I divine something like it now and then
in Aeschylus, through the mists of a language which will not let me be
sure of what I see, but nowhere else. Shakespeare, it is true, had, as I
have said, as respects English, the privilege which only first-comers
enjoy. The language was still fresh from those sources at too great a
distance from which it becomes fit only for the service of prose.
Wherever he dipped, it came up clear and sparkling, undefiled as yet by
the drainage of literary factories, or of those dye-houses where the
machine-woven fabrics of sham culture are colored up to the last
desperate style of sham sentiment. Those who criticise his diction as
sometimes extravagant should remember that in poetry language is
something more than merely the vehicle of thought, that it is meant to
convey the sentiment as much as the sense, and that, if there is a beauty
of use, there is often a higher use of beauty.
What kind of culture Shakespeare had is uncertain; how much he had is
disputed; that he had as much as he wanted, and of whatever kind he
wanted, must be clear to whoever considers the question. Dr. Farmer has
proved, in his entertaining essay, that he got everything at second-hand
from translations, and that, where his translator blundered, he loyally
blundered too.
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