not seek for truth, but rather is sought for by truth, and found; one does not construct beautiful imaginings, but beauty itself haunts and startles and waylays. These periods may be arrived at through prolonged moral conflict and victory, or through some sudden revelation of joy, or through supreme anguish and renouncement. Such epochs of

spiritual discovery lie behind the art of the artist, it may be immediately, or it may be remotely, and out of these it springs. Among many art-products some single work will perhaps give to a unique experience its highest, its absolute expression; and this, whether produced at the moment or ten years afterwards, properly belongs to that crisis of which it is the outcome. Lyrical writers usually utter themselves nearly at the moment when they are smitten with the sharp stroke of joy or of pain. Dramatic writers, for the purity and fidelity of whose work a certain aloofness from their individuality is needed, utter themselves more often not on the moment, but after an interval, during which self-possession and self-mastery have been attained.

Now, although we are not in all cases able to say confidently this play of Shakspere preceded that, the order of his writings has been sufficiently determined to enable us to trace with confidence the succession of Shakspere's epochs of spiritual alteration and development. Whether Macbeth preceded Othello, or Othello Macbeth, need not greatly concern us; the question is one chiefly of literary curiosity; we do not understand Shakspere much the better when the question has been settled than we did while the answer remained doubtful. Both plays belong, and they belong in an equal degree, to one and the same period in the history of Shakspere's mind and art, to which period we can unquestionably assign its place. In the present chapter Timon of Athens is placed near The Tempest, although it is possible that a play, or two or three plays, in the precise chronological order, may lie between them. They are placed near one another be cause in Timon of Athens Shakspere's mood of indignation with the world attains its highest, its ideal expression, while in The Tempest we find the ideal expression of the temper of mind which succeeded his mood of indigna

tion-the pathetic yet august serenity of Shakspere's final period. For the purposes of such a study as this we may look upon The Tempest as Shakspere's latest play. Perhaps it actually was such; perhaps A Winter's Tale or Cymbeline, or both, may have followed it in point of time. It does not matter greatly, for the purposes of the present study, which preceded and which succeeded. These three plays, as we shall see, form a little group by themselves, but it is The Tempest which gives its most perfect expression to the spirit that breathes through these three plays which bring to an end the dramatic career of Shakspere; and therefore for us it is Shakspere's latest play.* We have been endeavoring, so to speak, to scan the metre of Shakspere's life; to do this rightly, we must count rather by accents than by syllables; if we can find the last accented syllable, we have found the real close of the verse, although it may be an additional syllable or two follow, and enrich the verse with a dying fall. And so in the case of Timon of Athens; it may actually lie, in point of time, at a considerable dis tance from those discoveries of evil in man's heart which inspired the soliloquies of Hamlet and the frenzied utterances of Lear; but in Timon indignation has attained its

* Professor Ingram, in his paper "On the 'Weak-endings' of Shakspere," arranges the plays of the weak-ending period in the following order: Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Pericles, Tempest, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII. From an æsthetic point of view, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus seem to me connected with the plays that immediately precede, not with those that follow them. Professor Ingram is disposed to place Macbeth immediately before Antony and Cleopatra. I had independently arrived at the same opinion. Timon cannot be far off, and must, I think, come before The Tempest. Observe that Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII. are Shaksperian fragments. Thus the Tempest, Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline remain as the three complete plays which represent the final period of Shakspere's authorship. I treat Timon, in this chap. ter, as earlier than these, but not a great deal earlier.

ideal expression; it is the decuman wave which sets shoreward from that infinite and stormy sea of human passion.

Timon of Athens, although deservedly one of the least popular of Shakspere's plays, belongs to his best period, and was written by the poet with no half-hearted regard for his subject. Whether Shakspere wrote his portion first, and left it unfinished to be completed by a later dramatist-the conjecture of Mr. Fleay; whether Shakspere's play was cut down and altered for the stage, to please a public which demanded comedy and the conceits of clownage, either during the poet's lifetime or in the interval between his death and the appearance of the first folio;* or whether Shakspere worked upon the material

* See the laborious article by N. Delius, "Ueber Shakespeare's Timon of Athens," Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, vol. ii.; and that by B. Tschischwitz, "Timon von Athen. Ein kritischer Versuch," Jahrbuch, vol. iv. There is yet another and plausible theory, originated by Ulrici and modified by Karl Elze. In the first folio Timon ends upon p. 99. A vacant page (100) follows. Then immediately comes Julius Caesar, beginning not on p. 101, but on p. 109. Although there are irregularities in the pagination of the first folio, such a gap between two plays does not occur elsewhere in the volume. Sheet ii is wanting. Timon ends with sheet hh; Julius Cæsar begins with kk. Ulrici is of opinion that the printing of Julius Caesar was begun before that of Timon was finished, probably because the manuscript of Timon was imperfect, and the deficiencies could not be immediately supplied. Shakspere's manuscript was not forthcoming; the play had to be made up from the scattered parts of the individual actors. These parts were marred by omissions, and by the introduction of passages not by Shak. spere. Karl Elze adds the conjecture that only the parts of the principal actors could be found. (The play seems not to have been popular, and perhaps it had not been represented for several years.) To complete the play, the editors of the first folio fell back, for minor parts, upon the old Timon of Athens (not much older, perhaps, than Shakspere's play), which may have been the work of George Wilkins. Hence the incoherences and inconsistencies of the play as it exists at present. See the preface by Karl Elze to Timon in the German Shakespeare Society's edition of Tieck and Schle gel's translation of Shakspere. For Mr. Fleay's study of this play, see Trans. New Sh. Soc.