relapse from a later to an earlier habit, which may assuredly be traced
in the modulations of his varying verse, but can only be traced by ear
and not by finger. I have busied myself with no baseless speculations as
to the possible or probable date of the first appearance of this play or
of that on the stage; and it is not unlikely that the order of succession
here adopted or suggested may not always coincide with the chronological
order of production; nor will the principle or theory by which I have
undertaken to class the successive plays of each period be affected or
impaired though it should chance that a play ranked by me as belonging to
a later stage of work should actually have been produced earlier than
others which in my lists are assigned to a subsequent date. It is not,
so to speak, the literal but the spiritual order which I have studied to
observe and to indicate: the periods which I seek to define belong not to
chronology but to art. No student need be reminded how common a thing it
is to recognise in the later work of a great artist some partial
reappearance of his early tone or manner, some passing return to his
early lines of work and to habits of style since modified or abandoned.
Such work, in part at least, may properly be said to belong rather to the
earlier stage whose manner it resumes than to the later stage at which it
was actually produced, and in which it stands out as a marked exception
among the works of the same period. A famous and a most singularly
beautiful example of this reflorescence as in a Saint Martin's summer of
undecaying genius is the exquisite and crowning love-scene in the opera
or "ballet-tragedy" of _Psyche_, written in his sixty-fifth year by the
august Roman hand of Pierre Corneille; a lyric symphony of spirit and of
song fulfilled with all the colour and all the music that autumn could
steal from spring if October had leave to go a Maying in some Olympian
masquerade of melody and sunlight. And it is not easier, easy as it is,
to discern and to define the three main stages of Shakespeare's work and
progress, than to classify under their several heads the representative
plays belonging to each period by the law of their nature, if not by the
accident of their date. There are certain dominant qualities which do on
the whole distinguish not only the later from the earlier plays, but the
second period from the first, the third period from the second; and it is
with these