Always poet, he subjects all to the ends of his art, and gives
in Hamlet the churchyard ghost, but with the cothurnus on,--the messenger
of God's revenge against murder; always philosopher, he traces in Macbeth
the metaphysics of apparitions, painting the shadowy Banquo only on the
o'erwrought brain of the murderer, and staining the hand of his
wife-accomplice (because she was the more refined and higher nature) with
the disgustful blood-spot that is not there. We say he had no moral
intention, for the reason, that, as artist, it was not his to deal with
the realities, but only with the shows of things; yet, with a temperament
so just, an insight so inevitable as his, it was impossible that the
moral reality, which underlies the _mirage_ of the poet's vision, should
not always be suggested. His humor and satire are never of the
destructive kind; what he does in that way is suggestive only,--not
breaking bubbles with Thor's hammer, but puffing them away with the
breath of a Clown, or shivering them with the light laugh of a genial
cynic. Men go about to prove the existence of a God! Was it a bit of
phosphorus, that brain whose creations are so real, that, mixing with
them, we feel as if we ourselves were but fleeting magic-lantern shadows?
But higher even than the genius we rate the character of this unique man,
and the grand impersonality of what he wrote.
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