No writer was more of his period than Shakespeare, yet how contemporary he seems to each succeeding generation.  Leonardo, in a perfect portrait, showed forth the face of a subtle, sensuous, and mocking spirit, against a background of wild rocks.  It represents not alone the soul-phase of the later Renaissance, but of every individual and of every civilization which on life’s dangerous and orgiastic substratum has reared a mere garden of delight.  Living hearts throb to the music penned by the dead hand of Mozart and of Beethoven; the clownings of Aristophanes arouse laughter in our music halls; Euripides is as subtle and world-weary as any modern; the philosophies of Parminides and Heraclitus are recrudescent in that of Bergson; and Plato discusses higher space under a different name.

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL:  BEAUTY

The second characteristic of works of genius is their indifference to all man-made moral standards.  They are beyond all that goes by the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end.  The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude.  Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort.  Shakespeare’s most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his villains and his clowns.  To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness, beauty in disturbance.  It injects the acid of irony into success, and distils the attar of felicity from failure.  It teaches that the blows of fate are aimed, not at us, but at our fetters; that death is swallowed up in victory, that the Hound of Heaven is none other than the Love of God.

Though genius rebels at our moralities, it always submits itself to beauty.  Emerson says, “Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, have an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on common principles.  Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast maintainers of the pure, ideal morality.  But they worship it as the highest beauty, their love is artistic.”  And so it is throughout the whole hierarchy of men of genius.  “Beauty is Truth:  Truth, Beauty,” is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead us wheresoever they will.  With Victor Hugo, we follow, undisgusted, through the sewers of old Paris:  his sense of beauty disinfects them for us.  With Balzac and Tolstoy we gaze unrevolted upon the nethermost depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty even there; while with Virgil, Dante and Milton, we walk unscathed in Hell itself.  The terribilita of Michaelangelo, the chaos and anarchy of Shakespeare at his greatest, as in Lear—­these find expression in perfect rhythms, so potent that we recognize them as proceeding from a supernal beauty, the beauty of that soul “from which also cometh the life of man and of beast, and of the birds of the air and of the fishes of the sea.”