No one, I think, can help feeling that this is the style of a man rather aiming at finely-turned phrases than deeply in earnest with the matter in hand; more the language of brilliant rhetoric than of impassioned thought. At all events, there is to my taste an air of falsetto about it; it seems more like the image of a painted than of a living passion. Be this as it may, the Poet's own riper style quite discredits it; though I have to confess that, but for his teachings, we might not so well have known of any thing better. Now contrast with the foregoing one of the hero's speeches in _Coriolanus_, iii. 2, where his mother urges him to play the demagogue, and practise smiles for the gaining of votes:
"Away, my disposition, and possess me Some harlot's spirit! my throat of war be turn'd-- Which quirèd with my drum--into a pipe Small as an eunuch's, or the virgin voice That babies lulls asleep! the smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks; and school-boys' tears take up The glasses of my sight! a beggar's tongue Make motion through my lips; and my arm'd knees, Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath receiv'd an alms!--I will not do't; Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth, And by my body's action teach my mind A most inherent baseness."
Perhaps the Poet's different styles might be still better exemplified in passages of pathos; but here I must rest with merely referring, for instance, to York's speech in _King Richard the Second_, beginning, "As in a theatre the eyes of men," and the passage in _Macbeth_ where Macduff first learns of the slaughter of his wife and children. Both are indeed very noble in their way; but I think no reader of disciplined taste can fail to see the vast superiority of the latter, and that this is owing not so much to any difference of character in the speakers as to a far higher stage of art in the Poet. I must add that the rhetorical or speech-making style appears more or less in all the plays of his first period: we find something of it even in such high specimens as _The Merchant of Venice_ and _King Henry the Fourth_.
I have spoken of the fault in question as specially marking the _more serious_ parts of the Poet's earlier plays. The more comic portions of the same plays are much less open to any such reproof. The Poet's style in comedy from the first ran closer to nature, and had much more of freedom, simplicity, and heartiness in its goings. The reason of this difference seems to be, that the lessons of nature in sport are more quickly learnt than those of nature in her graver moods. The child plays, the man works. And there needs a ripe soul of manhood, with much discipline besides, before a man warms into his work with the free gust and spirit of play.