which Lee repudiates prompted solely by the desire
to find a justification for Prospero's course.
The
question is whether in describing his hero's "final
act" Shakespeare may not also have been thinking
of his own long years of sway, by virtue of an art
peculiar to himself, over the minds and hearts of
other men;
a sway which, with the enormous
labour it entailed, he had certainly bargained with
himself to resign before old age should take the
charm from the other satisfactions of life.

Now, so far as external evidence goes, nobody can pretend to settle this question; and there is no room and no occasion for dogmatizing about it. The biographer, moreover, is right in insisting that the utmost economy should be exercised in applying to Shakespeare himself the words of his characters. But, pace Sir Sidney, the analogy is poetically so perfect that the great mass of non-specialist readers will continue to please themselves by seeing it. Shakespeare certainly could not have framed a more appropriate valediction to his twenty years of creative work than is conveyed in those lines wherewith Prospero takes leave of the tools of his wizardry:— Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew: by whose aid, Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault Set roaring war:1 to the dread rattling thunder

1 We have here, of course, the kind of break in the structure of the sentence which the grammarians call “anacoluthon."

Vi 33 ff.

Effects of Shakespeare's magic.

Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have requir'd
Some heavenly music (which even now I do)
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

O man of men, O wondrous prince of the enchanted isle of Britain! How in this age of shamefaced reticence may we give voice to the pride and joy and love that your immortalizing work enkindles in us? You have waked sleepers from their graves, but they die no more. You cannot lay again the spirits that by your art you have called from their confines to enact your fancies. Your staff is broken, and buried certain fathoms in the earth, whence none may disinter it; none may wield it again! But never shall your book be drowned; never shall we forget the visions you have shown us. The solidseeming things of sense pass like the spindrift: but your words and your fantasies abide for ever. Ages and generations come and go; monarchs and conquerors arise and fall: many a regal garland since your day has crowned the queenly head of sacred England. And now again, with woe immeasurable, she strives to uphold the holy heritage that you and Such things are common in Shakespeare, and the literary usage of his time was more tolerant of them than that of to-day. But the best defence of Shakespeare's irregularities is the fact that his lines were written to be spoken rather than read, and in oratory such a violation of grammar is often a help, not a hindrance to the conveying of the meaning.

Milton have bequeathed to her, against the fierce might of envious hatred. The foe is embattled, and our happier brethren are pouring out their lifeblood to break his cruel onslaught. England, your England, has called, and from all the ends of the world her children come, eager to die that Shakespeare's land may live. O princely soul, we know not what shall be the issue: but you have given us the victory, let fall what will. Though the island home we love were sunk in the oblivious sea, yet should it live in men's memories and be blessed for ever for your sake. Your glory has bedimmed the noontide sun, and the shadows of your fancy are more real than aught the sun looks down on. Hail, magician, who may yet allay this last dread tempest! You at least have conquered the foe with whom we wrestle: and though he could destroy us it were nothing, for you shall live serene above the whirlwind of destruction. Look not down with sorrow from the realm where your imperial spirit sits ensphered. The tempest and the agony shall be spent, and earth shall breathe again in peace and bind up her wounds in hope and faith. Then shall fraternity, re-born, make us forget the heaviness that's past; and over the grave of buried hatred shall rise anew the temple of the God in man. England, that lives by you, through you shall live for ever; and never shall wane our love for you, or our pride and joy in you. Hail and farewell!

Shakespearean

In the preceding chapter, the general character- Tone of the istics of the three plays of Shakespeare's final period have been outlined. While The Tempest shares tragi-comethese, it yet represents in a sense another new de- dies. parture. “Tragi-comedy," the type of play in

In what sense the plays are autobiographical.

which there is tragic action but no death,2 and in which the ending must be happy, had become fashionable in the opening decade of the seventeenth century, and the success of such works by other writers may account in part for Shakespeare's turning his genius in this direction after his years of tragedy were over, instead of returning to comedy pure and simple. However deeply his inner life may have been perturbed, he always remained a true man of business, and never failed in transmuting the moods of his soul into plays that seemed sure of popularity. But this could not prevent his work from reflecting the feeling that dominated him at the time of doing it. The sunset calm, the peace after storm, which we see in Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, is no subjective fancy of the reader's, and it is not accounted for by the nature of the medium in which the poet was working. We have here the record of a spirit which has drunk life to the lees, without dulling the zest of its palate for the various vintages. Such joy and sorrow as Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies communicate cannot have sprung from anything short of the reality of life in him. Plays may be written to order, but not such plays. Passion may be simulated; but the woes of Lear, the agony of Othello, the proud melancholy of Hamlet, could not have been created save by one who had lived through their spiritual trials.

This is not to say, however, that some special personal experience underlies each of the great characters Shakespeare depicts, and every one of the

2 A rule which, more suo, Shakespeare could not refrain from violating! He kills Cloten in Cymbeline and Antigonus in The Winter's Tale.

great problems about which his tragedies revolve. I do not believe that even a biography which faithfully reported the incidents of every day of his life would give us the genesis of the changes of spiritual tone to which his works bear witness. Only a diary of personal confessions could do this. When a man has the seeing eye, the moral problems of the world haunt his reason and rack his soul, whether he be called upon to bear a load of purely personal grief or not. The religious experience-the discovery within oneself of a thirst for perfection which condemns the outward order of things, and which the world of the senses and the transient can never wholly satisfy-comes to every man who is endowed by nature with the appropriate organ, as it were. Now, this was what Shakespeare underwent. For many years he was tortured by the contrast between what the world gives and what the soul demands: between "what is" and "what ought to be." It is banal to think that such a soul needed to wait for a disappointment in love, or for betrayal by a trusted friend, before he could describe, in imaginary characters, the effects of such experiences. His distinctive power is that of suffering vicariously. It is no petty personal sorrow or joy that he gives voice to, but the joy of all mankind, the burden of the whole world.

how the fers.

martyr suf

There is no truly tragic experience save where a man by sympathy can universalize what he has seen or felt. The child-mind pities the martyr solely Why and for the nails in his hands and feet, and the thorngashes on his brow; but riper experience shows us that these things are as nothing. Christ was no sufferer, so far as actual physical pain, or the immediate spiritual assaults of false friendship or evil