Had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been cramped
by a book-language not yet flexible enough for the demands of rhythmic
emotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and familiar
expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical phrase as
to render possible that ideal representation of the great passions which
is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and general
consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease and congruity
of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years later, his ripened
manhood would have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with the
solution of political and religious problems, from which his whole nature
was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan social system, ordered and
planetary in functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the
Areopagite, where his contemplative eye could crowd itself with various
and brilliant picture, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of which
seems to have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly
sagacious--could draw its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its
lessons of prudence and magnanimity. In estimating Shakespeare, it should
never be forgotten, that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer and
artist, and incapable of partisanship.
Pages:
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228