temperaments, and
with temperaments great enough to write history the way God does--that
can be read.

History can only be truly written by men who have concepts of history,
and "Every concept," says Hegel, "must be universal, concrete, and
particular, or else it cannot be a concept." That is, it must be
dramatic.

And what is true of a great natural man or man of genius like Carlyle is
equally true of all other natural persons whether men of genius or not.
A stenographic report of all the thoughts of almost any man's brain for
a day would prove to almost any scientist how spiritually organised,
personally conducted a human being's brain is bound to be, almost in
spite of itself--even when it has been educated, artificially numbed and
philosophised. A man may not know the look of the inside of his mind
well enough to formulate or recognise it, but nearly every man's
thinking is done, as a matter of course, either in people, or to people,
or for people, or out of people. It is the way he grows, the way the
world is woven through his being, the way of having life more
abundantly.

It is not at all an exaggeration to say that if Shakespeare had not
created his characters they would have created him. One need not wonder
so very much that Shakespeare grew so masterfully in his later plays and
as the years went on. Such a troop of people as flocked through
Shakespeare's soul would have made a Shakespeare (allowing more time for
it) out of almost anybody.

The essential wonder of Shakespeare, the greatness which has made men
try to make a dozen specialists out of him, is not so very wonderful
when one considers that he was a dramatist. A dramatist cannot help
growing great. At least he has the outfit for it if he wants to. One
hardly wants to be caught giving a world recipe,--a prescription for
being a great man; but it does look sometimes as if the habit of reading
for persons, of being a sort of spiritual cannibal, or man-eater, of
going about through all the world absorbing personalities the way other
men absorb facts, would gradually store up personality in a man, and
make him great--almost inconveniently great, at times, and in spite of
himself. The probabilities seem to be that it was because Shakespeare
instinctively picked out persons in the general scheme of knowledge more
than facts; it was because persons seemed to him, on the whole in every
age, to be the main facts the age was for, summed the most facts up;