A goodly figure this to close the procession, which began with the twin Dromios and Launce, and which includes a host of worthies, who are as dear to us as all the heroes of old romance.

As they pass by, one by one, they serve not only to amuse us and arrest attention, to move alike smiles and tears, but they also serve to show that Shakespeare's laughter is as truly human as aught else in him; that tragedy becomes more tragic when the humour of every day life surrounds it; and that even these minor characters, as they have been called, reflect each varying phase of thought in the growth of their author's genius. The joyous and, at times, boisterous merriment of youth, the steadier mirth of manhood, the bitter irony of disappointment, and the wild laugh of despair, are all presented by the Fools.

[See, also, W. C. HAZLITT, on Source of the Plot, p. 323.]

GERMAN CRITICISMS

A. W. SCHLEGEL (Lectures, etc., 1811, trans. by J. Black, 1815, ii, 181): The Winter's Tale is as appropriately named as A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is one of those tales which are peculiarly calculated to beguile the dreary leisure of a long winter evening, which are attractive and intelligible even to childhood, and which, animated by fervent truth in the delineation of character and passion, invested with the decoration of a poetry lowering itself, as it were, to the simplicity of the subject, transport even manhood back to the golden age of imagination. The calculation of probabilities has nothing to do with such wonderful and fleeting adventures, ending at last in general joy; and accordingly Shakespeare has here taken the greatest liberties with anachronisms and geographical errors; he opens a free navigation between Sicily and Bohemia, makes Giulio Romano the contemporary of the Delphic Oracle, not to mention other incongruities. . . .

[Page 182.] The jealousy of Leontes is not, like that of Othello, developed with all its causes, symptoms, and gradations; it is brought forward at once, and is portrayed as a distempered frenzy. It is a passion with whose effects the spectator is more concerned than with its origin, and which does not produce the catastrophe, but merely ties the knot of the piece. In fact, the poet might perhaps have wished to indicate slightly that Hermione, though virtuous, was too active in her efforts to please Polixenes; and it appears as if this germ of an inclination first attained its proper maturity in their children. Nothing can be more fresh and youthful, nothing at once so ideally pastoral and princely as the love of Florizel and Perdita; of the Prince, whom love converts into a voluntary shepherd; and the Princess, who betrays her exalted origin without knowing it, and in whose hands the nosegays become crowns. Shakespeare has never hesitated to place ideal poetry close by the side of the most vulgar prose; and this is also generally the case in the world of reality. Perdita's foster-father and his son are both made simple boors, that we may the more distinctly see that whatever ennobles her belongs to herself. The merry pedlar and pickpocket Autolycus, so inimitably portrayed, is necessary to complete the rustic feast, which Perdita, on her part, seems to render fit for an assemblage of deities in disguise.

F. KREYSSIG (Vorlesungen, Berlin, 1862, vol. iii, p. 497): There is one charac

teristic of Shakespeare, which must not be overlooked, and this is: how small was the admiration which this Court-actor and poet of the theatre had for the manners or culture of a Court. If against Shakespeare's bitter and manifold attacks on plebeian, presumptuous ignorance, we should balance his representations of preposterous, aristocratic folly, it would not be hard to see that the be-feathered and musk-scented Cavaliers have not one atom of preference, in the poet's aversion, over sweaty caps and dirty hands. Everywhere and at all times Shakespeare pursues them; he treats them as game, small, big, or medium; he attacks them with the bird-bolts of his wit as well as with the inevitable arrows of his ruthless satire and the sharp sword of moral indignation. From the learned Pedant at the Court of Navarre, from Touchstone's courtier who was politic with his friend, smooth with his enemy, and had undone three tailors,-down to the flatterers of Richard the Third, and the downright malice of Cloten, no single symptom of the moral sickness in this sphere of life did Shakespeare spare. In this regard the Comedies, the Histories, and the Tragedies vied with each other. Love's Labour's Lost, As You Like It, King John, Henry VI., Richard III., Hamlet, and Lear, Cymbeline, and The Tempest all alike show how small the advantage, in the eyes of a poet who knows the heart, have the darlings of fortune over the stepchildren of society, and how, under all circumstances, like his mistress, Nature, he shows, incorruptibly and with truth, virtue her own feature, and scorn her own image. To all these delineations of a class, favoured by fortune and by power, this Winter's Tale presents an unmistakeable contrast. Not that dark heavy shadows are lacking in the Court-life here shown us. The murder plotted against Polixenes, a guest and friend from boyhood, and the trial of Hermione are not calculated to reveal the highest circle as a paradise of happiness and virtue; but we should take note that all these enormities spring from the moral disease of one single person, although he, to be sure, is the highest in rank. But of that band of flatterers and hypocrites, an unfailing group in all other night-scenes of the highest classes, of envenomed slanderers and fortune hunters, always on the alert to convert their rulers' bad thoughts into acts-of all these there is here no trace. No assassin can Leontes find for the man, against whom jealousy has goaded him to frenzy; not a single accuser of his disowned wife, nor a single false witness against her. Rather than purchase the favour of his lord at the price of his conscience, Camillo takes to flight; in the circle of courtiers not one will step forward as an accuser of the queen or as a witness against her. All counsel circumspection, calm deliberation, unintimidated by the frenzy of their king. The application to the Oracle is conducted throughout honestly and honourably; it never occurs to Cleomines and Dion to give to the interpreters of the God a hint of their lord's wishes. When Antigonus assents to the exposure of the infant he has, quite apart from the danger threatening his own life, no choice other than either to see the helpless creature murdered before his eyes by the king or else to deliver it to an unknown fate.

[Page 509.] Florizel's whole character represents the sovereign power of true, genuine love over the external forces of the world. Not for an instant do the thoughts of his birth, of his rank, of his duty to his father in the present and to his country in the future, make him waver in the choice which he has made for life. The remonstrances of his disguised father awaken in him not a single thought of repentance, or of misgiving. The only thing that occurs to him after the unwelcome disclosure is flight, and an independent completion of his plans. We can hardly avoid the thought that we are on the verge of a second tragedy, deeper than the discords of the first. It must not and it should not be denied that in the conflict now before

us, between the youthful impulses of the heart and the positive duties of life, the poet has spoken less earnestly than in Romeo & Juliet, or in Othello, and Cymbeline. Feelings and fancy outweigh the laws of the understanding, as is natural in a 'Tale.' Not the heart, but life must yield in the conflict between Must and May, and then to a gentle-hearted benign fate be the task committed of converting the follies of youth into happiness and blessing.

HEINRICH BULTHAUPT (Dramaturgie der Classiker, 1884, 2d ed. vol. ii, p. 378): The speed with which Leontes, one of the most disagreeable men on God's earth, talks himself into a jealous madness, is certainly in the worst sense 'more than hu'man.' Merely because his wife converses earnestly with his guest, his most trusted friend, after her request had induced that guest to remain longer in Sicilia, this horrible, bloodthirsty creature turns to a manifold murderer. Othello is nothing in comparison, he had a handkerchief to show, and the insinuations of Iago,-Leontes has not a word to say for himself. It goes on to the Third Act with steadily increasing madness, then comes the rebound. If up to this point Shakespeare reveals his boundless art in portraying elemental passion, then of a sudden he betrays the weakness peculiar to him in the dénouement. The mental conversion of Leontes, who has just called the Delphic Oracle a lie and a fraud, is accomplished in two lines! This is intolerable. A man who has been raving mad through three Acts cannot become sane in the twinkling of an eye; we do not believe it. [The long speech of Leontes following his conversion] is painfully and psychologically false. Hereupon sixteen years elapse, and then comes the enchanting Fourth Act with its charming vision of Perdita and that genuine Shakespearian character, Autolycus. Everywhere the unconfined play of sovereign genius. No sooner have we resigned ourselves unrestrainedly to it, when, alack! the Fifth Act yields another monstrosity. Leontes has repented. We must well believe it, although it may be permitted to doubt whether sixteen years must not either put penitence asleep or wear away the penitent. Enough, Leontes, deeply stricken, still bears in mind his wife so shamefully slandered by him and believed to be dead. And Hermione? The royal, exalted Hermione, who in the First Act, especially in the Trial-scene, is on a level with the grandest that Shakespeare has created, who walks in the ranks of innocent, afflicted, injured women, whose suffering souls no one but Shakespeare has laid so bare, this Hermione, still loving her husband, when she is again to appear before him, consents to this farce of a statue. Fully to realise the blemish of it all, the impossibility of the situation, just picture Desdemona on a pedestal. Can a loving wife after sixteen years of separation play such a comedy? If she still loves him with the old' strength must not her heart fly to meet him, yearning to break every fetter? . . . What trace is there here of a 'Tale'? is it not avoided almost on purpose? If some friendly god had watched over the poor ill-treated one for sixteen years in a death-like sleep, and then, when the cycle was complete, had awakened her to a fairer life,-who would not have willingly accepted it? Who does not look with a tender awe at the glass coffin wherein the lovely princess slumbers in the hut of the dwarfs, after she has tasted the poisoned apple of the wicked stepmother? To whom is the slumber, even longer, of The Sleeping Beauty, and of her whole castle, incredible? Freed from the fetters of the flesh we glide with true delight into the dazzling realm of wonder. But here, -is not every charm put to flight with the ever-recurring, dense, rationalistic preparation of the scene? Instead of using some means full of the miraculous, Shakespeare lets Paulina play Providence. Thus the scaffolding creaks in all its joints;

human passion and grandeur are inconceivably mingled with the affectation of a comedian. Our tragic sympathy, our moral indignation has been quickened,—but she, whom we commiserated, trifles away our sympathy with a living statue which she represents, and the man, for whom we wished the heaviest punishment, garners the fairest harvest of indulgent fate. A plot which should have been treated only as a tragedy, is, without intrinsic justification, conducted to a superficial end of reconciliation. Happily the poet appeases us with a hundred wondrous details. The Hermione of the earlier part is innocent grandeur itself; Paulina, harsh and ready in deed and word, is thoroughly original. And he who can contemplate the lovely scene of the little Mamillius, the genial boldness wherewith the droll Autolycus turns every situation to use, finally the whole Fourth Act with its charming love of Perdita and Florizel, he who can contemplate all this without delight is beyond human help. The sheep-shearing festival abounds in humour and life, and overflows with flowery beauties. It is one of the loveliest pearls from the clearest, stillest depths in the lyric soul of Shakespeare.

[All the first part of this Essay is devoted to proving that the Novel written by Greene (John Greene in the German) is a finer work as a story than The Winter's Tale. It would have been needless to translate it, inasmuch as it has been anticipated by Mrs Lennox.-ED.]

LOUIS LEWES (Shakespeare's Frauengestalten, Stuttgart, 1893, p. 326): For sixteen years Hermione permits her husband and the world to believe that she is dead, and, only when her daughter has been found, does she, in the celebrated Statue scene, return to life and to her penitent husband. This conduct has been pronounced heartless and unnatural. The reproach is unmerited. Hermione's husband with base suspicion has mistrusted her faithfulness, and thereby forfeited her respect. She has been publicly branded, her innocent daughter exposed to a horrible death, her promising son is dead, killed by her disgrace. For such injuries and pain a mere tardy acknowledgement of her innocence is no sufficing compensation; the instant repentance of her husband does not suffice again to restore him to a place in her heart. Can the high-souled wife, in royal array, again walk proudly at a Court which had witnessed her degradation, childless, widowed in heart by the unworthiness of that husband to whom she will be a constant reproach, an ever present humiliation? Therein is neither true feeling nor nature. Wounded in heart and soul, nothing remained to her but to retire from life, not to brood over her injuries, but to learn forgiveness, and through a penitence long sustained by her husband, to have him become worthy of her.

GEORG BRANDES ( William Shakespeare, 1896, p. 932): In the mode and manner in which the relationship between Florizel and Perdita is portrayed, there are certain peculiarities which are not to be found in the work of Shakespeare's youth, but which again appear in the description of Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, namely, a certain aloofness from the world, a certain tenderness for those who may still hope and yearn for happiness, a renunciation, as it were, by the author of all thought of happiness for himself. He is standing above and beyond the band who hope. When, in earlier days he portrayed love, the poet stood on the same level with the lovers; it is so now no longer; they are now regarded with a father's eye. He is looking down on them from above.

[If the foregoing be not gossamer fancy, as is not unlikely, it is a fresh illustration

in this, the latest work on Shakespeare of any magnitude from foreign hands, of the difficulty, almost the impossibility, of comprehending Shakespeare, except in broad, lines, which besets those whose native tongue is not that which Shakespeare spoke. -ED.]

FRENCH CRITICISMS

A. MÉZIÈRES (Shakespeare, ses Euvres, etc., Paris, 1865, p. 428): One of the most striking marks of this tendency of the poet [to soften tragic outlines] is the indulgence which he accords to the courtiers whom he had so often covered with ridicule in his comedies and with contempt in his tragedies. In The Winter's Tale he endows them with generous sentiments and with virtues. Not one of them does he represent as either approving of the suspicions of Leontes against his wife or as encouraging them, but on the contrary they testify a profound respect for the queen, and all endeavour to vindicate the crime whereof she is unjustly accused. Ah, rare example of courage in a court where the will of the master is law, and where the fear of offending him is greater than that of crushing the innocent! It is the very wife of a courtier, it is Paulina, who fills the most noble rôle in the play when she takes up the defence of Hermione, when she braves the anger of the king by presenting to him his new-born babe, and when she overwhelms him with reproaches after the supposed death of the queen. And withal she knows when to stop and not abuse her good qualities, for the poet will have nothing exaggerated, not even excellence. . . .

[Page 429.] The pastoral scene, introduced into The Winter's Tale as in Cymbeline, is not intended to set off the vices of the court. It is a simple picture of country manners which the poet adorns with natural colours, and which he everywhere embellishes with the poetic presence of Perdita. I cannot go so far as to say, with some critics, that herein is found a chef-d'œuvre of the Eclogue. On the contrary, what proves that Shakespeare does not take the peasants of his comedy seriously, is that he repeatedly mystifies them through the cunning of Autolycus, and that the two chief characters of the bucolic scenes, Florizel and Perdita, are, neither the one nor the other, peasants. The graceful and charming language of Perdita proves nothing in favour of the country, for she expresses herself thus naturally only because by her birth she belongs to the highest class of society. Her style no more resembles the genuine pastoral manner than she herself resembles a peasant. If her supposed father and brother are types traced from nature, as they seem to be, assuredly she neither speaks nor thinks en campagnarde, inasmuch as she has nothing in common with them. She introduces, therefore, a foreign element into the eclogue. Seeing that this is so, how can it be said that it is a model of its class? A genuine eclogue is not set forth with princes and princesses in disguise. Do not let us try to give to a simple play of the imagination, to a romantic tale divided into Acts, the serious character of a chef-d'œuvre. Let us gather the flowers which a great genius has sown along his wandering path, but do not by any means let us attempt to arrange them into a bouquet. In very sooth, Shakespeare has here no more written a pastoral than a comedy or a tragedy. He touches the three kinds, but does not settle in one. For my part, I admire all the beauties of detail which this play contains, but I see there only what really is,-a triple outline, where we acknowledge the hand of a master. I find there a rapid sketch of three pieces, whereof none is perfect.