Footnotes.

“I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an observer should be Balzac’s great popular title to fame. To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his Human Comedy are keener after living, more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outer world presented themselves to his mind’s eye in strong relief and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. He reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition is generally defined as Balzac’s great fault. More properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive duality. But who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him to invest—and that with a sure hand—what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.”

Nor was any very great thing done by the author of A Warning for Fair Women.

Now I do love her too: Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure, I stand accountant for as great a sin) But partly led to diet my revenge.

For “partly” read “wholly,” and for “peradventure” read “assuredly,” and the incarnate father of lies, made manifest in the flesh, here speaks all but all the truth for once, to himself alone.

But my kisses bring again, bring again, Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain.

The echo has been dropped by Fletcher, who has thus achieved the remarkable musical feat of turning a nightingale’s note into a sparrow’s. The mutilation of Philomela by the hands of Tereus was a jest compared to the mutilation of Shakespeare by the hands of Fletcher: who thereby reduced the close of the first verse into agreement if not into accordance with the close of his own. This appended verse, as all the world does not and need not know, ends thus:

But first set my poor heart free, Bound in those icy chains by thee.

Even an earless owner of fingers enough to count on may by their help convince himself of the difference in metre here. But not only does the last line, with unsolicited and literally superfluous liberality, offer us a syllable over measure; the words are such as absolutely to defy antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the three last in either line. Let us therefore, like good scriptural scholars, according equally to the letter and the spirit of the text, render unto Fletcher the things which be Fletcher’s, and unto Shakespeare the things which be Shakespeare’s.

Why star’st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay, Leap in my arms: mine arms are open wide: If not—turn from me, and I’ll turn from thee; For though thou hast the power to say farewell, I have not power to stay thee.

But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of King Edward III.

And speaking it, he wistly looked on me;

(King Richard II. Act v. Sc. 4.)

and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words invocate and endamagement, a mere απαξ λεyομενον can carry no weight of evidence with it worth any student’s consideration.