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_ In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear's pessimism
as evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady. There
is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the
whole weight of the world's misery without blenching. There is a
laugh always ready to avenge its tears of discouragement. In the
lines which Mr Harris quotes only to declare that he can make nothing
of them, and to condemn them as out of character, Richard III,
immediately after pitying himself because
There is no creature loves me
And if I die no soul will pity me,
adds, with a grin,
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity for myself?
Let me again remind Mr Harris of Oscar Wilde. We all dreaded to read
De Profundis: our instinct was to stop our ears, or run away from the
wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart. But we were
throwing away our pity. De Profundis was de profundis indeed: Wilde
was too good a dramatist to throw away so powerful an effect; but none
the less it was de profundis in excelsis. There was more laughter
between the lines of that book than in a thousand farces by men of no
genius. Wilde, like Richard and Shakespear, found in himself no pity
for himself. There is nothing that marks the born dramatist more
unmistakably than this discovery of comedy in his own misfortunes
almost in proportion to the pathos with which the ordinary man
announces their tragedy. I cannot for the life of me see the broken
heart in Shakespear's latest works. "Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's
gate sings" is not the lyric of a broken man; nor is Cloten's comment
that if Imogen does not appreciate it, "it is a vice in her ears which
horse hairs, and cats' guts, and the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot,
can never amend," the sally of a saddened one. Is it not clear that
to the last there was in Shakespear an incorrigible divine levity, an
inexhaustible joy that derided sorrow? Think of the poor Dark Lady
having to stand up to this unbearable power of extracting a grim fun
from everything. Mr Harris writes as if Shakespear did all the
suffering and the Dark Lady all the cruelty. But why does he not put
himself in the Dark Lady's place for a moment as he has put himself so
successfully in Shakespear's? Imagine her reading the hundred and
thirtieth sonnet!
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wire, black wires grow on her head;
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak; yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was
never for a moment safe with Shakespear. Bear in mind that she was
not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as
ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her
complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy
being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes;
that Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding
shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the
realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got
sick when they saw the queen's conduct; and then ask Mr Harris whether
any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the "sugred"
compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain,
that seemed to Shakespear as natural and amusing a reaction as the
burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his
poems by Cloten and Touchstone. _
Read next: PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS: Jupiter and Semele
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