one from another.  Accordingly, as in the men and women of Nature’s own making, different minds conceive different ideas of them, and have different feelings towards them, and even the same mind at different times:  in fact, hardly any two men view them alike, or any one man for two years together; the actual changes in us being reflected and measured by correspondent seeming changes in them:  so that a further acquaintance with them always brings advancing knowledge, and what is added still modifies what was held before.  Hence even so restrained, not to say grudging, a critic as Pope was constrained to pronounce Shakespeare’s characters “so much Nature herself, that it is a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her.”

    “Of Nature’s inner shrine thou art the Priest,
    Where most she works when we perceive her least.”

I have placed Shakespeare’s power of dramatic architecture or organization at the head of his gifts and prerogatives as an artist.  And so I suppose a just Philosophy of Art is bound to reckon it.  But comparatively few men are or can be, in the fair sense of the term, philosophers of Art, as this requires a course of special training and study.  But Shakespeare is a great teacher in the School of Life as well as a great master in the School of Art.  And indeed the right use of Art is nowise to serve as the raw material of philosophy, but to furnish instruction and inspiration in the truth of things; and unless it can work home to the business and bosoms of plain practical men, it might as well be struck from the roll of legitimate interests.  Now, in the circle of uninspired forces, Shakespeare’s art may be justly regarded as our broadest and noblest “discipline of humanity.”  And his characterization, not his dramatic composition, is his point of contact with us as a practical teacher.  In other words, it is by his thorough at-homeness with human nature in the transpirations of individual character that he touches the general mind and heart.  Here he speaks a language which all men of developed intelligence can understand and feel.  Accordingly it is in his characters that most men place, and rightly place, his supreme excellence:  here it is that his wisdom finds and grasps men directly as men; nor, at this point of meeting, does he leave any part of our many-sided being without its fitting portion of meat in due season; while our receptiveness is the only limit to our acquisitions.[16]

[16] Here is no stage language or manners, no standing parts, nothing that can be called ideal or favourite stage characters, no heroes of the theatre or of romance:  in this active world there is nothing fantastic, nothing unsound, nothing exaggerated nor empty:  neither the poet nor the actor speaks in them, but creative nature alone, which seems to dwell in and to animate these images.  The forms vary, as they do in life, from the deepest to the shallowest, from the most noble