Tennyson would not go to visit him: and of course I did not: nor even saw him. You have, I suppose, the Carlyle Reminiscences: of which I will say nothing except that much as we outsiders gain by them, I think that, on the whole, they had better have been kept unpublished, for some while at least. SHAKESPEARE: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT James Smetham to 2nd October, 1871. Shakespeare stands the wonder of all time. Now why? He had small Latin and less Greek. Ben Jonson had large Latin and much Greek; but who really cares for Ben Jonson except literary fogies who pity your ignorance if you say so? It is just this: Shakespeare was all alive, a nimble spirit like the lightning, who could put "a girdle round the earth in forty minutes," and not feel that he had done anything particular, but at the age of 46 to go to Stratford and buy a piece of property, and loll over the gates, talking to farmers and graziers, and Bill the butcher's boy, and the Squire at the Hall: at home with the Universe. His sort of carelessness in his plays reveals the man. When his blood is up he makes heaven and earth bend and deliver up what he wants on the instant, and goes crashing through the forest of words like a thunderbolt, crushing them out of shape if they don't fit in, melting moods and tenses, and leaving people to gape at the transformation. If the grammarians object, he goes on like the hero of Jabberwocky, O frubjus day! Calloo, Callay! He chortles in his joy! He's not going to stop and put their heads on straightThey should have kept out of his way. The truth is he did not conceive things in words at all. He was a Seer. He first saw the thing or the character, s if he had got out of himself into it, and then with the noble mould of Marcius" he just drove the words toether with a voice of thunder. "The poet's eye in a fine phrensy rolling Did glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." Do you think he was a talker; talking people down with his mall Latin? He talked, yes; but so as to make everyody "unbolt to him," and he had them ere they were ware by the gift of sympathy. He had what is reported f Mirabeau, le don terrible de la familiarité, and caught hem without guile. Sure am I of this, that Shakespeare vas like putty to everybody, and everything, the willing lave, pulled out, patted down, squeezed anyhow, clay to very potter. But he knew by the plastic hand what the nature of the moulder was. Your weak-strong man butts nd asserts himself, and gets to know nothing and nobody. |