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The hand is moving from the sword,
The heart is moving towards the Lord.
Move on! keep moving!

Progress is the law of loving."

It will perhaps be admitted that, in dealing with the opinions of these men-Socialists, Communists, organizers of labour, or by whatever title the devisers of artificial systems desire to be known-we have let them speak for themselves. If the picture be a ludicrous one, the blame or merit is theirs, not ours; but it has solemn enough associations to arrest an earnest attention. While Owen babbles of harmony, unity, and rationality, the streets of Paris run blood. The moral to be derived from the whole motley picture of ridiculous lights and tragic shades, is to teach men modesty, caution, and selfabasement. It displays the folly and the wickedness of those who believe that the qualities with which man has been endowed are insufficient, while their own individual intellects are allsufficient to direct the world, from its highest aspirations to its minutest actions of those who, in the despotic pride of selfconceit, think they can abrogate the moral laws of the universe, and substitute for them the mechanism of their own infallible ingenuity. In all their follies and failures they have taught us more than ever to see that it is in the individual consciences, responsibilities, and faculties of men, such as God has made them, and not in the absolute predominance of individual, regulating minds, commanding the embodied multitudes, that good is to be done, and onward progress is to be made. We see that the combination and artificial organization of mankind are powerful for the accomplishment of the bad ends of the ambitious, but incompetent for good. Organization can wield the sword, but it cannot wield the spade. It failed to combine the fifteen hundred tailors in the Hôtel Clichy, but it has combined an army of half a million, the braggarts of all the world, by whom men are daily expecting some bloody work to be begun. The Communism that is truly practicable-the communism of the bayonet-is the most alarming fact of the day. While dynasties and nationalities are losing their influence over men's minds, there is another power which the selfish and ambitious are finding better suited to their purposes-the power of standing armies. In this monster, which is frightening all good and peaceful men, may our unscrupulous theorists see, like Frankeinstein, the realization of their rash audacity.

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ART. V.-1. Notes and Lectures upon Shakespere and some of the Old Poets and Dramatists, with other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge. Edited by Mrs. H. N. COLERIDGE. 2 vols. 12mo. London, 1849.

2. An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakespere. By W.J. BIRCH. London, 1848. 12mo.

THE drama of Shakespere was an invention of his own, and to this day he stands as the great and only master in it. His plays are all the existing examples of an art which is quite as distinct from any other poetical development as Gothic or Greek architecture is from any other style of building. The unique character, and apparently inexhaustible significance of Shakespere's art, gives it a perennial and increasing interest to the critic: the longer he gazes, the vaster seems the expanse which he desires to measure; the more deeply he sounds, the farther does he appear to be from ascertaining the ultimate depths of that spirit whose plenary artistic inspiration makes it almost an irreverence to name the name of Shakespere in the same sentence with that of another poet or artist whatever. Below the surface of an ocean of beauty and wisdom, the abysses of which are dark from their depth, and not from any opacity in the waters, we have essayed to dive, and are now to produce such of our results as have sometimes seemed to us to merit preservation among the treasures which have been redeemed from the same source by the labours of critics, English and German, during the past half-century.

Until very recently the popular feeling about Shakespere has been far in advance of Shakesperian criticism; and even now, when literature boasts of the labours of Ulrici, written criticism still fails to render adequate reasons of the faith we all have in that name, which would be sufficient of itself to render us the most famous nation upon earth. Happy shall we be, when the understanding has circumscribed the colossal mind of Shakespere not until then will that mind have done its work: not until then dare we hope that another mind shall rise with power to make a great and wholly new effort in poetry. As it is, we feel of Shakespere that he is greater than we know, and that we must long follow him, as sheep the shepherd, ere we can look to enter on "fresh fields and pastures new."

Ulrici is the only Shakesperian critic who, in our opinion, has attained and steadily observed the height of his great argument. The lucubrations of Augustus Schlegel are comparatively weak and desultory. Goethe has seen far into the spirit of a

single play; Coleridge has contented himself with "uttering rather seeds than plants;" Ulrici alone has approached the subject with due reverence and resolution; we might even say with good common sense. Most others have claimed admiration for Shakespere on account of qualities which he has in common with other poets. The force, propriety, and music of Milton's language have not been surpassed by Shakespere; single characters have been depicted by certain English novelists, ancient and modern, in a manner that would have done him honour; Dante and Chaucer have excelled him in the vividness with which an image is conveyed by words to the eye, or a feeling to the heart. Ulrici alone has sought and found, in the construction of the entire drama of Shakespere, a peculiar secret of his art, and something like a justification of the high sentence of fame concerning it.

Ulrici's most remarkable discovery is, that each of Shakespere's plays has, for its foundation, some moral idea or theme, which is reflected and echoed over and over again, with endless variety and profit, in all the characters, expressions, and events of the piece. The subtle German critic would have produced more converts to his doctrine had he illustrated it fully by the analysis of some one play, instead of having merely suggested its prevalence, by means of a slight sketch in each. Before bringing forward other and quite unexamined questions, we beg to illustrate Ulrici's principal view by a rapid commentary on the "Merchant of Venice," that play being chosen by us on account of the unusual simplicity of its construction.*

When we say that the theme of the "Merchant of Venice" is the relation of the letter to the spirit of law, and the various liabilities of man to dwell on the first and to neglect the last, we make but a very crude and general statement. The play itself is the only full and true definition of the theme. There is always a certain amount of falsehood in the ordinary expression of any moral idea; such an idea is, in fact, incapable of direct statement. In this it is that the Shakesperian drama finds its meaning and justification the moral idea, which must always remain a riddle to words, is soluble in action. The exhibition of this solution has the highest interest and value for us all.

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* As a reply to the wide scepticism with which Ulrici's views have been received in England, it is well to state that those which relate to the central theme, or ground-idea, as Ulrici calls it, of each play, were rediscovered by the writer of this article, who was engaged in writing a work upon the subject when the translation of Ulrici's work came out and first fell into his hands. As far as the writer had proceeded with the analysis of the plays the coincidence of his results with those of Ulrici was so complete as to afford the most unanswerable proof of their validity, to those who require proof of that which ought to be self-evident,

The Merchant of Venice.

117

In the first passage of the first scene of the Merchant of Venice we have an instance of the letter or appearance, without any corresponding spirit or substance. Antonio's sadness is intentionally inexplicable. In the different judgments of Antonio's friends concerning the probable sources of this sadness we have a general statement to begin with, of the fallibility of all appearances or expressions. When Antonio denies that he is either anxious about his ships, or in love, Salarino says—

"Not in love neither? Then let us say, you are sad
Because you are not merry: and 'twere as easy
For you to laugh, and leap, and say you are merry
Because you are not sad. Now, by two-headed Janus,
Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time;
Some that will evermore peep through their eyes,
And laugh, like parrots, at a bagpiper:
And other of such vinegar aspect,

That they'll not show their teeth in way of smile,
Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable."

Bassanio, Lorenzo, and Gratiano come in and make further remarks of precisely similar purport. The two last, indeed, leave the stage again, immediately after Gratiano has commented upon Antonio's sadness. Bassanio then observes that "Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice," &c., after which he begins the business of the plot by speaking of his debts; but up to this point the whole aim of the poet, in about 130 lines, is to impress upon us the fact of the general fallibility of appearances, by taking the extreme case of appearances that have no corresponding substance, as the sadness of Antonio, the talk of Gratiano, and the characters which he and Salarino allude to in their comment upon Antonio's melancholy. In this play Shakespere has observed his usual practice of exhibiting the theme, first in its most ordinary and least important forms, and of allowing the true interest to depend upon the gradually increased significance of its application and occurrence in the more rare and momentous events of life. Here we may also remark that the fact of the ultimate identity of all moral goods or evils is the cause of the resemblance which obtains between a large class of Shakespere's characters, namely, those which stand, as it were, upon the outskirts of the plot, reflecting faintly, and in the most general way, those qualities which become distinguishable into separate vices or virtues as they come within and help to produce the vortex of the interest. Extreme folly seems to have constituted the ultimate view which was taken by Shakespere of all moral evils, and it is into this form that all the evils, which separately constitute the themes of the different plays, resolve themselves in the lower and less important characters.

In the remaining portion of the first scene, Antonio is exhibited making the true use of riches in the assistance of his friend, as a preparatory contrast to Shylock, in whose coffers hoarded wealth loses its meaning. In the next scene, between Portia and Nerissa, the nature of wealth, as an often erroneous expression of happiness, is commented upon, and in other parts of the play, riches, with their use and perversion, afford similar aid in the development of the central idea. In this second scene, the theme is brought out in various other ways. Nerissa moralizes on the ethics of wealth, and Portia says, "good sentences and well pronounced!" Nerissa adds, "they would be better, if well followed;" and Portia introduces a long commentary upon the infrequency of a correspondence between men's acts and their professions and injunctions to others. We are now made acquainted with the device of the caskets; and, whereas hitherto the frequent falsehood of the letter or expression has been insisted upon, we are now shown a remarkable instance of the value of the letter, even when the spirit of the law is not perceived. Portia complains that the will of a living daughter should be curbed by the will of a dead father; but she obeys his law, for, as Nerissa says, "that father was ever virtuous; and holy men at their death have good inspirations; therefore the lottery that he hath devised in these three chests, of gold, silver, and lead, will, no doubt, never be chosen by any rightly, but one whom she shall rightly love." Portia does not as yet see the wisdom of the law, but she trusts to that of the lawgiver, and is not mistaken. Portia's description of her suitors, in this scene, reflects the theme in ways too numerous and subtle to be described here: we can only remind our readers of the County Palatine, who "hears merry tales, and laughs not;" of Monsieur le Bon, of whom Portia says, "God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man;" and of "Faulconbridge, the young baron of England," who "is a proper man's picture; but, alas! who can converse with a dumb show." If the reader will be at the pains to accompany the perusal of this Paper by occasional references to the play, he will be at no loss to detect many more hints and reflections of the theme than we have space to notice. The second scene closes with Portia's remark, upon receiving the news of the Prince of Morocco's arrival, "if he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me," &c.

In Scene III., the developments of the central idea are of the most decided character. We are introduced to Shylock, whose whole being is a dead letter; whose every habit and association is the result of the observance of, and attachment to, spiritless form. Of wealth, of justice, of the laws of relationship, of the

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