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CHAPTER I.

THE SHAKESPEARIAN LOVE-PHILOSOPHY.

N default of direct information, the student of Shakespeare's philosophy will naturally first turn to his lyrical poems. The epic poet relates facts as he finds them in story; the lyric poet reveals his own feelings, and the motives of his own thinking and acting; the dramatic poet is both epic and lyric-tells the story like the one, and, like the other exhibits his dramatic persons acting and speaking in obedience to the inner springs of their natures. Hence the lyric poet is most purely, personal, because he is consciously and intentionally exhibiting himself. But the dramatic poet is personal too, because the thoughts and feelings which he puts into the mouths of his characters are all ultimately drawn from his own consciousness. Not that these characters can be taken as representations of what their creator is. Their production reveals, not what he is, but what he feels he might be, or should be, if he were not himself. If Shakespeare had been Othello, or Iago, or Hamlet, or Falstaff, or Henry V., or Hotspur, he might have acted and thought as they do in his dramas. But then he was himself, and not another. "I am that I am," as he says

B

in one of his sonnets. Hence the knowledge of what he might have thought and done if he had been other than himself affords no obvious clue to the knowledge of what he, the actual Shakespeare, really thought and did in his own person. We will therefore dismiss his dramas, and examine his lyrical poems.

Among these the sonnets alone are purely personal. The Venus and Adonis and the Lucrece are dramatic stories, bringing out moods of feeling and thought with lyrical delicacy, but still moods which are completely external to the author. In these poems the poet goes out of himself; Aso he does in the Lover's Complaint. But in the sonnets it is the poet who speaks; it is himself whom he describes. And though some of the facts presupposed in certain sonnets may have been purely imaginary, still there also it is the man Shakespeare who professes to tell us his feelings and ideas in regard to relations which, though imaginary, are so natural, that personal character is almost as easily manifested by his determinations how to act on the supposition of their reality, as it could be by his action in real circumstances. For in these sonnets Shakespeare is not telling us what he should be if he were Iago or Othello, and not Shakespeare; but what he should be if, remaining what he was, he were placed in certain imaginary relations with others.

If this were all, we might approach Shakespeare's sonnets with some chance of finding there the feelings, dispositions, and judgments of the poet himself. But when we examine them we, first of all, find them so monotonous, so limited in their range of subject, that there seems little to be gained from them of insight into the myriad-minded man. And then comes in the thought that the sonnets are not strictly original, but mere echoes-that all the great poets who expressed themselves in this kind of verse used it as a recognized medium of a special kind of philosophy. This was so notorious that students of this philosophy had made sonnets the usual texts and subjects of dialectical discussion. In the nineteenth century it would be thought superannuated trifling to wrap up in, or to extract out of, what seems a mere love song anything deeper than its superficial sense. We may read Dante's or Petrarch's poetry as we listen to Handel's or