dreamy atmosphere, the lastingly beautiful and noble style are not in the final effect of this play separate things. Separable as we have found them, they present themselves to whoever sees or reads "As You Like It" in the way in which any play is made by its writer to be seen or read, not as distinct facts, or perhaps not as facts at all. Really, they are the elements which go to make up the effect of the play, which together imperceptibly produce the mood into which whoever appreciatively enjoys and understands the play finds himself thrown. A word, then, of this mood, and no more. Whoever really enjoys "As You Like It" knows what the mood is. Whoever tries to name or to define it runs the risk of marring its very charm and its elusive beauty by the very effort to confine it within the lifeless limit of a phrase. Yet, after all, we all know it is a gentle mood, a joyous, a fantastic, a dreamy, at once lasting and fleeting. Romantic is one name for it; but not a good one-there is no good single name to call it by. Of one deep trait of it, though, we may be pretty sure. Whoever has begun to fall in love, and not yet fallen too far to feel the charm of such a moment; whoever for the instant idealizes some other human being, feeling himself unworthy and this other spotless, yet daring to dream that spotlessness may smile on unworthiness with heavenly goodness; whoever, in brief, knows the sweet sickness which time is almost cruel to cure, knows what Shakspere, the artist, meant to tell us when in the flush of his fullest power he gave us "As You Like It." BARRETT WENDELL. 1598. Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, 1598. 1599. Became a sharer in the newly 1599. Two sonnets and some poems 1599. |