Shakespeare should have understood that at
thirty.
When his vanity was injured, his blindness was almost inconceivable. He
should have seen Mary Fitton as she was and given us a deathless-true
portrait of her; but the noble side of her, the soul-side a lover should
have cherished, is not even suggested. He deserved to lose her, seeking
only the common, careless of the "silent, silver lights" she could have
shown him. He was just as blind with his wife; she had been unwillingly
the ladder to his advancement; he should have forgiven her on that
ground, if not on a higher.
He was inordinately vain and self-centred. He talked incontinently, as
he himself assures us, and as Ben Jonson complains. He was exceedingly
quick and witty and impatient. His language shows his speed of thought;
again and again the images tumble over each other, and the mere music of
his verse is breathlessly rapid, just as the movement of Tennyson's
verse is extremely slow.
More than once in his works I have shown how, at the crisis of fate, he
jumps to conclusions like a woman.
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