ns: they may be witty or stupid, refined or gross. Their
characters may be direct and plain as those of Lear and Kent, or they
may be as subtly shaded as that of Hamlet or of the melancholy
soliloquist of Arden. He can in imagination traverse the whole gamut of
feeling. He can be what or whom he will. This is the imagination in
which Shakespeare is unsurpassable. This more than all powers, unless it
be that of humour, is the one which Nature must bestow, and which
nothing but Nature can bestow. And this is the power which alone can
make drama convincing and immortal. Compare with the living and
breathing reality of the characters in even the poorest of the
Shakespearean plays, the wordy automata of Swinburne's _Faliero_ or the
frigid figures who talk through Tennyson's _Cup_. There are those who
compare Scott with Shakespeare in the gift of visualising and vitalising
the past. We Englishmen may leave it to the Scotchman Carlyle to settle
with that comparison. For my own part, as a student of antiquity, I
would maintain that, despite all petty anachronism, Shakespeare in his
Roman plays comes nearer to the essential truth than any merely
professional student can ever come. What he gives us is not archaeology,
not the exact Forum nor the precise etiquette of the toga, but the man,
the Caesar, the Coriolanus, the greasy populace, their heart and
mind--these he sees with the penetrating eye of an imagination which
never fails.

Of imagination, in this sense, wit and humour are a vital part. Without
them you may imagine an Othello or a Lear, but you cannot imagine a
Falstaff, a Touchstone, a Mercutio, or a Bottom. In this domain
Shakespeare is sometimes thought to be rivalled by Aristophanes and
Moliere. Yet one who read all three will find that these are his rivals
rather in broad strokes of humour and flashes of wit than in the
subtler virtues of his humour. His humour is all-pervading, it is colour
woven into the whole tissue of thinking, speaking, and action. Nay, true
humour is like the colour of a flower or leaf. It belongs to the nature
of the plant, and is carried in the sap of its life. To talk like
Falstaff, you must in imagination become Falstaff, feel as he would do,
think as he would think. You cannot lay on the Falstaffian humour by a
reasoning process from the outside. The result may be clever, but it
will lack just that subtle and evasive quality which the modern cant
seeks to describe by the word "inevitable