had been a favorite with her mother, and had interested her; she recalled some parts of it at once, and continuing to think of it during the night, was able to repeat to me next day as much as I have given above.

Though sometimes laughed at, the ballads remained popular with individuals and in company as I have said, during the first half of the nineteenth century in this part of the country, but about the time of the Civil War they went out of favor. The songs of Civil War days first replaced them to a considerable extent, but before long increasing contact with the city, and the vogue of parlor-organs, melodeons, and pianos, with the songs and tunes that their exercise-books and new sheet-music made fashionable, drove the ballads completely out of the field. A few grandmothers, a fewer mothers, crooned them to children, or as they went about their housework; a roving hired-man of the old-fashioned sort now and then whistled or even sang them; but, as I have said, even these are now gone from that part of the country, and the natives for the most part no longer even know that balladry ever existed amongst them.

I

THE ARTIST AND HIS TECHNIQUE

T. D. O'BOLGER

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

"Le style, c'est l'homme même."-Buffon.

T is a commonplace of at least English literature that very little of a personal nature is known about one of the most voluminous of English authors, William Shakespeare. The writer has seen a book entitled The Facts About Shakespeare which to the best of his belief, was compiled by two careful commentators, and which was yet so slight that it would make no ungainly lines in the pocket of a light summer suit. Within, the bulk of the material was drawn from documents and comments by other hands: in other words it consisted of indirect information rather than direct.

It contained no prefaces, notes, or photographs, yet Shakespeare wrote himself not only liberally but very strenuously into his verse and plays. His personal gaiety; his delight in fourth dimensional logic (the half crack-brained logic of the fool, Mad Tom, The Gravedigger, Touchstone, Falstaff, and Jacques); his pessimism; his deep-rooted loathing of narrow or mean personal opinion or behavior; his almost inveterate dislike of the lower orders; his disposition to glorify station, particularly kingship; his facile swing from bitter to oversweet interpretation of woman's character; his moments of energetic self-assertion, as when he put it firmly on record that his verse would outlive the brazen monuments of princes, as it has done, though not the verse that he esteemed so much as the musical rhetoric and moral challenge of his plays,-all this is pretty much the heart and nervous system of William Shakespeare written larger and all the more enduringly because it was done. as subconsciously as it is in the nature of art to be. Matthew Arnold denied what he called the grand style to Shakespeare. He meant the iron restraint of the master spirit when it is tense with emotion, yet is under the calm direction of the working spirit. Ber

nard Shaw has put it in his own way when, in commenting on a play by the ebullient Marie Corelli, he said that a great literary masterpiece represents the victory of a powerful mind over a powerful imagination.

When Matthew Arnold charges that this master constraint was wanting to Shakespeare he is, on the whole, probably finically right. But there are moments when Shakespeare achieved it and even held it. Oddly, and yet not oddly, the moment when his self-revelation reaches some of its most memorable if not impressive heights is when he makes open confession of his technique. Whether it be in the lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream where he tells how

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name;

or whether it be in the talks with the players, with Polonius, and even with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the Gravedigger, there is a resilience and liveliness in the thought and expression that raises it to an unusual level even for Shakespeare. The talk with the players in Hamlet is keyed up to an unusual pitch of intense feeling; the phrasing is perhaps even better than anything else in Shakespeare; the sarcasm directed at the robustious, periwig-pated ranter who tears a passion to tatters; the intense scorn of the mouther who "plays to the gallery"; or the man who "horses" his part with the aim of getting the unskillful man's laugh; all these are not only technique lifted to a most unusual pitch of statement, but such a revelation of the man who wrote and shaped the plays, and his sense of composition and interpretation as appears but seldom even in the most intimate and familiar literature. It is the most finished codification of the ordinary rules of composition that the writer knows anything about. Every laborer after expression, from the college Freshman to the octogenarian, Goethe, working at the second part of Faust, can con these pages to his profit. Probably more spirits have thrilled to these lines than have thrilled to any other equal documentation from the pen of Shakespeare.

It has always been so, I think. The moments in which an author

confesses his understanding of his art have an inevitable natural fascination for the layman. On the other hand, they represent moments of intense preoccupation on the part of the author, and so his thought and expression, and the attention and understanding of the reader are fused and blent with an unusual degree of felicity. How the other man works is always an interesting theme both to craftsman and casual observer.

Which is all very well, until we come to ask whether Shakespeare is as consistent in practice as he is precise and enthusiastic in precept. He is not. Hamlet's soliloquy-not the really fine soliloquy "O, what a base and peasant slave am I," but the popular "To be or not to be" is, in its way, the robustious, periwig-pated fellow tearing his passion to tatters. It is almost preposterously out of character. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the favorite of Fortune is not the man to be making "windy suspiration of forced breath" the while he utters forth, a little shrilly, a prettily phrased outcry against heaven and earth and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to because his withers are wrung and his kibes galled by misfortune. What does this young play actor and play goer, this fainéant Prince, this dilettante in emotion and action know of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the slights patient merit suffers at the hands of the unworthy? The cunning of Machiavelli on the lips of Polonius would be as much in character.

It may be argued that Hamlet was a man of thought,-observant, reflective, responsive. He was nothing of the kind. He was ever in two if not in half a dozen minds about everything that happened to him. He says so over and over. The very decision of the actor in being what he acts astounds him. "What is Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?" Yet the mime plays Hecuba to the pink of perfection, whereas he cannot live up to his convictions.

Hamlet's mood is "to be or not to be?" He is a novice knocking at the door of experience: he does not know; he cannot decide. He is just a happy college boy returned from school, sentimentally responsive to the factitious side of life, to the fun of Yorick and the histrionic capacity of the players. But when he is confronted by just one of the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to"-the murder of his father-he is as unsettled as a "base and peasant slave." He runs to the factitious-to the play-to decide his indecision. The play is the thing, and it is not the thing.