SONGS FROM free passage, such as a song itself may win on the clear airs of sea-shore or hill-top, is in all his fluent exits and entrances; as where we find him described, when leading Ferdinand by the sea-shore, as "invisible, playing and singing." What elusive harp-strain, flying on from one ripple of silver strings to another, such as he may have heard from some Welsh triple-harp in the West Midlands, had Shakespeare in his mind as he wrote the lines that the scene ushers in? "Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands: Foot it featly here and there, And sweet sprites the burden bear." So far as the stage could possibly suggest such things, the appearance of Ferdinand, sitting and listening there, suggests the loneliest of lonely sea-places. But one SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS hardly bears to read "The Tempest" as a stage-conditioned piece of art. It is a poem, that one recollects rather with the poetry that is, like the best of Shelley and Wordsworth, to be felt under quite another range of association than even the most ideal theatre can furnish. And so with Ferdinand's speech, sequent to the "Yellow Sands" melody: "Where should this music be?? the air or th' earth? This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air; thence I have followed it, Then come the famous "Full fathom five" lines"the ditty" which, says Ferdinand so imaginatively, "does remember my drown'd father." In all this there SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS is an art almost transcending art. It is like something struck out of nature, in a radiant, changing imagery. And it is the sense of such unforgettable melody, caught in a dramatic pause, like a fragrance of distant hay-fields caught at a town window by night, that makes these songs, like Ariel himself, so elusive—at once so tempting and so tantalising. Art, pictorial art or music, may succeed in interpreting them; it is certain that criticism, however ardent, can do little with them. ERNEST RHYS. |