the audience.  And, undoubtedly, the modern way of glutting the senses with a profusion of showy and varied dress and scenery has struck, as it must always strike, a dead palsy on the legitimate processes of Gothic Art.  The decline of the Drama began with its beginning, and has kept pace with its progress.  So that here we have a forcible illustration of what is often found true, that men cannot get along because there is nothing to hinder them.  For, in respect of the moral and imaginative powers, it may be justly affirmed that we are often assisted most when not assisted, and that the right way of helping us on is by leaving us unhelped.  That the soul may find and use her wings, nothing is so good as the being left where there is little for the feet to get hold of and rest upon.

To answer fully the conditions of the work, to bring the Drama fairly through the difficulties involved therein, is, it seems to me, just the greatest thing the human intellect has ever done in the province of Art.  Accordingly I place Shakespeare’s highest and most peculiar excellence in the article of Dramatic Composition.  He it was, and he alone, that accomplished the task of organizing the English Drama.  Among his predecessors and senior contemporaries there was, properly speaking, no dramatic artist.  What had been done was not truly Art, but only a preparation of materials and a settlement of preliminaries.  Up to his time, there was little more than the elements of the work lying scattered here and there, some in greater, some in less perfection, and still requiring to be gathered up and combined in right proportions, and under the proper laws of dramatic life.  Take any English drama written before his, and you will find that the several parts do not stand or draw together in any thing like organic consistency:  the work is not truly a concrescence of persons and events, but only, at the best, a mere succession or aggregation of them; so that, for the most part, each would both be and appear just as it does, if detached from the others, and viewed by itself.  Instead, therefore, of a vital unity, like that of a tree, the work has but a sort of aggregative unity, like a heap of sand.

Which may in some fair measure explain what I mean by dramatic composition.  For a drama, regarded as a work of art, should be in the strictest sense of the term a society; that is, not merely a numerical collection or juxtaposition, but a living contexture, of persons and events.  For men’s natures do not, neither can they, unfold themselves severally and individually; their development proceeds from, through, and by each other.  And, besides their individual circulations, they have a common circulation; their characters interpenetrating, more or less, one with another, and standing all together in mutual dependence and support.  Nor does this vital coherence and reciprocity hold between the several characters merely, but also between these, taken collectively, and the various conditions, objects, circumstances, and influences, amidst which they have grown.  So that the whole is like a large, full-grown tree, which is in truth made up of a multitude of little trees, all growing from a common root, nourished by a common sap, and bound together in a common life.