"shaping
imagination," and by other phrases which get so bandied to and fro that
the world almost ceases to attach any meaning to them at all.

I remember some years ago, in an essay on _Literary Judgment_, asserting
that the quality which chiefly distinguished the immortal works from the
transient was sincerity, single-heartedness, reality of intention and
love of the work for the work's sake. That was only a partial view of
the truth. It is right in a measure, since that sincerity, that absence
of make-believe, in the literary creation is a prime necessity; but it
is not sufficient. It is, indeed, a prime necessity, because it means
that the superlative writer must write at first hand of things genuinely
conceived and realized by his very self. It is, indeed, a prime
necessity, because you cannot conjure up vividly and hold in steady view
the communicable picture of your feeling or your thought, _unless_ you
feel it or think it with all your own being. But the sincerity is only a
pre-supposed condition. The supreme literary quality is the power to
realize the picture and so body forth the thing thought or felt. The
great dramatic genius, for example, first realizes a character and his
thoughts and feelings, and then, identifying himself with that
character, gives them expression. When Homer imagines Odysseus
descending to the nether world and meeting there the shades of heroes
whom he had known at Troy, his Odysseus accosts this one or that and
receives answer as befits the person. But to Ajax, son of Telamon,
Odysseus had indirectly done a wrong, and caused his suicide, and, when
the ghost of Ajax appears, Odysseus speaks to it gentle and soothing
words of explanation and self-defence. And what does that proud injured
Ajax reply? Well, on Homer's brain the picture is very vivid. His brain
becomes practically the brain of the very Ajax, and the continuation
shows it: "So I spake, but he answered me not a word, and passed on to
Erebus after the other spirits of the departed dead." That silence of
Ajax is truer than the most scathing of speeches.

So is it with Shakespeare. He sees his characters and realizes their
sensations so vividly that his brain and feelings become the brain and
feelings of his creations; and thus only does his Lear say with such
perfect naturalness, "Pray you, undo this button." Hence, too, all the
distinctness of character in his lifelike men and women, be it Hamlet or
Falstaff, Cordelia or La