78 IV NOTES ON A FEATURE OF SHAKSPERE'S STYLE

more or less similar in kind to these; but perhaps the reader has had sufficient. If any should be inclined, like Johnson, to regard these playings with words as indicating that Shakspere, after all, was for an age and not for all time, we might incidentally remind them that he shares this characteristic with many another great man. Paul himself, in writing to a friend, did not disdain to point a petition with a light play on a name; and one of the sublimest poets that ever lived, who wrote in a far distant period from Shakspere's and in a very different language, had the same peculiarity. Isaiah, seven hundred years before Christ, had the Shaksperean love of a paronomasia; nay, on one occasion he uses it to add force to the tremendous close of a lofty denunciation: "He looked for judgment, and behold oppression; for righteousness, and behold a cry”. he looked for mishpat, and behold mispach; for tsedakah, and behold tse'akah. Of such companionship even Shakspere might be proud; and in such surroundings the humble pun is raised to an almost royal dignity. He, in fact, who despiseth it despiseth life itself.

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V

Shakspere's Children

EXT to thoughtless blame, nothing is easier to a critic than indiscriminate praise; and nothing is

more useless. It is a pleasure to think that such praise is now ceasing to be showered upon Shakspere, and that we are being at last allowed both to admire and to censure with a certain measure of discretion. "Nothing to extenuate, and to set down naught in malice"-this should be our motto; our duty towards Shakspere should be to speak of him as Brutus spoke of Caesar, neither diminishing his glory wherein he was worthy, nor enforcing his offences, which at their worst cannot dim his fame.

Nowhere has Shakspere suffered more of this uncritical eulogy than in reference to his children. Swinburne, for example, deals always in superlatives; but his superlatives are never more shrill or inarticulate than when he speaks of Shakspere's "heavenly family" of little boys. On Mamillius he lavishes all his flowers. Of Arthur this is what he says:

I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare's Arthur; there are one or two figures in the world of his work of which there are no words that would be fit or good to say. The place they have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk; the niche set apart for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights and noises of common day. There are chapels in the cathedral of man's highest art as in that of his inmost life, not made to be set open to

the eyes and feet of the world. Love and death and memory keep charge for us in silence of some beloved names. It is the crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and transcendant gift of poetry, that it can add to the number of these, and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance fresh names and memories of its own creation.

So much for Swinburne on "this bud of Britain," "this most famous flower in a princely trinity of boys" -and so on, with his usual profusion of adjectives. But other critics, less exuberant than Swinburne as a rule, are on this point not less eloquent than he. One can find traces of this eloquence in the fragmentary notes that alone remain of Coleridge's lectures; and it is constantly blazing forth in the pages of Brandes. Such a consensus of opinion may well make us more than usually doubtful of the truth of our own opinion; to censure Shakspere at all is daring enough, but to censure him where so many have praised him is the height of presumption. And yet, after all our hesitations, the truth has to be told. We do not like Shakspere's children, nor can any effort make us like them.

It mitigates our sense of over-audacity a little to remember that, as far as we can judge, Shakspere with all his genius and all his observation had less chance of knowing children than very ordinary people have today. For he lived in times when children grew old fast —and, indeed, had to grow old fast in self-defence; for the barriers between the child and the adult were rigid, and the child was kept in his place by the severest of disciplines. When children were to be seen and not heard, the chances of studying the inner mind of child

hood were slight indeed. Even now, it is painfully difficult for a grown-up person to enter that sanctuary; what must it have been then? Few grown-up persons, indeed, seem to have even wished to enter it. Hence, as the child was suppressed, the only chance for him was to imitate his elders, and to emerge as quickly as possible into the more advanced stage. Thus-and not merely because of her Southern blood-Juliet is a woman at fourteen; Wolsey-not merely because the University was then more of a school than now is a Bachelor of Arts at fifteen; Henry VIII rules a kingdom at eighteen. A Lady Jane Grey had, indeed, scarcely a childhood at all. No wonder that, when this whole part of life was thus cut out, a John of Gaunt at fiftyeight seems to Shakspere a tottering old man.

Thus, partly because Shakspere did not and could not know children well, and partly because those he did know were of this precocious kind, the children in his plays are not child-like at all. He had doubtless been a clever child himself. His own son, as became the offspring of such a father, may well have been cleverer than most. But whatever the explanation, we notice in all these children the unfailing symptoms of the thorough prig. They are all forward and pedantic; all are of the class stigmatised by Gilbert as "children who are up in dates," and who "never will be missed." Every one of them, like little William in the Merry Wives of Windsor, might have been described by Sir Hugh Evans as "a good sprag memory"; and Mrs Page might say of each of them, "He is a better scholar than I thought

he was." Moth, for example, the earliest of the breed, is a concettisto who out-Armadoes Armado himself, and who puns on everything punnable with a skill which would have made Dr Johnson look to his pockets. By his "penny of observation," as he tells his master, he has purchased an experience which would not disgrace a man of forty; and he can balance sentences as well as Lyly himself. It might perhaps be objected that Moth is an unfair example; he is "conceited" indeed, but the whole play is one long conceit, and his twists and turns belong rather to his creator than to himself. This is true enough; but be it observed that in this play of prigs a child is the most priggish, and that in a play which is all Euphuism a child is the most euphuistic. Still, even if we pass over Love's Labour's Lost as a youthful extravagance, how fares it as we go farther down the stream? What of Richard III, a play immature indeed, but pointing towards maturity? Here we have two pairs of children, the "brats of Clarence" and the two ill-fated princes. The Clarences are the less objectionable probably because we see very little of them: but that little is enough to indicate that they are of the same breed as the rest; their questions reveal a precocious wisdom which is of a piece with the precocity of all Shakspere's children. As for the little princes, their forwardness is a portent. To quote the enthusiastic words of Brandes, "the oldest child already shows greatness of soul, a kingly spirit, with a deep feeling for the import of historic achievement. The younger brother is childishly witty, imaginative, full of boyish mockery