SHAKSPERE. BY JAMES FINLAYSON, Author of "Self Culture," in the "Popular Lecturer" for 1857. AFTER a comparatively short life of 52 years, in the prime and vigour of manhood, in the full flush and blow of his marvellous powers, did William Shakspere, the greatest name in English literature, leave our earth. Yet few as were the years of his earthly existence, if measured by the activity of his intellect, and the multitude and magnitude of the thoughts which swarmed behind that busy brain, that life was exceeding loug. It is not the number of our days that make life long or short. We are so bound within the conditions of time and space, that few of us can clearly and accurately judge of the real duration of life. Whether we do or do not believe with the German philosophers that space and time are the mere forms of our sensibility, having no real existence apart from our present organisation, yet we can all easily conceive that a mind possessed but of one idea could not be said to have a long life though it existed during centuries, as it is only by the flow of thought that time can be measured at all. And in the case of a man who thinks little and feels less, although his years were as the years of Methuselah in real life, he is but an infant of days. Thought and emotion are the measures of existence. As is our intellectual and emotional experience, so is the duration of our life. Shakspere's clear and comprehensive mind was ever peopled with great and innumerable thoughts,-that magnificent imagination was ever soaring from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. The doubts, the hopes, the fears, the sorrows, the joys, that meet us all, were all felt, and deeply felt, by him; that meditative man experienced, and could not but experience, those deeper and more solemn emotions which shake the soul to its centre, springing up from the contemplation of that eternal state compared with which this huge material world, with all its glow, and glitter, and glamour, is but a vain and worthless show,at best the quarry out of which the rough blocks are drawn, and in which they are hewn, shaped, and polished, that they may become fit stones for the temple above. I do hope and fondly believe Shakspere underwent that grand crisis and change of the human spirit without which all other changes in this changing world are utterly without significance. And if it be true, as I for one believe, that imaginative minds experience in the religious life the deepest sufferings and the highest joys, as David in Israel, and Bunyan in England, do testify, then would the soul of Shakspere quiver in the vibrations of every note in the wide gamut of feeling,— now sinking into the very hell of suffering, now rising to the very heaven of joy. Be that as it may, Shakspere did live much and long in the high realms of thought and emotion. In that half century were compressed the life experience of all classes of men, the experience of the fool and the philosopher, the peasant and the king, the Christian and the Jew, the innocent child, the loving woman, were his, not by a freak of imagination like the poor lunatic who fancies he has the semblance of a king, but experiencing that inner life, passing through the different states of mind pertaining to every age, every station, every form and degree of mental and moral development, feeling what men do feel, and expressing what men express in every possible state and sphere, whether he may appear dressed in a little brief authority, flaunting in all the pride of place and power, attended with the pomp of -- gorgeous ceremony, or whether he appears as a humble and a homely man, having little power and less authority, accompanied only by the flitting, ethereal retinue of thought, -no matter, every state and condition are portrayed by Shakspere with equal fidelity and marvellous power. After all, the real life of all men is radically the same (and that explains, to a certain extent, Shakspere's secret); there may be, and are, great differences in outward condition, -one man may be master over the civil and political destinies of millions, another may be so insignificant as to be altogether unnoticed and unknown,-yet they possess, in common, the grand essential characteristics of humanity,-body, and mind, and heart, and soul. The light of genius, like the light of Scripture, pierces and tears off the external wrappings, be they rags or robes, passes by the particular outward sphere of action, reaches the inner sphere of the soul's activity, detects there the same ruling and regulating principles, opens up the same gushing fountains of feeling, and hears the same presiding conscience proclaiming, from its strong high towers, the supreme authority of truth and righteousness. Shakspere's active and comprehensive soul, with its wondrous power of insight, knew how man would conduct himself in every mental state and outward condition, and thus passed through a rich and varied experience. Ah, we could live much in fifty years if our minds were ever active and astir, and we husbanded well our days. "That man," says Lord Bacon, "may be old in hours though young in years, if he hath lost no time; but that happeneth rarely." We spend so much time in eating, and sleeping, and idle amusements, so little in the cultivation of the heart and soul. With the great majority, day follows day in a changeless round: this and that day twenty years ago present physical changes, but little increase in mental power, or consolidation of moral principle. To very many the words of Shakspere are painfully applicable,"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace, from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time;" "Their life's but a walking shadow, - a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more,-'tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." And even in the case of the most cultivated men, if the dross which makes a great portion of their existence was eliminated, the real ore of life would appear shrunk into very narrow dimensions. It is the fine power and prerogative of Genius that he can seize hold of the salient points in a nation's history, can condense the stirring incidents of flood and field, and court and camp, into a few brief scenes,— that he can compress the experience of years into hours, and with the thoughts of an hour can fill the wide area of years; that he can take hold of the material world, and, in his plastic hand, that drop of water expands into a world peopled with thousands of inhabitants, revelling in all the enjoyments of animal life, if not distracted with municipal and political affairs, or puzzled with philosophical speculations; and then, by one magical touch, that huge firm-set earth, and all which it contains, is reduced to a drop upon the brow of heaven. Strange and startling is the power of genius, yet not more strange or startling than the revelations of science, and the records of human experience. Instances have occurred in the history of mind when individuals in one short hour have passed through a long age of agony,when the lapse of the moments have been as the march of the hours, when the rapid, raging rush of feelings through the heart hath quickened the pulsations of life, done the work of years upon the physical organisation, and subdued the wild passions of the soul. And, on the other hand, have not many unbroken years of happiness appeared short as a fleeting hour; yea, when even the long vista of three-score years and ten is as a few short steps, and all the changing and innumerable states and conditions of body and mind through which the man must have gone, but as the flitting phantas magoria of a dream of the night, or a tale that is speedily told? Science also teaches that in the world of matter the great is but the expansion of the little, the little but the compression of the great. Walter Savage Landor, one of our greatest literary men,- one of a class apt to disparage material things, exclaims, "The sublime is in a grain of dust." Sir Isaac Newton, our greatest natural philosopher, one of a class prone to magnify matter, gave as his opinion that the whole material universe could be compressed into a cubic inch. Thus the little and the great are but relative terms; yea, made as we are in the image of God, it is true of us that in the high heavens of pure thought there is neither time nor space; from those sublime altitudes the little and the great in the material world are identical,- -one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. It is a very trite and true remark, that the experience of the meanest man would be most interesting and instructive if faithfully and graphically told. How much more a record of the life-experience of William Shakspere, of the steps in that strange and chequered passage from deer-stealing to that proud station at the top of English literature. The autobiography of William Shakspere, written by himself, (to use an Irishism) would be a book that would sell even in these days of rapid reading and countless graphies, but unfortunately the idea never seemed to have entered his fertile brain, and we are left to draw it from other sources. While Shakspere did not leave us any record of his early life,those struggles, social and spiritual, through which he must have passed, and while we can catch but a glimpse here and there in contemporary history of his life and manners, yet I think it hardly possible for a writer like Shakspere not to project those sentiments and feelings with which his own soul was full and flashing, into the characters he so powerfully portrays. A natural philosopher may write on his particular subject, and we might not know anything of his mind or |