Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are pack'd;

Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort;-
Alas! alas! is it not like that I,

So early waking,—what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes, torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad;-
O! if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears?
And madly play with my forefathers' joints?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?"

This description, which seemed to us scarcely natural in the mouth of Juliet, was nevertheless not displeasing to the English, and it affords proof of this taste for the solemnities of death, which is one of the peculiarities of their literature. Romeo, in his turn, seems to be enraptured in the family tomb of the Capulets. True, he finds Juliet there; but no son of the genius of Homer or Sophocles, no Greek or even Italian lover would think, like Romeo, of finding Juliet more beautiful than ever in the bosom of death; his passion would not seem to be inspired with the very abode in which he saw his betrothed again. In Sophocles, Hemon kills himself upon the tomb of Antigone, as Romeo does on the tomb of Juliet ; but Sophocles does not show this scene of love and death on the stage. These lugubrious vaults are repugnant to the ideas which the Greek art conceived of love and marriage. Their horror, on the contrary, seems to increase the ardor of Romeo; he feels more passionate, more enthusiastic, more amorous, if we may so speak, not only perhaps because it is the last time that his eyes will behold the beauty of Juliet, but because-am I deceived? these funereal abodes are congenial to the imagination of this lover, a son of the genius of Shakspeare. Hear him: he speaks without terror and without disgust, of what? Of those very worms which are about to devour this adored body: "It is here, says he to Juliet, it is here that I wish to take up my abode with the worms which are thy chambermaids." Not when he had quitted her at the first rays of the morning, at the earliest carols of the lark; not when the morning dawn had witnessed their

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adieus full of love, had Romeo such fiery words as in this frightful abode; and nature which awoke all smiling and radiant with joy and gladness after a night of love, spoke less eloquently to his heart than the aspect of the tomb : "O, my love! my life! Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty, thou art not conquered." While Juliet was living, never was she more ardently adored. A singular imagination, which becomes inspired and inflamed even by the idea of death! A poetry strange and altogether novel, which owes nothing to Greece, but which is influenced by inspiration of the climate and those gloomy ideas with which Christianity loves to familiarize the minds of men! Shakspeare has felt these two influences; he has yielded without effort to the first, and he has even rendered the effect of it more vivid and powerful upon the temper of his countrymen; but he has altered and perverted that of Christianity.

We will endeavor in a few words to explain these different effects.

But

Montesquieu, in remarking that suicides are more common in England than any where else, attributes this malady to the influence of the climate. In our opinion, Shakspeare is also censurable to a certain extent, for that disgust of life, more frequent in England than in other countries. He has familiarized his countrymen with the idea of death, has represented it on the stage, and has carelessly mingled it with ideas and sentiments which seemed least to admit of it. Shakspeare himself only yielded to the inspiration of the North; it is to the genius of the North that he is indebted for this taste for the melancholy, of which he has created a school in his country. While Romeo and Juliet remained within the circle of Italian literature, they did not nourish those vague and gloomy humors, which now constitute one of the peculiar characteristics of their literature. Luigi da Porto, who is the first romancer (story-teller) who has written their history, has not represented Romeo and Juliet as melancholy dreamers. When Friar Laurence proposes to Juliet to put her to sleep and to transport her to the family vault, as if she were dead: "Would you not be afraid," said he, "if you were placed near the body of your cousin Tybalt, who has been recently buried in this place?" 66 0," replied Juliet joyously, "if I were compelled to pass through

hell to find Romeo, I would not hesitate." They are true Italian lovers, who, when they love, think only of their love; who have only fear of not finding each other, and not of seeing ghosts walking about amidst the tombs. The Italian Romeo, when he is in the vault of the Capulets, thinks nothing more of the charms of death; he does not even remark that Juliet is still beautiful, dead as she is, so much does the idea of death conceal from his eyes the beauty of his lady-love. We admire this weakness, or rather this bashfulness, of love, which is arrested at the presence of death, and feels for the object of its affection only the grief of having lost her. "Behold then," exclaims the Italian Romeo, "those eyes which I loved so much to see, this mouth from which flowed such sweet words, those lips which I have so often kissed, this heart which I have so often felt beating with so much joy! all now chilled by the cold hand of death. . . . And yet I still live!". . . . This grief is natural and simple, which has no savor of melancholy, which is the kind of sadness which the genius of the North knows best how to express. The contrast between them is remarkable and characteristic. All the thoughts of the English Romeo relate to the dead body which is before his eyes; to Juliet, such as he loved to contemplate her in the tomb, still beautiful, though lifeless; while the thoughts of the Italian Romeo have relation to Juliet, such as she was when she lived, beautiful and beloved; and the Italian and the English Romeo have each the thoughts and sentiments, which their climates inspire. In the South, life and beauty are sacred things, from which man repels the thought of death, as if it were a sort of profanation; in the North, man cheerfully recalls this idea, as if to feel more sensibly by the contrast, the charm of life and beauty. At Verona, when Juliet, despairing on account of Romeo's exile, requests Friar Laurence to give her poison: "I will not give you poison, my child," exclaims the old priest: "it would be too great a pity for a girl so young and beautiful as you, to die!" These are touching words, coming from the heart of an old man, full of this regard for life and beauty, which is one of the characteristic traits of the genius of the South. At London, on the contrary, you see, when Romeo wishes to purchase poison to destroy himself, how Shakspeare dwells with a sort of pleasure upon this apothecary who vends death by reason of his poverty; upon this poison which would easily kill a man

who had the strength of twenty men ;* upon those gloomy and repulsive ideas which are so pleasing to his genius, and that of his countrymen.

Such is in Shakspeare the influence which the climate has exercised upon poetry.

We will now remark the influence of Christianity, and how Shakspeare has perverted it.

It is true that before Shakspeare as well as after him the Christian pulpit loved to represent to man the dust of his tomb.† But according to the Christian doctrine, death is not a mysterious enigma to man: it is a judgment which God pronounces upon the life which we have led here below; a judgment favorable to the good and dreadful to the wicked. In Shakspeare, on the contrary, when Hamlet meditates upon death, it becomes obscure and incomprehensible.

To die-to sleep-[says Hamlet,]

To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub.
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.

In thus questioning the future, Shakspeare has represented the spirit of doubt and skepticism, and for this reason, Hamlett becomes the ancestor of the heroes of Lord Byron.

*Romeo and Juliet, Act v. sc. 1.

+ M. Olier, the founder of the Congregation of St. Sulpice, took his hand in the last days of his life, and said to it: "Body of sin, you must soon return to dust."-FENELON. Sp. Lett.

It is among the most legitimate, and among the highest provinces of the poet, to depict those contrasts which subject him to this charge-to show vice in the virtuous, and virtue in the wicked; and this unquestionable truth in art once granted, it follows, as the very condition of fiction, that to a hero thus selected, human interest must be given. You cannot blame a poet for making a faulty hero interesting, unless you contend that heroes of fiction must be perfect; by which dogma you would at once cut off from the poet the whole realm of the human heart, and separate his ethics from the representation of truth and nature. This love, indeed, of probing the sores of character-of representing the infirmities of the intellectual man-was not more remarkable in Goëthe than in Shakspeare, who, in the whole range of his dramas, has never presented to us a single male image of perfect virtue; who, in Macbeth, in Othello, in Angelo, in Shylock, in Hamlet, (the last so Goethe-like, that if Shakspeare had never created it, one might predict that Goëthe would have done so,) lays bare, with fearful precision, the weakness of the wise-the crime of the virtuous. It is in vain to deny that our paramount interest in all these plays is with the erring or the infirm.

They are begotten of him; the gloomy and blasphemous irony of Manfred proceeds from the soliloquy of Hamlet: Shakspeare has derived his meditations and his representations of death from the Christian pulpit; but he has applied them differently, and has diverted them from their proper object. This description of death, which should only serve to restrain the passions of men, he has shown in Romeo how love itself can become enamored of it, in order to move us with more effect; and this meditation of death, this fear of the just in awaiting the judgments of the Lord, he has made the terror of a man who, ready to kill himself, hesitates, uncertain of what may happen beyond the tomb.

The imitation of English and German literature, has caused death in our own days to become in France also one of the common subjects of poetry. Formerly we found death only at the Church, and heard it treated as a serious and solemn thing, full of grave teachings. Now we find it every where in literature, set off and adorned in such a manner as to form a contrast and strike the imagination; sometimes exaggerating its horror in order to increase the emotion by fear; and now, with its head crowned with roses, and a smiling countenance,* in order to captivate the wretched who despair of life. It is to the influence of Shakspeare that we must attribute this frequent and almost profane representation of the idea of death in our modern literature.

But who shall say that Shakspeare, while interesting us in the hero, sought to pervert our conscience into admiring the defect: that it was his object to decorate ambitious murder or jealous ferocity; licentious hypocrisy or implacable revenge; or to womanize the intellect, and emasculate the will, by all the doubts and scruples which make up the philosophy of Hamlet?--Hamlet, that great fountain-head of modern sentiment, from which have gushed a thousand rivulets of melancholy and skepticism; Hamlet, that perpetual mirror to minds fluctuating between the visible and the unseen, the actual and the ideal, the stern demands of uncomprehended duty, and the desire to escape from practical action into visionary self-commune; Hamlet, in which is shown the mysterious prototype of what man would be with virtue and with wisdom, but without-WILL!-Bulwer.

*

"It is only the lachrymose sinner who calls death a skeleton. He is, on the contrary, a sweet and lovely child, with a face as rosy as the god of love, but less deceitful: a silent and helpful genius, who offers his arm to the weary soul of the pilgrim, who assists him in ascending the degrees of time, opens to him the magic palace of eternal splendor, waves him a friendly signal, and disappears."-SCHILLER. Kaballe und Liebe.