FullReads

But of all the terrible plays we are inclined to think “Timon” the most terrible, and to doubt whether justice has been done to the finish and completeness of it. At the same time we are inclined to think that it was printed (first in the first folio, 1623, seven years after Shakspere’s death) from a copy, corrected by the author, but not written fair, and containing consequent mistakes. The same account might belong to others of the plays, but more evidently perhaps belongs to the “Timon.” The idea of making the generous spendthrift, whose old idolaters had forsaken him because the idol had no more to give, into the high-priest of the Temple of Mammon, dispensing the gold which he hated and despised, that it might be a curse to the race which he had learned to hate and despise as well; and the way in which Shakspere discloses the depths of Timon’s wound, by bringing him into comparison with one who hates men by profession and humour–are as powerful as anything to be found even in Shakspere.

We are very willing to believe that “Julius Caesar” was one of his latest plays; for certainly it is the play in which he has represented a hero in the high and true sense. Brutus is this hero, of course; a hero because he will do what he sees to be right, independently of personal feeling or personal advantage. Nor does his attempt fail from any overweening or blindness, in himself. Had he known that the various papers thrown in his way, were the concoctions of Cassius, he would not have made the mistake of supposing that the Romans longed for freedom, and therefore would be ready to defend it. As it was, he attempted to liberate a people which did not feel its slavery. He failed for others, but not for himself; for his truth was such that everybody was true to him. Unlike Jaques with his seven acts of the burlesque of human life, Brutus says at the last,–

“Countrymen,
My heart doth joy, that yet, in all my life,
I found no man but he was true to me.”

Of course all this is in Plutarch. But it is easy to see with what relish Shakspere takes it up, setting forth all the aids in himself and in others which Brutus had to being a hero, and thus making the representation as credible as possible.

We must heartily confess that no amount of genius alone will make a man a good man; that genius only shows the right way–drives no man to walk in it. But there is surely some moral scent in us to let us know whether a man only cares for good from an artistic point of view, or whether he admires and loves good. This admiration and love cannot be prominently set forth by any dramatist true to his art; but it must come out over the whole. His predilections must show themselves in the scope of his artistic life, in the things and subjects he chooses, and the way in which he represents them. Notwithstanding Uncle Toby and Maria, who will venture to say that Sterne was noble or virtuous, when he looks over the whole that he has written? But in Shakspere there is no suspicion of a cloven foot. Everywhere he is on the side of virtue and of truth. Many small arguments, with great cumulative force, might be adduced to this effect.

For ourselves we cannot easily believe that the calmness of his art could be so unvarying except he exercised it with a good conscience; that he could have kept looking out upon the world around him with the untroubled regard necessary for seeing all things as they are, except there had been peace in his house at home; that he could have known all men as he did, and failed to know himself. We can understand the co-existence of any degree of partial or excited genius with evil ways, but we cannot understand the existence of such calm and universal genius, wrought out in his works, except in association with all that is noblest in human nature. Nor is it other than on the side of the argument for his rectitude that he never forces rectitude upon the attention of others. The strong impression left upon our minds is, that however Shakspere may have strayed in the early portion of his life in London, he was not only an upright and noble man for the main part, but a repentant man, and a man whose life was influenced by the truths of Christianity.