action demands the very directest language, or its level character the very simplest.  Mr. Hallam,[16] than whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how extremely and faultily difficult Shakespeare’s language often is.  It is so:  you may find main scenes in some of his greatest tragedies, King Lear, for instance, where the language is so artificial, so curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to be read two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended.  This over-curiousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment of a wonderful gift—­of the power of saying a thing in a happier way than any other man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one understands what M. Guizot[17] meant when he said that Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of simplicity.  He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the ancients, partly, no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated and exacting audience.  He has indeed a far wider range than they had, a far richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them.  In his strong conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which he is penetrated with it, he resembles them, and is unlike the moderns.  But in the accurate limitation of it, the conscientious rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous development of it from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them, and comes nearer to the moderns.  In his chief works, besides what he has of his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients; he has their important action and their large and broad manner; but he has not their purity of method.  He is therefore a less safe model; for what he has of his own is personal, and inseparable from his own rich nature; it may be imitated and exaggerated, it cannot be learned or applied as an art.  He is above all suggestive; more valuable, therefore, to young writers as men than as artists.  But clearness of arrangement, rigor of development, simplicity of style—­these may to a certain extent be learned:  and these may, I am convinced, be learned best from the ancients, who, although infinitely less suggestive than Shakespeare, are thus, to the artist, more instructive.

What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models? the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and their widely different circumstances?  Not, certainly, that which is narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sympathize.  An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine’s duty to her brother’s corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest.  I am speaking too, it will be remembered, not of the best sources of intellectual stimulus for the general reader, but of the best models