Fixed in the past. But she defended her wrath
As part of her dignity and right: they stormed
Up, up the hill and down,

Increasing darkness to the end of life.
Of him friends said

He seemed like a lonely sentinel

Posted against the very edge of doom,

Whom no watch came relieving.

"She'll kill him yet, the fool!" the woodpile's verdict Before the pipe went out for the last time,

Leaving the pines unneighbored.

But he was wrong, the urn outlasted the flame.

One night, hands at her throat, she came
And knelt before him, timidly reaching out

And trying to speak, to speak-struggling as if words
Were something still to learn.

At last speech broke from her, so agonized

He hardly knew if it were supreme wrath or supreme supplication:

Her girlhood cry, a murdered thing returned.

He hoped that it was wrath, as easier to endure,

Feeling it burn from mind to heart, from heart to soul,
Gathering more awe, more terror, at each advance.
Like a priest with sacrifice it passed

The colonnades of his thought, entering without pause

Cross Patch

An unknown altar of his being

Behind a curtain never moved before. "You did not love me . .

Both gazed upon the sacrifice held up

As though it were the bleeding heart of their own lives
Somehow no longer their own.

And then the priest returned, slowly, pace by pace,
Out of the hush of feeling into the hush of thought.
It was the priest and not himself, the man believed,
Who like an echo, not less agonized,

Whispered across the waste of many lives,
Whispering "No . . .

Whose heart, the man's or woman's, lowest stooped
To raise the other prostrate heart aloft

With supplication and consolement, urging it
To live-oh, live!-dying itself the while,
God knew before the beginning of the world.

We only know that stooping so, dust turned to dust,
All hearts meet at last.

Horace Holley

EDITORIAL COMMENT

SHAKESPEARE

HAT manner of man was this who peopled a provincial stage, made music of a barbarous tongue, played a few parts, dreamed many dreams, set up an estate in his native village, and died in his prime three hundred years ago this month? What manner of man was it whose name, during these three centuries, has been rung on all the bells of fame, whose people are the friends of all the world, whose thinking washes under all our cargoes, and whose rhythms are the waves on which our visions ride? Everywhere he is present-we cannot escape him; he passes current like the coin of the realm. He is part of our language, of the phrasing and movement and beat of it; and when we are silent the very winds and stars march to his music. What manner of man was this who has become so much more important to the world than he ever was to himself?

Of course there is only one word that a man can write with whatever expenditure of ink-the word myself. Shakespeare has been called impersonal, but he could no more escape this word than the clamorous egotist who shouts "I! I! I!" on every page. If he hides behind his characters, he is nevertheless there, and the search for his evasive personality is the central and secret fascination of his work. Some writers are easy to find in the books they leave us, and

Shakespeare

when found they may be no great matter; others reveal themselves only to their friends, and reward them with special intimacy; others pause for a beautiful gesture, a smile, almost a touch, and are off again, always alluring and eluding. But this poet, who, giving himself away in thirtyseven plays and an hundred and fifty-four sonnets, was yet the most reserved of men, this poet is the most magnetic of all. The things we discover of him-that sympathy and insight, that humor and shrewdness, that love of all life and passion for all beauty, that poignant tenderness at the edge of a grave, that strange worldliness and baffling indifference to his art-these are but the beginning of his self. His secret is always deeper within, further beyond. The more we get those of us who get beneath the surface at all -the more awaits us.

Because this poet does not wear his heart on his sleeve or explain himself to the passer-by, and because a certain type of mind delights in puzzles and cryptograms and facile interpretations, we have had a thousand misreadings of his character; and even huge and elaborate Baconian theories to rob us of our Shakespeare, and substitute for that large figure something small and definite and precise. The "myriadminded," we are told, must have been a soldier to reveal war, a lawyer to understand law, a courtier to present princes, and of late Mr. Frank Harris has soberly asserted that he must have been a madman to compass the madness of Lear. What are these foolish commentators doing but exposing their own folly? The colossus stands there unshaken, smil

ing his enigmatic solemn smile, with that same look of pity and tenderness in his eyes.

It takes a poet to interpret a poet. Holbein might have painted Shakespeare if he had lived long enough, or Dürer might have made a copperplate of him as mysterious as the Melancolia. But no meaner imagination can quite compass that soul adrift between hell and heaven, devoured by earthly desires and divine despairs, writing immortal plays as a kind of lucrative by-play, a sop and solace to his tyrannous imagination, which clamored for freedom in worlds greater than his own. Now and then, during these three centuries, someone has cast a flash-light on this figure, but no one has yet revealed all the pride and power of it, all the sorrow and weakness. Even Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson, in his illuminating monologue, Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, though he gets nearer to the heart of his subject than any of the thousand-and-one critics and panegyrists before him-even he does not strip that spirit bare.

Shakespeare himself makes confession, of course, in the sonnets, besides his less deliberate confession in the plays. The sonnets present his supreme experiences-exquisite emotion, love exalting or degrading, conviction of sin, conviction. of fame, the sense of unendurable beauty, the magnanimity of unalterable love, the blight of decay and death, the glory of spiritual life. And through the poem runs the theme of Hamlet-that sense of inadequacy for life which must haunt the artist, the man of thought and imagination: self