Direct testimony beyond this there is none. The internal evidence, however, of style counts for a good deal, and this suggests that the composition of the Sonnets extended over a considerable period of time. No one can fail to see how closely akin the early Sonnets i.-xxv. (say) are to the early plays and the poems; various coincidences between them and Romeo and Juliet and Venus and Adonis are pointed out in the notes. On the other hand, Sonnet lxvi. sounds like an echo of Hamlet's soliloquies. The inference is clear: the Sonnets date from no one year: they represent the changing moods of the poet during a long period. Professor Dowden would place none later than 1605; and perhaps the earliest of them may be assigned to 1593 or 1594. This question of date leads to another important point-the arrangement of the Sonnets. The order in which they stand in the Quarto will not satisfy some critics; accordingly they have been shifted about and arranged in all sorts of ways.

Like the guests at Mrs. Prowdy's ball, they are summarily told to "group" themselves, and strange and wonderful are the results. As a matter of fact their present order is by no means haphazard. Supposing, as we have done, that they were written at different times, we should expect a certain amount of interdependence and connection; and this is precisely what we find. Time after time some word or idea that occurs in one sonnet is repeated or developed in the next. Any one can verify this for himself, and more than this partial sequence and similarity our theory as to their composition forbids us to expect. I cannot myself imagine any order preferable to that of the Quarto: I know no sound objection to it; and in any case, to rearrange the poems is a work of the merest futility and supererogation, for the very simple reason that no one has ever endorsed anybody else's ideas on the subject.

One more subsidiary point and we shall have touched-in cursory and inadequate fashion, alas!-on most of the questions which these Sonnets raise. The types of sonnet, no one will need to be told, are manifold-the Petrarchan sonnet, the sonnet of Milton, and other varieties which refuse to be classified. From

all these the Shakespearean sonnet stands apart, with a structure and an excellence all its own: formed on a certain model it aims at and achieves a certain object. What this is Mr. Theodore Watts has well brought out, and Mr. Watts is so accomplished and recognized an authority on the subject that I do not hesitate to quote his own words.1 After pointing out that Shakespeare's Sonnet is built up of three quatrains and a final couplet, and after showing that the number three was not chosen arbitrarily, as some critics have thought, Mr. Watts proceeds: "The quest of the Shakespearean sonnet is not, like that of the sonnet of octave and sestet, sonority, and so to speak, metrical counterpoint, but sweetness; and the sweetest of all possible arrangements in English versification is a succession of decasyllabic quatrains in alternate rhymes knit together and clinched by a couplet-a couplet coming not so far from the initial verse as to lose its binding power, and yet not so near the initial verse that the ring of epigram disturbs the 'linked sweetness long drawn out' of this movement, but sufficiently near to shed its influence over the poem back to the initial verse. A chief part of the pleasure of the Shakespearean sonnet is the expectance of the climacteric rest of the couplet at the end and this expectance is gratified too early if it comes after two quatrains, while, if it comes after a greater number of quatrains than three, it is dispersed and wasted altogether." This puts the case perfectly and leaves nothing for me to add.

CRITICAL REMARKS.

.

.

A writer who has endeavoured to trace the tortuous history of Shakespeare's Sonnets may well feel that after their story has been told the rest should be silence. Those who care for "mellifluous" Shakespeare and his "deepbrained sonnets"-the few whom Jove in his goodness has loved- are apt to resent critical interference and suggestion; while Steevens was probably not far from the truth in saying that nothing short of a stringent act of Parlia

1 From the article on the Sonnet in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

ment would induce ordinary folk to open the Sonnets. Some general statement of the chief grounds of eulogy is, however, called for; and they may perhaps be best discussed on the lines of the answer to the larger inquiry:

What primarily do we look for in a poem, more especially in a poem of great scope? I suppose there are two things of essential value: perfect harmony of expression and interest of subject. The poem should bear criticism from the standpoint of the artist and of the moralist: it should be flawless in manner and of vital significance in matter. What is said the way it is said: these are the two cardinal points, and of these twin essentials the latter, to my mind, is the greater. And if we ask what should regulate the expression of a poem, the answer is simple above all things we require of the singer a true and perfect sense of melody. Coleridge loosely defined the indefinable when he described poetry as the "right words in the right place." The right words are those which make for music, for the long-drawn harmonies and rhythmic roll of sounds that linger on the ear and haunt our memory. There are poets, like Browning, who can thrill us with strange dramatic touches; who can depict single moments of sovereign and supreme passion; who can throw upon their canvas with a few master sweeps of the brush curious complexities of character that last there and live as inexorable riddles for all time to read and read amiss; who touch life at all points, and never touch it without revealing to ordinary humanity the infinite pity and mystery of the world. These poets interest us; they cast a spell of fascination upon our thought so long as we are actually reading; they appeal to us with the appeal of the dramatist. They give us much; but we feel that there is a something beyond and above what they offer--that there is "one grace, one wonder at the least," for which we may turn to the singer-and that something is music; the music that sounds in every line that the Laureate has written, that sweeps through the involved harmonies of a Paradise Lost, that informs all true poetry, all really vital verse. Now, from either standpoint

It is

from that of the artist, from that of the critic of life-whether we look to their manner or their matter the Sonnets of Shakespeare are great with greatness unmistakable. not that we come across an exquisite piece of verbal beauty from time to time; every poem reaches a standard unattainable save by the true singer; from first to last it is the Adventurous song

That with no middle flight intends to soar.

The power of the language is taxed to its utmost; it can do no more; its merit as a means of poetic expression, as an instrument for the expression of a thousand varying shades of emotion, must stand or fall by such passages as these

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call; All mine was thine before thou hadst this more. -Son. xl.;

and Sonnet cxvi.:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be
taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;

and lxxi.:

Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe;
and cii.:

Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burdens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight;

and evii.:

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control;

and lxxxvi.

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain rehearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?

In lines such as these we have the last word in felicity of expression: a noble instrument sends forth its noblest notes in the master's hands, and if we ask for more piercing, more perfect melody of words, we must look to some other tongue; English can give us nothing greater than this. And such passages are not the exception: we have picked them almost at random. Open the Sonnets where we will, we find the same unerring sense of what makes for the music that, heard once, never dies from our recollection.

More I could tell, but more I dare not say;
The text is old;

and we have said enough if we assert that there is no poem in the whole range of English literature which maintains a loftier, more unfaltering flight than "these insuing sonnets."

We have noted the pervading element of beauty in the Sonnets viewed as one long continuous work; and we shall find a parallel excellence in them if we disintegrate this congeries of units and examine the poems individually. Each conforms, in a very remarkable degree, to what we may call the main canon of sonnet-writing, the principle which should guide all who attempt this form of art. The sonnet, in Wordsworth's phrase, is a "scanty plot:" the poet cannot expatiate at will. He is cabined, confined within the brief limits of fourteen lines, and in that tiny space must achieve his effect. Hence he cannot afford to introduce variety of themes: he must deal with some one idea; his work must be wrought round a single motive, a single dominating emotion, that informs the whole and links the verses in the closest sequence and logical connection. Now the Shakespearean sonnet is built pre-eminently on this principle. It is exactly what Rossetti calls "a moment's monument." One instanceSonnet cxxix.-will serve our purpose. The poet deals here with the subject which he had handled at length in Lucrece-the deadliness

and worthlessness of sensual pleasure: how that the wages of sin is death in the end and scarcely satisfaction for the moment; at best, "a dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy." And starting with this thesis he develops it from line to line with irresistible insistence and intensity. Each word is exactly fitted to its place; each touch tells; each phrase, à peu près, echoes what has just preceded and is echoed by what immediately follows; so that the poem is a gradual progression of ideas that advance from point to point till the climacteric pause is reached and the moral enforced. The whole poem is a masterpiece of compression, intensity, symmetry.

To speak of the matter of the Sonnets is more difficult. We tread here on difficult and dangerous ground, where much is matter of dispute, and where those who believe in the personal theory of the poems must sometimes almost lack the courage of their interpretation and shrink from the conclusions to which it leads. Some of the Sonnets are obviously artificial, verbal essays in the conventional sonneteering of the period. This is especially true of the "dark woman" series.

In these

poems the merit is purely artistic. What is said amounts to very little: we only care for the felicity with which the poet paints his description and turns his compliment. But in the larger proportion of the Sonnets the interest is the interest that we look for and find in every great work. Goethe somewhere says that, strictly speaking, nothing interests. man except man; and applying the doctrine to letters Matthew Arnold formulated his famous canon that all poetry, or rather all literature, is essentially and intrinsically "a criticism of life." "Criticism," perhaps, was not the happiest word to employ, but the truth of his dictum remains. All literature must deal with life, with the world, with human nature in its myriad complexities; and from this standpoint the greater writer is he who tells us more about life, whose works lead to a clearer, closer knowledge of the things which, for the mass of men, are behind the veil, the truths and facts that are seen through a glass darkly, if seen at all. Now it is impossible to show how any individual

work realizes what should be the aim of every writer-this object of dealing fully and effectively with life. We can analyse a single sonnet and point out how the rhythmic beauty of the verse is built up; how the magic and melody of sound are achieved by alliteration, balance, and what not. But it is not possible to disintegrate and dissect the thousand-andone touches which bring home to us the fact that the poet who speaks to us is wise with the wisdom from which nothing is hid. And 406

so we must leave each to discover for himself -and surely this is a case where who runs may read -how and why the Sonnets of Shakespeare are a revelation, a commentary on all things, a mirror held up to the human soul and reproducing all its phases. "O, Menander and Life! which of you copied the other?" Subtler praise or more perfect no artist ever received; and it is the praise that we must lay at Shakespeare's feet after reading these his Sonnets.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

II.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field, Thy youth's proud livery, so gaz'd on now, Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:

Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,-
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless1 praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer-"This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,"-
Proving his beauty by succession thine!

This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

III.

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest Now is the time that face should form another; Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

1 Thriftless, unprofitable.