He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet
In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day
is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned
like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)
What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in _Macbeth_! And in _Lear_, as
Jacobi says:
What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and
unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither
and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and
there a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending
the clouds.
One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to
justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies
at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms
one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry,
especially in Shakespeare.
With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained
before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical
to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the
Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by
dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and
illuminated all and everything.
Hense says[5];
The personification is plastic when AEschylus calls the heights
the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks
of hills that kiss the sky.
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