He knew human nature too well not to know that
one thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning,--that,
where one man shapes his life by precept and example, there are a
thousand who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances. He
did not mean his great tragedies for scarecrows, as if the nailing of one
hawk to the barn-door would prevent the next from coming down souse into
the hen-yard. No, it is not the poor bleaching victim hung up to moult
its draggled feathers in the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the
hawk-nature as well as the hen-nature; and if he is unequalled in
anything, it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability of
reason, that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune and
misfortune, with the equal eye of the pure artist.
Whether I have fancied anything into Hamlet which the author never
dreamed of putting there I do not greatly concern myself to inquire.
Poets are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we find in their
works; for these fine creations as truly build themselves up in the brain
as they are built up with deliberate forethought. Praise art as we will,
that which the artist did not mean to put into his work, but which found
itself there by some generous process of Nature of which he was as
unaware as the blue river is of its rhyme with the blue sky, has somewhat
in it that snatches us into sympathy with higher things than those which
come by plot and observation.
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