We have direct contemporary testimony that Shakspeare was supremely solicitous in this matter of form. Ben Jonson, in that hearty testimonial, "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakspeare, and What He Hath Left Us," which was prefixed to the edition of 1623, says, after praises which are lavish even for an Elizabethan eulogy:
(Meaning here thy technic, thy care of form, thy science),
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part; For though the poet's matter Nature be, His art doth give the fashion; and that he Who casts to write a living line must sweat, (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn, _For a good poet's made as well as born, And such wert thou._ Look how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race. Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines _In his well-turned and true-filed lines, In each of which he seems to shake a lance_, As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.
No fear with Shakspeare of damaging his spontaneity; he shakes a lance at the eyes of Ignorance in every line.
With these views of the progress of forms in general, of the relations of Science--or the _knowledge_ of all forms--to Art, or the creation of beautiful forms, we are prepared, I think, to maintain much equilibrium in the midst of the discordant cries, already mentioned, (1) of those who believe that Science will destroy all literary art; (2) of those who believe that art is to advance by becoming democratic and formless; (3) and lastly, of those who think that the future novelist is to enter the service of science as a police-reporter in ordinary for the information of current sociology.
Let us, therefore, inquire if it is really true--as I am told is much believed in Germany, and as I have seen not unfrequently hinted in the way of timorous apprehension in our own country--that science is to abolish the poet and the novel-writer and all imaginative literature. It is surprising that in all the discussions upon this subject the matter has been treated as belonging solely to the future. But surely life is too short for the folly of arguing from prophecy when we can argue from history; and it seems to me this question is determined. As matter of fact, science (to confine our view to English science) has been already advancing with prodigious strides for two hundred and fifty years, and side by side with it English poetry has been advancing for the same period. Surely, whatever effect science has upon poetry can be traced during this long companionship. While Hooke and Wilkins and Newton and Horrox and the Herschels and Franklin and Davy and Faraday and the Darwins and Dalton and Huxley and many more have been penetrating into physical nature, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, have been singing; while gravitation, oxygen, electro-magnetism, the atomic theory, the spectroscope, the siren, are being evolved, the _Ode to St. Cecilia_, the _Essay on Man_, _Manfred_, _A man's a man for a' that_, the _Ode on Immortality_, _In Memoriam_, the _Ode to a Nightingale_, _The Psalm of Life_, are being written. If indeed we go over into Germany, there is Goethe, at once pursuing science and poetry.