le passages in Shakespeare; they are perfect, their simplicity being
a _poetical_ simplicity. They are the golden, easeful, crowning moments
of a manner which is always pitched in another key from that of prose, a
manner changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style, regnant in most of
our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the continuation of this
manner of Shakespeare's. It was a manner much more turbid and strewn
with blemishes than the manner of Pindar, Dante, or Milton; often it was
detestable; but it owed its existence to Shakespeare's instinctive
impulse towards _style_ in poetry, to his native sense of the necessity
for it; and without the basis of style everywhere, faulty though it may
in some places be, we should not have had the beauty of expression,
unsurpassable for effectiveness and charm, which is reached in
Shakespeare's best passages. The turn for style is perceptible all
through English poetry, proving, to my mind, the genuine poetical gift
of the race; this turn imparts to our poetry a stamp of high
distinction, and sometimes it doubles the force of a poet not by nature
of the very highest order, such as Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond
what his natural richness and power seem to promise. Goethe, with his
fine critical perception, saw clearly enough both the power of style in
itself, and the lack of style in the literature of his own country; and
perhaps if we regard him solely as a German, not as a European, his
great work was that he labored all his life to impart style into German
literature, and firmly to establish it there. Hence the immense
importance to him of the world of classical art, and of the productions
of Greek or Latin genius, where style so eminently manifests its power.
Had he found in the German genius and literature an element of style
existing by nature and ready to his hand, half his work, one may say,
would have been saved him, and he might have done much more in poetry.
But as it was, he had to try and create, out of his own powers, a style
for German poetry, as well as to provide contents for this style to
carry; and thus his labor as a poet was doubled.

It is to be observed that power of style, in the sense in which I am
here speaking of style, is something quite different from the power of
idiomatic, simple, nervous, racy expression, such as the expression of
healthy, robust natures so often is, such as Luther's was in a striking
degree. Style, in my sense of the wo