and in Sonnet 42 he even finds in it a fresh symptom of love But here's the joy-my friend and I are one; Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone. The conclusion is not moral; but the imaginative stage of love is not yet moral. It is as yet but a sentimental fancy; and the scale of love shows by what stages this sentimental fancy is gradually transformed from a non-moral into a moral affection. On the other hand, it must be remembered that all the stages in the scale of love are symmetrical; the earlier foreshadow the later. And a general formula which may be quite immoral in a lower application may represent true morality in a higher one. Mr. Gerald Massey's interpretation saves Shakespeare's reputation; but these Sonnets are capable of a better vindication. The highest amor amicitiae of which man is capable is directed to God. Now any one who reads Sonnets 40-42 will see that they are as applicable as the Song of Solomon itself to the stage of divine Love. If God deprives a man of an object of earthly affection, either by taking it to Himself or by raising in it an affection to Him which supplants and extinguishes all human loves, the only permissible feeling in man is that which Shakespeare formulates in these three Sonnets. They contain a genuine and unassailable analysis of love, though the disagreeable nature of their first and obvious meaning rather tempts the common observer to neglect examining the real depth of their truth and beauty. This stage of love ends with a short series of three Sonnets, 43-45, which bring to light the unsatisfactory nature of this merely imaginary love. It is shadowy and unsubstantial. It does not attain to the deep recesses of the soul; it lives rather in the imagination and senses, which are tied to the four material elements of which the body is composed, than in the nimble thought to which distance is nothing, and bodily presence or absence is all one. this transitional reflection the first division of the first great series of Sonnets is brought to a close. Shakespeare has shown us the three steps of love, conceived in the eyes, generalized in the imagination, and again concentrated in the judgment, but not yet idealized-not yet possessing the whole heart. With To recapitulate. The first stage of love is represented an in Sonnets 1 to 25. In the first twenty the lover is represented gradually coming nearer to his object, beginning with a distant respect, and ending with a close intimacy. Then Sonnets 21 to 25 express the first unity of love's simple apprehension, in which it confounds the two lovers into one. The second stage is shown in Sonnets 26 to 37. Here this unity is put through its trials. It is not troubled by the duality of absence (26-28) nor by difference of station, nor by private sorrows (29). It envelopes and "sublates," as Hegelian would say, all former loves, restoring them in a different form, and raising them to a new life (30, 31). It expects to survive death (32); it excuses all offences, reckoning them as self-inflicted wounds, and making the sufferer an accessory to the offender (33-35); hence it cries, "depart from me for I am a sinful man," and shows how absence conduces to the growth of love (35-37). The third stage is exhibited in Sonnets 38 to 45. Love not only ceases to be troubled by the trials which it surmounts in the second stage; it even assimilates them, and turns them into its own essence. Absence becomes the dualistic life of love, and proves that it is expedient that friends should live divided (39); jealousy itself becomes a reunion of this dualism, and a fresh proof that "my friend and I are one (40-42); and the very insufficiency of the materialistic elements of these first stages of love becomes a force which suggests and helps to carry out the transformation of an imaginative into an ideal love (43-45). CHAPTER VI. IDEAL LOVE IN THE SONNETS. IMAGINATIVE love occupies the three lower grades in the scale, and ideal love the three higher. Ideal love begins with the substitution of intellectual for sensible beauty; for if love is born in the eyes, its life is in the mind. This change is indicated by Shakespeare in Sonnets 46 and 47. What the eye has been to the prior stages of love, the heart is now to be for the later. As before, the eye "played the painter, and engraved the form of beauty on the heart's tablets" (Sonnet 24)-so now, the heart is to play the painter, and to interpret the friend's heart to the lover's consciousness. To know another man, says Hamlet, is to know one's self. Love therefore when transferred from the beauty of form to that of the mind depends upon the knowledge of one's self; for this knowledge is our grammar and dictionary whereby we may interpret the tokens which reveal to us the hearts and minds of others. Shakespeare then, after introducing the subject in Sonnets 46, 47, has to show how love acquires, of itself, this self-knowledge. First he recurs to the general topic of absence, which leads the lover to fear that absence only typifies the entire loss of his friend (Son. 48). Then he asks himself" but what claim have I to keep him?" This leads him to a 66 knowledge of his own desert," and to the confession that he can allege no cause why he should be loved (Son. 49). The two next Sonnets (50 and 51) should be compared with Petrarch's "Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo." The intention is to show how much ideal love transcends the animal powers. The "dull flesh,' ""the beast that bears" the man, appears in its slowness to sympathize with him in the pains of absence; but in the ardour of desire, and in the triumph of return, the soul must be its own vehicle; no flesh can keep abreast of the mind in its " fiery race," and therefore all such weak auxiliaries have "leave to go." Sonnet 52 carries this asceticism of love even further, and dispenses, except on rare occasions, even with the imagination of the friend's shape. Every object reminds the lover of his friend's beauty (53), but nothing can represent his " constant heart." And yet (54) it is not the visible beauty, but the constant heart or invisible truth, which gives a man his worth. This truth, therefore, and no longer the mere outward form, as in Sonnet 5, the poet's verse is henceforth to distil, to make its memory live for ever (55) and “dwell in lovers' eyes." With Sonnet 56 a new vein of feeling comes in. The poet finds that the abstention and asceticism of the last few sonnets only "kills the spirit of love by a perpetual dulness." He once more therefore gives play to his imagination. He thinks of the bodily presence of his friend; he wonders where he is and what he is doing, and checks his rising suspicions by the deepest self-humiliation. Being his friend's slave, how can he demand an account of what he is doing? (Sonnets 57, 58). He finds it much more to the purpose to search old records to find his friend's "image in some antique book," written "since mind at first in character was done" (59). Thus love retires into itself, chews the cud of meditation, and bears again “the second burden of a former child" by remodelling its old thoughts, and giving new birth to pre-existing ideas. Such new birth is altogether of a higher character than natural nativity, which "crawls to maturity" and is eclipsed. The new life which the poet promises to confer on his friend is one that "shall stand to times in hope" (60). In Sonnet 61 the poet asks whether his friend's image which visits him so often is sent by him, or is conjured up by his own love. It is, he replies, his own love. But if he creates the image, what must be his own worth that is capable of casting such a shadow? All former self-inspection ended in self-abasement; this ends in a very different self-appreciation (62): Methinks no face so gracious is as mine, No shape so true, no truth of such account; And though he refers all this excellence to his friend, his second self, yet it remains true that he must have all its elements in his own person, or he would not be able to comprehend it. In himself, however, the excellence only exists. "crushed and o'erworn by Time." But as beauty still exists even in his wrinkles, so he will take care that his friend's beauty shall live in the "black lines" which his pen traces; and these lines shall defy Time, after the beauty which they celebrate has long been laid in the dust (63-65). The main features of this stage of ideal love are the three self-inspections whereby the lover comes to the knowledge of his own heart. First, he recognizes its absolute worthlessness by its defects; secondly, he determines its relation to the friend, whose slave and vassal he feels himself to be; and thirdly, he recognizes its real nobility when he finds in it those principles of superlative excellence which his modesty will not allow him to attribute to himself. Henceforth the self-conscious heart, and not the sensuous imagination, becomes the true interpreter of love. The When once, through self-inspection, the lover has become acquainted with his own soul, and therein with souls in general, he is perforce obliged to substitute a spiritual beauty for the material beauty which he has hitherto worshipped. And this substitution indicates an advance of the understanding from the concrete to the abstract. lover, says Plato, has now no eyes for gold or colours or outward beauties, but only for the beauty of souls, of arts, of sciences, and of institutions. He is no longer distressed by the waning of fair faces, or the fading of flowers, but by the soul which does not fulfil its high promises, by art which misses its aim, by science which babbles, by political institutions which are turned to purposes of oppression and revolutionary destruction, and by a religion which forswears its faith. To this new phase of love Sonnet 66 is an introduction as beautiful as it is appropriate. In common with Hamlet's famous soliloquy, and indeed in harmony with all Shakespeare's later tragedies, it expresses the poet's deep disgust with the world, and society as he saw them, and declares that his ideal love was the only thing which made life tolerable to him. But why, he asks in Sonnets 67, 68, should this love continue |