out of women's faces as Berowne learnt from women's eyes; he can generalise from the experience of his few seasons, and declare that a sad tale is best for winter; and amid the impertinences of his little lecture to the waiting-ladies he contrives to show off a good deal of mature observation. It may be that Hermione is foreboding a coming trouble, or it may be that she is fretted by the departure of Polixenes; but in any case it is notable that she finds the boy so troublesome that "'tis past enduring." Even the tale, which to Swinburne's sorrow was never finished, of the man who dwelt by a churchyard, is introduced by a cynical and adult-like gibe at "yond crickets" the women. Still less like a boy is the manner of his death, which indeed is the most precocious disease in literature. He had a right to die; but no child, of anything like the age apparently assigned to Mamillius, ought to die for such a reason. There is, in fact, but one boy in all Shakspere who even appears to promise some genuine variation from this perverse type. Young Coriolanus, in the line and a half allotted to him,

A shall not tread on me;

I'll run away till I'm bigger, but then I'll fight, utters the solitary truly boy-like sentiment in the whole of Shakspere's plays. Alas! like Marcellus, he is but shown and then withdrawn; he is only once put in person before us, and he seems to be rather an allegorical shadow of his father than an independent living being. We pass over here the boy in Henry V and the fool in King Lear, both of whom, though seemingly very

young, are beyond the age of childhood. Even in them, however, there are traces, visible to those who care to look, that their infancy, so recently left behind, was of a thoroughly Shaksperean character. We could wish that Shakspere had not made it seem as if this character was typical and representative of the genus boy: and we may be sure that he would have given us many very different child-types if he had felt something of that interest in children which Dickens, for example, possessed. But to expect this from an Elizabethan is to expect the impossible; even Shakspere could not rise altogether above his age.

It is, in fact, only the astonishing breadth of Shakspere's treatment of older people that makes us notice the narrowness that marks his treatment of children. No one remarks on the same narrowness in Milton or in Ben Jonson. But Shakspere is so great that we ask more from him than in the nature of things he could give. And yet nothing but harm can be done by failing to state the exact truth. As child-psychology is a modern science, so Shakspere's knowledge of children contrasts very unfavourably with that of relatively far inferior writers of the last fifty years. His children are colourless beside Charlotte Bronte's, or Stevenson's, or even George MacDonald's, and are drawn with vastly less penetration. Nor again, to test him on the poetical side as distinct from the dramatic, does he show the slightest vestige of the Wordsworthian view of the child as a prophet or blest seer. All this, of course, proves no inferiority in him to Wordsworth-still less, of course,

his inferiority to the crowd of other writers. But it does show the immense advance our age has made as compared with the Elizabethan in at least this one respectsympathy with children and an eagerness to understand them. When the greatest of the Elizabethans can give us no better studies of children than those we have just considered, then we can congratulate ourselves that the progress of knowledge and of feeling has drawn children into its net, and made us resolve to understand and to realise them. The old idea of forcing them into our mould is, we trust, dead for ever. We recognise, as Spinoza did with reference to mankind in general, that our duty to them is neque lugere, neque ridere, sed intelligere; and, further, to look on them sub specie aeternitatis.

T

VI

Shakspere and Marriage

o judge a dramatist or a novelist by the opinions expressed by his puppets is a mistake in any case.

Few would imagine, for instance, that Thackeray would have defended all that is said by Barnes Newcome, or that Dickens would have endorsed all the views of Quilp: nor must we draw conclusions as to the ideas of the author of Job from those of Elihu the son of Barachel. Still greater would be such a blunder in the case of Shakspere. Others, when the question is put to them with a certain amount of vigour, "abide" it: but he, who is all men at one time or another, remains "free." What Shakspere did, we know; what he was, in spite of all the psychological analysis of writers like Brandes, remains as obscure as ever.

Yet we must not press this sound principle too far. There is much that we can tell about the intellectual and moral character of Shakspere, and this without identifying him with Prospero or with Jaques. To judge him by the words of his creations would lead us astray; but the general conduct of his plots, the atmosphere of his plays, is an infallible guide to his opinions within a certain range. For instance, we can gather from Henry IV, in conjunction with the sister-dramas, that Shakspere was a firm believer in Nemesis, and saw that crime, however apparently successful, is punished at the

last. From King John or from Richard II we see Shakspere's strong faith in the destiny of England as clearly as if he had, after the fashion of Aristophanes, silenced Faulconbridge or Gaunt for a moment in order to declare his own views in a parabasis. We shall run no great risk if we assert, on the sole evidence of the plays, that Shakspere, whether he despised mobs or not, believed in a monarchy; that he was firmly, if not violently, opposed to the Puritans; that, in literary matters, he belonged to the romantic rather than to the classical school; and that he had a strong bias towards supernaturalism and fatalism.

More difficult perhaps to arrive at, but more infallibly certain when gained, is a conception of Shakspere's character and circumstances from his works. Even apart from the revelations of the Sonnets it would, we fancy, be possible to gather that he was a man of very strong passions, which he was at times utterly unable to control. It is clear, from the plays alone, that for several years he was the victim of a terrible depression, leading to the gloomiest views of life; so much so, in fact, that when he set out to write a comedy he produced in Measure for Measure perhaps the most sombre of all his works. It is equally clear that he to some extent escaped from this imprisonment-yet so as by fire.

But there is one subject on which unquestionably, as can be shown from the plays, he held certain opinions: opinions which inevitably reacted upon the very construction of his dramas, and which, in our view, not only betoken a serious defect in his personal character,