He speaks for William Shakespeare: in soliloquy and out, he is a mouthpiece for the dolors of the London dramatist rather than the Prince of Denmark. Not that it matters greatly for whom he talks. The talk and the thinking are the thing.

And poor old Polonius: what a merciless scarification he is subjected to from the time of his coming in, to his being dragged out. A stray mongrel would have more kind words flung to him than fall to the poor old man's share in the whole play. True, he was a bore, but he had some claims on human consideration. Instead he is torn to tatters as mercilessly as any passion ever was.

The ranting before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and before Laertes is deliberate and forced. But when we come again to the penultimate scene of the play, where Osric enters to announce the duel, we hear Shakespeare at his bitterest again in his scorn of redundancy and pleonasm. Not only is the fault laid to the door of the "water-spider," Osric, who "complied with his dug," but to the whole "yesty times" which when put to the test the bubble is out.

It is an admirable treatise of its kind in composition; it is likewise an almost startling picture of the intimate personality of William Shakespeare, artist-technician.

In our own day a gentleman with a very different sense of the value of reticence in art, and who has raised the question (and partly answered it) as to whether his art is not better than Shakespeare's, has likewise washed his technical linen in full public view. In one of the most pretentious of the many prefaces which he has written, he discusses style. He admits the force and value of the wellchosen word in the well-turned phrase and then makes the assertion that the Alpha and Omega of style is effectiveness of expression. True. But what is effectiveness of expression? Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith (who is said to have told the Doctor that if he wrote a story about little fishes they would all talk like whales), Herbert Spencer, Walter Pater, George Moore,1 -thousands of men of letters have answered that question, each in his individual manner and each as best he might, for what tale could an author tell more acute and more vital to his sense and to the public's understanding of him than this tale of how he shapes his

1See in particular Mr. Moore's admirable paper on Tourguenieff in Impressions and Opinions.

soul and thought and how he directs his pen? "If you would have me weep," said Horace, "you must first weep yourself."

This is impression: the mark in the soul of the artist. To convey it in apt, stirring speech "with good accent and good discretion" is expression. It is style. It is rhetoric. It is composition. It is the whole artist at white heat. It is an imperishable subject, an inexhaustible study.

I

DR. FURNESS'S METHOD IN EDITING THE
NEW VARIORUM

DANIEL E. OWEN

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

N 1848, Fanny Kemble, one of his father's parishioners and a family friend, presented Horace Howard Furness, a boy of fifteen, with a ticket to her forthcoming series of Shakespeare readings. "Admit Mr. Furness to all readings," so ran the inscription on the card. Young Furness did not miss a reading, and from the delight he took in Mrs. Kemble's interpretation of the plays he was accustomed to date his lifelong interest in Shakespeare.

In 1860, Furness was elected to the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia. The first fruits of his membership were notes on The Tempest, privately printed, and a scrap-book variorum Hamlet described by Dr. Furness in a letter to W. J. Rolfe, dated Jan. 28, 1900, as follows: "As for the time when I began to work over Shakespeare and study him with zeal, it began in '62 or '63 when I made a mighty Variorum Hamlet, cutting out the notes of five or six editions, besides the Variorum of 1821, and pasting them on a page with a little rivulet of text. 'T was a ponderous book, of Qto. size and eight or nine inches thick-I took great delight in burning it some years ago. But the work revealed to me that it was high time to begin a new Variorum, that we might start afresh."1

During the year 1866-67, the Shakspere Society devoted its meetings to a thorough reading of Romeo and Juliet. "Perhaps we may flatter ourselves," writes a historian of the Society, "that this year's reading of Romeo and Juliet may have had a direct effect, perhaps been causa efficiens, in guiding the mind of Dr. Furness to select Romeo and Juliet as the first play to be discussed in the 'New Variorum.'

1

2

"2

The Letters of Horace Howard Furness, 1922, II, 55.

Shakspere Society of Philadelphia: Histories: Mallery and Ashhurst, 1898, II, 12.

Dr. Furness himself ascribed his selection to a predilection for the tragedy. "I chose Rom. and Jul. as the first," he wrote to Rolfe, "merely because I was enamoured with the play and I thought 't was probable that I should never edit a second." 1

In preparing his edition of Romeo and Juliet, Furness had the counsel and encouragement of such scholars as Rolfe and F. J. Child. Edwin Forrest lent his copies of the second and third folios. On his own part, Furness purchased Shakespeariana so extensively that by 1875 his library was already a notable collection. It received important accessions in later years and as at present maintained by Dr. Horace Howard Furness, Jr. offers an enviable array of critical apparatus including the four folios, a number of original quartos three of them once the property of Edward Capell and full of his collations, facsimiles, some fifty editions of Shakespeare, from the earliest of Rowe to the most recent, together with collateral works in great variety. When, in his Phi Beta Kappa address delivered at Harvard, June 25, 1908, Dr. Furness implored the members of his audience not to write an essay on Hamlet, he enforced his exhortation with the statement that his own library contained over four hundred books on the play of Hamlet alone.

The New Variorum of Romeo and Juliet appeared in 1871 and was cordially received on both sides of the Atlantic. The first edition of five hundred copies was exhausted in six weeks and the publishers have been reprinting it at short intervals ever since. Congratulatory letters poured in from all quarters and although he had not contemplated a complete edition of Shakespeare on the heroic model of his first attempt, it became evident, as Furness himself remarked, that "he was in for it." Increasing deafness had rendered difficult the practice of his chosen profession of law and the success of his venture with Romeo and Juliet pointed to a congenial alternative occupation. So he sat down to Shakespeare for good and all, and by forty years of patient industry compiled fifteen volumes of the New Variorum, a monument of American scholarship, distinguished among works of its class by the sanity and wholesome humor of its unacademic editor. "Mere industry can do much," says Mr. Talcott Williams, "but mere industry could not build the monument of these volumes. . . . There is a certain form of stupidity never found except in notes. . . . Nothing saves a man 'Letters, loc. cit.