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"Yet must I not give Nature all; thy Art,
My gentle SHAKSPEARE, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion."—Ben Jonson.
Whoever would learn to think naturally, clearly, logically, and toexpress himself intelligibly and earnestly, let him give his days andnights to WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE. His ear will thus accustom itself to formsof phrase whose only mannerism is occasioned by the fulness of thoughtand the directness of expression; and he will not easily, through thehabits which either his understanding or his ear will acquire, fall intothe fluent cadences of that sort of writing in which words are usedwithout discrimination of their nice meanings,—where the sentences areonly a smoothly-undulating current of common phrases, in which it takesa page to say weakly what should be said forcibly in a few periods.
These are somewhat novel arguments for the study of one whom all theworld has so long reverenced as "the great poet of Nature." But they mayproperly serve to introduce a consideration of the sense in whichthat phrase should be understood,—an attempt, in short, to lookinto Shakspeare's modes of creation, and define his relations, as anartist, with Nature.
We shall perhaps be excused the suggestion, that a poet cannot benatural in the same sense that a fool may be; he cannot be anatural,—since, if he is, he is not a poet. For to be a poet impliesthe ability to use ideas and forms of speech artistically, as well as tohave an eye in a fine frenzy rolling. This is a distinction which allwho write on poets or poetry should forever seek to keep clear by newillustrations. The poet has poetic powers that are born with him; but hemust also have a power over language, skill in arrangement, a thousand,yes, a myriad, of powers which he was born with only the ability toacquire, and to use after their acquirement. In ranking Shakspeare thegreat poet of Nature, it is meant that he had the purpose and the powerto think what was natural, and to select and follow it,—that, among histhick-coming fancies, he could perceive what was too fine, what tingedwith personal vanity, what incongruous, unsuitable, feeble, strained, inshort, unnatural, and reject it. His vision was so strong that he sawhis characters and identified himself with them, yet preserving his cooljudgment above them, and subjecting all he felt through them to itstest, and developing it through this artificial process of writing. Thisvision and high state of being he could assume and keep up and work outthrough days and weeks, foreseeing the end from the beginning, retaininghimself, and determining long before how many acts his work should be,what should be its plot, what the order of its scenes, what personageshe would introduce, and where the main passions of the work should bedeveloped. His fancy, which enabled him to see the stage and all itscharacters,—almost to be them,—was so under the control of hisimagination, that it did not, through any interruptions while he was athis labor, beguile him with caprices. The gradation or action of hiswork, opens and grows under his creative hand; twenty or more charactersappear, (in some plays nearly forty, as in "Antony and Cleopatra" andthe "First Part of Henry the Sixth,") who are all distinguished, whoare all more o