in, to repeat the question in
other words:--is Shakespeare a great dramatic poet on account only of those
beauties and excellences which he possesses in common with the ancients,
but with diminished claims to our love and honour to the full extent of
his differences from them?--Or are these very differences additional proofs
of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living power as
contrasted with lifeless mechanism--of free and rival originality as
contradistinguished from servile imitation, or, more accurately, a blind
copying of effects, instead of a true imitation of the essential
principles?--Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius to rules. No! the
comparative value of these rules is the very cause to be tried. The spirit
of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe
itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody
in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized
one; and what is organization but the connection of parts in and for a
whole, so that each part is at once end and means?--This is no discovery of
criticism;--it is a necessity of the human mind; and all nations have felt
and obeyed it, in the invention of metre, and measured sounds, as the
vehicle and _involucrum_ of poetry--itself a fellow-growth from the same
life,--even as the bark is to the tree!

No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is
there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless;
for it is even this that constitutes it genius--the power of acting
creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it that not
only single _Zoili_, but whole nations have combined in unhesitating
condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in
beautiful monsters--as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the
greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine
out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth,
so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the
flower?--In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of
Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of
Shakespeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost
idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the
confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic,
when on any giv