As we study these, we seem
in our limited way to penetrate into their consciousness and to measure
and master their methods; but with Shakespeare it is just the other way;
the more we have familiarized ourselves with the operations of our own
consciousness, the more do we find, in reading him, that he has been
beforehand with us, and that, while we have been vainly endeavoring to
find the door of his being, he has searched every nook and cranny of our
own. While other poets and dramatists embody isolated phases of character
and work inward from the phenomenon to the special law which it
illustrates, he seems in some strange way unitary with human nature
itself, and his own soul to have been the law and life-giving power of
which his creations are only the phenomena. We justify or criticise the
characters of other writers by our memory and experience, and pronounce
them natural or unnatural; but he seems to have worked in the very stuff
of which memory and experience are made, and we recognize his truth to
Nature by an innate and unacquired sympathy, as if he alone possessed the
secret of the "ideal form and universal mould," and embodied generic
types rather than individuals. In this Cervantes alone has approached
him; and Don Quixote and Sancho, like the men and women of Shakespeare,
are the contemporaries of every generation, because they are not products
of an artificial and transitory society, but because they are animated by
the primeval and unchanging forces of that humanity which underlies and
survives the forever-fickle creeds and ceremonials of the parochial
corners which we who dwell in them sublimely call The World.
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