*

In the introductory part of this article, we said that it was doubtful
if Shakspeare had any conscious moral intention in his writings. We
meant only that he was purely and primarily poet. And while he was
an English poet in a sense that is true of no other, his method was
thoroughly Greek, yet with this remarkable difference,--that, while the
Greek dramatists took purely national themes and gave them a universal
interest by their mode of treatment, he took what may be called
cosmopolitan traditions, legends of human nature, and nationalized them,
by the infusion of his perfectly Anglican breadth of character and
solidity of understanding. Wonderful as his imagination and fancy are,
his perspicacity and artistic discretion are more so. This country
tradesman's son, coming up to London, could set high-bred wits, like
Beaumont, uncopiable lessons in drawing gentlemen such as are seen
nowhere else but on the canvas of Titian; he could take Ulysses away
from Homer and expand the shrewd and crafty islander into a statesman
whose words are the pith of history. But what makes him yet more
exceptional was his utterly unimpeachable judgment, and that poise of
character which enabled him to be at once the greatest of poets and so
unnoticeable a good citizen as to leave no incidents for biography. His
material was never far-sought; (it is still disputed whether the fullest
head of which we have record were cultivated beyond the range of
grammar-school precedent!) but he used it with a poetic instinct which
we cannot parallel, identified himself with it, yet remained always its
born and question-less master. He finds the Clown and Fool upon the
stage,--he makes them the tools of his pleasantry, his satire, and even
his pathos; he finds a fading rustic superstition, and shapes out of
it ideal Pucks, Titanias, and Ariels, in whose existence statesmen and
scholars believe forever. 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 w