Certain New Elucidations of Shakespeare 31 



" So in the next play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we find 

 Shakespeare learning and, perhaps even more deliberate^, un- 

 learning. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not a great play: 

 but it is a curious one, and a very wardrobe of ' effects ' in which 

 Shakespeare afterwards dressed himself to better advantage. 



" In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare is feeling for 

 character, for real men arid women. Tricks no longer satisfy 

 him. Yet the old tricks haunt him. He must have again, as in 

 The Comedy of Errors, two gentlemen with a servant apiece — 

 though the opposition is discriminated and more cunningly bal- 

 anced. For stage effect Proteus (supposed a friend and a gentle- 

 man) must suddenly behave with incredible baseness. For stage 

 effect Valentine must surrender his true love to his false friena 

 with a mawkish generosity that deserves nothing sO' much as a 

 kicking : 



All that was mine in Silvia I give thee. 



And what about Silvia?- Where does Silvia come in? That 

 devasting sentence may help the curtain, but it blows all character 

 to the winds. There are now no gentlemen in Verona." 



This is of course edifying and quite what is to be expected of a 

 mind acute in character distinctions. No one can so well be 

 trusted to discuss the growth of an artist's powers as he who has 

 himself experienced that growth. Who else can know of the 

 chasm that lies between vision and expression? "All art is see- 

 ing and saying." It is not easy always to observe. Yet it is 

 sometimes easy to see, but impossible to say. Trollope speaks, 

 we remember, almost dolorously of an author's limitations : 



It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photog- 

 raphy has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be 

 reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an luierring 

 precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, 

 and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his 

 mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character 

 and personage of a man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and 

 ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint and 

 play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described 

 has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the sign-board at the 

 corner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge. — Barchester Towers 

 I. 232. 



133 



