Olass_mfiA2S_ Book >TvVn|5 / y£ppteti&ti(m0 of J3orace l^otoarii I?urne0£ OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC By TALCOTT WILLIAMS FROM THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER, IIJIZ HORACE HOWARD FURNESS By AGNES REPPLIER 1 FROM THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, NOVEMBER, I912 CLEVELAND PRIVATELY PRINTED 1912 Q%EETINGS from the Librarian and the ^ice-Librarians to their associates in the Cleveland Tublic Library and the Western c I{eserve Library School Christmas 7 9 12 Reprinted by the kind permission of the Authors and the Publishers, and with the approval of the sons of Dr. Furness Copyrighted, igi2, by The Century Company Copyrighted, IQI2, by The Atlantic Monthly Company The portrait is a copy of the last photograph of Dr. Furness, ■which was taken in IQ08, and is furnished by his son, IV. H. Furness, 3d red from . fice. OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC THE LATE HORACE HOWARD FURNESS NOVEMBER 2, 1833 AUGUST I 3, I9I2 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS NLY a great man can accomplish a great task. For fifteen of Shakspere's most familiar plays, Horace Howard Furness condensed the criticism of three centuries for each play in a single volume, save Ham/etywhich has two. 1 From 6000 to 8000 works have been published on Shakspere. All on each play is brought within the compass of its volume. Who holds this volume holds the fruits of all past criticism and comment on the play. Mere industry can do much, but mere indus- try could never build the monument of these volumes. I confess I never look at the im- pressive row without amazement at the labor for which they stand. It would be much, if this were all. Long labor of this order grinds like a 1 The plays edited by Dr. Furness are Romeo and Juliet, 1871 ; Macbeth, 1873; Hamlet, two volumes, 1877; K* n g Lear, 1880; Othello, 1886; The Merchant of Venice, 1888; As Ton Like It, 1890; The Tempest, 1892; Midsummer- Night's Dream, 1895; The Winter's Tale, 1898; Much Ado about Nothing, 1899 > Twelfth Night, 1901 ; Love* s Labour' s Lost, 1904; Antony and Cleopatra, 1909, and Cymbeline, completed and to appear. His son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., will complete his father's task, and has already published Richard III, 1 9 1 1 , and revised Macbeth. 6 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC glacier over a writer's style and individuality. Textual criticism saps men. There is a certain form of stupidity never found except in c notes.' Small have continual plodders ever won Save bare authority, from others' books. Nothing saves a man from this but personality. The first great tonic is humor. Dr. Furness, man and work together, brim with it. Who else would have made a merry mark of the one word in Shakspere — in The Tempest , 'young scamels from the rock' — for which no one has ever sug- gested a convincing or even plausible meaning? The humor needed to salt these barrels and bar- rels of Shaksperian pemmican is much more than the capacity to see a joke. This is to hu- mor what a pocket-dictionary is to an encylope- dia. What is needed for adequate comment on Shakspere, the most English of all figures in the world of letters, is that numberless capacity to see the broad laugh in all things which lies so near to tears that when the coin of fate is flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. This gives sanity. It enables the editor of a Variorum to know from time to time what a fool a German scholar can make of himself and his author. I suppose no man could see Horace Howard Furness, that solid figure, that sturdy step, that firm face of roomy planes and liberal modeling, those twinkling eyes, that air of benig- nant wisdom and general good-nature, without OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC J seeing that the worst joke of all, life itself, could not daunt this resolution or dull this humor. There is a look we all know on the face of the judge — a detached habit of thought. It comes on the bench, and it comes, too, let me assure you, if a man has had before his bar for forty years all the culprits who for two centuries have been writing about Shakspere. His beam will stand sure and he will c poise the cause in jus- tice' equal scales.' There are scholars whose lives are given to the great in letters who be- come surfeited with honey and 'in the taste con- found the appetite.' Nothing saves from this but the incommunicable capacity for the percep- tion of the best. This capacity grows by what it feeds upon. Through these volumes there has grown certainty of touch and serenity of judg- ment, but from the first issue there was apparent, as in the man, the norm which is not to be cor- rupted even by the Elizabethan extravagance of the greatest of Elizabethans. Dr. Furness came to his life task through the Kemble tradition. The Kembles, who succeeded Garrick, first gave dignity to Shakspere. Three critics of the contemporary stage, dramatic crit- ics all, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, two of them working journalists, began the present at- titude. It has since been impossible for any scholar to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that a pas- sage in a third-rate play, Congreve's 'Mourning Bride,' was better than anything in Shakspere. 8 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC The stage was dear to him, and he believed that no play could be adequately understood unless it was heard. The foremost players of his day he knew, and each had counseled with him, and he had gladly learned from them. With Fanny Kemble and her light touch and perspic- uous, penetrating interpretation as a model, he read the familiar plays himself to many audiences, interspersing comment. To all who read or act he was a living proof that lines are 'read' by the mind and that he or she who fully understands will fully express, and he or she alone. Deaf as he was, stress, cadence, emphasis, intonation, and expression were as manifold, accurate, and illu- minating as his comment. All was suffused with the cheer and glow of strength, and had behind that incomparable organ of interpretation, a mind that knew, loved, and voiced the inner meaning of the uttered word. It is now sixty-five years since Dr. Furness, a boy of fourteen, received from Fanny Kemble a season ticket for her readings. In her readings she sat at a green baize-covered table still cher- ished in his library. She made him a Shak- sperian for life. He was living in a city which, until Boston took its place a little over twenty years ago, as Chicago is doing to-day, gave the stage a more serious, steady, intelligent, and con- sistent support than any other. To a local stage possessing this tradition the Philadelphia of threescore years ago added OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 9 through his father, William Henry Furness, for fifty years head of the Unitarian Church founded by Joseph Priestley, a more intimate contact with the romantic movement in England than fell to other young Americans of the period. It was in Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first appreciated at his full value by an American. It was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, in a commonwealth for two centuries nearer Ger- many than any other American state, German translation began. William Henry Furness early addressed himself to this field. His daughter, Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued the task through thirty years, her last work appearing in a volume of her brother's Variorum series. Where other commentators in our tongue, in either home of our race, have looked to English com- ment, Dr. Furness from the first significant ded- ication of his Hamlet (1877), written in personal exultation over German triumph as proving Germany no longer the ( Hamlet of Nations,' has seen Shakspere as a world poet, has come close to German authority and research, and equaled its thorough and exact character with- out falling into its pedantry or its far-fetched gloss. From many causes he knew all it is to be a gentleman, and when every year he rose as dean of the Shakspere Society on St. George's day to give the solitary toast, 'William Shakspere, gentleman,' it was on the last word that;his IO OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC sturdy accent fell. Beyond all the other great voices of our tongue, Shakspere was 'gentle.' The author of Coriolanus loathed the general mass. He scarce mentions it without touching on its evil smell. Its sweaty nightcap ever stank in his nostrils. Certain sympathies are needed for full critical appreciation of the poet who was the last word of the feudalism of the past to the democracy of the future, and these sympathies Dr. Furness had. The Shakspere Society first began his study. For sixty-one years its fortnightly meetings have gathered a group of men foremost in Philadel- phia. One has read Shakspere there with a cabinet-minister, a chancellor of the bar associa- tion, a judge of the first rank, a great physician as well known in the art of letters as in the let- ters of his art, and a novelist whose best seller has not had its total exceeded. It was in a like practical atmosphere that, a young man not yet thirty, Dr. Furness was stirred half a century ago to try to compare texts by the aid of a scrap- book. Out of this grew the Variorum, first with the firsL folio for a basis and later the Cambridge text. He had leisure, a perilous gift. He early collected, until 7000 volumes were at hand in a building for their use; but most collectors are swamped by their apparatus. C A Concordance of Shaksperian Poems,' 1874, by Mrs. Furness, bespoke a common bond in a perfect union. In 1883 she was taken. After a generation, those OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC I I who then saw his grief from without will not adventure to speak of it. A sense of loss was never absent from him. It drove him to ardu- ous labors, which the years made a habit of life. Save a single volume of his father's intimate friendship with Emerson, he wrote nothing but the Variorum. His prefaces, his addresses, and his letters should, now that he is gone, make a volume. He preserved the epistolary gift, lost in our day. His simplest note had style, charm, and weight. In his research he was to the end a firm be- liever in the study of the plays and the plays alone. The order in which the plays were writ- ten did not interest him. For c weak endings,' 'incomplete lines/ and all the newer apparatus of Shakspere study, he had an unconcealed dis- regard. It was not for him. He would have ques- tioned his personal identity as soon as question the personal authorship of Shakspere's plays. The happy fortune befell me once at his side and over his ear-trumpet to say of him that which greatly pleased. It was at the luncheon when the New Theatre gave him a gold medal and he monopolized the affectionate attention of every woman in the room. His appreciation gave whatever value there was to my words, in which I said that it was not as a scholar unrivaled and a critical authority unequaled that he would be most loved and remembered, but because his work had made accurate study possible to the 12 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC wandering player, given the solitary teacher on the frontier the best of past criticism, and armed the smallest village club with a library of learn- ing, making the best of Shakspere the general possession of all. It was for this he labored. It was this American ideal that inspired him. It was in the service of this ideal that he renounced all royalties. It is only as a friend I write of Horace Howard Furness, as one of those that loved and knew. It is ever ill writing of one's friends when they are gone, but his going changed the very hori- zon of life for us all, robbed of its landmark the landscape of the years, and left a gap where once we all looked up and learned and had new sense of the fashion in which long purpose, fulfilled and never forgotten, shapes character and carves cliffs from which men see afar. For forty years he sat at a desk and worked to make books from books on a book. In all our American life there is no other, few in any land, who so encysted himself in a task wholly of letters. There goes with this for most, as all know, the bent figure, the absent-minded or the self-conscious gaze, aloofness from the actual. Not he. To the last there was the sturdy, erect figure, the ruddy, full face, shaped and blocked as of a man of many tasks, the resolute mus- tache, the solid chin, the stiff, short, aggressive hair, early whitened by tears and tasks — 'your white-haired son/ as he wrote in an inimitable OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC 13 acknowledgment to his father in one of his vol- umes. Even a year from eighty his very step was decision. He bore down Chestnut Street in his weekly visit from his country home like c a royal, good, and gallant ship, freshly beheld in all her trim.' There is in Philadelphia a little group which has dined together just short of four decades every three weeks for eight months of each year. He was of the first that met, and the last of the first to go. To one who began thirty years ago as the youngest of those who sat at this board, and now, alas ! finds himself among the elder at a table peopled with the past, nothing so bulks in all the round of a manifold social contact as this dominant figure, alert, awake, clear-visioned, felt through all this gathered group of men. Each of them was himself felt in all the various walks of life, on the bench, in law, in medicine, in letters, in art, in journalism, and in affairs; yet he the center, stone-deaf. How did he do it? I do not know. I only saw. He alone had the secret. Gay, responsive, indomitable, flash- ing sheer personality, and with a big silver ear- trumpet moving here and there, into which some one at his side poured a reversion of the pass- ing talk, who is there whom you know, or whom you have known, who could have done it? None other that I know. Yet he so did it that one felt that the best recipe and assurance of unflag- ging talk, of explosive, masculine laughter, of 14 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC a perpetual source of the dearest and most pre- cious thing on earth, the easy interchange, con- flict, and contact of friends with friends — the best recipe for all this was to have there a great scholar, unable to hear a word until it was drop- ped into the silver trumpet, yet giving edge, guidance, direction, and inspiration to all the flow of mutual utterance that has run in this well-worn channel for twoscore years. To do this was more like his very self than all his throned volumes; and I am not sure but that, in the great chancery of existence, it is bet- ter worth while to have made friends gay, high- spirited, and ready to give a frolic welcome to all the years as they came than to be known ever after, as he will be, as foremost in his great field. It was like him to concentrate all his social life on this one group. Elsewhere he was always sought and scarcely seen, though his house was graced by an open hospitality the loss of which in time he made up by night work. How wise to know your friends in your forties, and to gather them and to be with them to the very threshold of the eighties! How far wiser than the wandering way in which, like children, we fill our hands so full that we can neither use, nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! It was like him resolutely to keep this dinner of high talk and plain fare, with men who dined much and well elsewhere, to a dollar apiece, as a constant pro- test against a lavish age which kills all by gild- OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC I 5 ing it, as with the luckless boy in the Medicean festival. Life was compounded by him of simples; but they were 'collected from all simples that have virtue under the moon/ He lived in one city and loved it. Two homes housed all his years. He sprang of a goodly ancestry and was justly and openly proud of it. He held high the long descent of men given to the works of the mind. His father was known before him, and his sons were known with him and will be known after him. His heart visibly and frankly warmed, though without word or bruit, when in a narrow span of years he and his son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., published each his volume which garner the comment of all the years on a play of Shaks- pere. Another son, Dr. W. H. Furness, in the same span, wrote an authoritative volume on the Dyaks of Borneo, placing in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania the best existing monographic collection on the region he studied. A daughter, Mrs. Horace Jayne (Caroline Fur- ness Jayne), issued the one most important book ever published on the perplexing, fascinating, and almost unknown field of catVcradles, a mine of patient research and accurate, skilful descrip- tion. His sister, Mrs. Caspar Wister, published the long series of translations from German novels the success of which, among a score of 1 6 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC failures in this field, was wholly due to the skill with which the c translator' adapted this fiction 'made in Germany ' to the English-speaking world. Five years ago this brother and sister were at work side by side, Mrs. Wister on the proof-sheets of her fortieth German translation, c The Lonely House,' by Adolph Streckfuss, and he on the proof-sheets of Antony and Cleopatra, the twelfth in his monumental march. Her first translation, 'Seaside and Fireside Fairies,' from George Blum and Louis Wahl, had appeared forty-three years, and his Romeo and Juliet thirty-six years, before. His brother, Frank Fur- ness, whose death preceded his by so short a span, was, when a mere lad, in Rush's Lancers, and all his life looked the cavalryman, with his drooping, yellow mustache and his seamed face. He retained to the end the walk of a man who, for years together in his youth, has felt the saddle-leathers between his legs. Like Lever's hero, he once escaped capture by taking a barn- yard fence no other man would have dared or persuaded his cavalry mount to venture. By carrying powder to a battery not only under fire, but through burning woods, he won a medal of honor. At Cold Harbor he risked life openly and flagrantly by walking out between two firing- lines a few rods apart to give a wounded Con- federate a drink of water. Years later, when there came to this dauntless soul heartbreaking grief, he solaced himself by finding through a news- OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC I 7 paper friend, who sowed the strange and mov- ing tale broadcast in Southern papers, the man whose life he had saved, bringing him to Phil- adelphia and filling a month with mutual mem- ories for both. To the world Frank Furness was known as an architect, a pupil of Richard Morris Hunt. It could be only in such a family that, as a family lark at a family dinner, a novel was writ- ten, the first chapter by Horace Howard Fur- ness, the others in turn by the rest, three sons, a daughter, a son-in-law, and a daughter in-law, no author to kill a character without the consent of its creator, and all printed in seven copies as 1 Grace Auchester.' I foresee a pretty penny for this volume in catalogues of Shaksperiana a century hence. It is the odd blunder of a dull world that social buoyancy and the notable mind seldom march together; but, as an acute thinker has said, a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east as easily as he walks west, and our great Shak- sperian had all the mirth that rang under the rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. He was the dancer of his year and led in the play of more than sixty years ago. I like it that after his death there were found, preserved through all the half cen- tury, the pink tights and the spangled skirt which the toil-worn commentator had worn in glad youth as Mile. Furnessina. In the world of si- I 8 OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC lence in which he lived so long he seemed to know laughter by instinct. His speech on the ' Miseries of Old Age ' at a Harvard dinner four years ago swept the tables. He presided over a dinner or a meeting marvelously. His instinct, his attention, his capacity to interpret a look as easily as a word, carried him through all. Nor was humor ever far from the ceremonial surface of things. For example, at the lunch given at the opening of the Bryn Mawr Col- lege library — it was on the hottest of June days, and he was sweltering under the crimson trap- pings and beef-eater hat of his Cambridge degree of Litt.Doc. (1899), when a young friend spoke a consoling word to him. He replied, c Ah, Mademoiselle, il faut souffrir pour etre swell. 9 The world narrowly missed in him a great Arabic scholar. His trip abroad after his grad- uation at Harvard carried him far afield. He was in Damascus when the Crimean War set the East ablaze. He saw Richard Burton, imperi- ous-souled, a vision of masterful will, holding his consular court ; and to the vision he recurred again and again. He had a week or two in the desert. He became enamoured of Arabic and its study, of which relics exist in a grammar and reader that he owned. But his brief days over Semitics had this strange by-product. In the polychrome Bible, projected by Professor Haupt of Johns Hopkins, and halted midway for lack of support, Dr. Furness, perhaps the only man OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC I 9 alive so versed in Elizabethan English that it was as the tongue to which he was born, and knowing enough of Hebrew, furnished the translation of the revised text. In the Hebrew lyrics and psalms translated for this edition of the Old Testament he reached the summit of his style, an incomparable mingling of nice scholar- ship and exalted utterance. H ow fit it was that the Bible and Shakspere should attract the same critical capacity ! If I were to sum by a single inanimate object the temper and tradition of Dr. Furness, I would turn to the gloves, in his unrivaled collection, which one is glad to believe were Shakspere's. They are manifestly the gloves of an Elizabethan gentleman not too large in build, gold-embroid- ered, and shapely. They were treasured as genu- ine by the descendants of Shakspere's son-in- law, the physician who attended him in his last illness, and were handed down in that family. They passed to Garrick, who gave them to Philip Kemble, and so by descent again they passed from Fanny Kemble to their recent owner. There again is the double line of grace, the descent both of line and of genius, to make precious the gloves that rested on Shakspere's hand, took its shape and knew its strength and beauty. HORACE HOWARD FURNESS HORACE HOWARD FURNESS BY AGNES REPPLIER ONJECTURAL criticism/ observes Dr. Johnson, c demands more than humanity possesses, and he that exer- cises it with most praise has very fre- quent need of indulgence. Let us now be told no more of the dull duty of an editor/ With these words of soberness ringing in his ears, Dr. Furness began more than forty years ago the vast labor which has placed him at the head of Shakespearean scholars, and has made the student world his debtor. He brought to bear upon his task qualities essential to its com- pletion: patience, balance, a wide acquaintance with Elizabethan literature and phraseology, the keenness of a greyhound on the track, an incor- ruptible sense of proportion, and an apprecia- tion, equally just and generous, of his predeces- sors' work. Leisure and that rarest of fortune's gifts, the command of solitude, made possible the industry of his life. Above all, a noble en- thusiasm sustained him through years of incred- ible drudgery. 'The dull duty of an editor'! Well may Dr. Johnson heap scorn upon the words. When one is fitted by nature to enjoy the pleasure which perfection in literary art can give : one does not find it dull to live face to face 24 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS with vital conceptions of humanity, embalmed in imperishable verse. The first volume of the new Variorum, Romeo and Juliet l , was published in 1871. Dr. Furness confessed that he chose the play be- cause he loved it, and because he thought it probable that he would never edit another, — an anticipation happily unfulfilled. As he worked, he saw more and more clearly the im- perative nature of his task; and, in his preface to Romeo and Juliet , while giving ample praise to Boswell's Variorum of 182 1, he states simply and seriously the causes which make it inad- equate to-day. Even the Cambridge edition of 1863, which Dr. Furness held to have created an era in Shakespearean literature, and to have put all students of Shakespearean text in debt to the learned and laborious editors, lacks one important detail. There is no word to note the adoption or rejection of contested readings by various students and commentators. This Dr. Furness considered a grave omission. c In dis- puted passages/ he wrote, c it is of great inter- est to see at a glance on which side lies the weight of authority.' To read the fourteen prefaces which have en- riched the fourteen plays included in the new Variorum, is to follow delicately and surely the intellectual life of a great scholar. There was an expansion of spirit as the work advanced. From being absolutely impersonal, an unseen editor, HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 2$ arranging and codifying the notes of others, sift- ing evidence and recording verdicts, Dr. Fur- ness emerged gradually into the broad light of day. In the later volumes, every note dealing with a disputed point, closes with a judgment, or dismisses the dispute as futile. A shrewd humor, held well in check, illuminates the dusty path of learning. To distinction of style has been added the magnetic grace of personality. If we cannot say of the Preface, c With this key Dr. Furness unlocked his heart,' we can at least learn from it how much of his heart he gave smilingly away to a lady of such doubtful merit (what is the worth of merit in a bad world!) as Cleopatra. For the first five plays, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello, Dr. Furness formed his own text. The remaining nine were reprinted from the First Folio. 6 Who am 1/ observes the conservative editor, in justification of this change of plan, c that I should thrust myself in between the student and the text, as though in me resided the power to restore Shakespeare's own words?' This instinct of conservatism strengthened in Dr. Furness with every year of work, until it became a guid- ing principle, making for vigilance and lucidity. c Those who know the most,' he was wont to say, c venture the least'; and his own ventures are so carefully considered as to lose all chance of hazard. Upon internal evidence, 'which is of imagination all compact,' he looked forever 26 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS askance. Hypothetical allusions to historic per- sonages and events (we like to think that there are half-a-dozen such crowded into a score of Ober- on's lines), he dismissed as unworthy of critical consideration. Even when points of resemblance came as close as do the affectations of speech in Lovers Labour s Lost to the weary euphuisms of Lyly, Dr. Furness stoutly refused to trace a dim connection. An undecipherable word or phrase never presented itself to his level judgment as a species of riddle, to be guessed at frantically until the end of time. If he did not know what the word or the phrase meant, he said so, and went on his way rejoicing. Who can forget his avowal of 'utter, invincible ignorance' as to the mysterious 'scamels' which Caliban finds on the rock, and his determination to retain the word as it stands. 'From the very beginning of the Play/ he reminds us, c we know that the scene lies in an enchanted island. Is this to be for- gotten? Since the air is full of sweet sounds, why may not the rocks be inhabited by un- known birds of gay plumage, or by vague an- imals of a grateful and appetizing plumpness? Let the picture remain of the dashing rocks, the stealthy, freckled whelp, and, in the clutch of his long nails, a young and tender scamel/ So, too, with Mark Antony's c Arme-gaunt Steede,' which, since the publication of the First Folio, has supplied abundant matter for con- jecture: HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 27 he nodded, And soberly did mount an Arme-gaunt Steede. Dr. Furness prints conscientiously two solid pages of notes anent this mysterious epithet, giving us every suggestion that has been prof- fered and discarded concerning its possible signif- icance; at the close of which exhaustive survey he adds serenely: c In view of the formidable, not to say appalling combination of equine qual- ities and armourer's art which has been detected in this adjective, Antony would have been more than mortal had he not approached his steed with extreme caution,and mounted it "soberly." Far more remarkable is the incurious attitude preserved by Dr. Furness in regard to the chro- nology of Shakespeare's plays, his indifference to dates which have cost other commentators years of study and speculation. Many and stern were the reproaches hurled at him for this in- difference, but he remained indifferent still. In- deed it was his most noteworthy characteristic that, while regarding his own work with a stead- fast and sane humility, he was wholly unvexed and unmoved by criticism. Immaculately free from what Dr. Johnson terms 'the acrimony of scholiasts,' he never assumed an editor's role to be an c intellectual egg-dance ' amid a host of sensitive interests. Nor did he begrudge, even to the youngest critic, the pleasure of flaunting some innocent rags of research — the mere swad- dling clothes of learning — in the face of his pro- 28 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS found and gentle scholarship. c Great tranquil- lity of heart hath he who careth neither for praise nor blame/ said the wise a Kempis, who knew whereof he spoke; and I have many times heard Dr. Furness quote with approval those stern and splendid lines in which Dr. Johnson, confiding his dictionary to the public, expresses his frigid insensibility as to its reception. Indifference to dates was but one feature ot that serene unconcern with which Dr. Furness regarded the hidden personality of Shakespeare. He was not merely content, he seemed glad to know no more of the poet over whom he had spent his life; and because 'every assertion con- nected with Shakespeare is accompanied, as a ground-tone, by the refrain "it is not unlikely," he found such assertions to be little worth his while. c We cannot tell whether Shakespeare was peevish or gentle,' he wrote, f sedate or mercurial, generous or selfish, dignified or merry; whether he was a Protestant or a Catholic, whether he loved his home or liked to gad abroad, whether he was jocund or sombre, or whether he was all these things by turns, and nothing long/ Even the Sonnets afforded to Dr. Furness's mind no key to the enigma. He held that Shake- speare followed the fashion of his day, a fashion borrowed from Italy, which made of the sonnet a personal thing (no Italian would have dreamed of writing a sonnet on Venice and the Rialto as Wordsworth wrote one on London and West- HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 29 minster Bridge) ; and that the poet's essentially dramatic spirit gave to his own sonnets a dra- matic form. They seem spoken by one human being to another, spoken in accents of grief, of doubt, of ecstasy, of despair; but in this man- ner do all Shakespeare's characters speak. This is the impelling force of the dramatic spirit, peopling earth and sky; not the impelling force of the personal spirit, seeking to take the world into its confidence. Shakespeare may even be permitted to bewail his outcast state, without our beginning straightway to sniff a peccadillo. That the dramatic spirit which baffles scrutiny should have made a powerful appeal to Dr. Furness was right and reasonable. It was the appeal of consanguinity. Like all his race, he had the actor's gifts: not only spirit and fire in declamation, not only the flexible voice and the appropriate gesture; but the power to lose him- self past finding in every character he portrayed. Those who have heard him read, know what I mean. The clarion call of Henry the Fifth be- fore the gates of Harfleur, his prayer upon the field of Agincourt, — these things were not mere elocution, however noble and effective; they were passionate appeals to man and God, breaking from the lips of one whose head was reeling with the joy of battle, whose heart was heavy with the awful burden of authority. It was as a boy of fourteen that Dr. Furness first heard Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Peirce Butler) read Shakespeare's 3